On the Swiftie phenomenon: I think a large part of why people love Taylor is her unabashed emotion. She does not attempt to rationalize her music. It is not a matter of ideas so much as personas-- feelings-- vibes.
Hence why the concept of “eras” suit her so well-- she is defined by her emotions and aesthetics, not a common thematic thread. Like poetry-- small highly subjective snippets of life-- rather than a unified novel.
Usually, I like 80s/90s alt soft rock, but I am also a massive “Swiftie” and for me it is almost liberating to be able to perceive the world in such a subjective manner through her eyes. It makes me feel like a child-- through this hyper subjective lens everything feels important and novel. This is why her music has such universal appeal and an unshakable innocence.
This is also why Taylor Swift seems so enigmatic to this community: She is in someways the antithesis of rationalism. She is absurdity, intellectual indulgence, and hyper subjectivity.
Speaking as a non-Swiftie who recently saw the Eras film with some friends, my big takeaway from watching it all was "this is what working parasocial connection looks like at the master level."
Parasocial relationships are a cornerstone of modern media celebrity. The audience feels like they know the youtuber, which is simultaneously awkward for the youtuber and also the key that unlocks the most engagement and support for them.
Taylor Swift's music is intensely personal. It's love songs and breakup songs, and thus to an extent universal, but the audience also knows, often right down to the specific partner and thing that was said, that they are about *Taylor's* loves and breakups. So you hear the song the first time, and think "I get that feeling," then you learn the backstory and you think "I get her," and since she wrote the song that your feelings connected with at step 1, you also get "she understands feelings that reflect my feelings" which is only a hop/skip away from "she gets me." It's tailor made (forgive me) to cultivate this parasocial dynamic where I feel like I get Taylor and Taylor gets me, and I'm driven to engage without her ever knowing me.
It's pretty unique to her - other celebrities (Madonna, Janet Jackson, Beyonce) occupy a similar niche, but in the same way that Taylor will never be able to download Madonna's dancing background into her brain and build that level of dance performance into her shows, other performers can't go full Taylor unless they themselves are obsessive and intensely personal songwriters.
I see how a crowd of screaming fans can make you think that. But I actually think Taylor is one of the least "para-social" or "intensely personal" celebrities. She is undoubtedly *emotional* but that is a different thing.
For example: the past two albums before midnights (Folklore and Evermore) were almost entirely not about her-- she wrote about novels and fictional characters. Even earlier on in her career, her first two albums were about love but not her love (she had never had a boyfriend at that point!). A lot of her most popular songs in recent years are not at all personal: they are outwardly sarcastic or based on tropes rather than her own personal experience. (Shake it off, You need to calm down, You belong with me, Love story, Blank space, etc.) And she is one of the most private celebrities (she rarely talks about her love life).
Of course there are some para-social relationships in the fan base, but they are certainly not her intent and, in my opinion, definitely not the reason for her success. (even the concept of "eras" contracts para-social relationships-- if you know someone changes there "persona" every few years then you can't possibly be deluded into thinking you know them through their music).
Maybe if you could explain more about what you made you think "this is what working para-social connection looks like at the master level" I might understand more?
I could go on and on about this, but in short Taylor is popular because she is the antithesis of what our current culture celebrates.
Her persona is feminine, emotional, innocent yet defiant, and celebrates fandom for fandoms sake. In other words, she is everything that people are told not to be... (In that saw, she is just like the romantic poets who sprung up in the middle of the enlightenment...)
I will stop ranting now. But maybe that helps people understand her more. (Happy to take any questions people have ever wondered about "Swifties“ and "Swiftie“ culture).
Here's my question: seemed at one time that teenage girls couldn't get enough of singers their own age or slightly older. Thinking of the 90s when you had Britney, Christina. Then it seemed normal for those acts to have a commercial dip then make a comeback, but with a loyal fan base rather than a new army. So Kylie, Madonna have had long careers based on a loyal fanbase. But Swift is 33 and yet it does seem she is genuinely still exciting teenage girls. Is this something new or am I just cherry picking my 90s memories?
This seems to be a thing that’s not limited to Swift. The young ‘uns these days are more musically omnivorous then their peers from the times past. I suspect the streaming revolution has something to do with this.
Taylor Swift changes her persona almost entirely every few years. (Of course, at her core, she remains the same person-- which is what allows her to keep a strong core fan base). But the aesthetics, emphasis, sound, and visuals change with every new album. Other artists are tied to one specific “act” (eg. there is no clear distinction between Britney or Christina’s first, second, or third album). I think this gives Taylor the unique ability to appeal to new generations. (There is no way that “Speak Now” Taylor could ever sing “You Need to Calm Down” or “Lavender Haze,” but some how it makes sense when broken into “eras”). If Taylor had stayed with her original “country pop” persona, then I think she would have aged in a similar way to the artists that you mentioned.
I think most of the arguments I've seen for democracy-as-best-form-of-government contrast it against either autocracy or anarchy. What are the best arguments (either a priori or empirical) for preferring democracy over oligarchy?
I think oligarchy overlaps with autocracy strongly enough that the same arguments apply. There's not much difference between "rule by one guy", and "rule by one guy plus his three close friends who agree with him about almost everything, and that one other guy who quietly hates them but knows he can live like a prince as long as he goes along with the consensus".
I think this is like asking which side of a penny is better. Democracies or democratic republics tend to turn into oligarchies and then oligarchies tend to either become empires with one man rule or else are defeated from without and incorporated into someone else's empire.
You really can't point to republic that lasted more than 300 years or so without becoming either an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Oligarchies tend to have trouble maintaining a state apparatus in the long term, while dictatorships have almost infinite variation and a more mixed record.
Finally, there's the problem of classification and hybrids. Was Venice a republic, an oligarchy, some hybrid of the two, or some hybrid of the two along with a third element which seemed to contribute its longetivity: namely, a complex system of randomization which incentivized minority factions and families to continue to participate in the system because they were not locked out of power indefinitely in the way that a minority is within a democracy or even the less wealthy of the magnates are within a pure oligarchy.
The problem for all arrangements that are not democratic (or at least sufficiently democratic) is that the people who lack a voice eventually find that they are more and more marginalized and forgotten. This doesn't even have to be intentional and I think most of the time is not. This creates an incentive for the forgotten to act up - riots, strikes, uprisings, revolts. Marxism and socialism were both angry responses to the same Gilded Age Industrialist oligarchy that controlled Europe and the US. The oligarchy responded by giving more influence and power to the workers and poor. Not that they had much choice, seeing what was happening in Russia and to a lesser extent all across the west.
Coastal elites in the US right now think that they have the best interests of all people in the US in mind when they talk about their policies. They think anyone who disagrees is deluded or evil. Obviously Trump supporters directly disagree. By virtue of the fact that Trump won in 2016 and has a better chance of winning in 2024 speaks to the difference between an oligarchy (if the coastal elites decided things on their own) verses a reality in which they might actually have to contend with what Trump supporters want.
Elites can try to throw the masses some bones (welfare, free stuff, Medicare) but because they don't know what the masses actually want (because they don't understand them and don't actually listen to them) they will often get this wrong and fail to mollify the concerns.
This doesn't mean that the Socialists/Trump supporters are *right* but that they have a perspective they feel is not being understood or considered.
tl;dr - Oligarchy is less stable than democracy because by its very nature it excludes interested parties who are likely to express their opinions in ways that break up an oligarchy if they are not sufficiently included. Bread and circuses can work for a while, but are doomed to failure over a period of time with only elite perspectives being considered.
I would say it depends on your definition of oligarchy, and how you distinguish an oligarchy from an autocracy.
China is an oligarchy, in as far as it is ruled by a small club who gatekeep themselves. China has had some pretty good growth, but not nearly as good as Taiwan (which changed to democracty in the 1980's), or South Korea, and now China's growth seems to be slowing.
On the other hand, if by oligarchy you mean a country with a constitution, free courts, parliament, free press, etc, but just with voting rights restricted to a minority of the population (usually the richer people) then I must admit: Such oligarchies function fine, but they always end up turning into a true democracy after a few generations.
Almost all wellfunctioning modern democracies actually started this way. Usually they would let men with a certain income, or not economically dependent on others, vote. Then they would slowly turn into a modern democracy, in a completely peaceful and constitutional way. I think the last western country to finish this move was Switzerland, who gave women votes in 1971.
So there you go, free and constitutional oligarchies work, and one of the ways they work is that they inevitably turn themselves into full scale democracies, no foreign intervention needed.
Most arguments I've seen in favor of democracy stem from either a moral claim in favor of self-determination, or a claim about the practicality of having one individual (e.g. the autocrat) making decisions on behalf of several others in addition to himself.
For arguments of the first form, the anti-oligarchic extension ought to be obvious enough. For the second form, notice that if an autocracy of, say, 1000 individuals is bad, then an oligarchy of N oligarchs over 1000N individuals will be roughly as bad. One could maybe argue that it's tolerable for some K<1000N, but that'll go about as well as an argument for an autocracy of 1000N/K.
Includes Syria, Russia, Israel, and Hamas. Attacks on medical care are serious and getting worse.
I don't know why the war in Syria gets so little attention. The soft bigotry of low expectations?
"The year 2022 set a grim record — 1,989 attacks on health-care facilities and their personnel, the worst total number in the decade since the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition began its sobering count."
"Attacks on health care aren't new. "You can go to the Korean War and wars in El Salvador and Central America during the 1980s," says Len Rubenstein, director of the Program on Human Rights, Health and Conflict at Johns Hopkins University. "Health care was attacked — just didn't get reported as much.""
"Garlasco has been working in this space for two decades, and he says he's never seen anything like what's taken place in Syria. "I've been in Iraq, in Afghanistan," he says, "and Syria was just something at a different level when it came to attacks on medical facilities.""
"Assaults on health care in this part of the world aren't unique to the current conflict. In Gaza, for example, Al-Shifa hospital was attacked in 2014. Zarifi says the Palestinians blamed it on an Israeli strike, but the IDF said a misfire by Palestinian militants was responsible.
"The International Criminal Court has had multiple years to carry out this investigation and it hasn't," says Zarifi. "Hamas has blocked it. The Israelis have blocked it. But that lack of accountability has really fostered an environment in which different groups can think that they can attack these targets with impunity.""
Both sides are afraid they might be responsible?
While that optimistic idea of the end of history seems to be wrong, I wasn't expecting a decline in ethical behavior. Perhaps a sufficiently complex, multi-party prisoner's dilemma leads to some people cooperating to increase defection.
One reason I could see that Syria et al may get less attention is that our tax dollars and elected representatives do not support, endorse, and fund their attacks on medical facilities and personnel.
No matter what your opinion of those countries actions are and how often you denounce them, citizens in the west do not elect those governments or pay taxes to them, those governments do not represent us and we are not participants or facilitating any of their war crimes.
This is not the case for Israel, where their current war would be impossible with direct military supply, economic subsidy, and political shielding by the US. And since most of the west is ostensibly democratic republics with representative governments and civil rights, the personal risk of criticizing the government is far less and the degree of responsibility for government policy is far greater.
People care a lot more about what Israel does than what its neighbours do in countries that don't use tax money to fund Israel as well, so I don't think that's a good explanation.
Can you recommend me a good software for making animations? Preferably free.
The intended purpose is making math videos, so many of the animations would be gradually updated equations, and maybe some objects on the side to illustrate what it is about.
I don't know if anyone here but Scott will be interested in this but I'm pretty sure that Scott would like to see it and I don't have his email address so I will share it here and hope that it finds additional appreciators here as well.
I have a chabura (intimate gathering dedicated to a good cause) for whom I just explained and summarized the Maimonidean distinction between three oft-confused matters of Jewish mystical belief.
The resurrection of the dead
The afterlife
The messiah
I hope that anyone likely to find this interesting and worthwhile receives the opportunity to enjoy it, whether through seeing this very comment or through having the article shared by someone who did.
The chair of Israel's investigative committee into rape on 10/7 by Hamas, @CochavElkayam, presents an old image of dead female Kurdish fighters as women sexually assaulted at the Nova music fest
During a 11/12 talk for Harvard's Maimonides Society, Elkayam referred to "an image of a woman stripped from the waist down... photographed on the side of the Nova music festival"
This image was originally published on the anonymous Hamas-Massacre website promoted by Israel's govt, but removed w/o acknowledgment after I demonstrated it was first published in 2022 and showed dead female Kurdish fighters
To support this claim, you'd need a pointer to the alleged image on a web site hosted by the Israeli government, and also a pointer to the same image at a pre-10/7 web site documenting the Syrian conflict. Archived versions at e.g, the Wayback Machine would do, but all Blumenthal seems to have are blatantly partisan web sites saying "look at this picture that we say the Israeli government tried to say was from 10/7 but really wasn't".
I already know that there are blatantly partisan sites that want me to believe that Hamas only attacked military targets on 10/7 and everything else is Israeli propaganda, so this adds nothing.
"Blumenthal is the editor of The Grayzone website, which is known for its apologetic coverage of authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese, Russian, Syrian, and Venezuelan governments, including its denial of chemical attacks by the Syrian government and of human rights abuses against Uyghurs"
The fact that Israelis needed to go to this extent to lie(using the picture of an apparently raped kurdish woman) suggests strongly that their refusal to cooperate with the UN in an independent investigation, or collect actual proof themselves stems from a darker reality-
that they're lying about the rapes as they lied about the beheaded babies, and the baked babies, and the mutilations and all of the rest of their sordid lies. They lie so they can murder Palestinian babies. That it's just another lie lacking proof because they simply cannot have proof for something that did not happen.
There's lying on both sides. For whatever reason, people think that just plain killing won't get people emotionally involved, so sometimes emotionally resonant atrocities get invented.
Why is it always that one side in particular has to be the one to stop the "cycle of violence"?
When one side rapes and tortures and puts babies into ovens, it's "just an inevitable consequence of the cycle of violence." But when the other side retaliates, it's not "just an inevitable consequence of the cycle of violence" — it's "perpetuating the cycle of violence."
Huh?
The whole point of the "cycle of violence"... is that it's a cycle. One act of violence leads to the next, which leads to the next, which leads to the next...
One type of person is consistently excused on the basis of the "cycle of violence", while another type of person is consistently treated as if they are the only one with agency, and must be the one to stop the cycle of violence rather than simply being a victim of it. Isn't this implicitly admitting that the first type of person is essentially less than human, with no capacity for empathy, strategy, or even basic logic and reasoning?
The great irony is the reverse is in fact true. Only one side is actually part of the "cycle of violence" in the sense that they directly respond to violence with violence in return. The other side is just equally violent all the time. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-cycle-of-violence
I'll speak to the abstract case, since the concrete case you're probably thinking of will have enough differences to fill a whole other discussion.
To briefly summarize the other replies I've seen so far:
* One side is more powerful, and presumably can afford the cost of being the one to end the cycle (i.e., forgiving the most recent violent act).
* Ideally, one side has been committing most of the violence, and therefore is required to pay the cost.
* Cynically, one side has been tapped by the mob as the one that must pay that cost, and the mob makes the rules. (The mob might even accuse that side of fitting the ideal case.)
* Also cynically, if you're the party who wants most badly for the cycle to end, then you get to decide which side has to pay the cost, and it may as well be the side you didn't like to begin with.
Another possibility I've run into in the past assumes, like the last point, that you're the one who wants the cycle to end. Ideally, you'd fully investigate and produce an objective measure of who was violent where and how much, and draw up a bill for both. Barring time to investigate, you default to the assumption that both parties are roughly equally responsible and send each one a bill for half. In practice, though, *you'll often be able to contact only one side*. The other is beyond your reach, for whatever reason - language barrier, culture barrier, values are too different, whatever.
This is where a lot of "be the bigger person" rhetoric gets its leverage. You see a fight between your teammate and someone on a rival team, a lot of tit for tat, and the rival is tough or inaccessible enough that you can't just crush him, so you appeal to your teammate to turn the other cheek. It's not because your teammate is in the wrong; rather, it's that your teammate is the only one who'll listen to you.
There's probably some of this going on between the US and Israel.
In the case of Hamas, they have publicly stated that they intend to commit more terrorist attacks like Oct 7. Stopping a tit-for-tat cycle only works if there is reason to believe that ending the attacks from one side will lead to the other side ending their attacks. There is no reason to believe that Hamas will ever stop their attacks. After Hamas is gone, perhaps Gazans can pick a non-terrorist group to negotiate with Israel.
I don't expect you'll like this answer, but AFAICT, there's actually a lot of reason to believe Hamas will eventually stop; or rather, to say you believe it; the evidence is the existence of a lot of people saying just that.
I have a hypothesis on what that specific reason is, and it says ugly things about people's attention span, and understandable and unpleasant things about people's epistemology.
Could you elaborate? ( I have a guess that I might agree about the attention span part - depending on who you have in mind. I suspect that the West's attention span (and the attention span of the leftmost factions within it) are not much longer than a 24 hour news cycle... )
I think you largely filled in the blanks. The reason to express belief that Hamas will eventually stop its attacks requires believing that that belief won't be called out.
Which, in turn, requires believing that those of the public who learned that Hamas didn't stop its attacks in the past, will forget; and that those of the public who never learned in the first place (for boring reasons such as "was born in 2005 and didn't read up on history") will see "Israel launched some sort of attack against Hamas" and not inquire further.
There are two asymmetries here. Israel is far more powerful than Hamas, which implies a certain responsibility, as others have noticed. But Hamas is more aggressive: their leadership asserts that they will continue violence against Israel as long as they have the ability to do so, regardless of the consequences for Gazan (or Israeli) civilians. (They have asserted in fact that they see all civilian deaths in Gaza as advancing their cause.) In contrast, Israel has indicated they will cease hostilities if Hamas is fully incapacitated. In other words, their various stated positions suggest that if Hamas 'surrendered' tomorrow, Israel would cease hostilities, while if Israel pulled back tomorrow, Hamas would continue hostilities. Logically then only Hamas can fully end the hostilities; as long as they exist they are committed to hostile actions.
Only one side of the cycle has the ability to alter conditions on a large scale in a way that could end the cycle of violence. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility, and Israel is by far more powerful than Hamas. This is true regardless of if the method Israel chooses is "make a deal with Hamas" or "slaughter Hamas to the last man." Hamas neither has the internal control to prevent people from doing things that will provoke retaliation, nor the military power to change things by force.
Keep in mind that most flare-ups in Israel/Palestine don't start directly with a Hamas attack, like they did on October 7th. More often there are smaller security problems - police brutality or settler action in the West Bank, lone wolf terrorists, a soldier shoots a kid who was throwing rocks at him, that sort of thing. It's very hard to for either side to keep a lid on *all* the possible provocations, which means that both sides will have to grit their teeth and accept that their are some crimes against them which are not worth unleashing a bloody war to avenge.
(I think attacking Hamas is going to be a necessary part of the puzzle, but not a sufficient one - you'll have to change the material conditions that cause these provocations.)
Israel is a first world country, and we generally assume those have the tools to run counterterrorism operations without killing more civilians than terrorists. And even if we grant that Hamas is an especially talented terrorist group and Gaza is an especially civilian-rich place to fight, we at least expect that Israel has the internal control needed to stop its own people from illegally settling the West Bank. I mean, come on. This is like the US not being able to stop a bunch of Texans from building a city in Mexico.
Given (a) how Texas started, and (b) all the arguments over illegal immigration when it comes to these states - is this really the best example for "can't/won't stop people founding settlements in other people's territory"?
Suppose it's not the *worst* example either, though. I suppose 2014 Ukraine would be a contender for worst there.
Part of the confusion here is caused by the asymmetry in the language we use. We refer to the IDF as "Israel", but we refer to Hamas as "Hamas". Despite the fact that Hamas is the official government of Gaza, the widely used linguistic convention of referring to the actions of governments using the name of the region or people they represent ("The United States withdraws from the Paris Agreement", "Russia invades Ukraine", "The Hutu genocide the Tutsi") is notably absent here.
Not "IDF bombs Gaza", or "Gaza attacked Israel", or "Palestine attacked Israel". It's always that "Israel", taken as a cohesive entity, strikes Gaza, but "Hamas" attacked Israel. Never "Gaza" or "Palestine" - despite Gaza likely having even more popular support than the Israeli government, making it even more appropriate to phrase it this way.
> counterterrorism operations
This is not a counterterrorism operation. It's a war. This is the whole point. Hamas is not just "some terrorist group", it's the official government of Gaza.
The analogy here is not some rogue Mexican terrorists suicide bombing Texans - it's the Mexican military launching a full-scale land invasion of Texas, firing missiles into Arizona with their F-5s, rolling across New Mexico with their Panhard ERCs.
If this occurred, the US would not respond by identifying and assassinating each individual soldiers that launched each missile. They would simply deliver complete and total devastation to the country of Mexico, just as any country would. And they would be fully justified in doing so as part of a defensive war.
But Hamas is not the official government of Gaza, on any, well, official definition of "official". Insofar as it is officially part of any government, it is a part of Palestinian National Authority / the State of Palestine, which in turn is led by Fatah.
Of course, preferable option would be Fatah asserting its control over West Bank and Gaza, but it currently does not happen to possess either the wherewithal to do this, or the sanction of the country that happens to be between them.
And yet when we want to know how many Palestinians have died in the present conflict, we cite Hamas's health ministry.
Hamas is the government of Gaza in the same sense that Jefferson Davis et al were the government of the Confederacy. Which is the only sense that really matters, until the status quo is changed the only way it can be.
The point is the definition of the word "official", quite deliberately used by the post I was replying to. Sure, Hamas de facto governs Gaza, but that doesn't make it official. Lots of areas in this world are ruled by entities other than the government formally in charge.
Why would anyone in their right mind care if it is "official"? Official and five dollars will get you a cup of coffee. Official, an army, and international support may in the future get you installed as the new government in place of the present "usurpers", but so will an army and international support alone. What use is "official" in any of this?
> Only one side of the cycle has the ability to alter conditions on a large scale in a way that could end the cycle of violence. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility, and Israel is by far more powerful than Hamas.
What could Israel realistically do, that would put an end to Hamas' aggression and terroristic activities?
> we at least expect that Israel has the internal control needed to stop its own people from illegally settling the West Bank.
I agree, they absolutely should put an end to this, immediately. But do you think that Hamas would stop shooting thousands of rockets towards residential areas if the IDF withdrew from Gaza and all illegal settlements in the West Bank were torn down tomorrow?
The answer to this depends on which positions are supported by rhetoric and which ones are grounded in reality.
Iran seems to hate Israel independently of what Israel does now. If Hamas and Hezbollah only exist because of Iranian money (debatable, almost certainly not entirely true but maybe enough to overwhelm other reasons), then nothing Israel can do will solve the problem. This implies their only option is to fight until Iran's proxies are destroyed and there's no foothold for Iran to use.
Palestinians seem to have mixed feelings about Israel. Non-Jewish Israelis exist in large numbers, and don't seem to hate Israel or Jews. Most of them are Palestinian. This implies that if Israel treated Palestinians like their own citizens (including those in the West Bank and didn't bulldoze their houses to make room for Jewish settlements) that the Palestinians would calm down and become peaceful neighbors.
These are pretty much the two core arguments. They might both be true, for different groups of people. Hamas and Hezbollah seem to hate Israel regardless of what Israel does, but maybe most Palestinians don't? If so, then the solution would be for Israel to give more and more rights to Palestinians under their control (West Bank and Gaza included) while consistently confronting Iran's proxies. I don't think this is possible under a two-state solution, because Iran can use the foothold of wherever Israel doesn't control to import weapons and train + indoctrinate fighters against Israel. A one state solution is a gamble for Israel because they would be inviting millions of Palestinians in as equal citizens. If they were wrong about Hamas existing only because of Iran but in fact it was the genuine feeling of the Palestinians then they would be inviting the terrorists inside and make it much harder to protect civilians.
Why should Israel be the one to give concessions to the people that are constantly attacking and massacring them? That would simply be rewarding their behavior. If you reward massacres by granting more political rights and better living conditions, you are telling your enemy that the way to get better outcomes is to commit such attacks. Hamas' popularity would surge as the ones who delivered these better outcomes as a result of their massacres.
Strategically, Israel has an obligation to cause large amounts of widespread suffering to Gazans for the foreseeable future, even if for no other reason than to demonstrate that when you attack Israel, this is what happens - things get much, much worse for you. Of course, this won't deter the animalistic bloodlust of the Palestinians, but it at least avoids the worst possible outcome of rewarding them for their atrocities.
I'm talking long term solution. I agree that the recent attack makes that solution impossible in the short term. The only viable option for Israel right now appears to be to completely take over Gaza and implement some kind of Israeli-controlled government to oversee it afterwards. This will not work out well for anyone involved, but may be better in some ways than the October 6 status-quo.
Steelmanning this somewhat, though I mostly agree with you. If one side has significantly more power, authority, or influence, it does make sense to hold them more accountable. For a bit of a silly example, if a father is arguing with his 10-year-old son, we would hold the father more accountable for escalating to violence than the son, even if we would say that either would be wrong to punch the other.
Hamas only has power through PR and what Iran sends them to fight a proxy war on Iran's behalf. Israel has the second highest GDP in the Middle East, behind Saudi Arabia - it's significantly higher than Iran, despite Iran having far more people (88 million to less than 10). Israel also has solid support from the most powerful country on the planet. We *should* hold them more accountable than we do other groups, including Hamas, for the same actions. That doesn't mean we excuse Hamas, and I am broadly supportive of Israel's desire and need to invade Gaza in an attempt at rooting out Hamas. I think Hamas has shown that they cannot be left on their own, and it's unreasonable to ask Israel to allow the possibility of such attacks as happened in October to randomly happen.
To go back to the silly example, it would be as if the son has stabbed the father and is still holding the knife. The father, despite being much stronger, may have to resort to some violence in order to diffuse the situation, and can't just allow the son the possibility of stabbing him again.
One pattern is that the observer calling for stopping the "cycle of violence" is subconsciously attributing different degrees of moral agency to the two sides, or at least feels more empowered to second-guess the policy decisions of one side than the other. Basically, you're viewing one side as if they're the protagonist of a work of fiction or the player character in an RPG and you're judging the morality and wisdom of their actions in isolation without considering the other side. This is an easy trap to fall into when one side or the other is your own government or at least much more akin to your society than the other side is.
The other pattern is an isolated demand for rigor applied to the side you more dislike. This is nearly the reverse of the first pattern: in this case you have cast one side as the villain and are cataloging the reasons the villain sucks. The other side's faults are either excused because they're cast as the good guys or ignored because they're mere NPCs.
And despite what I said about the second being nearly the reverse of the first, both effects can be in play at the same time for the same observer, particularly if the side being second-guessed is the observer's outgroup and their adversaries the observer's fargroup while the observer's ingroup is not directly involved. Basically, the conflict is being read as a Villain Protagonist story, or perhaps as one of the darker classical tragedies.
Or a simple reason might simply be that a Westerner (the assumed subject, here) might expect Israel to respond to potential Western pressure in a way that Hamas, hostile to the West anyway, wouldn't respond.
I've begun a substack to post thoughts and ideas. The first one is, weirdly, a script for a Bob Newhart Show (the old one, where he was the psychiatrist). Just a creative writing exercise. Guest starring Peter Falk as Columbo, because why not, as well as Young Larry, Young Darryl and Young Darryl.
If you have a background or interest in Judaism, particularly the black-hat variety, you may find my recent posts and videos very worthwhile.
You have a right to know my background so that you approach this with the weight my life story implies but I've never learned how to do that. Suffice it to say that the story of Mankind, and of the Jews, is one I have personally followed through unto the ends of the ends of the earth. I have sought and found all of the enlightenment I was able to seek and find, including having been an ultra-orthodox rabbi, etc.
This piece is a free gift for anyone capable of unwrapping it. And I apologize for the few typos. It was written in a unique state of consciousness and if it is a gift you are capable of enjoying I hope you have the ability to unwrap it.
Has anybody used or have any thoughts about 23 and Me's Health testing? I have the kit and am debating whether or not to use it.
Some background - my son is deaf and when he was born we did genetic testing to find out the cause. The answer turned out to be pretty bog standard, but as part of that testing they also found that he has a mutation that can cause LongQT syndrome (which can lead to sudden cardiac arrest). Further testing revealed that I have it also; however, neither of us has a long QT. After some back and forth with the testing lab and experts at the Mayo Clinic, it seems that our variant may not be pathogenic. But the whole episode caused us a lot of worry and if we had followed the initial doctor recommendations, would have put my son on beta blockers for the rest of his life. On the other hand, if our variant was pathogenic, we would have wanted to know that!
Basically, I'm left with very mixed feelings about genetic testing for health. And partly, I want to take this test because I'm curious what it might find and find the whole idea kind of interesting.
Note that I am not at all interested in discussing the privacy implications!
I think the majority of variants are currently classified as "VUS" - variants of uncertain significance. I don't know what's included in 23 and Me's health test, but I presume they tell you which variants they look at? Although I couldn't find a list of variants included in their chip, which is annoying. Anyway, you might have a list of variants as a purchaser, and if so you could take a look at them, check them out on ClinGen, and see how many of them are VUS. That might tell you whether it's worth pursuing or not.
If you're based in the US, you could look into joining the All of Us research program - which has the advantage of being free. It's unusual in that results are fed back to participants.
According to an unfortunately-paywalled article (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.ade9214), "The All of Us program began reporting genetic ancestry (seven populations and 20 subpopulations) and genetic traits (such as lactose intolerance, cilantro preference, and earwax type) in 2020. Since then, more than 182,000 participants have received these results. Beginning in December 2022, health-related DNA results are also being returned to participants, including a Hereditary Disease Risk report for 59 genes informed by ACMG recommendations and a Medicine and Your DNA report for variants in seven genes involved in drug metabolism informed by CPIC guidelines. To date, more than 68,000 “Hereditary Disease Risk” reports and 65,000 “Medicine and Your DNA” reports have been returned to participants. The results are returned through the All of Us secure participant portal, and participants who elect to see their results can access a free genetic counseling visit through the program’s Genetic Counseling Resource with materials and counseling available in both English and Spanish."
That's proper sequencing, not the snp-chip type of thing that 23andme do.
I think, typically, you get told you have e.g. 5%. Increased risk of some rare ish disease that you probably don't actually have. That is, getting the test result changes your p(have disease) so little that isn't worth it.
This, unfortunately, doesn't help - the problem is in the territory, not the map, so better-mapping-protocols like repeating the test don't improve your ability to know what's going on.
In a previous discussion in a previous Open Thread I asserted the following :
>>> [Israel is] a genocidal state hellbent on ethnic cleansing as much of the middle east as possible of Arabs with as little consequences as possible
I retract that fully. It was more of a "boo outgroup" style assertion even when I said it, but I believed there was some truth to it at the moment. I now don't think there is any.
> Operation Good Neighbor [...] was a directive of the Northern Command's Division 210 of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) launched in June 2016 to provide humanitarian assistance to Syrian citizens who were affected by the Syrian Civil War. The army kept the operation confidential until announcing it in July 2017
> The IDF relied on local contacts and operated in numerous villages near the border, primarily in the Quneitra district. As of July 2017, the primary recipients of the aid were the approximately 200,000 residents of the Hauran region
> According to the IDF, over 4,000 Syrians were brought to Israel to receive treatment, including hundreds of children.
The strongest possible version of the anti-Israel bundle of claims would predict that this should never happen. From an Israel-hostile point of view, Good Neighbor can only be explained by :
(a) Propaganda material, as the Syrian Civil Wars was one of the deadliest, most hellish, and most widely popularized conflicts in the 21st century.
(b) As cover for fanning the flames of the war and deepening internal divisions in the Syrian factions landscape, since Israel later admitted in 2019 that Good Neighbor included military aid to Syrian rebels.
(c) Non-systematic actions by low- and mid- rank personnel in the IDF
(b) This can't explain why the military aid didn't go to Al-Assad or Pro-Al-Assad or even Anti-Al-Assad groups that wreak havoc on civilians like ISIS (there are, however, allegations that Israel collaborated with ISIS), all would have equally deepened the division among Syrian factions and prolonged the civil war. The aid to civilians appears unnecessary regardless of where the military aid goes.
(c) The wikipedia article quotes a high-ranking IDF general responsible for all Israeli forces in the Syria-adjacent sector approving of the operation, and the article intro itself attributes the operation to Israeli high command in the region.
So it appears that Israel, at least outside of Gaza and the West Bank, at least in the second decade of the 21st century, is not that keen on the death of non-Palestinian Arabs. It feels abrupt to change my view based on a single piece of info, especially with the torrent of contradicting info coming from Gaza. But this piece of info has caused me a good deal of surprise, this is not what I would have predicted Israel to do at all.
Footnote : I started the internet rabbit hole that ended up in me discovering Good Neighbor when I stumbled upon this playlist of excerpts from the hilarious Israeli comedy The Jews Are Coming (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv5Eiy9qLWVMlYRtN-I5x8asJUV-NR6y-). Very recommended, some videos only have Arabic translation but some have only English or mixed Arabic-English. Contains very offensive mockery of Abrahamic prophets, including Abraham himself.
It feels impolite to get all this praise and not respond with a simple thank you, so to all the good people heaping praise on me down thread, Thank You. I'm commenting this under my orignal post because it would be too spammy to repeat the same thanks under 6 comments or so, but if any of you see this, please know it's for you.
I certainly don't feel I deserve all those thanks, it's not like it's emotionally difficult for me to be wrong on this matter, I don't wake up everyday wishing from all my heart that Israel would commit a genocide so I can write mean things about it online. I **want** to believe I'm wrong about Israel, that's why being socially rewarded for changing my mind on this feels a bit undeserved.
People who do *not* change their minds get implicit social rewards from "their side" plus the feeling of righteousness (and that too is usually undeserved), so I think it is good to have a culture that explicitly pushes against this.
"You just impressed the hell out of me. It is very rare for someone to publicly change their mind -- even here, where people are on the whole more fair-minded than in most online forums."
You just impressed the hell out of me. It is very rare for someone to publicly change their mind -- even here, where people are on the whole more fair-minded than in most online forums. There's a book by Alan Jacobs that I like a lot -- it's called How to Think -- where Jacobs talks about the debate conventions at the Yale Political Union, an undergrad organization. Convincing the person you are debating that your view is the correct one is called "breaking" the debater, and it is not an uncommon occurrence for one of the debaters to announce that they have been convinced by their opponent. The most admired debaters are those who have both broken someone and also been broken. So you win the Fair-mindedness & Courage award -- from me, anyhow.
You just impressed the hell out of me. It is very rare for someone to publicly change their mind -- even here, where people are on the whole more fair-minded than in most online forums. There's a book by Alan Jacobs that I like a lot -- it's called How to Think -- where Jacobs talks about the debate conventions at the Yale Political Union, an undergrad organization. Convincing the person you are debating that your view is the correct one is called "breaking" the debater, and it is not an uncommon occurrence for one of the debaters to announce that they have been convinced by their opponent. The most admired debaters are those who have both broken someone and also been broken. So you win the Fair-mindedness & Courage award -- from me, anyhow.
Yeesh dude. I'm surprised to have this much to unpack from such a short reply but:
(1) Group identity can be forged out of shared experience, and much like the American revolution separated American identity from British identity, decades of having other Arab countries largely turn their back on Palestinian Arabs, together with a lot of struggles very unique to Palestinians, can most certainly form a Palestinian identity.
(2) Even if you want to debate that - time and place, man. When someone adverse to your way of thinking extends an olive branch, it is not (assuming you actually want to convert people) the time to shit in his oustretched hand. You seem to be having a lot of fun fighting with NS about this stuff, so maybe channel that energy up there with them rather than pointing it at the guy who's leading with "hey I have to own that Israel is better than I thought it was."
(3) Why is there a parenthesis around the "a" in your last sentence? I don't want to assume you are being flirty with "they are not people" but it's hard to read as anything else, which makes the whole post look all the more trollish.
The shared experience of being butthurt revanchist losers? When you start a war with the explicit stated aim of genocide, and lose, sometimes you lose land. Cry about it.
My friend, I'm afraid you've missed my point. I am not offering you an opportunity to debate the legitimacy of the Palestinian claim to a cultural identity distinct from that of other Arabian peoples. I am offering you notes on how you can improve your behavior.
As it is right now, assuming you really do care about Israel, the easiest and best way you can help is to look less like a troll when representing their cause in public.
OP is leading with "this previous criticism of Israel I had was wrong." Assuming you are pro-Israel, you want more of this, not less. I and plenty of others on this board have argued against OP in other posts where he has criticized Israel. Assuming you are pro-Israel, you want more of that too. Your behavior, however, is only serving to make those things less likely.
Read some of the other replies in this thread, made by people who have been arguing against OP on this issue off and on for several weeks now. That is what "doing it right" looks like and what you should aspire to if you're looking to represent your cause well in a public forum. "[Outgroup] are not (a) people" is most decidedly not the foot you want to put forward.
Which Texans? There are 30 million of them. How many want to live “free from the occupation of the US”?
When say 20+ million Texans express strong enough desire for independence, strong enough to form an army to fight for it, strong enough to protest the US occupation on a daily basis, etc etc etc, then sure, they’ll eventually be a separate people.
First of all, suggesting that secession is ever an option? That's racist.
Second of all, you need to cherry-pick your definitions more carefully, because the TNG is a stronger military than Hamas, and the Catalans are just as protest-y as anyone else.
I literally have no idea what your argument is here. Most Texans consider themselves American. When that changes, they may end up being a separate people. What’s so controversial about that?
I am pleased and impressed with your honest search. May you be blessed.
P.S. If you are not anonymous and want to have a video conversation or even to ask me questions about my own take it would be a pleasure to join you in that.
You can read about my take all over my Substack and Youtube. I explain myself most assertively to my Israeli/Rabbinic audience here.
Thanks for being willing to update and also say so publicly. That's hard and beneficial to you and the community.
I would also add that Israel cementing formal relations with numerous Arab countries in the last six or so years is a positive sign and represents a better ideal. It gives me hope for long term peace - at least 50+ years from now.
I'm picking up an old side project, which is to come up with a notation for defining user interfaces.
I'm making a half hearted effort to actually do some research and hear other's opinions this time, instead of diving right in like I usually do. Hence this post.
I'm seeing a ton of stuff has sprung up since last I looked, a lot of it bundled into "low code no code" saas products.
But it's all pretty basic web/mobile stuff, with the more sophisticated ones straying into db design. From a power perspective, these things look like they'll tap out at a simple shopping trolley.
I am interested in developing/discovering a more complete notation, something that could be used to fully define real workhorse apps like Blender or Autodesk Fusion.
I have my own ideas, but does anyone here know of any similar work I should know about? Has anyone played with something like this themselves?
Have you used Figma? I watched some videos but decided it probably wasn't what I wanted before I actually bothered playing with it. From what I saw, it's what I meant by basic web/mobile stuff.
I'd certainly welcome input by people who've used it. Can you use Figma to do basic staples like dragging-dropping icons, dragging selectboxes to select entities, that kind of thing? My current dummy test project is an app that lets you create circles by clicking to place them and dragging out to set the radius. Would Figma let you do that in a natural-feeling way?
Are you familiar with the words "Turing-complete"? The implication is that whatever replaces code will inevitably either be limited in functionality, or will be just another form of code -- probably much worse than the existing ones, because the existing ones have decades of research behind them.
A picture with ten shapes is nicer than a code with ten lines. But I can work with programs that have tens of thousands of lines. Seeing a picture with thousand shapes (where each of them must be perfectly right otherwise the entire thing stops working correctly) would drive me crazy. Navigating it would probably be hell, because you couldn't use the keyboard, or things like search, regular expressions, diff, changing or extracting information using a short script, etc.
So these things usually only work for narrow domains, where you do more or less exactly what the author of the tool had in mind. Trying to do something else is either impossible or a descent into madness.
I think you have misunderstood. We are talking about user interfaces. A flyout from a button could lead to a textbox that says "Boolean Union all selected objects" (pre-implementation) or "run_op_boolean_union()" (if the actual business code is already working) and the app in question can have all the Turing-completeness it needs without requiring the notation system itself to be self aware.
What I'm interested in is notating the concepts and situations and caveats that arise when creating the UI of an app.
The "narrow domain" is exactly the domain that covers human psychology during tool use, and what any notation could reveal or clarify about that field is interesting to me in its own right.
Coders in my experience both hate UI stuff and are abysmal at it, so if the kind of system I'm talking about came into being it could mean a lot of utility for a lot of people.
> A picture with ten shapes is nicer than a code with ten lines. But I can work with programs that have tens of thousands of lines. Seeing a picture with thousand shapes (where each of them must be perfectly right otherwise the entire thing stops working correctly) would drive me crazy.
Nope, I don't believe you. You have far more visual interpretation machinery in your head than you do symbolic manipulation intrastructure. You're just not using it for the task of software development, because no one has yet worked out how.
Although Hollywood likes to show us the l33t coder rattling away on his keyboard as lines and lines of code scroll past his eyes, the better software developers seem to work mainly on notepads and whiteboards, hammering the solution into shape before writing a single line of code, and only after the creative work is done commencing the implementation. If you truly find working with code easier than working with graphical representation, it must be because years of experience have worn grooves of that shape into your brain - a cruelty I would would see others spared from.
Are there any reports of OpenAIs revenue? ChatGPT 4 is $240 a year and if only 5% of users paid for I estimate billions of revenue. About $2b assuming 5% of the reported 180M users.
I would expect much fewer than 5% to be paying for it. At the university I attend practically everyone I know has pulled it up at one point or another, but the great majority of these people have no interest in AI and use the website less than weekly.
I'm sure they're bringing in a lot of revenue even if e.g. 0.5% are paying for GPT 4 but I think $2b is a high estimate.
Can anyone suggest a useful source of data for online death threats/online threats of violence? From what I can make out, UK homicide rate has very slightly declined since 2008, but threats to kill reported to police in the same period have grown very significantly. Most of those would be online I assume but would be nice to know for sure - doesn't have to be UK data.
Why is his shirt soaked with blood, but the "wound" is not bleeding at all and has already completely clotted?
We're supposed to believe he was shot, then everyone around him waited around doing nothing for 20 minutes, then they started recording, and then hurriedly pulled his shirt off to inspect the wound as if he had just been shot seconds before?
"Dan Cohen is an American journalist and filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He is the host of Behind the Headlines. Formerly of RT America, Cohen has contributed to Al Jazeera English, Alternet, Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone, Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, The Nation, and Vice News."
"Al-Jazeera network remains the standard bearer for the Islamist position."
"The Electronic Intifada is an explicitly pro-Palestinian political and ideological Web site" [9] that hosts "anti-Israel propaganda."
"Middle East Eye Palestinian journalist Shatha Hammad... made a Facebook post in 2014 which praised Adolf Hitler for "sharing the same ideology" and the Holocaust"
NICE! All more reliable than the IDF. Are you still trying to spread the beheaded babies story or did you finally quit spreading that lie, mr child killing hasbarist?
"We're supposed to believe he was shot, then everyone around him waited around doing nothing for 20 minutes, then they started recording, and then hurriedly pulled his shirt off to inspect the wound as if he had just been shot seconds before?"
You are inserting a lot of unnecessary stuff there, but I am not surprised, you are an insincere hasbara and this comment of mine is just to laugh at you :) keep murdering children, Palestinians will keep taking down soldiers.
You just mumbled a bunch of unnecessary gibberish you silly hasbarat you didn't expose anything. Israelis snipe kids to death because they are evil people as is anyone who supports them, no shortage of instances and videos. Go scream "pallywood" to the sky, we know you are just a child killing liar.
HUGE admission: Israel finally admits there was an "immense and complex quantity" of what it calls "friendly fire" incidents on 7 October.
"I set it on fire... I shot at him... we checked the house and heard the sounds of young children in the safe room. We shot at the safe room... we heard young children's crying... we shot at the door. Until we didn't hear noise anymore."
"Military forensic teams in Israel have examined bodies of victims of last week's Hamas attack on communities around the Gaza Strip and found multiple signs of torture, rape and other atrocities"
I've had a new frustration recently: trying to hunt down which paper some math fact was originally proved in. I'll find that paper X claims that paper Y proves some fact, but paper Y just proves a similar fact. If I'm lucky, miniscule modifications yield the desired fact, but these are often far from obvious.
It seems like it would be useful to have a repository about what's proved in what papers. I wonder if anyone has tried doing such a thing, for math or for some scientific field (not sure it would be as useful there). The unfortunate part is due to unreliability of what's out there, a lot of work would have to be done to make sure the information is correct.
(Specific example: "Brown proved that the Houghton Groups are type F_{n-1} but not type F_n"; actually, Brown proved FP_{n-1} but not FP_{n}. However, his methods readily adapt to the claimed statement. This is one of the less egregious statements, it's just the one I had to deal with today.)
If you formalise all of the statements being catalogued in a consistent framework in order to make them comparable, wouldn't that itself require re-phrasing the results, thereby introducing more of the minor edits this is intended to get around? If you're not making edits like that, then I don't see what the advantage is meant to be over just using the papers themselves. Would the catalogue just list all of the theorem statements and definitions verbatim while cutting out the proofs and discussion?
For math at least, a good number of the minor rewritings are in fact proven equivalences, so you could point to something for that as well (X proved Y, which is equivalent to Z by W).
A hefty chunk of a paper is often details, where what I'm looking for is more "the core of this proof is that you can do X, because of property Y", and other such statements. Also, as in my reply to rebelcredential, a repository for the presently unwritten lore.
Another thing this could help with is the static nature of published work. While people can update arXiv versions of papers, they often don't bother. Such a repository as I seek would be more amenable to corrections and updates.
Out of curiosity, how would you imagine one could uniquely identify/describe/search on the proofs/facts/statements you're talking about? Can this be structured at all, or are you thinking more along the lines of an AI reads all the papers and answers your queries in natural language?
An AI could certainly be helpful here, once we get hallucinations more under control. I was thinking of something stylistically like a wiki. There's ncatlab, but... well, that tends to be more limited in content, and the focus is very much more on definitions and theorems, whereas I want to have the historical information attached to everything (who proved what, in what papers, using roughly what methods).
In a sense, I'm largely just complaining about how much unwritten lore there is: subtle errors that "everyone knows about", "obvious" consequences that are anything but and no one ever wrote down. It doesn't help that chasing citations down requires interfacing with a variety of opaque systems. God bless for arXiv, if only we could get everyone to use it
Nice, I'm somehow reminded of Glinda from the Wizard of Oz books. (Not the movie version.) (Or Mary Poppins, but the movie version this time. Julie Andrews, sigh.)
What's good form for reporting repeated spam? I reported one at least three times, but it looks like it will be here 20 to 50 times if I open all the "new replies".
Oh, the Spam that was all over this thread -- it says something about Christmas? I reported about the first 3 instances of it I ran into, then when I realized there were probably dozens of posts from the same spammer I just added a note to my last report saying that there were lots of posts from the same spammer sprinkled all over the thread.
Ah, the beneficial advancement that adoption of AI brings to ordinary life, as we saw with our little friend spamming their heart out, all enabled to be faster and more convenient for them with their new AI friend doing the hard toil of sending the same message over and over.
I even got it in my email, so I'd like to know if it happened anybody else, and maybe a heads-up that our little visitors are now scraping contact details off here.
I'm thinking of getting a tablet for my 4 year old son to learn on. He's currently working through beast academy on my laptop. That would move to his own tablet, but he would also use it for learning English etc. Any recommendations from fellow parents?
I would highly recommend good boundaries and setting reasonable expectations. Kids quickly become addicted to the flashing lights and immediate feedback and don't want to give it up. Expectations about how long to be on the tablet at one time (we found 30 minutes was a good limit) are important. I would also suggest limiting travel and having him go to a particular place - maybe a couch or comfy chair. Learn a routine.
Our kids would become agitated when we would ask them to turn off electronics for things like dinner or bedtime, especially when they were allowed to be on it for indefinite periods. When we started setting a timer for 30 minutes, that very quickly went away and they got used to the expectation that tablet time was over.
The primary goal is to create a more nuanced understanding of the psychological orientation towards the EA and adjacent rationality communities. The insights gained could be pivotal in developing strategies to mitigate memetic hijacking in these spaces.
The survey will remain open until December 20th, and I plan to share the findings publicly. Your participation would be valuable and greatly appreciated. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you in advance for your contribution! 😊
Elon Musk seems to be sliding into the extreme crowd of the likes of Alex Jones, someone he despised only a year ago. It is sort of easy to see how he was pushed further and further right by the relentless attacks from the left, but I wonder if there is a good description of the radicalization process in general, and whether his unfortunate slide matches this description.
I wish I could like this post, so I'll add to it. To me this is not a post in support of Alex Jones, but of realizing that "the right" isn't alone in this and ignoring the crazies on the other side is counter-productive in creating a better society. I'm less concerned with Elon Musk allowing Alex Jones on a privately owned publicly accessible social media platform than I am of an elected official with the same proclivity for nonsense conspiracy theories.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not in support of Jones here. If it were simply a matter of him as an individual, I would be broadly supportive of cutting him off from all social media. But it's never just about one person, it's often about precedent that his opponents might try to use against others. The whole, "first they came for..." line of thought.
And if we're going to take an Alex Jones out of polite society, then we should take out an Adam Schiff as well. I'm not actually in favor of either, from a "government shuts you down" perspective, because I don't think the government should have that power. I'm happy to never trust what either says on my own volition.
Unfortunately, I don't think they're entirely wrong. I think there's an unhealthy despair about the human race on the left-- there are the people who think aliens don't visit us because we're so disgusting and the people who think humans are a blight on the planet.
It is not at all easy for me to see how Elon Musk, famously stubborn tech visionary, one of the richest men on Earth, who literally owns the platform that all the people attacking him post on, is so weak-willed and vulnerable that he endorsed Alex Freaking Jones because leftists were making fun of him online. Like, that is an incredible amount of power you're suggesting "the left" has here.
Musk wants to push society rightwards, and while he might not agree with Jones on everything, Jones - a popular voice speaking to a very select audience - is a very potential tool to do that. There's no need to assume weak-willedness and vulnerability, Musk has, during the recent years, acquired an obvious ideological quest and now has a bully pulpit to offer for enabling that.
Yeah the idea attacks from "the left" did this is ridiculous. I think what we see with Musk is a combination of narcissism, being detached from society because of his wealth, and his (much more than) rumored drug use. I also think he desperately wants to be liked and seem cool, but just keeps picking the worst set of peers to want to look cool in front of.
Innuendo Studios (Ian Danskin) has a video which pretty much explains the process (at about 23 minis there is a neat little analysis of good vs. bad arguments). Without knowing Musk well, it may be impossible to tell how he was radicalized, if he was. But if you watch the video, you will see how central a role platforms like Twitter ("X") can be to the process. Musk is, at the very least, not a good caretaker.
I recommend checking out Innuendo Studios channel, there is a long series of videos closely analyzing ultra right wing techniques and tactics, on-line and off.
I saw most of those videos back before i made the (good) decision to largely disengage from political YT - they do contain some useful insight but there's also a *lot* of fallacious argument that stems from his huge in-group bias in favour of progressive rhetoric.
I don't disagree, but I would be interested in some specific examples that you saw. Of course, he self-identifies as a radical (I do not), so it's understandable that he wants to provide the strongest argument possible in favor of his values and beliefs.
I can't remember the details because i don't want to fall back down the political YT rabbit hole I'm not going to rewatch to check (sorry) but the video on how 'moderates are effectively republicans' or similar was especially egregious and made some unfair identitarian assumptions iirc.
I agree. I self-identify as a left leaning radical centrist, and Dan made the same assumptions that MLK (erroneously) did: if a white moderate isn't actively attacking the racists, then they are part of the problem. "Anti-Racism" is a binary to a rad lefty, not a spectrum. You're in or you're out.
I watched part of the townhall-- Musk seems to genuinely like Jones. There was a lot of "We like the human race! We must expand into space! The top of the left wants the human race dead!"
Restoring Jones's Twitter account without actually agreeing with him is totally consistent with Musk's stated aim to premit freedom of speech (assuming, that is, that Jones was banned as a result of his views rather than for abusing the platform in some way; I don't pay enough attention to this sort of thing to know whether this is the case).
Yeah, restoring would have been fine, if cringe. Participating in a meeting where Jones is prominently featured is a different story. The one about sliding towards more extreme and fringe views.
Taylor Swift was the biggest recording artist in the 2010s. It's not really surprising that when she did a truly massive concert series for the first time in years. it did gangbusters, although credit as well to her active cultivation and management of a large, obsessive fanbase that helps drive coverage and publicity for her brand.
I can't help but wonder if a backlash will come in 2024, though. She's so heavily exposed and hyped, it kind of seems inevitable - although social media makes that more dangerous now, since artists can weaponize their ultra-fans against critics and upstarts.
She has gone through at least 2 backlashes already - being rejected from the country scene but not yet accepted by pop; everything she wrote about in Reputation - but is bigger than ever. There may be backlash at some point, but it's unlikely to damager her at all.
I'm not sure if a url counts as a high quality comment, but I mean, the url itself does give a pretty good idea of what happened. Someone died at her concert this year and there's obviously some controversy around that.
Are you daft? How was Swift responsible for the death of an attendee?
The show happened in the middle of a sweltering heatwave, in a football stadium whose owners, Time For Fun, did little to keep fans safe: it placed walls around the middle levels of the stadium to prevent non-paying fans from viewing anything inside, which blocked airflow; it refused to let fans bring in their own water while they waited hours for the show, forcing people to pay inflated prices for the same drink, which itself was in limited supply because the company believed many would pay more for alcohol; and when reports started coming through that many fans were fainting or having health issues, especially those on the floor who stood on metal, heat-absorbing sheets placed over the pitch, the company refused to, at the minimum, provide free water to counteract dehydration.
The situation was bad enough that the Brazilian government said it would open an investigation into the company.
I haven’t seen any discussion of the story about the reaction of big tech to the release of ChatGPT in the Dec. 5 New York Times.
We could start the story in August 2022, when Meta made BenderBot available on the web, which did not gather too much attention. In November 2022, Meta made Galactica available, which was designed to assist scientific researchers. I'll quote the <em>Times</em>: “Someone asked it to write a research paper about the history of bears in space. It did. After three days, Galactica was shut down.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI was struggling to fix problems with GPT-4, particularly surrounding hate speech and misinformation. One idea was to release an older version of the software, in the hopes that the interactions would give the company more insight into those problems. Sam Altman decided to go ahead with “a low key research preview” of the older technology.
Quite unexpectedly, ChatGPT 3.5 was a big hit, getting over a million users in its first five days, and over 100 million over the next few weeks. OpenAI juggled computing resources and managed to handle the load.
The reaction in Silicon Valley was to race to get AI products out the door. Sam Schillace of Microsoft captured the mood when he wrote, “[it would be an] absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.” Google’s attitude prior to the release of ChatGPT had been, as best I can make out, that they would invest money in AI research but there was no target date for releasing the technology. If they developed an LLM that performed like ChatGPT, their next step would be to try to develop a better LLM, with the hope that after enough iterations they would come up with an LLM that met Google’s safety standards and could be used in a product. But once ChatGPT hit the scene, the goal was to get a product out the door while doing the best they could to address safety issues.
Zuckerburg reorganized Meta to focus on AI, and X.AI probably wouldn't even exist if it weren’t for the release of ChatGPT.
The tech world has a large “winner take all” quality to it, meaning it’s easy to trigger a race where safety concerns are subordinated to getting a product out the door quickly. It’s a bit ironic that OpenAI, for all its professed concern about AI safety, triggered this race, but it’s not clear how anyone could have foreseen that the impact of ChatGPT would be that much different from the impact of BenderBot.
And then the employees revealing the terrifying extent of the personality cult by unanimously siding with the sociopath wasn't such an encouraging sign for humanity either.
I posted late in the last open thread and didn't get a reply, so i'm trying my luck again (as I strongly dislike this behaviour, I swear I won't do it again, and apologize):
I just noticed that what I know about HSV-1 (herpes) don't make sense:
1- A large majority of the population carry the virus (per internet & common knowledge)
2- But only a minority sometimes get blisters (per internet & common knowledge)
3- Active blisters are highly contagious (per my physician)
4- But asymptomatic carriers still shed virus 20% of the time (less if they're under antiviral treatment) (per wikipedia)
5- During a blister episode, I should avoid touching it, or wash my hands thorougly afterward, especially before touching any other mucosa (eye, lips, genitals) (per my physician)
From 5-, I assume that a given HSV-1 infection is localized, and that I could get multiple ones if I were careless. But for someone in his 30's who never developed any, is the precaution actually relevant? The odds are high that they're asymptomatic carriers, would a different source of HSV-1 risk causing episodes when the previous one(s?) didn't? And if asymptomatic carriers shed viruses 20% of the time, any time I shake hands with someone, and we don't have super rigorous hand-mouth hygiene, and I rub my eyes afterward, shouldn't I risk getting an infection in the eye?
And if each infection is independent from each other, and asymptomatic carriers shed virus 20% of the time, then shouldn't any unprotected oral sex involve a ~20% (a bit less, for those that aren't carriers) risk of getting a genital infection?
There's something that is wrong, either from the bits I got from wikipedia, from those I got from my physician 20 years ago, or from those I infer.
I think the standard blood test for HSV-1 is very unreliable. Something like 50% false positives. So it's possible that all those statistics aren't actually true.
My guess is that 4 and 5 are the kind of more-zealous-than-necessary contagion advice that we got a lot of during covid. It probably is good to avoid touching a blister, and wash one's hands thoroughly afterward, especially before touching any other of your surfaces, but probably not so valuable that it's worth making your life difficult for it. Similarly, although asymptomatic carriers probably "shed virus" some non-negligible fraction of the time, it's probably much lower levels of shedding than someone with an active blister (just like people with covid really are contagious before symptoms reach peak, and for quite a while after, but are a lot *less* contagious than at peak).
If your town really was completely covid free (maybe in early 2020) or herpes free (possible ever?), then it would probably be worth taking some effort with these precautions, but for an ordinary person, probably only the obvious precautions are worthwhile.
The messaging around HSV is pretty poor. I also object to the habit of doctors not screening for HSV unless pushed because "everyone has it".
In response to your collection of somewhat contradictory "facts", I recall being told that if you have a specific type (HSV1 or HSV2) and outbreaks occur in a specific bodily location, that unless you have a compromised immune system, it is highly unlikely your infection will occur at another place on your body, as the antibodies are there so in a sense you are naturally immune to the same form jumping from place to place.
But who knows for sure? The medical community constantly comes up with contradictory recommendations that seem to be passed through a tight "will the absolute truth really help here, or should we spin things in what we believe to be a utilitarian way?" filter. Or perhaps they just don't know, but like mansplainers and GPT, they can never admit they don't have a pat answer.
Yeah the messaging on this has never really totally hung together into a consistent picture.
I had a girlfriend who used to get sores on her lip like once or twice a year which she supposedly got from her mom. Years after dating her I noticed I suddenly one year would get sores on my chin if I was underslept and under a lot of stress.
But after say eight 2-week long outbreaks in 4-5 years, literally just less work stress and more sleep totally ended them. Never any medication or anything. And now I haven't had an outbreak in 10 years. I assume there is some virus deep in my chin flesh somewhere though?
Not a doctor, but it's my understanding that the virus stays dormant in some kind of tissue (nerve cells IIRC?) for long periods of time, and occasionally is triggered to become active somehow.
My assumption is that the chance it infects any particular place is pretty small, and the odds it becomes symptomatic is small, but there are lots of chances for this to happen, so it works out that you should be careful to avoid transmission when it's active, since there are lots of viruses around then.
I have a friend who "hates math" but I suspect what they really hate is how math is taught in modern American schools. What would be a good book for them to read to potentially change their perspective? ChatGPT suggested "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" but I'm looking to see if others would recommend more books.
Math education sucks at most schools. I am not familiar with American schools, maybe they are exceptionally bad, but hating math is probably a common thing everywhere.
There is a new series of math textbooks in Czech republic, called "Hejný method", they are really awesome. They make math seem just like solving puzzles.
Unfortunately, the paper textbooks are only available in Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian. There is also an English 1-year electronic license for €27 available for either the 1st grade or the 6th grade. (But you would need to buy it on a non-English e-shop; I would be happy to assist you.)
How to Lie with Statistics and How to Take a Chance. Neither is high-powered or anything, if that’s what you’re looking for they won’t help, but they’re fun and extremely approachable. The latter is more math (probability theory), the former more how not to get lied to, but it makes reading anything with statistics in it very fun for a while.
>What would be a good book for them to read to potentially change their perspective?<
...you want to give them homework?
The only math book I've read was Mathemagics: How To Look Like A Genius Without Really Trying. It lost me at, like, multiplication. But my addition is faster now because of it.
Videogames are the true answer. Get some heavy number-cruncher games and play them. Learn the exact break point where a flat +10 becomes worse than a +4%, and the price point where the +10 is still the better long-term purchase.
Not my favorite either. My knee-jerk reaction reaction on seeing a geometric problem is to slap a coordinate system on it and try to turn it into an algebra or calculus problem.
take a look at some from this article! Though this is aimed at improving children's education and not convincing adults to like math, I'm "relearning" math as an adult and appreciate resources that assume little to no prior knowledge and aren't as heavy and dense as adult resources.
On the second learning, I noticed this little gem:
> In much of Europe now it’s deplorably fashionable to burn Russian books
Yeah, that actually happened... in your imagination.
Generally, the article seems trying to suggest that Russian math education is somehow superior. I strongly doubt it.
The fact that these books exist doesn't say about Russian education more than the fact that their English translations exist says about British or American education. Books are one thing, schools are another. The average math lesson at the average Russian school probably sucks, just like it sucks everywhere.
If you look at the results of International Mathematical Olympiad, the United Kingdom is actually doing quite well. On average they end up at ~10th place compared to other countries. Which means that some kids get elite math education.
In other words, there seems to be no evidence for the moral panic. There are no data showing that UK kids are somehow worse at math compared to e.g. Russian kids.
The fact is, many communist countries really had great math teachers. Not because their education was somehow better, but simply because there was nothing else to do, for a nerd. You couldn't try your luck in finance. You couldn't start a software company. The best possible job was to be a math teacher, because it allowed you to spend a large part of your day doing math, and for a moment it allowed you to forget how everything else sucks. There wasn't a better paid alternative for a nerd anyway. (It was also a relatively safe job. Lenin and Stalin didn't make many statements about math, so the risk of accidentally contradicting them about something was small.) So you taught math, and if you had a talent for writing, you also wrote math textbooks. This was not specific for Russia; you could probably find many great math books in other post-communist countries, too. Many of those books were probably never translated to English (perhaps someone should do something about it today, especially with the help of automatic translation).
I am completely in favor of improving math education everywhere, but hopefully with less of this political bullshit. The list of books is cool, and many of them are available at Library Genesis; just saying. The difficult part are the gaps between "great books exist" and "kids actually read them" and "kids actually read them at school".
That fits with an idea from _The Peter Principle_(1969), whose premise was that people get promoted to their level of incompetence. This now seems optimistic, since we're seeing people promoted past their level of incompetence.
Anyway, there was a claim that prejudice is the way to keep the Peter principle from operating. If people are limited to only rising to a certain level, some of the people at that level will be competent and not promoted past it.
My impression is that Dominic is roughly pointing in the right direction, but the part about "government controlled tests" is a red herring (probably a mandatory one to make for a conservative politician). If you are actually learning math -- only using a different, allegedly superior method -- then you should be able to pass the tests, shouldn't you? I mean, it would be really suspicious if someone claimed superior math knowledge, and then failed at the math tests that the current kids, who mostly hate math and don't really understand it, can pass.
I would actually say the opposite: tests are *good*, especially when you want to reform math education. As a parent, I would want to be sure that my kids actually learn math, and there are essentially two ways to convince me that they do -- either I trust the method they use to teach, or I see that my kids do well at the tests so I don't care about the exact method that achieved this. Without tests, if someone casts a suspicion on your new method of math education (and of course, someone will), there is no credible defense; it's just an opinion against an opinion. With tests, you can simply say "hey, our kids can pass the test as well as the other kids, maybe even better" and you can have an external authority confirm this.
What you shouldn't do, of course, is start with the tests, and then drill the kids to the tests using the most boring method imaginable. That is definitely bad; and that is what bad teachers will do if you let them. Passing the test shouldn't be the goal of math education, but should be a side effect. Otherwise, either the test isn't testing the right math skills (in which case, fix the test) or you are not teaching them.
There should be multiple difficulty levels of the test. For example, a basic level for the bare minimum everyone should now, a medium level for students who want to proceed to a university (not necessarily a mathematical one), and maybe a hard one for the gifted kids to flex their muscles.
> building education institutions outside political control, including but not only ‘schools’
Yes, definitely. More sources of education, not controlled by the same people, makes a more robust system. That includes YouTube channels, Khan Academy, math circles, math olympiads, correspondence seminars, whatever.
> [Kolmogorov's extraordinary schools] were connected to a university so those teaching 15-18 year olds were real mathematicians and physicists teaching in the university.
That doesn't scale well. I would instead propose an afternoon club, once a week, taught by university *students* (volunteers). Those students would be coordinated by the university professors, who would design the lessons, and the students would then deliver the lessons at the high schools. Then the students would be encouraged to design their own lessons, and share it among themselves, so there would be more material.
Technology is an applause light, but in reality it is double-edged. I can imagine great technology that advanced education. I can also imagine tons of money wasted on worthless technology, just because someone wanted to check the "we use technology" checkbox. The debate should be on how specifically to use technology. (Educational videos, interactive demos, personalized spaced repetition...)
In my experience, and awful lot of tests are designed around the curriculum, and include some pretty specific things that don't necessarily follow from the general skill that the course is theoretically aiming to teach. This can come in quite a few forms.
* Testing students on the particular methods taught, while other methods to reach the same result are possible.
* Including notation for intermediate steps in the questions.
* Requiring students to regurgitate outdated or otherwise inaccurate information they were taught.
Some of these are kind of reasonable, others less so. Sometimes it's necessary to teach something that is quite a few layers of abstraction away from the actual problems that technique can be used to solve, and testing for these using only the real-world problems would be difficult at best.
I have a whole lot of examples of these from my memories of school (most of these were minor tests or exercises rather than exams). All of these are the cases where it was not justified, because those are the ones I got annoyed by and therefore remembered.
* I once used a value g=9.81ms^-2 instead of the expected g=9.8ms^-2 in a physics exercise, getting an answer that was different from the expected one in the last decimal place, and got marked down because the teacher assumed I had rounded incorrectly.
* We were taught about voltage dividers and op-amps, and on a test they decided to combine them together by asking us to calculate the output voltage from a circuit with a voltage divider feeding in to an op-amp based amplifier, but what we had been taught about voltage dividers glossed over the fact that their voltage changes if there is a current flowing in, which was very much the case in this circuit, so the expected answer was completely wrong.
* There was an exercise involving an object sliding on a frictional plane in 3 ways, and the answer was very obviously just 3 times the angle of friction, but they expected us to calculate it 3 separate times for the 3 different cases rather than just using common sense because common sense wasn't on the curriculum.
* In computing we were taught about bitmap images, but to make it simpler it was just a bit depth of 1, and for some weird reason we were taught that a black pixel was 1 and a white pixel was 0 despite this being the opposite way around from the usual convention, and when we were tested on bitmaps we were required to use this convention to answer even though it wasn't mentioned in the questions and isn't an actual convention we could use otside of the context of the course.
* In French class we had an actual French person in the class, as a student. I don't know why. The only explanation I remember being given was that in order to pass the tests, it wasn't sufficient to just be fluent in French, you had to know extra stuff that was in the course. As for why someone French would want an anglophone country's French language qualification, I couldn't say. Even I, as someone who was actually learning the language in school, found the most difficult aspect of the tests to be the bit where we had to come up with a short story matching a given prompt, not the bit where we had to write that story in French.
* And of course, being told to show my working thousands of times.
it certainly does have a conservative flair; I know little about the author and even less about UK politics to really weigh in on the merit of his intentions (which at the surface seem good)
In my case, I scored perfect 100s on every state test issued to me. It wasn't until I was at my top-tier university studying for a math-adjacent degree that I realized just how poor a grasp I had on the fundamentals. I trudged through college successfully but have always felt my foundation was too shaky to take the caliber of math course I wanted and really understand (my 100s had turned to C+/B- scores and were kept from being worse by my good memory alone)
To your point about scaling and the rejection of tests -- my dad (a public school teacher of 30+ years) always likes to say about people who shun tests or defend their children's poor scores as being due to them being "not a good test taker"... "how convenient they're only bad at the part where we find out how much they know!"
>If you are actually learning math -- only using a different, allegedly superior method -- then you should be able to pass the tests, shouldn't you?<
The tests require you to write out every step of the solving process and then grade you on your steps. I straight up lost my ability to do mental math because of math tests.
I see reasons for requiring steps, though I'm not sure if these are the actual motivations of the opaque education system.
1. Something that would often happen to me in late high school tests: I would know how to solve the problem, would get all the steps right, but would get a completely wrong answer because I'd made an unbelievably stupid mistake at one point, like misreading my own handwriting or getting a trivial piece of arithmetic wrong. It wouldn't seem entirely fair to get a zero on a ten-mark question because I'd scrawled a 7 on the fifth line of working and on the next line copied it down as a 1. Losing one mark is far more appropriate. Of course for this you could make the showing your steps optional, but then you give a time advantage to kids who are better at handwriting or quick and accurate mental arithmetic or something else largely orthogonal to what the test is supposed to be testing.
2. If you only require the answer, what's to stop people guessing by trial and error? E.g. one of my final exams had an exponential equation to solve with an answer like 3. It's good to have a simple answer like that, so you can tell you've solved it (absent enormous coincidence) without having to check ten times. But without working required, someone with no clue how to solve exponential equations can just plug in different numbers until they find the answer.
3. I imagine it wpuld help for teachers and/or statewide examiners to be able to easily see which steps the most students got wrong or had trouble with, to focus more on that in class. (Not that I expect the class to do a remotely good job at that).
Sure, require steps every third question or something. But there was about a four year chunk where NOTHING could be mentally solved, and by the end of it math was so tied to visual processing I couldn't do it without it anymore.
Who cares about time advantages between students, everyone gains time if they only have to do the steps that matter to them.
Guessing is stopped by asking forty questions at a time and not making all of them single digit answers. If you can trial-and-error your way into passing forty questions, you're probably doing some level of math unconcsiously.
My issue with the emphasis on the writing out of steps was less that I felt it degraded my mental math ability (once in high school, no one including the state cared that I didn't explicitly write out 13*5), but that the writing of the steps was the ONLY component. It was completely operations-based with NO theory -- and at some point, the absence of theory makes the operations much more difficult to understand!
Learning u substitution in calculus is great and all, but it wasn't until watching a lecture on Youtube that I learned "the integral represents the area under the curve"...
> it wasn't until watching a lecture on Youtube that I learned "the integral represents the area under the curve"...
I once tutored a kid who had no idea that "fractions" and "division" are somehow related. He could simplify "40/20" to "4/2", and after some nudging to "2/1", but was quite shocked when I told him that "2/1" is... obviously... 2.
But here I blame the teachers (or maybe the student), because I got a decent math education in the same system.
You make a good point that tests can verify mechanical skills without verifying the underlying knowledge. Though this could be fixed, if they just added one question specifically asking "what is the area under this curve?"
> Though this could be fixed, if they just added one question specifically asking "what is the area under this curve?
I'd be totally in favor of that, assuming it meant the teacher would then mention it in class (and ideally spend 10 minutes talking about real situations where one might like to know the area under a curve and what it can represent)
That happened to me. It took *ages* before I realised that "a/b, as a different notation for division" and "the fraction a/b" are the exact same thing.
Definitely blame the teachers/curriculum. They teach stupid things like "the correct notation for division is ÷" then a few years later teach you fractions, then a few years later teach you "an alternative notation for division is /". And so I end up thinking that "a/b" has two different meanings. I don't know if it's the obsession with correct notation over truth, or the constant changing of correct notation for the same thing as you progress, but it does enormous damage, ironically, to clarity.
Oh fuck, I had no idea! Then this is much worse than I imagined.
Do you have any link to evidence? I trust you, but if I tell this to someone else, they probably will not. Some people just assume competence by default. I definitely know teachers who are like this, even some university teachers, but luckily they do not design the government tests in my country.
I still say that tests are a good idea in general -- but I definitely mean tests that check the correct *result* no matter how you achieved it!
The usual objection is "what if someone just makes a lucky guess", but the obvious solution is to make the test so that a lucky guess is statistically unlikely. Also, one lucky guess should not substantially change the overall outcome, and if the tests are reasonably made, then five lucky guesses should be very unlikely.
I have no issue with tests in and of themselves, just the fact that the ones I took were purely testing operations and arithmetic ability -- which is also the most boring part!
I remember learning box and whisker plotting with no mention of their relevance to statistics or expressing scientific data, matrix operations with no mention of how one might use them for any number of physics/computer science/economic application or how they are representing real values in space, the unit circle with no mention of its ties to sinusoids (or any reason I should buy that imaginary numbers have any relevance at all)
Nothing built off of anything else except for operations. Each unit it was just a new set of boring operations to drill with no context or building of intuition
Did they like grammar school math OK? What's their current level of math knowledge? Did they Also, was there a particular thing, geometric proofs or whatever, that caused them to bail?
The reason I asked is that for a lot of people what not liking math really comes down to is that at some point they encountered something they did not grasp early on, and the ysort of freaked out and bailed on learning it, and had an unpleasant failure experience. I can remember as a high school student looking at the beginning of the year at the stuff at the end of my textbooks, and thinking it looked really really hard. But I'd had enough experiences of going from not grasping some math thing to grasping it that I had confidence that I'd be able to master the new stuff. What helps the people who bailed on algebra or whatever is mostly help with getting over the hump -- whichever hump it was they gave up on.
If it's more that this person thinks, jeez what's the point of this stuff, I'd say a book about fractals might give them a thrill. I'm talking about a book that's heavy on illustrations, and talks about the underlying math only in a general idea sort of way. Or even just one of the youtube zooms into the Mandelbrot bug. The math involved would daunt them, but there's something about the beautiful intricate patterns of fractals, and the knowledge that the depth is infinite -- you can zoom forever -- that thrills a lot of people, me being one of them.
Forgive me for making this comment a second time, but I was very late making it under the Cavities article and it's still bothering me, dammit! I promise this is the last try.
> Babies have no existing mouth bacteria, and get theirs from their parents’ kisses.
Is it literally that simple?
A while back it occured to me to be curious about how we get the mouth bacteria responsible for cavities, and about how, as a civilisation, we take them so much for granted. Are we born with them, or if not, how and when does transmission occur, can it be stopped even in principle, why is the problem hard, and why is the question nowhere on the radar.
I tried to ask my dentist about it. He and I chat about politics and culture, so why not this? I tried to be very clear I'm not asking for the standard "how to not get cavities" advice. He literally couldn't understand me. Kept talking about things like eat less sugar. I came out briefly half-convinced there's a dentist conspiracy around this.
Google was the same. No matter how I formed the question, I could hardly find a treatment purely of the problem of transmission. It's always "brush your teeth". Maybe I'm bad at googling.
So yeah, I still have that question. Could the transmission of the mouth bacteria to the next generations be stopped if we simply chose to?
Could it be that parents have a real, practical choice whether to inflict this lifelong problem on their children, and therefore maybe a moral duty not to? Could this in fact the reason why the problem is so unthinkable, because nobody is going to stick their neck out to tell basically all of adult humanity that they have an annoying moral duty they didn't know before?
I'm sure the real answer is somewhere between "literally impossible" and "impractically difficult", but still. I'd like to see the problem discussed in a way that doesn't make me feel like I'm crazy for even being able to think of it.
When I was reading up on this and that as part of thinking about the Cavities article, I ran across a factoid: 50-some percent of C-section babies have that S mutans (or whatever) bactium that causes cavities. 70-some percent of vaginally delivered babies do. So apparently babies can pick it up in the vagina during birth. Can't remember whether the article was about newborns or older babies.
Your mouth will have many different kinds of bacteria on it. There are probably things that some of them do that are quite helpful for you (even if it's just eating resources that would otherwise provide a tasty home for some much more virulent bacteria).
The question is presumably whether there are *specific* bacteria that cause cavities (I would have assumed that it's a lot of different bacteria that each contribute varying amounts of lactic acid) and whether one could avoid getting colonized by *those specific bacteria* while still having a health biome otherwise (this sounds extremely difficult to me).
As I understand it, bacteria of different species often work together to form biofilms, where they can become a nuisance even if they would be harmless on their own.
At the end of the day, I guess children will inadvertently ingest a wide variety of bacteria suited to colonising the mouth and gut.
This is only N = 2, but both of my two kids have had no shortage of behaviors which will strongly tend to result in them acquiring similar microbiomes to their parents.
Right now my 2-year-old only wants to eat the exact same thing he sees his parents eating. Not “I’m having soup so he wants soup too,” or even “he wants a bowl of soup served from the same pot as my bowl;” he only wants to eat the exact same soup as me, out of the same bowl, with the same spoon. He would rather go hungry than eat anything other than my own personal food. Meanwhile the 5-year-old loves to snuggle, but has a totally insufficient understanding of personal space. His preferred way of snuggling is to smoosh his face directly against mine, ideally while breathing directly into my mouth.
There’s probably a significant evolutionary advantage to sharing your oral microbiome with your parents.
"Bacteria are everywhere" is a fact, but is only pertinent if the kind which are adapted to live in mouths, concretely, are everywhere. (And IIRC the contention was that it is possible to create mouth-adapted bacteria which fight off re-colonization by the common varieties.)
True, but you'll no doubt come across the mouth-adapted kind pretty soon if you hang around humans. Humans are always breathing, talking, emitting tiny drops of spit from their mouths as they do so.
I doubt that actual mouth-to-mouth kissing is required.
According to the guy Scott interviewed, even kissing won't transmit it reliably. You need to first get the level of other bacteria really low via a professional cleaning, then aggressively (I think I remember him saying with a pumice stone-like thing) rub a batch of the anticavity bacteria into parts of your teeth or gums)
This comment chain isn't about the new bacteria, it is about the babies starting without the normal ones and if it is possible to keep them that way. So there are no "other bacteria" that you would need to kill off first.
Yeah, I get that. I wasn't being clear. Point was just that judging by the info about how you get the new bacteria to colonize your mouth, introducing a new strain and having it stick is not that easy. So babies are sort of like someone who just had an aggressive tooth cleaning (at least when newborn -- who knows how many bacteria they have at age 6 mos.). So what I meant was that the things Melvin mentioned as mode of transmission -- droplets from other people's mouths, etc. -- might not be enough to introduce the decay-causing bacteria into the baby's mouth. Like maybe the stuff would need to be on something like a pacifier, something they have in their mouth, rubbing against surfaces, for long periods.
The entire planet is effectively covered by a thin film of bacteria. You can’t avoid it. I suppose you could raise children in a sterile bubble but chances are you’d simply permanently cripple their entire immune system and leave them vulnerable to serious allergies.
I'm not sure how you could possibly do that given that kids put random things in their mouth all the time, including toys that have previously been in the mouth of other kids. Then when you get to the teenager phase everyone is super horny and I doubt you'd convince someone to avoid kissing before getting a "mouth bacteria test" for their partner. Then there's potential sources of bacteria from cats and dogs who have a predilection to trying to lick your face.
I suspect you could achieve it by enacting draconian restrictions in society but I don't think it's at all realistic in practice.
I'm looking to partner with an illustrator for a small niche book publishing project. Subject is early American (military/colonial) history. I'm a graphic designer by trade and could probably produce some illustrations on my own if I really had to, but ideally I'd like to work with someone who can help bring a very old text to life. Anyone here work in simple line drawn pen and ink, storybook-style illustrations? Or know of anyone who does? Reach out to me at brandonmquintin@gmail.com
Most likely an amateur or art student. I can pay, but not much, and mostly on the back end as a percentage of profits. Probably a few hundred up front, then 15 or 20% of profits.
I'd be interested to hear people's take on Jeremy Howard, especially his take on AI, which is that AI itself is a wonderful thing, but that having huge, rich organizations in control of its development and distribution is catastrophically bad. If you work in AI you'll know who he is. For those who don't, he's this guy:
I'm especially interested in your take on his view about the the dangers of having a few huge tech companies having almost all the decision-making power about AI, and a great deal of power about a lot of other things, as more and more things incorporate AI into their workings. But if you have opinions about his smarts, his honesty, his personality or whatever I'm curious to know those too.
Thank you for describing his claim that these companies will be able to control the training datasets their models will use, and thus make their models better at producing certain types of answers. I don’t know what results those companies would hope to get, but I can easily imagine this being a bad thing anyway.
As is pointed out in the article, the newest GPT models require enormous amounts of resources to run. Did he really think the future would be one where everyone trains an AI on their laptop?
Technological advancement at the cutting edge has always occurred via large institutions. The path of the information age ran through Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, and a host of other large companies. And it was the action of those large companies that allowed new technologies to become cheap enough and (importantly) easy enough to use for the average person to take advantage of them.
Maybe I'm just getting cynical, but I increasingly find these calls to "democratize" emerging technologies to be incredibly foolish and more than a little gatekeepery. Not everyone has the ability or desire to train their own AI on their home computer, so the implication seems to be that only those with the will to do so should get to reap the benefits. It reminds me of the bad parts of the open source community.
We know that a human-level AI can be run on about 20 watts of power and 2 pounds of computing hardware - the brain. So it seems believable that the tech will come down in price enough that people can train their own AI if they want to.
Like with open source software, most people will probably be happy with the standard commercial AIs that don't require you to learn anything about ML, but I think it's important that the capability to do otherwise exists.
Yeah, I get it, everybody is saying that it would be naive to expect things to be in any configuration other than the one they're in right now. But setting aside the question of whether Howard and others are dum-dums, how does it look to you like governance of the US population are going to play out over the next few decades? I asked this question in more detail a little ways off on this thread.
Difficult to say. Concentrations of power all always dangerous. That being said, the power of the private sector (even massive companies with control over emerging technologies) is still massively outstripped by the power of traditional states. So there's an argument to be made that increasing power in the private sector relative to the public is to be desired, as it would reduce the hegemonic power that the state possess and produce a more multi-polar societal structure, thus reducing the possibility of any one actor abusing their power due to resistance by other power structures.
I believe that it depends on exactly how these AI's play out, and what, if any, privacy restrictions are placed on them. Imagine an all purpose AI assistant, who reports every little thing you do with it to Google.
Then it's programmed to upsell you. Then they start selling your meta data to political parties. Then the government.
> Imagine an all purpose AI assistant, who reports every little thing you do with it to Google
This is already on the market (and there's Amazon's, Apple's versions as well, and the snooped audio has already featured in court cases), I'd expect that it will continue.
I agree there are substantial dangers associated with the centralization of AI. But the dangers associated with the proliferation of AI seem to be more substantial, at least in the medium term, and so I prefer centralization.
So far, what people are saying is that Howard is naive -- jeez, what did he expect? I agree, his thinking is very unworldly and it's odd that he's surprised at how it's playing out. In 2017 he trained an LLM on his home computer, and it's as though he imagined that the way development and use of AI would proceed would be via bunches of people doing stuff on their home computers and sharing it.
But setting aside whether he was naive to expect things would end up any other way than with the big tech companies in control of AI, what do you think of the idea that this is a dangerous configuration? It does seem likely that as AI gets bigger and smarter and more interwoven in things, the power of the big tech companies over the rest of the world will be enormous. But the people running these company have no special qualifications for governing, and on the average seem less interested than the average person in relevant subjects such other people's needs and feelings and style of thought, in how to think about large-group phenomena like the proliferation of misinformation or the development of cults, in how to organize society. And there will be no clarity among the tech companies about who gets to decide what. And nobody involved will be elected, will have term limits, will be plugged into the subsystems that government manages.
> And nobody involved will be elected, will have term limits, will be plugged into the subsystems that government manages
Arguably, we only have "lunch money"-priced PCs, Internet, etc. (vs. e.g. "SAGE" and ARPAnet) precisely because, in 1980s, the field managed to (temporarily?) escape from under the control of people who run for elections, sit in ministerial chairs, have "special qualifications for governing", and plugged into subsystems the government manages.
Yeah, I get it -- though I'm a lot less sure than most people that affordable PC's and similar have led to improved quality of life for humanity. But in any case, you're not really addressing the question of how you imagine it playing out, if the tech companies become so powerful that they are the real government, and US presidents etc. are figureheads, sort of like British royalty. So in the population at large there will be all kinds of new activities, new kinds of empowerment, new ways to deceive, new ways to do harm. There will be extraordinary group phenomena -- cults, interest groups, ways of partially merging with each other or with some AI-based game or character, campaigns, rumors, lies, alliances. And there will be, let's say, no more than 5 big tech companies, with various alliances, rivalries and grievances going on among them. Do you have a picture of what steps those with the most power should take to organize society, or will take. And can you please forego talking about the many failings of our present system of governance? You'd be preaching to the choir, and in any case it really does not bear on the question I'm asking.
IMHO you've described, for the most part, the present, rather than the "grim future". Though AFAIK financiers remain above tech corps in the food chain.
Re: "how will/ought they (re)organize society" -- I question the notion of GPTism being a serious "disruptive tech" at all : it reliably emits only various mixtures of copypasta and erudite bullshit; something that already had been in painfully plentiful supply to start with, and for that matter, is only "in demand" at all because we live even now in a "sadist utopia", i.e. where most keyboard work is societally unnecessary from any sane POV, but our rulers, for various reasons, don't want to simply "UBI" (nor, luckily for "desk pilots", to shoot) the "surplus" people.
I like the direction in which you are thinking, although I have no solid answers for you. But I would suggest that the danger to individual autonomy isn't just centralization (though that is dangerous)--it's optimization. Because you have to ask yourself what LLM's are optimized for (persuasive messaging). So you end up in a world that looks superficially very much like this one, but where consumer and voter behavior is largely predictable.
I recommend "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads" by Tim Wu
> Because you have to ask yourself what LLM's are optimized for (persuasive messaging).
Not sure what you have in mind here. Did you think I meant that an advanced AI would itself be running things? If so, I wasn't clear. What I had in mind was that the AI companies would become so powerful that they had considerably more power and more of the public's attention than the official US government, and that they would be able to make policy changes or whatever without going through government channels. So the problems I had in mind were that (1) it seems like widespread availability of AI will produce a lot of change and chaos in the lives of US citizens; (2) Tech companies would have more power than the government to bring about legislation. programs or whatever to reduce chaos and overall nuttiness., but (3) there is no structure to decide who from which AI company gets to carry out these steps and (4) people who are passionately committed to AI development are often Aspergerish males who are considerably less perceptive about people than the average person, and considerably less interested in understanding them or governing them.
Or did you bring up the persuasiveness of LLM"s because you imagined the chief tech bros would turn the whole task over to LLM's ? Or at least the communication part?
No, I am proposing that Big Tech will use the AI's themselves as the tools they will use to consolidate their own power. As I suspect that LLM's are in fact optimized for crafting maximally persuasive messages, given a set of training data, and that user meta data is widely available for a fee, this seemed like a possible recipe for underhanded political messaging.
The expense of operating a bleeding-edge chip fab is inherently a massively-centralizing influence on everything downstream of it (which includes the party tricks currently marketed as "AI").
I’m not sure… these fabs are “for hire” (hence “fabless semiconductor companies). I can’t say what the minimum order is but plenty of startups use this fabless model.
All of these "we must keep AI away from big companies" takes seem to be so naive they aren't even wrong. Neither their goals nor their methods make the slightest amount of sense; it simply seems to be a backdrop for complaining.
Somebody has to control the models, no amount of organizational structuring will change that. Somebody has to pay for the models. And this, inevitably, means that that somebody will be a "big tech company" sooner rather than later.
And their methods seem to be one part "stick our head in the sand" and one part "emotional manipulation via the internet", neither of which have the slightest chance of doing anything.
I mean, AI proliferation could be an absolutely catastrophic thing too. It seems he doesn't believe in AI X-risk if he wants to democratize AI. As to more centralization of power, eh, at this point, it's a given: that was already the trend even with no AI, so what difference does it make if the process accelerates? Everyone knows we live in an oligarchy: bit late to be fretting about democracy.
i like reading old Sf, and I was surprised to find in a bad novel a weirdly prescient take on AI art. The novel is The Flaxen Femme Fatale by John Zarkov, a comic novel about a future-retro PI tasked to track down a superpowered girl. It was published in 2008.
Summarizing it because the passage is too long.
The girl hides in the future San .Diego Comicon. Our main character tells us it has been down in recent years because of one major reason and one not so major one.
The not so major one was companies replacing human authors and writers with bot artists and writers. Over time, that led only a few companies making them, and while they still sold well due to lust for number one issues, the lack of creators for fans to interact with caused the con to dry up.
humans tried to compete by making indie comics, but the power of endless cheap bot artists was too tempting for even small publishers. only some underground comics remained, a few even on real paper, but the lack of marketing budget meant no one heard of them.
What changed things was after art and writers, the companies went after the movie industry, replacing them with bots too. But the unions were powerful enough to stop it, and they created a campaign saying stories were as much mysticism as art and there were stories only humans could tell. the public believed them and chose humanity.
keep in mind the major cause was the discovery of aliens, and this book has people replace profanities with negative computer terms like DOS. Ipods still exist, lol.The novel isn't really a good one, but that little aside was so weirdly on point it was eerie. written more than 15 years ago.
i don't think SF is good at predicting the future-read Asimov for example-but kind of an oddly realistic take in a novel that has fembots with jet boots.
There's _The Silver Eggheads_ 1959/61) by Fritz Leiber-- in the future, robots write fiction for robots, but humans read "wordwooze"-- fascinating but forgettable fiction (no one wants to read it twice) produced by machines. Publishers hire people to pretend to be writers. The fake writers (who have to wear period garb) find this so humiliating they destroy the wordwooze machines.... and then find out they have no idea how to write....
"The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound."
it reads a lot older than its date, even granting the comic focus. Craig Shaw Gardner wrote better earlier, and it read like a homage to 80s SF homaging 50s SF. but i think time accelerates; 15 years ago was Barack Obama being elected and that was one different world lol.
I think that's just because you lived through it. Consider that 15 years before 1940 was 1925: to the people living in 1940, 1925 would feel like a different world. Heck, for the people living in 1923, 1908 would've felt like a completely different world.
Leaning on the world wars is kind of cheap, but the changes they wrought are still easily legible to people today. You could probably say the same thing about many 15-year periods in the 19th and 20th centuries, it's just that it's harder to see the difference when you're not living through them.
AI-skeptical piece linked by Tyler Cowen on his blog, arguing that training LLMs suffers from a 'supply paradox'- the more data there is easily available to train the LLM, the less economically valuable that activity probably is. I.e. current LLMs were clearly trained on all of the forums and other written text easily scraped off of the Internet, like Reddit. Result- we have LLMs that can basically write Reddit comments, which is not exactly a valuable activity. Current LLMs were also clearly trained on every stock photo scraped off the Internet, result, we can sort of replace some less-skilled visual artists.
In other words, the author is saying that higher-value economic activity doesn't generally leave around a lot of training data that LLM developers can easily hoover up. I'm not making this argument either way as frankly I'm not qualified to, but I thought it was interesting.
Having made art with Midjourney for about the last 12 months, I will say that it's not going to replace corporate-employed visual artists anytime soon. It may make a rough template that a skilled artists can alter further in Blender or Photoshop or something, but it's not some kind of Star Trek 'give it commands and it creates exactly what you want on command' thing. I could see it modestly reducing the number of employed artists (like graphic designers and such), but mostly complementing them, as Photoshop did
1. Coding is a big example of an economically valuable activity for which there exists a lot of data. The copywriting industry is also worth tens of billions of dollars. Large amounts of data probably also exists for many other fields like law and medicine, although that data might be harder to get your hands on.
2. If a task is economically valuable enough to do, data can be collected through more expensive mechanisms. A prominent example is self-driving, where Tesla has collected billions of miles of data because they think they'll one day be able to use it to win a substantial portion of the automotive industry. OpenAI is apparently paying people in a number of industries large amounts of cash to generate high quality training data. A similar sort of approach could be expanded to most jobs - if the economic incentives for automation were strong enough, companies could make their employees record themselves while they work, and that data could be used to help train the next generation of AI employees. Note that unlike with humans, AIs only need to learn a task once. Once a single AI learns to do a task well, you can then copy that learning into an arbitrarily large number of other AIs. So even if it takes much longer for one AI to learn a task than one human, once it's averaged over enough AIs, the per unit learning cost will be lower.
3. Models are getting better at learning with small amounts of data. Eventually once models get smart enough, we should expect models to be able to do the same sort of things that humans can do, namely learn new tasks/jobs with only a small amount of experience. This would not require massive datasets, just a small amount of on-the-job training.
Reason I ask is because I think this has certain implications regarding who well AI could get at generating persuasive messages micro-targeted as a single individual social media user.
The scientists say that phenomenon of everyone forgetting the concert happens due to excitement, and that it is known to happen to people with their own weddings, for example, which undermines the point he was making about Taylor Swift being this impossibly artificial, desireless thing.
But interesting observation that (some) incels can work up the nerve to go shoot people up, but seemingly can't make the effort to go meet people.
Elliot Rodger's manifesto is thin on any attempts to actually talk to women. I have read excerpts, but I never saw anyone mention him doing this. A big part of his outrage wasn't really about lack of sex, it was that women weren't throwing themselves at him.
And you know, coming out of the closet as an incel myself (not an ideological one, just a technical one, in that I'm still a virgin way past the point where that is acceptable), I have made very few attempts to talk to women. I have even turned down opportunities to have sex 4 times now, simply because the woman was not attractive to me: I feel like an ordinary guy would have just taken those opportunities, since I definitely have the impression normal guys will screw anything, specially if they're thirsty, and maybe even if not.
Does anyone have any special insights into what is it that Musk is trying to do with Twitter? I don't want to start a culture war / Musk good/bad fight, so please don't pile on the heat without light - if possible. I'm genuinely puzzled about this from a purely business viewpoint: it looks like he's "deliberately" crashing the thing into the ground. Curious if anyone has a different take on this.
Elon musk is a bad at business. He is a great salesman/showman, but he is not good at business. This was why he was pushed out of PayPal. He has succeeded with Tesla and SpaceX because both companies required selling a big vision, throwing money in at it, and getting somewhat lucky (which he did successfully). He didn't start either of these companies, but took the kernel of a great idea and blew it up to mega company size.
He tried this with Boring Company but that was just too dumb and wasnt a true innovative vision - mostly because it was his and not someone else's.
There is no vision with twitter (he is trying with "X for everything" but it's just the wrong play). Twitter is just a social networking site that is funded through advertising - a pretty simple business model. Twitter wasn't run very well before Elon bought it, but he isn't going to fix it because he is not good at business.
Well, I don’t quite see Musk being generally “bad at business”. Only because it’s such a broad generalization. He’s been enormously successful as a businessman. It’s more like he’s better at some specific kinds of business: e.g., both Tesla and SpaceX are at a core high-tech manufacturing companies in wide-open spaces (meaning too few competitors so plenty of room for optimization). In contrast, Boring Co operates in a space where a lot of innovation already happened, tunnels are dug everywhere for hundreds or years, so the idea that there are easy improvements there does not make sense.
> He didn't start either of these [Tesla and SpaceX] companies
Musk clearly founded SpaceX. And although its success doubtlessly depended on some early key employees, its long-term vision definitely stemmed from Musk.
I've been wondering if Musk is positioning himself as Trump's heir. Desantis and others have tried to position themselves to inherit Trump's political goodwill. But to be blessed by Trump involves submitting to Trump, and submission is a posture of weakness.
Musk doesn't need to submit to Trump. Musk likes accruing power and causing trouble. He not only doesn't mind turning off large swaths of people, he seems to seek it out. His social methods probably appeal to people who want their leaders to "own" the other side. If Musk has the same sort of political instincts as Trump, maybe he could inherit Trump's mob without Trump's help.
My opinion is that Twitter didn't work as a business before, and really, really doesn't work as a business now that all the cheep financing has dried up. Musk is just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, though I doubt anything will come of it all.
I think he's at the point where he's just trying to entertain himself and get as much engagement as possible with the site, and hope that maybe the advertisers eventually return plus greater engagement will create more subscription revenue. I doubt he'd deliberately try and run a business into the ground - Musk has gone to great lengths in the past to try and avoid an outright business failure, including that hasty purchase of Solar City by Tesla years ago.
I think it's simply that he's trying to accomplish too many mutually-conflicting goals.
1. He wants less restriction on speech, particularly on the right-leaning side. He sees Old Twitter as being too dominated by the speech repression culture of the left and wanted to counterbalance that.
2. He also seems to want it to be more of an even playing field, letting people buy their way into the kind of relevance that previously only verified accounts could possess.
3. He still wants it to be a good place to get accurate timely information. This pretty directly conflicts with goal #2.
4. He wants to turn it into a profitable enterprise on its own. It is worth noting that Twitter was not profitable beforehand, so he had a hard road here.
5. He wants to fulfill his longtime dream of an "everything" app.
6. He wants to still have time to pay attention to his other enterprises (Tesla, SpaceX).
My overriding thesis to all of these is that he is a man of impulse, and that his position as 'richest man in the world' has gone to his head, and that he plunged into Twitter with too many conflicting ideas about what to do with it. And whenever he takes action in one direction, it undermines his other goals. Time - and the tolerance of his partners in the $44B buyout - will ultimately tell how it all works out.
I think he also has a penchant for drama. Virginia Postrel had a good line in her review of that Walter Isaacson biography of Musk, that when Musk doesn't have some sort of problem or drama to thoroughly sink himself into it he tries to go and create it instead.
Twitter as a public company was significantly profitable in both 2018 and 2019 (see table below). Any buyer of the company would have viewed that as a reason for optimism, "it was making money so we'll just need to get it back to that" etc.
I should have said that Twitter was not _especially_ profitable beforehand, but you're right, it wasn't exactly a hopeless case.
But I think that even if the 18/19 results had held, it would be difficult to justify the $44B purchase unless you had other motives in mind beyond profitability, especially since it had just finished two straight years falling back into the red.
Even Musk seems to have thought that the $44 billion price was too much, since he made it impulsively then tried to get out of it legally later. $10-20 billion would have been a reasonable price for pre-Musk Twitter.
Make it his personal bullhorn and, to some degree, a social media for right wingers (broadly speaking). The previous attemps at the latter have invariably failed since it's hard to create something out of nothing just to be a "X attempt at Y"; better to take over an existing one and refashion it through your own actions signalling the equivalent.
If, in this process, he loses money, he can take it (and his brand is based on a devil-may-care attitude to business anyway); if he happened to earn some, so much for the better. That's not the main purpose of all this, though.
The simplest and most absurd-seeming hypothesis could actually be the correct one: Musk deliberately fell on a $40B grenade, aiming to bulldoze Twitter, salt the earth where it stood, and thereby raise the US's collective IQ by a few points.
The biggest problem with that theory is that after he agreed to buy it, he spent months trying to back out of the deal. I suppose you could steel-man that by saying that he was still committing to buying it and just wanted to get a better price, but I haven't heard any reporting that backs that up.
I think the true simplest hypothesis is that Elon is a man of impulse, and the means to indulge his impulses, and we're all trying too hard to see grand designs. But I think that deserves it's own reply to OP.
Simply closing it down overnight risks freeing up hands which could conceivably re-create it elsewhere and attract a critical mass of users (observe that several such attempts already took place, but for whatever reasons not succeeded) given that there is still a strong demand. Musk's behaviour seems to be consistent with an attempt to destroy the demand, and perhaps even to permanently discredit the entire concept.
IMHO it wouldn't have seemed absurd even a year ago, if one recalls that Musk isn't a simple finite state automaton like most oligarchs, and historically was quite willing to burn arbitrary fortunes on elaborate attempts to make a world that is more to his liking, rather than merely to upgrade a megayacht.
Which specific decisions seem like him trying to burn the place to the ground? The mass firing specifically, while pretty bad for the employees (and also labour law violations) seems to be done to achieve a specific culture change to a lean high per-employee productivity company with faster movement (but more bugs), and while I personally would prefer fewer features and fewer bugs I can see why he would have wanted that goal.
Changing the way they render external link previews
Blocking imbedding of twitter links on certain sites
Opening up blue checkmarks to anyone willing to pay
Renaming the company X from Twitter
Catering to groups and people that scared off twitters biggest advertisers.
These are all terrible business decisions that show he either has no idea what the value of twitter was for most people or that he is intentionally running it into the ground.
most of these, but opening up bluecheck seems straightforwardly reasonable (despite annoying elitist journalists), since it both provides a new source of revenue and removes twitter from the uncomfortable position of having to decide who counts as important.
unblocking people who scare off advertisers is probably a net negative as a business decision, but not an unreasonable one for someone who ideologically believes in free speech (or even in free speech that doesn't offend him personally). I think Musk would describe it as a cost worth paying rather than an unintentionally bad decision.
I'm of the position that the mass firings was one of the best business decisions he could have made. The company was obviously very bloated, and he not only saved a lot of money but apparently got rid of a bunch of people who were influencing the company culture in a way hostile to his intentions.
I'd like to think he has good reasons for a lot of the other stuff he does on there, but I keep coming back to "he felt like it" as a primary goal. Not a lot else makes sense for at least some of his moves.
I think in general "Elon Musk isn't strategic and just does things in fits of mania" is underrated as an explanation for things.
I think that while the reasons you describe were part of the motivation for the firings (and reasonable reasons), there was also an explicit decision to move the company into a more "move fast and break things" direction (which is musk's style more generally). I understand why he would want to do that, but in general I think mature t ch companies should do it less.
I'm ambivalent about the mass firing, it's hard to tell how much damage this did vs. savings. But telling key major advertisers to F themselves, and then re-instating Alex Jones' account on top, feels like a next level of damage without a possible business upside.
what I get from what he said was more along the lines of, "you're going to try to push me around, with money? you're going to try to blackmail me? then--"
I'm also seeing that everyone's talking about what came after "then" and no one's talking about what he said before. Adolescent the delivery may be, there was content there.
Saying that you aren't going to buy a service if that service isn't set up to provide a net benefit to you isn't blackmail, it's basic capitalism.
There's room to argue that the advertising companies are mistaken and advertising on Twitter is still valuable. But instead of doing that, Musk decided to tell the advertising companies to go fuck themselves. This is not an effective way to convince them to give him money.
Robb's whole point above is that the premise you're claiming here is false (at least, from Musk's POV). Advertisers aren't merely telling him they're getting no benefit from buying ad space on Twitter/X; they're *threatening* him.
To see the difference, imagine if Musk had proposed a framework in which their ads are profitable for them, and Twitter/X still had the same internal culture Musk wanted. Would the advertisers accept that, or would they want the pre-Musk culture badly enough to leave those profits on the table?
If it's the former, then yes, Musk is overreacting. If it's the latter, then Musk is correct. I think Musk sees these advertisers as the latter; they'll take a personal hit as long as they get to tell Musk what to do.
Alternately, Musk is seeing several advertisers declare they're not renewing their ad purchases - which, in a free market, is perfectly reasonable - but also trying to attach a moral valence to it - which is only fine if both parties get to do it. So, if an advertiser wants to tell Musk it's leaving because "X sucks", Musk can tell them he doesn't want their business because *they* suck.
I think he hates being beholden to advertisers, and is actively trying to get the platform away from that model of income. Whether he has a chance to make that successful is doubtful but possible. I really doubt that he's there yet, such that the alienation of current advertisers is likely a significant problem. He may have calculated that his users will care more about a principled stand than his advertisers (assuming those who left are not likely to come back either way?).
Agreed, and I totally think that's what he was doing with Blue or whatever it was called. He seems to genuinely have hoped that a significant number of his users would pay for functionality and then he could drop the advertisements. If you think about how early in his time there he started looking at alternate funding sources, this seems pretty likely.
Users don’t pay nearly enough to sustain it. Unless Musk can figure out a model that does not depend on ads he’s pissing off paying customers while acquiring non-paying users.
Also, “Musk tweet about user growth” should have a picture of a salt mine truck attached to it :)
My take is that Musk is psychologically incapable of accepting a loss and would much rather make a risky play which has the possibility of vast success.
So when he bought twitter he paid $40 billion for a company which would be worth ~$20 billion after the recession hit. Now theoretically the right moves shouldn't depend on the actual purchase price and he could try and maximize its value by tinkering at the edges and maybe get it up to $30 billion. But he would much rather reduce the average value to $15 billion if it included a significant chance of a big win.
My take (somewhat informed by Matt Levine's takes), is that Elon originally started the process as a joke he never really intended to complete the followthrough on, got enough inertia to end up actually signing contracts, and then the Twitter CEOs (seeing their golden parachute attempting to back out) sued him to ensure he actually paid them out.
So now Musk owns a company that it was a bad decision for him to have bought in the first place and is flailing around having fun and is just flying by the seat of his pants without a properly reasoned end game strategy.
It -doesn't- make sense from a business standpoint, and Musk is rich enough he doesn't have to care about that fact.
Looking for advice on effective, efficient ways to refresh very rusty generalist coding skills.
I am a former longtime generalist coder who has spent the last decade of my career on a management track. It's been about 7-8 years since I wrote any significant amount of code for my job, and more than a decade since coding was my main job. I will have some leisure time in the coming year which I'd like to use to become "more technical" again. This is not with any particular specialty or tech stack in immediate view, but so as to be able to join Team Build the Thing where the Thing is something I deeply intrinsically care about building, and actually pitch in effectively with the building work rather than just doing management. In a couple of cases where I tried to do that pitching-in over the past two years, I found it pretty painful and slow. This leads me to think that I need to go back to the gym, as it were, before doing more.
My current default plan is to work through one of those Udemy Python courses that has example projects in a lot of different areas, and then find a tutorial on Github Copilot since that is clearly the new productivity-enhancing hotness. I'd appreciate suggestions for alternative and/or supplemental plans. Bonus points for material that might have some application to embedded control systems programming, whether vehicle controls or SCADA-type industrial controls or similar; the last time I did anything like that was in the late 1990s, so now a *very* long time ago, but it seems like it'd be particularly fun to try and go back to that, and also potentially applicable to a lot of cool Things to Build.
Thanks in advance for whatever wisdom you may have!
If you already have the generalist coding skills, you can't really lose them. The rust will go away quickly as you use them again. I second the advice to not bother with Udemy or video courses in general, except maybe a short intro if you want to get into modern tooling, and also skip Copilot for now, because if you let the code mostly write itself, you won't be refreshing the skill to produce it yourself, which is what you want now. Just get your hands typing and debugging, maybe with the help of some challenge like Advent of Code.
The big question is what kind of programming you want to get into, and what are the specific difficulties in it. Lots of code is functional but relatively unsophisticated: updating UIs, creating records, validating inputs, handling errors, updating, etc. If you're going into a large-scale project, you will want to get back a sense of taste in how the thing is structured ("architected") inside, and the pros and cons of different ways of modularizing it. I'm quite a fan of John Ousterhout's Philosophy of Software Design. If it involves significant amounts of computation (e.g numpy), that's another specific area to learn about. Same with distributed systems, high availability, etc. First see what specific skills are required, then go practice those.
If you were a generalist coder in the past, I would stay away from Udemy courses, likely to be much too slow and underpowered for you. I'd suggest going *right now* to Advent of Code, and start on the current set of problems, from the first one on. Do it in whatever language you want to acquire/freshen up. AoC is fun and starts easy. Use https://learnxinyminutes.com/ as a cheat sheet, for Python or any other language.
Particularly for Python, if you want to see inspiring examples of short, elegant, idiomatic, readable code, look for Norvig's pytudes. In particular, you can read Norvig's solutions of past AoCs, or even "compete" with them (by trying to solve e.g. 2022 AoC one by one, then comparing with his solution). Though I'd start with the current AoC just for the sport of it.
I don't understand the idea of using Copilot for this, and would steer clear of it until you are confident in your generalist coding skills.
Once you're comfortable with AoC-style problems, go deeper on whatever domain is close to your heart.
Whatever you do, it has to become something you’re hooked on. I find a concrete project is typically far better than a course, because I care more about progressing. I am also forced to solve real problems - some of which may never have been solved in that exact form. That’s typically not the case in a course. The real world is usually more fun than a course.
My approach is that whenever I'm between programming jobs, I have a couple hobby code projects I work on, usually small games of some sort, that I can focus on putting together and actually playing through them to locate the rough edges and attempting to code a proper fix to them.
The key point is that it's fun for me to mess with and I can set a target goal that isn't some arbitrary homework assignment from someone else.
Yeah, this would have been a useful thing for me to do in retrospect. Instead, other hobbies and life constraints intervened, and now I think I need a bit more of a guided "start here" even if it does have a homework assignment flavor.
This is regarding an old Slate Star Codex post "Meditations on Moloch"
I am using a quote in my bachelors degree project.
This one:
Alexander makes a point that C. S. Lewis once said: ”what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead, we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?”
Alexander says that Ginberg awered C. S. lewis whith his poem "Howl" in which he describes Moloch.
What I am looking for is whether Ginsberg answered C. S. Lewis or whether Alexander just made up a quote out of thin air?
I have REALLY looked for where C. S. Lewis has actually said this. Scott Alexanders link to where he has gotten it from, is just a meme. The only place I can find that Lewis should have said this, is in Alexanders blog. I would really like to find out from where the original quote is from. Cant find it. Not in libraries, not on Google Scholar, not on PhilPapers, not anywhere. What is up with that, and can anyone help.
I’ve read a lot of CS Lewis and have a pretty good ear for prose. I don’t think Lewis would have used the image of a sphinx breaking open a skull and eating what’s inside. It’s too violent and gross And he would not have used “eat up” to mean “eat”. “Eat up” may be an Americanism — whatever it is, it’s got an informal, slangy sound. This sounds to me like Scott’s remembered and restated version of something of Lewis’s he read.
I don't think it's intended to mean that C. S. Lewis asked the question in that exact phrasing, or that Ginsberg's poem was written as a direct response to Lewis.
I'm not sure whether Lewis' writings asked 'this question', the question of What Makes Things Suck When Surely They Could Be Fine, or if it was just a reference to the meme.
Scott isn't claiming that Ginsberg is responding to Lewis or even that Lewis ever said that paraphrase. The line "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?" was written by Ginsberg and wasn't quoting anything earlier. Scott is saying that Ginsberg's Moloch is an answer to the question "what does it?" where it means make the world worse than it could be. He only brings up Lewis because "what does it?" is attributed to him in that joke image.
The U.S. encompasses a huge variety of climatic and geological zones and has a lot of natural beauty. Does Canada have anything of interest that either can't be found in the U.S., or is better than its best U.S. counterpart?
The only two places I can think of are Banff National Park, which some people subjectively say is more beautiful than the U.S. counterparts in Alaska and Montana, and Newfoundland, whose climate (and its volatility) doesn't seem to compare to anywhere in America.
While Alaska does have some High Arctic areas, much more of it is forest/mountains/coastal biomes than people think. I'd submit that there isn't really anything like the Canadian Arctic archipelago in the *world*, but certainly not in the USA.
I'm sure there are places of equal beauty. But I went canoeing for two weeks in Killarney provincial park and I'm still blown away by the memory. Green pine trees, white granite cliffs and blue lakes that are a color I haven't seen elsewhere. (There must be some copper sulfate or something else in the water.) A day trip to crystal lake at the 'top' of the park was the highlight.
I'm interested in the case of Geraldine Largay, the woman who left the Appalachian Trail in Maine to go to the bathroom, got lost, could not be found after an extensive search, and eventually died in the woods. What can we learn from her story? My takeaways:
1) Despite a narrative that all kinds of people can hike the Appalachian Trail, it's probably not a good idea for all kinds of people. Geraldine was 66 and only capable of carrying limited weight due to back problems. Her pace was 1 mile per hour. Being slow by itself wouldn't have killed her, but it may have impeded her ability to hike back out. Age would have impaired her ability to handle the physical stress of being lost with limited food.
2) Hiking skill is distinct from survival skill. Geraldine actually went to the Appalachian Trail Institute to study hiking skills, and other hikers seem to have considered her well-prepared. Her survival skills were limited.
3) After realizing she was lost, Geraldine hiked uphill, apparently in search of cell signal, rather than downhill towards civilization. After that strategy failed on the first day, she stayed put in very dense terrain where she was difficult to find rather than trying downhill. It's unclear whether she did this as a deliberate strategy or whether she was too fatigued to keep hiking.
4) She had the means to make fire and in fact did so, but the fires weren't large, consistent and smoky enough to be seen.
5) She only carried two days worth of food. Although it was July and she was probably surrounded by edible plants, she apparently didn't have the skills to identify edible plants or mushrooms.
6) She carried a compass but it was cheap and her navigation skill was limited. (But I'm not sure if navigation would have helped if she didn't know which way to go.)
When I discuss being lost with male friends, I ALWAYS (but always) get the "oh that wouldn't happen to me, I'd just follow water down towards civilization" and—while I don't disagree with the strategy—I hate the arrogance. It's not going to be that easy. The lesson to take from this is not that you'll be fine if you're faster and younger than Geraldine, and not that staying put is always a bad idea. Trying to self-rescue by hiking out CAN work, but especially under the stress of being lost, people can move too fast, make bad decisions, push themselves too hard under fatigue, and end up worse lost, injured, wet/hypothermic.
As a solo hiker, I will certainly be thinking about Geraldine next time I step off the trail to go to the bathroom. I'm thinking of taking orange tape to create landmarks for myself.
Facts here largely from the book "When You Find My Body."
I'm interested in the "I'd just follow water down towards civilization" comment. Is that conventional wisdom for lost hikers in the US?
I've never heard it in Australia, which I suspect might be about geography. I feel like trying to follow water in Australia is unlikely to lead you to a nice stream that's easily followed, and more likely to lead you into a steep-sided gully with a creek at the bottom which will be very hard to follow. Going downhill in general will likely lead you to the top of a cliff, or worse still to some point where the ground ahead of you is too steep to safely descend and the ground behind you is too steep to easily ascend. And of course while the creek that you might wind up following will probably hit some kind of civilisation before it runs into the ocean, the median distance to civilisation is a helluva lot further than it would be in the US.
I've been lost in the wilderness in the past, never for more than a few hours, but always due to stupid decisions. I'm not going to assume that any particular idiot situation can't happen to me.
Yes, that’s the conventional wisdom, and my understanding is it’s likely to work IF you actually can keep following the creek and avoid injury and exhaustion.
I appreciate your humility and this is a good reminder that I’d probably have to learn a whole new set of survival skills when I go hiking in Australia
There are similar places in the US where following a creek is likely to leave you staring at a nasty drop into a canyon. And, while the northeast is somewhat densely populated (not Maine though outside of the coast), the distances to civilization in the southwest can be formidable.
I'll just chime in to say even the baby mountains are dangerous. We've got an easy one here, three-hour walk, nice gravel trail all the way up, and I've been repeatedly told "never hike it when it's foggy, you'll lose the trail and die."
The most dangerous part of nature around here is in fact the vegetation; it acts like water, growing to the same height everywhere and hiding holes. Take a careless step and that's your leg.
I was once benighted on a belay ledge with 3 other people (2 were our kids, otherwise we, the adults, would have just waited til dawn. Yes, the kids were very safely tied in to anchors.) We knew the wife of the other adult in our party would call rescue if we were not home by dark, so I just started blowing my whistle once ever 5 mins or so, 3 blasts in a row. Rescuers heard it within an hour and found us soon after.
She had a whistle (I generally carry one too FWIW). Apparently you can hear a whistle for up to a mile, and searchers at some points were within a mile of her. So....either she wasn't blowing the whistle (you wouldn't be able to do that constantly) or that weren't able to hear on the dense trails.
I don't think this would happen to me. With all due respect she doesn't seem like she was very knowledgable (news articles say she didn't know how to use a compass) or in the best condition (in her 60s) and made elementary mistakes I wouldn't make.
Google "hiker died in Arizona" and you'll find hundreds of instances of people hiking without even the most basic sun/heat protection and/or remotely sufficient water and predictably dying; these are extremely avoidable mistakes.
One of the most vivid memories of unprepared hikers comes from White Sands: a young couple in beach attire with a single small plastic bottle of water happily walking out into the blazing desert furnace, while the covered head-to-toe me with a gallon of water in the backpack is looking on in a mild state of horror. AFAIK they made it out ok, didn't see any emergency responders.
"It's sunny out so obviously I should expose as much skin as possible" is such a common and dangerous misconception; National Parks in the Southwest really need a dress code. A few years ago my group basically rescued a newlywed couple lost with no water or apparently sense of direction, I truly think they would have needed a helevac if somebody even called one for them.
At this point I basically discount all stories of people dying in nature because the people who die in nature seem to be on a completely different preparedness level than I would be
1) Any phone can now store offline maps for the entire earth and the combination of GPS, Glonass, Baidu and Galilleo ensures excellent accuracy in almost any weather conditions.
2) You can get the iPhone 14/15 Pro with emergency satellite connectivity or a Spot device that does the same. If you get the iPhone you can get a few powerbanks for spare capacity. If you get the Spot, it's got ~3 months of battery life (and you can bring spare batteries too). Both allow you to send your exact coordinates to emergency personnel and even get a reply back letting you know what the ETA is on help arriving to your location.
Obviously there _are_ extreme conditions where emergency services won't help you out - i.e. you probably shouldn't go hiking in the mountains during a snow storm unless you're an experienced hiker. Anything else though? Meh, bring a phone + Spot and there's a ~zero chance you'll ever get lost.
I agree they can help, I don't agree these devices reduce the chance to zero. You can lose these devices or lose battery (spare powerbanks are quite heavy and a lot of hikers are not going to carry them).
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Portable-Double-Speed-Recharging/dp/B09VP9QJSS - this powerbank weighs 2 pounds and can recharge a smartphone 10 times. If you use your smartphone in airplane mode on the trail (GPS still works, it just doesn't try to connect to the phone network) it will last for 2 days at a time easily. So you're looking at 20 days of use.
If that's too much you can just take two Spot devices and a paper map and while you won't have access to Maps, you'll have a 99.99% chance of being able to call for help.
If I was hiking the Appalachian trail my setup would be: iPhone 14 Pro, a plain Android smartphone with a big battery, two powerbanks, two Spot devices and a couple of water-resistant paper maps. My only concern at that point would be danger from wild animals and possibly a small risk of encountering hostile humans.
Plus a compass, right? The author of the book on Geraldine surveyed 21 thru-hikers (not just day hikers) near the end of the AT in Maine. SIXTEEN did not have a compass. Two more carried a compass they weren’t sure how to use. So yeah, your setup sounds safe, albeit very heavy, but many hikers are not even doing step one.
Yes, a compass would be good as the final backup - but not really necessary as long as your phone works. But like I said, anyone getting lost in the woods as of 2023 is doing so purely due to their lack of foresight in purchasing some satellite-enabled devices. We're now completely and permanently done with the idea of "total wilderness" :-)
Oof. Stuff like this just always hits home for me how much being alone accelerates your risk for camping/hiking type activities.
There's a whole constellation of things from twisting an ankle to getting sick that are pretty easy to manage if you're with a group of people in a remote location but are suddenly on the "devastatingly difficult to life threatening" scale if you're off in that remote location by yourself.
IIRC, for some years now, several hundred $ buys you a "GPS + satellite SMS" emergency beacon. I assumed that at this point, all wilderness exploration aficionados have them. Evidently not?
According to the book, Geraldine considered getting such a device but decided not to. Not sure how many hikers carry them, but they're pretty expensive and heavy. I think I'd get one for a very long hike, but haven't feel the need so far.
A quick market survey reveals e.g. "ResQLink", ~5oz, ~400 $. (Disclaimer: I have never used this item and am not affiliated with the vendor.) And there appear to be others like it, priced similarly.
Yep, expensive and heavy. I’m not against these devices, but it’s not realistic to expect everyone will have them, nor are they an adequate substitute for carrying and knowing how to use a compass.
The linked item weighs (and costs) almost the same as the iPhone SE. But certainly more than a compass. Parachute is not a substitute, by same token, for knowing how to fly the plane. (Interestingly, most amateur pilots don't carry parachutes.)
You can even rent them from a decent outfitter. One of the guys I do this kind of stuff with started bringing them along so that he can track his route and his kids can see on the map where dad is adventuring around.
I did get lost off the appalachian trail right around the same place a few years ago, spent a day trying to get back on trail and then did the downhill until you find civilization thing. I don't think I was ever in any danger but it wasn't fun or easy, and I second "out of shape people in their sixties who wouldn't be able to handle getting stuck and lost in a rainstorm for a few days shouldn't be hiking the AT" (or at least definitely not alone.
I was a Boy Scout, and I can't shake the feeling that this couldn't happen to me. Not because I'm an expert survivalist (I can't find edible plants either), but because I can't imagine getting lost so easily. Maybe she actually left the trail for some reason other than using the bathroom, and therefore went further than she would have for that purpose?
The most common reason for going far enough off the trail to get lost, is that one is trying to take an "obvious" shortcut. Which in hindsight is an obviously dumb thing that a person might not want to admit to and use the "potty break" excuse instead. But in this case, we don't have any testimony as to why she left the trail, so, yeah, we don't know and shouldn't presuppose.
On the same topic of edible plants, my impression is that the Northeast is honestly not-great for readily edible forage prior to early autumn. Mushrooms maybe (although if you're me good luck identifying anything less obviously edible than the bright-orange-and-not-very-close-to-poisonous-alternatives Chicken Of the Woods), anything that resembles a raspberry/blackberry/salmonberry definitely, and in July/August blueberries if you're in an environment that supports them (AIUI basically a lot of exposed granite and acidic soil), but beyond those options (and maybe fiddleheads in early spring) you're not gonna find much that's both plant-based and calorically valuable.
I've spent a fair bit of time in Northeast woods and hiking, and your basic forest ground cover is overwhelmingly non-fruit bearing trees (generally deciduous), with an undergrowth (if any) of various likewise non-fruit-bearing plants and shrubs (modulo the occasional raspberry/salmonberry aggregate fruit). It can be a decent place to be a deer, but if I had to feed myself I think my first instinct would be that I'd have better luck eating the deer (or, much more plausibly with limited equipment, find some fish) rather than trying to forage for calories, assuming I was otherwise precluded from reaching civilization or rescue for several days.
The inner bark of many if not most North American trees is pretty rich in nutrients/calories, if not tasty (and pretty certain not to be poisonous) -- conifer seeds would also be good in a survival situation and not require knowing which roots to dig up or whatnot.
Honestly the amount of caloric content you are going to get versus energy spent probably isn't worth it versus jsut using that energy to hiking further. You are never that far from civilizaiton on the AT. probably less than a days walk always. You aren't trapped on an island.
No need to draw a dichotomy between hiking out and gathering food. You can do both. I strongly suspect that part of the reason Geraldine didn’t hike out was weakness from lack of food, and even 500 calories could have helped… which she could have gathered within a few yards of her campsite. If she had had the knowledge.
There's a ton of edible plants, but it's going to be hard to get sufficient calories from greenery. I personally would have no idea how to trap game, but maybe you have more skills with this
As you say it's the caloric content rather than nominal edibility that's the real sticker.
As to mammals, I have no trapping experience at all and extremely limited faith in my capacity to improvise. Fish seem like something I'd have a better shot at either brute forcing or using primitive techniques in a way that's calorically favorable, but realistically we're talking about me going from like a 99% chance of starving to 60-80% of starving.
Rescue or return to civilization at the earliest available opportunity are overwhelmingly the only plausible ways for *me personally* to not die in this context, my point was more that I was skeptical that the odds were especially good for almost anyone to survive in the New England woods prior to autumn without recourse to animal sources.
Bushwacking (hiking off the trail) in the Adirondacks a friend and I got 'lost' for several hours. We knew about where we were on the map but woke up in the morning to a thick fog and after a while a bit of a panic set in. We got over it, but for a while we were uncertain about which way to go.
We have her journal entries and (unsuccessfully sent) texts. I do think that some people naturally have a better sense of direction than others, but...you've never gotten lost in the woods?
Edit: Or maybe you don't go very far off to pee in the woods. There are probably sex/personality differences on this
I've found that my sense of direction has gotten worse as I've gotten older. I also think I get less practice using it these days, though, with GPS doing the hard part for me for the last 15-20 years now.
Oh I've definitely been unable to find the trail. If you miss a blaze or two in dense foliage, or the blazes get worn away. I've also had this problem after a big leaf fall when the leaves were so dense as to cover traces of the trail.
I haven't gotten really lost going to pee in the woods, but sometimes I find myself unable to follow the exact route back and wind up some yards further down the trail than when I went in. So although I do think of myself as a "better" hiker than Geraldine FWIW it's easy to see how this could happen.
New England woods can be incredibly confusing. I can easily imagine getting disoriented there. However, I am struggling to understand how an experienced hiker with a compass couldn't figure out which way to turn to get out, even if not by the shortest path.
I've been having problems with an electric range and could use advice diagnosing the problem. The unit has an old-fashioned cooktop with four heating elements, just like this:
Over the past two months, three different receptacles that the burners / heating elements plug into have melted, and in a separate incident, the stove tripped its circuit breaker. This video shows the exact problem:
When the first receptacle melted, I bought a new one from Home Depot and replaced it. It melted again within weeks. A different heating element's receptacle also melted. Only two of the stove's elements are still working.
What's the problem here?
This electric range is in a rental property that I own. It came with the house when I bought it eight years ago, and worked fine until the current tenants moved in. On literally their first night at the house, the first receptacle meltdown happened. They were adamant that they didn't misuse the machine in any way.
They're a large family, and they use that kitchen to cook much more often than the average group of people. I think the electric range is getting more use (e.g. - all four heating elements on at once, multiple times daily) than it ever has. I think they might be inadvertently overloading it, but shouldn't the machine be designed to handle that level of use without malfunctioning?
I read some of the reviews at the link you provided for that stove and it seems you are not alone. Apparently that stove has some kind of safety switch on the burners that shuts them off when they get too hot and apparently on your stove that’s not working. All in all people seem to be rather dissatisfied with the burners .
> what a horrible oven this is..it came brand new in a house i purchased..because it has temperature limiting burners,i cant even boil a pot of water for pasta because the burner wont stay on high for more than 5 minutes before it shuts itself off.<
And then there are other complaints of the shut off switch not working in which case it would lead to the problem you’re having.
There allegedly are people who attempt to abuse their kitchen stove as a space heater. (AFAIK however it is typically a gas stove, and in a dwelling where the mains current was cut off for nonpayment.)
The more likely thing is that an absent-minded tenant routinely let the electric burners run without a load.
Replace the receptacle, and swap elements with another receptacle to see if the element is causing the failures (risks toasting the *other* receptacle) - or just replace the bad receptacle and that element at the same time. If the element-side contacts are bad it could be arcing or heating the socket excessively.
I went with the overboiling hypothesis because the OP mentioned two separate burners being affected. So it's unlikely to be a specific element or socket. Although not impossible - maybe the thing is getting near the end of its reliable lifetime and getting cascading failures.
Without being able to inspect the sockets closely, here's my best guess (context: I'm an engineer working on wide range of problems in electronic-to-physics domain): someone lets liquids boil over to the point that the liquid gets into the socket. Now there are a couple of mechanisms that can cause excess heating:
1 - conductive liquid within the socket creates a shunt that passes current and dissipates I²R amount of power. If the R (resistance) goes low enough it will generate enough heat to melt the plastic
2 - liquid like milk doesn't cause enough of a shunt to dissipate power directly, or the burner is turned off. The milk dries up within the socket, and adds resistance to the current path. Now when the burner is turned on, the current passes through the crud resistance, and heats up that poor contact enough to melt the plastic.
Look for evidence of burned-over liquids and contamination on the drip pans and under the burners.
I hate what google, or internet, has become. I googled "knight cat" because I thought there might be a cat breed called knight and I also expected cats dressed in armor, because I remembered seeing a hamster in armor.
Instead, almost all results were ugly AI generated garbage that all looks the same. It also seems that google started prioritizing websites selling things rather than websites providing information.
There you go https://pinterest.com/pin/773141461002313911/. turns out I had to google "knight cat real" and there are plenty of cats in armor (on pinterest). I just wish I didn't have to explicitly filter through fake AI garbage.
Wait, you typed Knight Cat and that's what it searched for? Because I was looking for Plastic and it autofilled the searchbar to Plastic Surgery like a complete piece of shit.
I hope someone made a backup copy of the internet yesterday, because this is exactly what I expect -- internet getting filled by automatically generated things, which will make it difficult to find something, and also to train future generations of LLMs.
They likely don't need your money - they are paid tens of millions of dollars each year, by people who have very specific demands about what should and should not be preserved. https://archive.org/about/
Searching "knight cat" gets similar results to "cleric cat" or "wizard cat" - a bunch of art, some of it done with AI, but all of it depicting cats being [insert RPG class here].
Searching for "cat armour" gives the results you were looking for.
I do agree google search feels like it lost some battle against SEO tools and no longer reliably puts good quality stuff at the top, though.
The reaction to the ongoing Israel-Gaza war shows that support for Israel and Jews is lower than it has been in decades in the West. Will the trend towards favoring the Palestinians continue as time passes, or is there some way that the balance could reverse?
Probably, especially since there doesn't seem to be any likely indication that further encroachment on the West Bank by settlers is going to stop anytime soon.
1. The Holocaust is slowly but inexorably declining as a driving factor in sentiment, as it recedes into history.
2. Israel maintaining and growing its disproportionate power in its region.
As long as (2) holds true, the change in (1) will translate into lower and lower levels of sympathy. The 10/7 attacks could have given Israel a chance to play up international sympathy, but for various reasons that just hasn't happened beyond a brief blip.
So to be candid: what are “people of color” or the global majority being taught, at their places of origin or here in America - that would produce this result?
Because everyone - apart from some kids in heavily immigrant enclaves, such as the little Central American girl murdered alone in her apartment by the also-recent Central American illegal - goes to the government daycare known as school.
I don't know. I haven't looked over textbooks that are currently being used in American schools, let alone in other nations. Can you suggest a good way to check?
Also, I don't know whether some of the under-30s are conspiracy theorists who reject a chunk of accurate information as lies.
As of 2019, the fraction of the American population that thinks that Apollo 11 was faked was 11% ("strongly believe" + "believe") https://www.statista.com/statistics/959480/belief-that-the-moon-landing-was-faked/ (with an additional 11% "neither believe nor disbelieve" and a further 7% "don't know"). The web page didn't split it out by age. Maybe the lizardman constant is higher than it seemed to be...
Frankly, I would feel more comfortable supporting Israel if it finally stopped expanding and declared that its current borders are final. As I see it, this is not going to happen until the entire territory of Palestine is conquered. And I suspect that this was probably always the plan.
Israel is not a monolith. Different parties and politicians support different policies. I don't think anyone was planning on annexing Gaza though. At some time in the past there was a two-state solution on the table that the Pals could have signed off on. Probably not at the moment.
> Israel is not a monolith. Different parties and politicians support different policies.
Yes, and some of those parties and politicians get democratically elected.
> At some time in the past there was a two-state solution on the table that the Pals could have signed off on.
Your idea of where you country begins and ends should not depend on what anyone else is saying.
For example, Ukrainians insist that Crimea is a part of Ukraine, regardless of who actually controls the territory now. But they also agree that e.g. Moscow is *not* a part of Ukraine. So they have a clear definition of both inside and outside that they could paint on a map. And I trust them to not try conquer the territory outside that area, and they would lose a lot of support if they did. (Whether they can actually control all the territory inside that area, that is a different question.)
Can you show me a line that Israel will *not* cross (permanently)? Like, not even 10 or 20 years later, because most Israeli citizens agree that the territory behind the line is definitely not theirs to take, so the expansion behind the line would be politically outside the Overton window?
I am okay to support self-defense, but not expansion, and if you blur the line, then you simply lose my support. (I can understand the need of an occasional military action behind your lines, but the goal should be to destroy the targets and return. If you stay there permanently, it is annexation.)
Since 1947, I believe Israel has only expanded when someone else decided to wage war against Israel, lost badly enough that the Israeli army was standing on what used to be their territory, and then refused to sign a peace treaty but let it stand as a ceasefire along current lines. IIRC the Israelis formally annexed the extra territory they wound up with in 1948, but everything since has just been placed under "temporary" Israeli administration pending some permanent settlement.
Sinai, they returned to Egypt as soon as it was clear that Egypt wasn't up for another war. They wound up in de facto control of a bit of South Lebanon in 1984(?), but withdrew from that. I believe they tried to give Gaza to Egypt at the same time as the Sinai, but Egypt didn't want it. And of course they eventually gave Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, albeit with joint Israeli/Egyptian control of the borders.
And, yes, have been settling the crap out of the West Bank, which is illegal, immoral, and provocative. But that didn't start in earnest until the West Bank was de facto Israeli-occupied for a decade and likely to remain so for many more decades.
The evidence does not support any great desire for territorial expansion on Israel's part. At worst, they are too reluctant to give territory they happen to occupy to others with a better claim on it, when they find that territory convenient for their own use. If you don't want Israel's borders to expand, just get people to knock it off on trying to invade Israel already. And I think we're mostly there.
To me it seems that you described the *major* expansions here, and then there are also the countless minor expansions whenever a group of settlers builds a new home in a territory formerly inhabited by Palestinians and IDF comes to their defense. Doing minor expansions all the time and the major ones only occasionally does not seem to disprove the hypothesis.
Unless you perceive all Palestine as de facto already belonging to Israel, in which case the settlers do not really count as expansion, only the wars do.
I covered those under "settling the crap out of the West Bank, which is illegal, immoral, and provocative."
But which occurs only on territory which was already under the physical control of Israel and which basically everybody including the relevant Arab nations agrees should remain under the physical control of Israel until a more permanent solution is in place. Jordan, e.g., isn't asking for the West Bank back, and there is zero prospect of Israeli settlers opportunistically building settlements on the *East* Bank.
The set of territory under Israel's physical control, has only ever expanded when other parties have started wars with Israel. The set of territory under Israel's physical control, has on occasion been reduced by Israel voluntarily reverting territory to Arab control in the name of peace and/or administrative convenience. If you don't want to see Greater Israel, don't try to invade Actual Israel.
Fortunately, the set of people that seriously want to invade Actual Israel, seems to have diminished from "basically the entire Arab world", to just Hamas. Plus maybe Iran but they don't have a common border. And Hamas may not have a common border with Israel much longer either.
The settlement of the West Bank never stopped since it began, and was funded and accelerated by both left wing and right wing governments.
A defined border is not a prize that you throw to your neighbours whenever they're behaving themselves, it's the bare minimum that a state that doesn't want to be seen as a colonial entity should do. Judged by the outrage I see whenever Israel is being accused of colonialism, this point seems to be lost on most Israelis and Israel's supporters.
In general, any question of the general form "Didn't Israel try to do [Something that is ostensibly fair] ?" can be answered by "Yes they did, and they included so many attached strings and backdoors that the entire thing is null and void and useless" after you research it for a while.
This is the case for the Gaza de-settlement, which looks fair and peaceful until you see the actual self-admitted rationale of the people who masterminded it ( The sabotage of the peace process and the explicit support of Hamas). This is the case for the Palestinian state they offered in 2000, a mosaic of disconnected Palestinian enclaves in a sea of Israeli roads and settlements, with no army, navy or airforce. This is even the case for the Israeli acceptance of the 1948 partition, which looks fair and is parroted by all as evidence that Israel want to live in peace, until you dig more and realize that there were plans and classified documents revealing all the plans of the deliberate displacemenet of Palestinians was all there in 1947 and before.
So maybe. There might have been an instance where Israel tried to give the West Bank to Jordan. But I give it about 75% to 80% that - after enough research - this will turn out to have been so faustian and cynical that Jordan refused, and then Israel added that to the long list of dishonest case studies it can point to in order to prove that Arabs are warlike monsters who keep refusing peace for no reason.
And it's not like the Jordanian royal scum are angels either, so even if that was earnest it wouldn't have been any good for Palestinians.
You may be right. I haven't tried to look at the level of detail that would reveal all the "attached strings and backdoors".
My point of view is that Israelis could build taller (seismically safe) apartment buildings in Haifa and move the Israeli West Bank settlers there. And hand the Israeli roads and settlements to the West Bank Palestinians. Palestinian armed forces are too much of a hazard to Israel, those couldn't be on the table. What if it were a semi-autonomous region within Jordan, with the Jordanians _just_ there to ensure that the Palestinians did not attempt to arm themselves? Given recent history of Palestinians, I doubt that they will give each other a democratic system or much in the way of human rights, but that would be their choice.
>"Judged by the outrage I see whenever Israel is being accused of colonialism..."
That's because the *Arabs* are the colonizers (outside Arabia); it's a fundamentally dishonest accusation, which shouldn't be a surprise given taqiyya...
Taqiyya تقية is the Arabic name of the Islamic license given to Muslims to pretend they're not Muslims when threatened by death or other severe consequences. Your implicit accusation that Pro-Palestinians who accuse Israel of being a colonizer are liars practicing Taqiyya rings bizarre, given that the a lot of Pro-Palestinians are neither Muslims nor particularly fond of Islam, this Pro-Palestinian certainly isn't.
Arabs are colonizers, yes, but universal human rights came too late to condemn and stop their colonization. Universal human rights didn't come too late to condemn and stop the Israeli colonizers, which we should do in the same way we condemned and stopped any number of colonizers in the 20th century even though the natives they took the land from are themselves earlier colonizers from earlier natives. "The crime I'm doing now is the same one the victims' ancestors once did in the past" is not very convincing.
"That's because the Arabs are the colonizers (outside Arabia);" True enough. I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashidun_Caliphate counts as their first imperial colonial project? I guess Persian grievances with Arabians have a 1400 year history...
You're approaching this from a fundamentally misguided point of view, one that views Diaspora Jews as an extension of Israel and Israel as nothing more but the political representative of Jews everywhere.
This is about as misguided as thinking that the world's outrage about Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a deeper indication of some deep-seated hatred or prejudice towards Slavs. The analogy is particularly apt because, just as both Russians and Ukrainians are different flavors of Slavs, both Arabs and Jews are different flavors of semites, and Hebrew is both related to Arabic and explicitly borrowed from it when it was being revived in the 19th century after a millennia long hiatus as an everyday language.
There are 2 questions hiding inside your seemingly singular question :
1- Why is the world not clapping for Israel or turning a blind eye like it had done for the last 70 years ?
2- Why do some believe that Jews are somehow magically connected such that harassing a Jewish grandma in the UK is likely to affect a genocidal minister in Netanyahu's government 3000+ Km away ?
(1) is a positive development, (2) is a very negative and worrying development that threatens to undo (1) or worse. In my opinion they both have different casual chains that interlock at many points, but I might very well be wrong. But we can't honestly discuss this or reach anything meaningful under the flawed pretense that Israel and Jews are intrinsically and inevitably correlated and attitudes towards one determines attitudes towards the other.
I could agree in principal that views of Jews living in Israel as a nation-state and views of Jews living elsewhere are separate. If the concern were purely a matter of Israelis using their power to oppress their neighbors, there's a legitimate discussion to be had and the Israelis often do not come out looking good with that. If their enemies didn't also do things that make themselves look bad (suicide bombings, killing 1,200+ people on October 7), then the Palestinians could quite possibly have unified support. Even with those things, an argument can be made that it's an ongoing war and civilians die in wars.
What gets to me is that there's spillover across the Western world where Jews are being attacked (both verbally and physically). These Jews may or may not support Israel, but are clearly separate from it. Every time a Jew in a Western country is singled out for attacks, it reinforces the idea - right or wrong - that Jews are not safe from attack. It gives credence to the idea that without a Jewish state with a strong military and hard borders, Jewish people would be in danger.
I've never been to the Middle East, so I recognize my view is limited. What I do know is that Israel has been attacked numerous times in both organized wars and terrorist attacks. This reality could be the result of Israeli actions, or it could be a more general hatred of Jews. Every time a non-Israeli Jew is attacked, it supports the idea that the hatred isn't about Israeli actions but is instead about Jews. If it's about Jews, I can't support any of the groups who are against Israel/Jews right now. If it's not about Jews, then it needs to be very clear that attacks on non-Israeli Jews absolutely need to stop.
I mean, a large portion of the blame lies squarely on Israel itself. Israel incessantly insists in its propagandistic literature and various national mythos that it's the land of Jews, that everything it does is for Jews, that everything that happens because of it happens because of Jews. Built by Jews, operated by Jews, for the Jews.
Imagine if the US justified its wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam or Korea using Christianity, I wouldn't be too surprised if Christians started getting attacked in and around those regions, and possibly elsewhere. It's a tragedy, yes, but a very predictable tragedy.
When 9/11 happened, Muslims started getting attacked in Western countries. Is this "Islamophobia" ? Probably, but it's quite rational to be fearful of a religion whose adherents just demolished 2 skyscrapers and killed 2000+ people, it's not rational to take out this fear and rage on ordinary peaceful Muslims, but who is rational when they're filled with rage and fear and adrenaline ?
It's similarly quite rational to be fearful of a religion whose adherents just killed 15000+ innocent civilians, displaced 1.8 million innocent civilians, and demolished 100K buildings, hospitals, and schools. It's not rational to take out this fear and rage on ordinary peaceful Jews, but who is rational when they're filled with rage and fear and adrenaline ?
> If it's not about Jews, then it needs to be very clear that attacks on non-Israeli Jews absolutely need to stop.
I can equally well invert your syllogism and say :
>>> Palestinians have been attacked numerous times in both organized wars and terrorist attacks. This reality could be the result of Hamas actions, or it could be a more general hatred of Palestinians. Every time a non-Hamas Palestinian is attacked, it supports the idea that the hatred isn't about Hamas actions but is instead about Palestinians. If it's about Palestinians, I can't support any of the groups who are against Hamas/Palestinians right now. If it's not about Palestinians, then it needs to be very clear that attacks on non-Hamas Palestinians absolutely need to stop.
How is this useful ?
You're basically complaining "If X and Y are different things, why do some people still treat them as the same thing ? I refuse to treat them as distinct until all others make this distinction first", but this is incoherent and - furthermore - feeds the positive feedback loop you're ostensibly complaining about. People treat X and Y, the 2 different things, as the same because they're confused and/or malicious. You refusing to see distinctions plays right into their hands and perpetuates the exact same confusion.
If non-combatants in other countries were attacking Hamas supporters, or especially random Palestinians, then I would also be against that. I'm not sure what your point is here. Can I see that people will tend to conflate Israel and Jews, and also conflate Muslims with terrorists? Yes - but that's exactly my point. This is a *bad result* and we should be against it.
>> If it's about Jews, I can't support any of the groups who are against Israel/Jews right now.
I could be misunderstanding this, but to me, this implies some sort of ultimatum : You will not criticise Israel or recognize any of the horrors it inflicts upon Palestinians, unless and until people stop attacking Jews for their supposed connection and/or support of Israel.
While attacking Jews indiscriminately for supporting Israel is dumb and evil, the ultimatum above (if I'm understanding it correctly) doesn't seem to help matters. You're conflating Israel with Jews in the same way those who attack Jews do, the only difference is that you support both instead of attacking both, whereas what you should do is to separate both, treat Israel entirely independently of Jews.
If groups who dislike Israel are attacking Jews (including Jews in other countries and those that don't support Israel/Zionism) instead of or in addition to Israel, then those groups are wrong/evil. They're failing to distinguish between a country and people who have the same ethnic or religious background as many of the people in that country.
If it's about Israel, then there's good arguments that Israel could do better (West Bank settlements being the clearest example). This should result in few to no attacks on Jews in other countries. In fact, the specific example of Israeli settlers should result in attacks on the *settlers* and not indiscriminate attacks against all Israelis even. The October 7 attacks also killed many non-Jewish foreign workers, many of which were also kidnapped and taken back to Gaza. This doesn't fit the model where Hamas is a reaction to Israeli wrongdoing.
Many decades ago, I concluded that the leadership of the PLO and of Israel were, without necessarily directly communicating with each other but acting more or less on an unspoken understanding, were choreographing their attacks on each other as a way of perpetuating the conflict and solidifying the power structure on both sides. I have seen nothing since to convince me that I am wrong. Of course, who pays the price are the civilians on both sides.
Outside of that - I think (maybe overly optimistically) that racial justice essentialism (whoever's less white is both more victim-y and morally superior) is on the decline as people see the disastrous results and remember it's not actually compulsory to be maximum woke, which would counteract this.
I wish that you prove right. I'm less hopeful (granted, I spend a chunk of time on reddit, which has a _lot_ of toxic wokeness). Any suggestions on how to track this? My knee-jerk reaction is to look for something on google trends, but I can't think of any obvious terms to track which would be reasonably unambiguous.
Counting catastrophes in which AI plays a critical causal role feels like a slightly misleading thing to do.
I think that the modal future is one in which AI is used in lots of things that were previously done by humans, and does them better than humans but not perfectly. That future will contain lots of catastrophes caused by AI errors, but AI will still be making us safer on net.
I think "AI makes it easy to build a homemade super virus, which some terrorists decide to make at home, destroying civilization" is a reasonably central version of AI doom.
"Warring nations using AI to launch nukes when if it didn't exist they could have just launched them without it" wouldn't be, but I worry more about the first example.
One problem with the homemade super virus example is, no matter how good a job your AI does at making a super (deadly) virus, once it gets out into the real world good old-fashioned evolution will get to work turning it into another variety of the common cold, flu, or whatever. Because what those viruses are doing is way closer to the evolutionary optimum than "kill all your hosts ASAP". Historically, diseases mostly get super deadly when they break out into a new population, and then settle down to an occasionally-deadly inconvenience.
The other problem is, if you have anything resembling a plan to make this work and especially a plan that considers and overcomes that first problem, you're going to need to test at several intermediate steps along the way, and as you get closer to testing a super deadly virus in a realistic operational environment, those tests are going to be noticed.
If the plan is that the AI will just use its mighty silicon brain to stare at base-pair sequences until it says "Eureka! With 100% confidence, this is the plague that will extinctify humanity!", then no, it's not going to work that way.
Wouldn't the super-smart AI that is developing the virus know about that problem, and suggest to its human masters that they overcome it by releasing a new killer virus every year or two?
"dangerous biological weapons are impossible" seems like an overly optimistic take. Plagues are historically common and it wouldn't be that crazy hard to make one immune to most of our antibiotics.
"You'd have to test several steps along the way" is also not reassuring. Terrorists have historically proven fairly able to execute complicated plans with multiple moving parts, including making multiple tries when early ones failed.
The claim is not that dangerous biological weapons are impossible, but that dangerous biological weapons are not trivially an X-risk. Lots of things that aren't X-risks can still kill millions or billions of people.
we had a minor worry with people fearing the rise of 3-d printers would make creating or modifying guns much easier; just download plans and go. it seems to have been forgotten; i know consumer 3d is extruded plastic, but 3-d printing in general seems to quietly died as a thing.
3-D printing is still a big thing in some areas of industry where it's genuinely the best way to make something. But 3-D printing as a household cornucopia, wound up competing with the Amazon logistical machine that gave everyone next-day access to whatever factory was efficiently already mass-producing the thing that they want, and Amazon won that competition hands-down for obvious reasons.
This meme was just a failure to understand who wants to use guns and why. Pretty much none of us who have both the ability and the interest in 3d printing guns have any incentive to use them in anger.
It hasn't died, it was just never time efficient. Sure you can replicate that $40 plastic totchke with a dozen hours of skilled labor. But a couple dozen hours of skilled labor aren't worth that.
So it just becomes useful for custom stuff you want so bad you don't care if it takes tons of time.
One of my friends regularly designs and 3D prints stuff. It indeed mostly falls in the "custom stuff you want so bad you don't care if it takes tons of time"
Also, he is willing to live with the material property limitations of extruded plastics, which are ok if you want e.g. a holder for kitchenware, but are not great if you want transparency, or substantial strength, or heat resistance.
I've thought for a while that the massive growth of homebrewing and small breweries over the last couple decades could provide quite good coverage and opportunity for people engaged in questionable biological research.
You're already operating and optimizing production from little microbial factories, likely maintaining different stocks and experimenting with them... Viruses are harder to handle and manipulate than yeasts, though. But that's where the somewhat-handwavey "that's what the AI is for!" factor comes in.
Still I get the impression that it might be a bit dangerous for the amateur virus maker. He’s out in his barn brewing up a world destroying virus for a diabolical AI with equipment bought from auctions. Find dead a few weeks later the last recording is:
“I‘ve done it! Humanity will pay for ignoring my genius! ah ha ha ha .... cough. Splutter. Cough “
Just because the virus maker is dead doesn't mean the virus is too. In theory it could then spread to whoever finds the body or otherwise find an escape vector.
Wellll....yes, but. IIUC, the cost isn't beyond what a moderately successful business could afford. Or many universities. And parts of the job can be farmed out to 3rd parties that have no idea what you're up to...and accept "it's a company secret" as a reason not to tell them.
More recently I overheard an interview on NPR with some commercial bio-chemists who had apparently accidentally discovered a list of very potent potential bio-weapons, and were keeping it a secret, but I have forgotten the date and the name of the show.
There are ways to either get illegal access to it or make some of it with your existing tools (not easily, but this does seem like something sufficiently strong AI could reasonably tell you how to do even if you don't assume it becomes agentic).
I am looking to dive into the world of marketing, copy writing and develop a general aptitude for business/online commerce. I don't know where to start - there is so much out there. Does anyone here have any advice or resources? I want to learn.
I am a 33 year old (former) lawyer who has been out of my field for 3.5 years now. I was diagnosed with MS just before starting my career, worked for 1.5 years before worsening illness forced me to stop. I got a stem cell transplant about 2 years ago which has put me into remission, but at this point I don't know if I have the constitution to return to the meatgrinder that is the legal profession. I realized I don't feel very much passion for it, and if possible I'd like to change into something with greater flexibility.
I've thought long and hard about what kind of work I can do remotely, and my thinking is in the direction of learning HOW to sell first, and gaining knowledge about marketing, SEO, online advertising, and then using those general and valuable skills to decide WHAT to sell. An obvious choice is just to start a marketing firm and sell services to businesses to run their marketing/ads/website or bill them for creation of web/copy/ad campaigns.
I have strong analytical skills, I read very fast, I'm a decent writer and so I think with training I can also become a good copywriter. My brother is a software engineer so I have someone close to me who has a lot of knowledge on web development and related online business/tech/etc stuff that I can consult with on a variety of online commerce matter at least on a technical level.
Thank you in advance for any help - I am grateful for book recommendations, courses, any learning materials, other communities or advice in general.
I couldn't really be called a marketer, copy writer, or any of those things, so my approach may not be so valuable to you. But I do have some success when it comes to face-to-face selling products at a market stall. And to learn how to do that I basically wikied a ton of psychology stuff and read a lot of stuff from changingminds.org, and that site had a lot of stuff to do with copywriting and online sales too - although it's been ten years and I don't know whether it's as good as it was then (wikis can go sour over time.) Also, it may not be so useful for you because for me the real helper was practise. Being face to face, I also had the benefit of immediate feedback of what was and wasn't working, plus I could model the behaviour of stallholders doing better than me. Would recommend trying in person stuff if you can, in the hopes that the same principles then inform your online copy.
Thanks for your reply. That site is interesting but it has a really terrible layout and navigation, I have to click more than I read. As to your advice, I am sure that experience was invaluable, but I think a lot of my work will be done online. There is simply too much leverage in building an online presence versus trying to get around in-person to all your prospective clients.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting you pivot your plans. Just if you get the opportunity to do anything face to face (helping a friend or whatever) then it's worth doing from a learning standpoint.
Looking for two (rather specific) book recommendations.
I once read that I. The eighteenth century, as the English novel was in its birth throes, people started writing novels with unusual narrators -- novels narrated by mice or by combs. The only one I've been able to find, though, is Smollett's History and Adventures of an Atom. I know a couple of late nineteenth-century narratives with animal narrators (Black Beauty, Autobiography of a Flea) but I'm looking for something earlier, and hopefully weirder. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Also: I really enjoyed the Penguin Classics volume Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, which includes Lazarillo de Tormes and El Buscón. I'd love to read other similar, contemporary Spanish picaresques in English. Any good translations people can point me to?
Very much appreciate any recommendations of books, or of places to look at that themselves recommend these books!
Maybe not precisely what you are looking for, but _Life & Opinions of Tomcat Murr_ by E.T.A. Hoffmann is both weird (it's two interleaved autobiographies) and earlier (early 19th century.) Hoffmann is otherwise best known as the author of _The Nutcracker_.
On that subject, does anyone know how many brain cells this thing has, versus how many it will have at some later date?
On quite another note, I'm wondering how a medaeival peasant, without the benefit of all the leaflets, public awareness videos, and mandated visits from all the various hospitally people we've had paraded past us, how does someone without all that take one look at the tarry black shit coming out of this baby and not immediately conclude demonic possession?
Thanks! In the UK they give you this little red book in which they keep a record of all physical changes to the baby over time - so they can see if bruises and birthmarks appear.
On a completely unrelated note, does anyone know if a brown fineliner felt tip is safe to use on a newborn baby's skin?
If you're having a bad day and want to feel uplifted, I found an amazing video last night of a fan coming onstage with the Foo Fighters to play drums. Spoiler Alert: he crushes it.
Such a wonderful vibe in the whole arena. You can tell just how happy the kid is to be playing onstage. The crowd is loving him. Dave Grohl egging him on.
It's not the first time the Foo Fighters have done this, either. Search YouTube for Yayo Sanchez aka "Kiss Guy". That one was guitar. Same Dave Grohl attitude (including being so surprised at how well Sanchez played that he forgot a lyric).
This is probably now an extra reason to go to a FF concert, esp. if you're good at playing their songs.
I teach in a humanities department, in a university. I am also the author of a moderately successful textbook. I think that AI is likely to revolutionize our teaching, and the textbook business, over the next few years. I'm a little frustrated that, when my colleagues talk about AI, they seem to focus entirely on the issue of students using AI to cheat. There is so much else to talk about!
So, here is my question: Where do I go to find smart conversations about the future of AI in education, especially university-level education? Are there any promising start-ups in this area?
Some people want to disrupt the current educational system, other people would prefer to keep it frozen as long as possible. Any change, even if it improves the things for everyone, is a danger for those currently at the top, because they are best at the currently needed skills, but someone else might be better at the new skills.
The most conservative use of AI would be to write new textbooks with its help. As a professor, you would provide the outline and write the important parts, and let AI fill in the rest, which of course you would check afterwards. You could ask AI to generate exercises for the chapter you wrote. You could ask it to check the text you wrote for mistakes. I imagine this alone could allow you to write the textbook at least 5x faster. The AI could also create illustrations for the textbook, or animations for a web page or a video. The AI could also translate the book to various languages.
All of this can be done without antagonizing your colleagues, because you don't need to talk about the AI involvement. Everything is ultimately checked by you, and the students do not interact with the AI directly.
As a teacher, what I want is an AI that can interact with my students outside of classroom time, giving them reliable feedback and keeping them engaged with the topic. I'm not sure it's there yet.
It's one I often recommend for down to earth, "what can I use it for *now*?", practical writings about AI. He's a professor at a university in Pennsylvania so education and AI is a topic that often comes up, for example
Be the change! Try to start an online community of like-minded professors, and see how far you can go in organizing yourselves. We need voices from within academia that recognize what is happening and can help give critical, on-the-field perspectives on the most critical things AI can do to improve the educational experience in university.
I agree with you. My wife just finished her undergrad in her 30s, and while ChatGPT cheating became a hot topic in her final year, she was able to see the many legitimate ways it could really help her learning. She could get it to explain certain concepts simpler than her professors, and she could use its analytic capabilities to create many examples of some concept she wasn't getting until it finally clicked. Of course, you can develop pedagogical GPTs to really help yourself or your students learn by asking questions and seeing where the gaps in the knowledge are. Dynamic testing will also be a great boon where the chatbot responds based on its knowledge of what you know and what you have gotten wrong in prior conversations/tests.
One crucial thing about the Taylor Swift thing is that there exists a difference between, I don't know, "lyrics listeners" and "melody listeners". Some people seem to automatically pay the most attention to the lyrics of whatever song, dwell on them, analyze them etc. Someone like me, on the other hand, has a very hard time really even noticing what the lyrics are about unless I really like the song enough to specifically find out, and even then the lyrics always seem secondary to the melody, the rhythm and the sound itself; the voice is an instrument, obviously not unimportant, but still the lyrics just seem like a secondary affair. This might partly of course be affected by most of the music I listen to having English lyrics and it not being my native language, but it also affects things sung in Finnish.
As such, when Swifties talk about the introspective lyrics etc., even beyond my gender being different from the intended audience and so on, it's kind of impossible me to *really* understand, since when I listen to the music it just seems like your standard cookie-cutter pop rock, not really distinct in any way from pop hits of the last decades. Lyrics? Might be whatever.
(Of course, one reason for that might simply be that at least some songs, ie. Shake It Off which one of the few ones I actually remember) are from the same author as so many other pop hits of the last decades, ie. Max Martin and other Swedes of the same variety - can a Swiftie enlighten me if I'm just working off stereotypes and the other stuff is more fully Taylor's?)
One theory is that Taylor Swift is music for people who don't really like music.
I don't mean that in a snobby way; I mean they don't really like music in the same way that I don't really like wine. There's all sorts of people out there who really like wine and enjoy it in ways that I just can't. I, on the other hand, neither particularly like nor dislike the taste of wine, but I can definitely have a good time drinking it in a social situation, but then it's not really about the wine at all. The wines I like most are uncomplicated and a little bit sweet because they're the easiest to drink.
I bet people who enjoy Taylor Swift are enjoying it in the same way that I'd enjoy a nice wine party with friends. There's far more music sold to people who don't really like music than to people who really do.
I listened to much of her catalogue over a day a few months back. I would describe it as not bad, but not great. I am more of a melody guy too so the lyrics washed over me. Can’t remember a song.
Later I tried Billie Eilish expecting to be underwhelmed and there’s some good songwriting talent there. I’m not as much a fan of her singing though - a bit breathy. Those songs do lodge in your brain.
The last thing I tried to be cool with the kids, on the recommendation of my 19 yr old niece, was to listen to girl band BoyGenius who do have great harmonies and singing skills. Very different individual voices but the harmonies work.
I am sympathetic to Taylor since the fiasco with Kayne though.
Fellow music-over-lyrics listener here. I agree with you about the general listening practices of the Taylor Swift fan base, I think for a lot of people they connect with what they listen to almost more as poetry than as music. Than being said, from a purely instrumental/sonic perspective I think she's had some pretty stand-out stuff over the years.
Not the biggest Swiftie so someone with better knowledge of her catalog might have better examples but songs like Lavender Haze feel much cooler/more unique than cookie cutter pop rock to me. Plus her songs that are super basic are often some of the very best executed in that genre--Mine or Paper Rings come to mind.
Shake it Off is from the album 1989. It's the only album she has worked on with Max Martin (the producer in question). She has had 5 albums since then, mostly working with Jack Antonoff as producer and co-writer. Antonoff also work with her on 1989 and is also a producer of many modern Pop hits.
My wife is a major Swiftie, so i have spent a lot of time these past 8 years listening to Taylor Swift's music. I think her songs are less generic than they seem at a high level. And often the songs that sound generic are because their form was copied by others after Swift did it first. Now, I wont say she is creating new genres or is some musical genius, but she does innovate and has a lot of songs that are genuine pieces of good music as music and not just pop. Of course in such a large discography there will be many clunkers.
She (or her team though it has spanned two record labels now) is also pretty bad at choosing lead singles for her albums. The first single tends to be the worst song or nearly the worst on the album. Shake It Off is one example. It has quite a different vibe and maturity than the other songs on 1989. "22", "Look What you Made Me Do", and the vomit inducing "Me!", are other examples of terrible lead singles.
On the main subject of the original comment: I am a melody person and my wife is Lyrics. There are songs i have heard 100+ times and she has heard <10 times but she knows the words way better than me. The lyrics for Swift's songs are the *thing* for her, first and foremost. Knowing all the references and the story behind the songs is something she loves. The earlier albums (pre 1989) were more about the story and the emotion in the lyrics - these songs were more about generic love/song concepts, but they were just as important.
I believe (though I've never been diagnosed or even taken the time to look closely) that my music-over-lyrics listening is caused by some form of audio processing disorder – meaning that while my hearing is just fine (for my age, anyway), it's somewhat tougher than usual for me to parse words out. I wonder if there's a correlation between mild autism and audio processing disorder (and therefore between both of those and this blog).
fwiw, I have mediocre audio processing that’s a problem for me at the margin, probably some degree of mild autism (too old to have been considered for today’s broad spectrum of autism diagnoses and have seen no point in pursuing it; do have an adult ADHD dx), and I’m a lyrics prioritizer. I see your logic that perhaps it should not be so , and yet!
That's interesting. I also have some sort of audio processing disorder, to the extent that I can't really understand lyrics on a car radio, but am firmly in the lyrics-over-music camp. But that drives me to seek out genres like filk that tend to have lower volume music and typically 0-2 instruments and a focus on clever lyrics so that I can more easily follow them.
I know very little about the subject, but I’m very suspicious about the near universal condemnation of Purdue Pharma / Sackler family wrt opioid abuse. (And the fact that Netflix made a special slamming them only strengthens my skepticism!)
I’m generally leery of people trying to limit access to painkillers simply because some patients will abuse them, and it always seemed like this tendency is a hangover from the war on drugs.
But maybe I’m way off base. Did Purdue/Sackler really do anything wrong? Please educate me!
Googling “in defense of the Sackler family” turned up very little and chatgpt couldn’t really come up with anything either!!
If you look at the graph of Oxycontin use, and the graph of opioid deaths, the story that one caused the other doesn't seem to hold up. And it looks like the crackdown on opioids was far more dangerous than the increase in their prescription, both in the short and long term (heavy emphasis on "looks like").
But they've admitted to wrongdoing, and that wrongdoing was connected to the deaths of a very large number of people. You can make a case that we should be subjecting those who limited access to painkillers to the same scrutiny we have subjected the Sacklers to, but I think that case is weakened by trying to claim that the Sacklers did nothing wrong.
They absolutely did. There is a reason they sold off what they could before the army of agencies and state authorities came after them. It's good to be skeptical but this is a strange one; what exactly stands out to you as innocent? They created a huge incentive structure for doctors to prescribe highly addictive opioids, which ruined countless thousands of lives. No other nation had such an issue with these kinds of drugs as America did.
The addictive nature of the drug they created is an important factor in their immoral and illegal actions to get doctors to prescribe it en masse. They didn't create a blood pressure drug and then somehow conspire to get doctors to prescribe it to people with normal blood pressure - it's an opioid.
Of course it helped and continues to help millions of people around the world, but that's not a defence to what they did. The argument isn't "they invented an evil drug", but that they irresponsibly, illegally and immorally propogated it by esseentially bribing doctors to prescribe it.
Opioid prescriptions have been down a lot in the last five years, yet opioid deaths keep climbing. The policies these people want haven't been working, alas, that doesn't stop them from continuing to push them.
I observe that the rhetoric around opioids is a lot like opioids themselves. Opioids, when misused, provide an immediate high at the cost of severe problems down the line. Users know this, deep down. If you're an opioid addict, what's the takeaway from all this rhetoric? It's that it's not your fault, it's the fault of China, Mexico, the cartels, "the border," Purdue Pharma, McKinsey & Company, etc. It provides a temporary high, at the cost of making the problem worse long term, for those thinking about abusing opioids will be more likely to do so if society responds by treating them like victims. And politicians who indulge in this rhetoric know this, deep down. But solving the problem matters much less than staying in office.
I expect the judgment comes in belatedly, in the form of reading “100,000 people overdosed last year” or whatever - and feeling that humanity will not miss them. Basically a comfort with the recognition that the lax attitude toward drugs will kill plenty of people and in particular make the lives of lots of children miserable but it is worth it and the fittest will survive/thrive.
The show to watch is the earlier one, “The Pharmacist”. Real hero, not made-up ones.
It’s been awhile but the pharmaceutical reps were basically pushers, and pressured to be so as I recall.
And it was all based on a long ago paper that said something on the order of, we observed in-patients (e.g. after surgery) getting opioids for a few hours or a day and found they didn’t become addicted …
If they deliberately lied to doctors, patients and regulators about the addictive properties of their products (which seems almost certain to me), I would say that they definitely did something wrong.
(I suspect some people think lying is a somewhat trivial sin – just “spin” – in the big picture, because there’s often an indirect route from the lie to the actual, physical harm. But lying is a keystone sin, that can cover so much other wrongdoing. So I think it’s important to take it seriously when anyone lies or otherwise deliberately deceives/misleads the public at scale, even if it is hard to draw the direct line to physical harm. That’s usually the point of lying.)
If they then speculated in their product being addictive, compounding the damage done by actively and knowingly working to increase their profits off of people who were addicted (which seems likely but hard to prove), then they were being something a lot like evil.
Of course, I don’t think anyone who thinks of themself as a good person would have said that out loud or even thought in those terms. There’s jargon for that. But that’s how evil works: A lot, if not most, evil in the world is done by normal people trying to do a good job while deliberately - maybe subconsciously - closing their eyes to inconvenient fact about the harm they’re causing. There should still be consequences, though.
Don't doctors have a certain expected level of analytical ability? What doctor would have not known about the addictiveness of opioids and taken that into consideration? If they didn't, then that seems like a case of malpractice.
I'm not sure about what the Sackler family did wrong, but I certainly think the pharmacies filling the prescriptions got short shrift here. What were they supposed to do with a prescription prescribed by a doctor, say "you seem to be getting too many of these, so we aren't going to fill this prescription"? If they didn't fill a doctor-prescribed prescription then I would think people would have complained about that.
If Purdue says that Oxy uses new sustained-release technology that differentiates it from other opioids, and they show you studies that show far lower risk of addiction than for comparable opioids, it's not unreasonable to think they may be telling the truth. Medical breakthroughs happen, and I don't know that most PCPs understand all the mechanisms involved in judging how plausible those claims were.
Combine the claim and possibility of a medical breakthrough, with eager sales reps, heavy marketing, and an astroturfed movement to reform pain treatment and not let patients suffer chronic pain unnecessarily (Partners Against Pain), and it might seem reasonable for a PCP to prescribe Oxy to manage chronic pain – not just in place of other opiates, but in gray-zone cases where they might previously have been more restrictive.
It seems much more reasonable to blame the people who told the lie, and then hyped it for all it was worth, than the doctors who believed it (or the pharmacists who just filled the prescriptions).
At a certain point the penny should have dropped more widely, of course. If not before, then certainly after 2007, when an affiliate of Purdue Pharma, and three of that company's executives, pled guilty to criminal charges of misbranding OxyContin by claiming that it was less addictive and less subject to abuse and diversion than other opioids.
Having said that, there were obviously many bad doctors (and researchers and pharmacists) who contributed to the disaster early on, and who should take their part of the blame – running pill mills issuing on-demand prescriptions to patients with obvious addiction issues – but it's hardly unreasonable that most of the blame lands at Purdue/Sackler's feet. They definitely would have taken most of the credit and reward if OxyContin had turned out to be a huge success story for humanity.
I agree that if Purdue *lied* and said it was less addictive, then a doctor, trusting them to be a reputable organization, ought to believe them. In that case, yes, Purdue and those responsible should be held responsible for fraud. If the Sacklers were knowledgeable in this, then such judgement ought to include them.
Yes. But the owners will always be responsible to some degree. It's a large family, and I am sure different family members have different degrees of knowledge and liability. Some may be criminally liable, others not.
However, owners of a company that defrauds people should always be prepared to pay back the money made from that fraud, even if they didn't know about it. (Not only should they have known, but the alternative is to reward ignorant owners, and deny the victims proper restitution.) I don't know about the exact legal mechanisms or corporate protections, but it can't be okay to basically rob someone, and then plead innocence and ignorance because it was actually your C-Corp that did it. If the owners really are innocent, they can and should go after their dishonest employees in court in turn.
I think it's related to the aggressive marketing of opioids to doctors and patients, along with either a faux or wilful ignorance of the very real side effects.
I agree the war on drugs is stupid but I think that, even if you want to decriminalize something like Heroin, Meth or Cocaine, it's probably a really bad idea to allow companies to profit from them. Incentives all in the wrong place.
How about "it's illegal to advertise then in other than to list them in your catalog"? Buying is legal, selling is legal, possession is legal, trading is legal, but advertising can only be done by those with no commercial interest.
I'd like to present some broad metaphysical speculations, to get feedback and comments. Again, this is speculative, the realm of verbal argument and broad generalization. It's not proof or even knowledge, just my best throw for today. If you're not into these things, or find no utilitarian value in them, please ignore.
The classic starting point are the three realms of knowledge: physical, conscious and platonic.
The physical realm we all know, with bodies of meat and laws of physics in mathematical form and so on.
The conscious realm is raw qualia, subjective experience in itself, capable of self-awareness, in which the objective world (including the "I") experientially appears.
The platonic realm is logically necessary truth, the fact that in logic and math, when you put some assumptions, you get much more back. E.g just assume the integers and basic logic and Fermat's last theorem is already true.
Much metaphysical speculation amounts to juggling these three. Physicalism takes the physical as primary, and argues that the other two emerge from it through e.g epiphenomenalism and formalism, and shrugs at the hard problem of consciousness. Classical Idealism, from Berkeley to Shankara, takes consciousness as primary, with everything else just appearing in it, and shrugs at the mathematical regularity of physics. Pure Platonism is rare but is possibly making a bit of a comeback - the equations instantiate themselves, something something.
Today's speculative view is that both the conscious and the platonic are primary in their own way, and together they give rise to the physical.
The platonic is easy to justify, because logical necessity does not need anything else to be true. It's a realm of possibilities, not of entities. There are e.g no actual numbers in it, but conditionals such as "if you have numbers, then...", all the way up to "if there were a universe with such and such laws, you could end up with bipedal apes drinking the milk of bovids".
The primacy of the conscious realm is a strong hypothesis, here I take it to be even prior to the universe itself: a primordially self aware and self existing totality, prior to space and time. It's a big thing to assume, I know.
Now the point is that both of these would be inert, and contentless on their own. But the conscious principle can freely take the potentialities of the platonic as its object, because it's just there, universally available.
And by tracing the edges of its possibilities, timelessly exploring every possible structure and rule, it breathes life into every possible equation, instantiating every possible universe. Including our own with its four dimension of space-time, which happens to be complex enough to support self replicating bits of structured matter. These are then tuned and shaped by aimless evolution into bodies and brains, through which an echo of primordial conscious is experienced as individual awareness. And these individuals in turn are just about smart enough to represent these three realms within themselves, in a final twisted self referential loop.
In other words, if you take a classic idea like Brahman or Hegel's absolute or Spinoza's minimalist conscious God, the usual objection is why and how would a unitary timeless consciousness "come up with" a shared physical world and individual consciousnesses in it? But if you give it a Platonic realm to roam, the mathematical potential complexity within it provides just the missing piece.
For those who are better read in philosophy, does this view have a name? A classic presentation? Obvious flaws?
I would argue that you are missing one--narrative truth, the meaning we get from perceiving our experiences as scenes in a story. The narrative builds directly from the conscious (I would call it the "qualitative"), and, I would also argue, the platonic (I would call it the logical) builds on the physical (I would call it the material), assuming, of course, that the physical actually exists (we can take that only as premise). This means that there are two fundamental types of praxis: the narrative, and the logical. Of these two, the narrative carries more emotional meaning, and is typically primary in most day to day decision making.
The basic term for philosophies that hold that direct conscious experience is all we really know (at least in the moment) is "Cartesian" (after Descartes), and analytical philosophy goes back, as you seem to know, to the ancient Greeks, including famously Plato. I haven't seen them combined in quite this way before, but I'm just an amateur philosopher. It certainly makes sense to me, and I think it's supported by quite a lot of classic research in psychology, esp. in perceptual studies (the Gestalt Psychologists, for example, held that we see the world in wholes, and our mind therefore fills in gaps and completes figures and forms that appear more meaningful and memorable than raw visual stimulation would be). That's the basis of your "physical realm". Look into the way in which long term memory is organized, and therefore how humans learn, add in the Information Processing Model of the brain, and you will have the basis of your conscious one. Platonic can come out of decision science, and the perception of sets. So there's some science backing it up.
I don't know that it has a name, so make one up. "Neo-Eclecticism"?
“The primacy of the conscious realm is a strong hypothesis, here I take it to be even prior to the universe itself: a primordially self aware and self existing totality, prior to space and time. It's a big thing to assume, I know.”
Big, if true. What kind of throws me about panpsychism is the brain seems to disappear from the equation. Yet consciousness seems very related to brains.
There are many kinds of panpsychism I guess. Somebody called my proposal "reverse panpsychism", I kind of like that. In this view, brains don't disappear from the equation; they're right there, made of physical matter and shaped by evolution, providing the entire content of our experience in the usual naturalistic way, with the dance of neurons and hormones and the whole kit. The only thing the primacy of consciousness adds to that is making the whole thing "feel like something" instead of being p-zombies, and accounting for the deep intuition that consciousness is "its own thing". Not a small difference!
I'm not philosophically sophisticated enough to answer your questions, but I want to comment on this :
> when you put in some assumptions, you get much more back.
My view is that you don't get "more" back, you get exactly what you put in, just in slightly different forms. The seeming abundance is an artifact of the human failure to grasp logical consequences.
It's wrong to say "Chess is a truly generous game, after you put in an initial configuration and some rules, you get much more back", Chess is not generous at all, every single configuration you get during a Chess game is a straightforward and logically/programmatically trivial consequence of the initial configuration plus the rules of Chess. The reason it's interesting is that the human brain **doesn't** grasp all those consequences, there are so many of them, so they appear as a sequence of increasingly exhilarating and unpredictable developments, but they are completely determined by the initial configuration and the rules of play.
An analogous physical situation is microscopic photography of everyday objects. If you took a bunch of sand in your fist and put them under a microscope, you will find that "you get much more than what you put in", but that's only an artifact of your bad sight, what you view under the microscope has been there in the sand since forever, you simply had bad eyes.
I believe that Scott Aaronson's Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity (https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf) is the one that made me see this clearly. It's probable I had similar views before, but the paper makes the case particularly clearly and eloquently.
"An analogous physical situation is microscopic photography of everyday objects. If you took a bunch of sand in your fist and put them under a microscope, you will find that "you get much more than what you put in", but that's only an artifact of your bad sight, what you view under the microscope has been there in the sand since forever, you simply had bad eyes."
Agreed.
I actually see the whole abstract domain as an _approximation_ to the physical one. I'm very skeptical of parts of the abstract domain that correspond to structures that couldn't fit in the physical universe.
"A pair of researchers find a defect in mathematics, where an assertion (X) leads to a contradictory assertion (not X) after a long but finite series of steps. Using a powerful virtual computer made of light beams (Luminous), they are able to map and shape the boundary between the near-side and far-side mathematics, leading to a showdown with real consequences in the physical universe."
I don't really expect that _this_ could happen but
</fictional evidence>
it _is_ true that there are only so many planck lengths in the observable universe, and so many bits, in _any_ representation that fit in the observable universe. We can talk about sparse examples of very large numbers that happen to have compact representations, e.g. 2^10^1000, but an arbitrary number around 2^10^200 can't be represented in the observable universe - so I am skeptical that it "exists" in a meaningful sense.
To put it another way, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms about the natural numbers include "For every natural number n, S(n) is a natural number. That is, the natural numbers are closed under S" where S is the successor function, and no representation that fits in the observable universe actually satisfies this. I look at the Peano axioms as an _approximation_ to what could be said about physically possible representations.
> My view is that you don't get "more" back, you get exactly what you put in, just in slightly different forms. The seeming abundance is an artifact of the human failure to grasp logical consequences.
That's funny, it's precisely because I'm (somewhat) acquainted with the field of computational complexity that I believe that "you put in some assumptions, you get much more back". Before that I was happy to apply Ockham's razor and call myself a formalist.
My original example is Fermat's last theorem. It was first stated around 1637, in a formally precise way. There was no doubt as to the meaning of the problem, but no complete proof was found until 1994, using a huge bevy of abstract tools that took over 300 years to develop. To me this is not like a human failure to grasp logical consequences, but rather like a tentative exploration of a genuinely complex pre-existing terrain.
Or take one of the central results of computational theory, the halting problem. You have it right there: you put in only a short program, but there is no limit to how far you need to go in order to know whether it ever stops. For the Collatz conjecture, which a middle-schooler could understand, we still don't know.
But hey, if you consider logical omniscience to be the state of nature, I'm not that far from you... I just ascribe that to primordial consciousness, not to our individual ones.
EDIT: I see that Scott Aaronson's paper starts by distinguishing computational complexity from mere computability, which I just roughly lumped together. If your answer was intended to rely on that distinction, I must not have got the point, feel free to clarify.
Yes, my views very much depend on the distinction between Computability and Computational Complexity. This is the crucial distinction.
What I mean to say is this : Mathematics appear to be novel, but this is an illusion, every mathematical result that doesn't require new axioms is "trivial", where "trivial" means potentially extremely difficult but ultimately obtainable by repeatedly applying mechanical rewrite rules to the axioms. Even new axioms that are straightforward extensions of existing axioms or generated by a simpler, deeper principle don't really count as novelty in my view.
Basically, what I'm saying is this : If a piece of mathematics could have been obtained by running a computer for potentially trillions upon trillions upon unimaginable trillions of years, then it's not truly novel, it's logically trivial, and the only thing that makes us humans excited by it is that we have weak brains that are bad at logic. Not all Mathematics fit this description, but the vast majority of it is.
With infinite computational power, the vast majority of Mathematics is trivial for the same reason that navigation becomes trivial once you have GPS and satellites, or a marathon will become trivial if you allow participants to ride motorcycles. All the excitement was due to the limitations of the unaugmented human overcoming a much bigger, more powerful, and unknowable reality.
I'm not familiar with any of the developments that led to the proof of Fermat's last theorem. All I know is something something elliptic forms something something. So I can't say whether it amounts to "novelty" by my definition or not. Probably yes, but I can't be sure.
I'm sorry but I think you're kind of contradicting yourself here. I don't actually disagree with what you're saying; if you take the view of infinite computational power, then of course by definition everything becomes trivial.
But the whole point of computational complexity is to *not* take infinite computing power for granted, but instead distinguish the kind of time complexity that things take.
This reminds me of Rene Guenon's The Multiple States of the Being, which posits the Infinite at the center of metaphysics, the Infinite being the thing that admits no limitation, and also being the sum total of Possibility: if a thing is possible, it exists somewhere in the Infinite.
Not exactly philosophy though. Not entirely sure what that book is. It's like the skeleton of a religion to me, written by someone who almost became a Messiah. It's also only 95 pages, go check it out!
What *is* the primordial consciousness? Is it a Cartesian substance? Then how can it create from itself a different substance, the physical? It's clearly not a property of all physical matter (panpsychism) as you say it's ontologically primary (compared to the physical). So is this kind of the opposite of panpsychism, where matter is a property of thought?
A general point about any notion of "all possible worlds exist". If this is true, how does ours have any meaning whatsoever? Does this imply nihilism? And also, how do we have a conception of actuality and possiblity, if possibility *just is* actuality, and vice versa.
> What *is* the primordial consciousness? Is it a Cartesian substance?
If "Cartesian substance" means something self-sufficient that exists in such a way that it does not depend on anything else for its existence (thanks ChatGPT!), then yes, the primordial consciousness would be a Cartesian substance. It does not so much "create" matter, as picture it up or dream it. The usual analogy for all kinds of idealism is the way our ordinary dreams conjure up worlds and beings. In this specific case, the idea is more precise: primordial consciousness timelessly takes within itself the abstract form of every possible logical-mathematical structure. Since the fundamental laws of our universe are among those possibilities, it dreams up our world, among so many others.
> A general point about any notion of "all possible worlds exist". If this is true, how does ours have any meaning whatsoever? Does this imply nihilism?
"Meaning" can mean more than one thing, I'm interpreting your question in the sense of things having "importance", rather than about the literal meaning of words or concepts. Let me know if you meant something else! In this sense, meaning is a lived experience, my sense of meaning does not depend on whether an alternative universe with a slightly different version of me exists somewhere or not. We just intuitively feel that things matter to us, as you can tell whenever you jump back to avoid being hit by an oncoming bus. In this model, the capacity to feel meaning, or for that matter, to feel anything at all, comes all the way from the fact that consciousness is primordial, but the actual contents of feeling or meaning just bubble up from below, in a naturalistic way, shaped by our evolutionary history and circumstances.
> And also, how do we have a conception of actuality and possibility, if possibility *just is* actuality, and vice versa.
Different layers of reality. Being here, writing within this world with these laws and these starting conditions, I have no access to any different world, even if I may think that it also exists within primordial consciousness just as much as this one does. OTOH, evolution shaped our brains to give us the ability to think of possibilities and counterfactuals, because it's useful to us.
Nice one. My proposal is more that the conscious and the abstract are like two plates rubbing together, and physical worlds (with us included) are the patterns created by this interaction.
I have been pondering this for a few days, and I am stuck; I can't rub the abstract and consciousness together and get anything, let alone the physical world.. I am missing something.
To understand this one, we need to step out of the usual physicalist worldview for a moment. In a consciousness-first view, whatever shows itself reliably to a consciousness is real, as real as it gets.
For a simple analogy, look at the people that appear in your dreams. We consider them unreal, even though they appear, because of things like: 1) our attention on them is flickering, one moment they are there and the next they are not, 2) the dream is low resolution, e.g we can't reliably do a biochemical analysis of their skin flakes, 3) our strand of consciousness that creates them doesn't extend to actually giving them an inner experience, we only ever feel like we are *us* seeing *them*, not the other way round, etc. OTOH, if these limitations were overcome, there would be no reason to call them unreal.
My claim is that in a world dreamed or simulated by a primordial consciousness, none of these limitations apply. So if the laws of the universe that is being simulated are conducive to the evolution of life, the beings that appear in this world do have an inner life (as a strand of the original consciousness), and they will experience a reliable shared environment around them, as real as our Earth and sky and bodies appear to us.
Now, the hard question is, why would a primordial unitary consciousness ever dream or simulate worlds with multiplicities of objects and beings in them? Imagine a consciousness, as aware as ours, but infinitely more powerful, unlimited by anything. Being unitary and timeless, without anything "other" than it around, it would still have no concept of objects, of multiplicity, or of possibility. These structures were given to us by evolution, e.g we have a clear sense of a boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world, rather than feeling at one with the universe, because our long line of ancestors were very interested in having their skin boundaries unpierced by the teeth of predators. None of that conditioning would exist in a primordial consciousness; it's like a super mind that would never have a reason to think anything more than the obvious, tautological thought, "being is".
This is the point where philosophical traditions that believe in something like a primordial consciousness usually get stuck, and feel the need to bring in some other principle. The absolute symmetry of neutral oneness must be broken somehow if the hypothesis of a primordial consciousness is going to help account for worlds and conscious beings in them. At this point, theistic traditions tend to resort to anthropomorphism, and the minimalistic primordial consciousness somehow develops a will, or some kind of desire, and turns into a classic creator God. The Sufis very elegantly have it think, "I am a treasure wanting to be known", and the Eastern Tantriks also recognize the need for some extra interference to break the absolute uniformity, so they say things like the "ground of being is stirred by a vibration", without further explanation. These make for nice myths, but philosophically they are very onerous hypothesis, arguably more complex than the world they are trying to explain. So I'm trying to explore what can be done without them.
The answer I'm suggesting, is that the seeds of multiplicity, possibility and complexity are all to be found in the platonic realm of mathematical/logical necessary truth. So if (by hypothesis) the primordial consciousness, beyond feeling its own timeless being, is able to roam that realm, to start thinking "if false then true, but not (if true then false)", and so on, and then "if we define numbers in such way, then every number is either odd or even", and then "if we define numbers in such way, then there have to be infinite prime numbers", and so on, up to the point of being able to picture first-order logic within itself, then the entire world of computability appears within it. Which means that, for every possible set of laws that a universe could have, those get consciously simulated, and for the rare few universes that happen to not collapse into triviality but whose laws give rise to significant complexity, such as our own, processes of life and evolution get bootstrapped, and you get beings such as us, aware of and interacting with our reliable environments as I was saying above.
So this feels stupid, but nine months ago I had a nightmare that has deeply shaken my more-or-less atheistic confidence that death is a total cessation of consciousness and thus a good option for relieving intractable suffering. The memory of the dream is vivid and feels just as experiential as any memory from waking life. It stayed with me for days and made sleeping difficult for about a week (and I am a good sleeper!).
I've never used a psychedelic, but from hearing people discuss life-changing trips, this sounds far more like one of those than just a regular bad dream. For the first time in my adult life, I fully understand what faithful people mean when they say they just "feel" something unprovable is true and no amount of data or argument will convince them otherwise.
I'm normally quite content and usually pretty good at self-soothing by either solving a problem or rationalizing my way out of feeling bad, but I can't shake how this experience makes me feel about death.
So...does anyone have any suggestions?
Here are some things I've considered and the reasons I haven't tried them yet:
- Could a guided psychedelic experience potentially offset/overwrite this dream, or is there too big a risk of reinforcing it?
- Mindfulness training seems like an option, but I'm a little wary of monkeying around with it when I seem to have been born with a high happiness "set point" and after reading some articles about the "dark side of meditation."
- I've never seen a therapist, but I don't have a lot of disposable income, therapy isn't covered by my insurance, and I'm dubious a therapist could help with this, anyway.
I wrote out my dream a couple of days after having it, hoping that recording and sharing it might purge some of its immediacy (as writing stuff out usually does for me), but that didn't help, either. I'm including it below in case the specific experience of the dream makes a difference.
********
I'm staying in the family home, in San Clemente, which is the southernmost beachside town in Orange County, California. The large house, with its bank of windows facing west, sits just a little over a mile from the ocean, on a terraced hill which used to perch 250 feet above sea level.
I say "used to" because it's not 250 feet above the water anymore.
I'm upstairs in the master bedroom, watching as a foaming, swirling mass boils over the town below, over the rooftops of businesses I've known for 20 years, as it covers a hill that conceals my favorite restaurant in the world. The mass surges closer to engulf the 5 freeway. It crashes back on itself as it meets the climb up to the house, seawater and dirt and buildings and trees...and cars and people, I know, although I can't see them yet.
I turn away from the window to bellow at my uncle and brother that they should have taken my advice and actually stored enough emergency water for two weeks, goddamnit, because we've survived the tsunami only to likely die of dehydration when the 10 or so gallons of bottled water in the house run out. The utilities are gone, and every shop that might have water is at or below the waterline, and even if they weren't, there are thousands of people living on this hillside who will also be looking for water. I have my Sagan survival bottle in my backpack, sure, so I can *maybe* filter any dirty fresh water we can find, but it doesn't desalinate saltwater, and there are five of us! My parents are on the other side of the house, I know, and my focus divides between checking on them and securing drinking water, *now.*
Then my uncle's and brother's faces go slack at something behind me.
I turn back to the ocean and the horizon is too high again, because there is another wave, a *much* bigger wave, a foaming white wave which initially appears to be just a little below our elevation, but within a second or two I realize that is wishful thinking. The wave is traveling highway speed and the horizon rises even higher as the wave begins to climb the hill to the house. In a few seconds more, it's clear the wave is going to be 10 or 20 feet taller than the house.
In the blink or two it takes to think about running...*somewhere*...the wave is here.
It's stupid and futile, but I turn my back to the wave as it blasts in the windows, snatching me up and hurtling me head-first toward the fireplace on the opposite wall.
Notdrowningpleasenotdrowning.
Impact.
Smash to blackness, but no pain.
I'm so relieved I died instantly, without suffering.
Perhaps a useful question to reflect on is why an albeit apocalyptic nocturnal adventure like this has troubled you.
As for interpretation, my go-to is always the object as self. You are the wave, in this case.
I had a dream last week that freaked me out to the extent that I turned the light on and wrote it down, also about the family home and death. It was pieced together from recent fragments of experience and thought. Some of which I'd barely registered at the time.
I dream often of my late father, in very negative ways. I've come to realise that he is me, in the dreams.
It was easier to describe the apocalyptic wave than the void, so that's what a lot of people focus on, but I was actually *far* more bothered by the void than I was by the apocalypse. I've had many vivid nightmares, some of them apocalyptic, but they're often so cinematic that I kind of enjoy them, especially in retrospect! There have been a few where I woke up scared but actually wanted to get back to sleep, hoping I could see what else might happen!
I think those dreams are mostly about processing whatever disaster movie I might have seen and perhaps a low-grade anxiety from living in places where it's not *totally* inconceivable that I could die in a giant wave (I live in Seattle and of course visit my family in San Clemente four weeks a year). I occasionally have nightmares about earthquakes and nuclear attacks, too.
But those are relatively rare. Most of my unpleasant dreams are about mundane, everyday problems, like being extremely late for work and not being able to dial my phone correctly to give them a heads up.
I'm sorry to hear you're dreaming about your late father in unpleasant ways. I hope you're able to find some peace in your realization.
Ah, that's interesting then ... so perhaps the void is you. Worth at least reflecting on a bit. I was in a TA therapy group when the leader introduced us to the dream interpretation of object as self. It's made sense to me ever since. (I think Jung also talks about this idea, but I don't know much about Jung). There is rarely a dream in which this approach doesn't help. It does also help to find peace, because I don't feel jerked around by my subconscious. Speaking of which, I've never had any worrisome effects from meditation either. Maybe keep writing about your dream and see what comes?
I now think, based on a couple of comments here, that the void was a result of one of my usual cinematic, scary-in-an-almost-fun-horror-movie-way-and-not-at-all-traumatizing nightmares being followed by actual sleep paralysis.
My brain constructed it as a single narrative, but the void had enough features of sleep paralysis that I tend to think that's what made it so "convincing," if you will, particularly when I didn't have anything troubling in my life that would have made sense of the void as a regular dream.
Yeah, it's been a fascinating thread to follow. Really glad you shared it with such a smart group of readers. My only real brush with sleep paralysis was quite recent and very disturbing. I ended up croaking out to my other half to wake me up because I was powerless to rouse myself from an unpleasant dream situation (that I can't recall). Even speaking was almost impossible. All's well that ends well.
Have you considered trying prayer? Not even to any deity (or non-deity) in particular, just... whatever's out there. Asking why, was there a reason for this dream; asking for peace, to be free of this dread/terror/feeling.
What could happen: maybe nothing. Maybe you find you were wrong a little. Maybe a lot. Maybe you end up feeling it so silly that it helps quell the disquiet you've been feeling.
Maybe none of that, but you end up finding your way to a little more understanding of what's going on internally.
I've had some unusual dreams of my own, albeit none so extreme as yours. I could talk about one of them if you'd like.
Here's a recurring dream from when I was young (I think this one stopped around age 8?)
Seems like a typical falling dream, the clouds are far below, slowly approaching. Eventually I pass through the clouds, and I see the ground approaching, and... I hit. And I bounce, flying back into the sky, back above the clouds, only to eventually start falling again.
And it *hurts*. Over and over, I hit ground, bounce, and feel the pain.
And eventually, after more bounces than I can remember, the bounces have gotten small enough that I come to a stop, and fall asleep.
And back in the real world, I wake up. It's morning, it's a new day... and I still feel every ounce of pain. (I can rule out that I was somehow hurting myself in my sleep, I woke up as snugly wrapped as when I went to bed.)
I credit these dreams with a significant amount of my abnormally high pain tolerance (sensei can smack me full force in the gut and I'll barely notice). Personally, I view them as something sent by God. Training. Preparation. It also helped me develop some emotional toughness as well.
Come to think if it, another dream that featured an odd emotional state.
I don't recall the lead-up, only that at some point my sister needed me to kill a spider for her. Totally normal occurrence, only this time, it was a large tarantula, the size of my hand.
And it was leaping at me. I was dodging, making my way to my room, getting my backpack to try and smack it with. Once I had my backpack, it became a dance, mostly me dodging, occasionally taking a swing and missing.
And the entire time, there was no fear (except from my sister and mother). I felt no emotion except a calm, mild annoyance. I was entirely unperturbed by this whole game.
I think the spider also grew larger through the dream, ending at torso size. I don't think either of us ever won. I just woke up eventually.
My understanding is that experiencing physical pain in a dream is a vanishingly rare experience unless some real-world pain intrudes on the dream. I've had dreams of impact after a long fall, and the "worst" it ever feels is a sort of "thud" from which I almost always wake up.
The only time I can remember experiencing pain-pain in a dream was one about evil surgeons strapping me down to an operating table in order to blow torch my back like a creme brulee. When I finally woke up, I still had the blow-torch feeling and discovered a scorpion in my bed that had stung me in the back a dozen times!
I'm into self-defense, too, and occasionally have dreams about it. Like yours, they're almost always about a kind of stalemate rather than winning or losing the encounter.
I'd like to speak up for therapy helping with this.
It sounds like you've attributed a lot of real world meaning to this dream and that this meaning attribution (because of how scary and real the dream felt) has made it a sticky thought in your head. If you have a tendency towards anxiety and/or OCD, you may be more prone to fearful experiences becoming thoughts that you have trouble letting go of.
The dream seems to have surfaced existential terror, which is a normal thing for a person to experience here and there in their life. This doesn't mean your specific existential terror is true, it means that you had a scary experience (the dream) that surfaced existential terror that you're now having trouble knowing what to do with.
You have some choices about how to find a way to be less spooked by this dream, but it sounds like you could use some outside help in walking you through those choices and implementing the one you opt for.
That sort of already happened in a comment down-thread!
I think a therapist might have taken this dream much too seriously, and potentially persuaded *me* to take it much too seriously, when what I really needed was the perspective to stop taking it seriously, period.
Your comment, "The dream seems to have surfaced existential terror, which is a normal thing for a person to experience here and there in their life. This doesn't mean your specific existential terror is true, it means that you had a scary experience (the dream) that surfaced existential terror that you're now having trouble knowing what to do with," helped prime me for the "IT'S JUST A DREAM, STUPID!" lightbulb I needed to have turned on, and I thank you for that!
Had a pretty strong dream a while back that left me in tears for a couple of days, and ended up concluding it was caused by guilt at swinging too hard on an unpublished novel the week prior. So, what significant events or emotional states were happening the week before this dream, and would they metaphorically connect to tidal waves or complete stasis?
I really examined what was going on with my life at the time and couldn't connect any dots; the dream, and particularly the part about the void, felt like a "sending" from outside myself, if you will. That's one of the reasons it was so upsetting - I wasn't able to point at anything I was currently worrying about in real life.
But a commenter below basically fixed it, so I feel immensely better now!
This hits very close to home for me. Over the past couple of years I've been really bothered by the thought that death might not be the end and one might go on existing forever in a void. It's kind of an impossible thought to deal with. It caused me extreme anxiety and a return to panic attacks, which I thought I was done with.
I also avoid meditation for the exact reasons you mentioned (happy by default; sounds like you can fuck yourself up with it).
So here's the thing - therapy actually did help. I realized I had mild OCD (existential OCD being the subtype), did some exposure therapy dealing with the idea of death, and got on the right SSRI. I still have the thought, but I can turn my attention away from it and it doesn't have the same urgency. I can still get a bit triggered by things like your post, but it passes.
So yeah, this might be true, and it is the most terrifying idea one can imagine, but I haven't seen any better evidence for this one than any of the other theories about the afterlife. In the meantime, we can't do much about it, so the best solution is to find psychological techniques that help us to deal with the uncertainty. Your mind is trying to scare you by coming up with the worst possible scenario, and if you have a good imagination it's going to succeed. But you don't have to believe every idea your brain comes up with.
Thank you for your comment, it was gratifying to know that other people had experienced something similar. I mean, I knew intellectually that of course people had, but it's nice when someone specific volunteers their own experience.
Although I'm sorry it was triggering!
I really don't seem to have any of the features of OCD or even chronic anxiety (I can worry about immediate problems and potential problems, but I sleep well, so I don't think it's at the level of clinical anxiety, per se), but this dream was so distressing for so long I started wondering "therapy, I guess?"
But it turns out I just needed someone to slap me out of indulging in the fantasy that maaaaaaaaaybe the dream was *really* real merely because it felt so real. @skaladom and @Radar managed to do that with their comments, but you primed me for it by reasonably reminding me in your last paragraph that the sensation of this being true is not actually a reason for it to be true, and that indeed I don't have to believe every experience my subconscious generates.
That's awesome! Yeah, I think when we have brains that tend to be right about stuff, it can be hard to dismiss some of the bullshit that they are capable of coming up with.
Oh, I did also want to recommend NOCD (https://www.treatmyocd.com/). It's pretty affordable, and while you probably won't find the most insightful therapist on earth there, they are all well trained in evidence-based exposure and response-prevention techniques.
This is very tentatively offered, but there's a method of dream interpretation based on the assumption that everything in a dream is made of your consciousness, so it's worthwhile to identify with everything in the dream, one thing at a time, and see what turns up.
I'm inclined to think that *characters* in a dream are significant parts of one's consciousness, but for me, stuff like the giant tsunami is often more of a flamboyant, cinematic set-dressing than deep symbolism.
Like, I saw Deep Impact in theaters in 1998, and it made a serious impression on 18 year old me. It was one of the first disaster movies with special effects so cutting-edge that I was able to fully buy in, and I've had occasional wave dreams ever since. Sometimes I dream about volcanoes, too, courtesy of 1997's Dante's Peak (and living near a goddamned active volcano).
But what the *people* in my dreams do often feels very significant!
Sounds like Buddhism actually. You see, Buddha says life is bad, and that this whole samsaric mess arises out of ignorance, ignorance as to what desire for anything that isn't the emptiness you experienced will bring you to, that is, that desire will bring you to life, where you will be exposed to old age, sickness, and finally, death, the loss of everything you clung to in this life.
You can become an orthodox Buddhist and try to eradicate desire, e.g. be perfectly ok with the void, or you can just embrace the view that you will eventually fall down to a world after death since it is what you crave: you didn't like the void, so your fate is samsara.
Hell, if you think that void is where you were before birth, why believe you won't come out of it again? You already left it at least once. It's nice having mystical experiences like this, but that's more of an invitation to engage with mysticism and spirituality, you shouldn't believe you got unvarnished Truth from that dream.
I never had an impression that the void was somewhere I was before birth. Had there been any hope of reincarnation, I wouldn't have been so horrified by the void, even if there was going to be a long "wait," if you will.
But ultimately a commenter below snapped me out of it with a comment that amounted to, "it's just a dream, stupid!" that indeed gave me the perspective to not take it at all seriously, and I feel immensely better.
I'm sorry to hear you've had a dream that caused you so much worry.
I haven't experienced anything quite like it. The closest thing was probably when I tried experimenting with lucid dreaming, and experienced sleep paralysis without knowing what it was. For a brief moment – though far too long – I was completely paralyzed, locked into my body, and for all I knew in that moment, it was going to last forever. Naturally I panicked. That was years ago, and I now know what sleep paralysis is. I think I would be less freaked out if it happened again. But I can still remember that panic in my body, as tough it is a physical part of me now – like a marble I carry around in a pocket inside.
I think my point is that the feeling was real, and its memory will stay with me as long as powerful memories stay. BUT… I was wrong about what was happening, and what the experience meant. There is no correlation between the intensity of the feeling and the actual implications of the situation I was in.
So I think that's worth considering: The intensity of the feelings you had in your dream may very well have helped make the dream more vivid, but it does *not* make the dream any more true or even likely.
I am also an atheist, but went through a phase of being a bit anxious about dying. It actually helped me to think about different scenarios, and consider what would have to be true about the world for those scenarios to be true. Also, reminding myself that I can't remember being present and conscious for most of the history of the universe. Why would the rest of time be any different?
But all that may be a bit theoretical … If you want a more fun way to maybe try to rewrite your ideas of the afterlife, I really enjoyed having my imagination tickled by …
Eagleman comes up with a bunch of different scenarios for what happens when we die, some hilarious, others a bit darker, none very hopeful. I suggest using Amazon's "Read Sample" feature to get a taste.
Wow, I'd heard of sleep paralysis, but I thought it was something that occurred within your known real-world space, as in, you know you're in your own bed asleep, but you can't move, and maybe a demon is sitting on your chest. I had no idea that it could occur from the perspective of being in a dream "place," if you will.
You might be right and that my nightmare transitioned into a minor form of sleep paralysis (minor only because there were none of the menacing characters or painful sensations that go with typical sleep paralysis). Thanks a lot for sharing that!
Thanks, also, for pointing out, "I was wrong about what was happening, and what the experience meant. There is no correlation between the intensity of the feeling and the actual implications of the situation I was in....So I think that's worth considering: The intensity of the feelings you had in your dream may very well have helped make the dream more vivid, but it does *not* make the dream any more true or even likely."
It was good priming to be fully receptive to a comment below that has now more or less fixed the issue.
Although like you, even though it feels better to have a different perspective about the dream, it's still a little marble I'm carrying around in my pocket.
I'm glad to hear I may have contributed in a small way to "more or less fixing" the issue.
I actually learned a bit more about sleep paralysis myself, when I went down a rabbit hole after replying to your first comment, and was similarly surprised to learn how many forms it can take.
And I still recommend checking out the book – if mostly as entertainment 😉
I think I will, now that I'm not worried that hearing about other people's thoughts about death might make mine worse, LOL.
Someone should really get the word out that there are nightmares and then there are NIGHTMARES, and the latter often have a completely mundane explanation. I can't believe I went 40 years without learning that.
I used to call my bad dreams nightmares until I realized the mind can do a whole lot worse than the carnival rides my mind has taken me on at night.
Outside of the sleep paralysis experience, I can only recall two of my bad dreams rise to the level of actual *Nightmare*. Not the story, but the feeling of coming out of sleep sweaty, terrified, confused, mind and heart racing, all my metaphorical claws out. And those have come late in life, after I had kids. (Someone else mentioned that having kids can bring on a new round of existential anxiety. That might explain it for me.)
Also, while not exactly nightmares: It was terrifying but eye-opening to see my son have sleep terrors the first few times. I know now they’re very common, but I was not prepared. Based on the screaming, the incoherent words, and the fear, shock and disbelief in his wide-open eyes – clearly blaming his (dream) mother for something unspeakable and unspoken – it is obvious that the mind can serve up some absolute frickin horror shows, that are in a different league than younger me’s slightly uncomfortable dreams of drowning in my apartment as it fills up with water.
This is a hugely helpful bit of awareness to take on board:
"BUT… I was wrong about what was happening, and what the experience meant. There is no correlation between the intensity of the feeling and the actual implications of the situation I was in."
Anxiety tends to turn up the volume on emotional reasoning -- "it must be true if I have strong feelings about it." And it really helps to recognize from repeated experience that things don't mostly unfold how our anxious interpretations fear that they will.
Your concern is your experiential memory of the dream - how it feels to constantly remember it and the experience of the feelings associated with these memory recalls. It's not a trivial thing, but I don't think there is much worry that you somehow saw some deep truth.
To me, it sounds like your brain was working out how death works - your atheist sensibilities that it's just a nothingness versus your conscious brain simply not being able to comprehend non-existence.
Huberman Lab podcast had a guest on earlier this year, and I forget the episode but the guy was a world expert who also had some kind of cancer that was going to kill him very soon, and at the end of the podcast he talked about what that meant for him, what his perspective was like, and it was fascinating listening to a neuroscientist discuss his brain/mind experience subjectively but with a scientist's approach. One thing that stood out to me was relevant to this discussion:
Paraphrased: "I know that I am going to die, probably very soon, but my brain still can't seem to comprehend the reality of that. The doctors don't know exactly when, and I accept they are probably right, but the idea of just not being here cannot be really accepted on the deepest level of my brain".
They go on to have a discussion about the brain and why that could be the case. I think logically many people on Earth believe "you die, you aren't alive anymore to feel bad about your own death", but then if you actually try to think about what that's "like", it breaks our brain. To simply not exist anymore.
So I think your dream is a tension between those 2 things - your atheist belief that you just extinguish your consciousness versus some kind of experience of blackness, some faint awareness without any actual content.
FWIW, psychedelic experiences usually have more content than just an awareness of blackness or emptiness. You feel that there is something more concrete beyond this current consciousness, and that's a very common, near universal report, of people having those experiences.
Thanks for this comment, it was helpful in regaining perspective.
I was contemplating guided psychedelics mostly as a means to "overwrite" the void with an equally convincing "experience" that SOMETHING IS THERE, but I wasn't confident that would definitely be the outcome (which is why I didn't attempt it), and I don't think it's necessary anymore, anyways.
At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, I think you are wrestling with the deep themes themselves, not the dream. The dream was a way of your subconscious trying to work it out.
Guided psychedelics could help you start to deal with these themes, but they can be a quite difficult experience and they are definitely not for everybody. Doing mushrooms or LSD or something in that wheelhouse would almost certainly take you right back into that place, into those themes, but in an ultra-intense way. If you've never done them, it's simply impossible to relate what it's like.
My suggestion to you would be to take steps to reconnect with your inner observer and your subconscious. That takes many different forms, it all depends on the person. Psychedelics are a shortcut there, but can be a harrowing one. You can certainly work towards the issue without them, and I would suggest that as a starting step.
Try journalling on how you feel about death. One exercise is to set aside 15-30 minutes, and tell yourself you will not put the pen (or keyboard) down the entire time. Just keep writing. Do this either every day, or every X days in a regular interval for 4-5 sessions.
After each session, take a few minutes to unwind yourself, recalibrate back to reality, and to thank yourself for being brave enough to go to this difficult place. You don't need to read your journal back, but it is helpful once you've done 3+ sessions to take a look and see how the character of your writing has changed. Typically, this kind of journalling tends to help you work things out, and the writing becomes more positive or at least more descriptive as you go on.
In any event, I know what it's like to feel that deep existential dread. I've had experiences like yours. There is no easy answer. Generally in life, if there is fear, you have to go to to the fear. If there is pain, you have to go to the pain. There are wise and foolhardy ways to go about this, so work out what is wise for you, and start slowly. Wishing you good health and lightness of heart.
This is very good advice, and I thank you for taking the time to write it down! I think it would be very productive for some or even most people, but I don't think that exploring this very deeply is going to be helpful for me, particularly.
Based on some observations in the comments, the most likely explanation for my experience was that one of my typical cinematic almost-fun nightmares turned into sleep paralysis. Not having good understanding of the phenomena, I couldn't easily dismiss the overwhelming intensity of the experience as "just a really bad nightmare," because it was *so much worse* than a really bad nightmare.
But that's what sleep paralysis is like; so much worse than a really bad nightmare!
As soon as I understood there was potentially a physical explanation for the intensity of the dream, I was much more receptive to rational arguments in the comments about a dream being just a dream.
I had a very good laugh at myself and I feel great now! Burden totally lifted!
I seem to have a pretty high hedonic set point and I'm back to believing that my experience of being dead isn't going to be anything, the same way my experience before I was born wasn't anything. Moreover, I believe death is a precious tool for ending intractable suffering, and I am so goddamned relieved to have that option back again, both for myself and my loved ones.
(Obligatory parenthetical: I don't want to die. Rather, I fear physical suffering at the end of life more than most because I don't experience the analgesic effects of opiates due to a lab-verified mutation of CYP2D6, a gene which is responsible for metabolizing opiates. Having been through a couple of surgeries with zero pain management, I would literally rather be nothing than be in that kind of physical pain (or worse!) with no expectation of recovery.)
Sleep paralysis is indeed a terrifying phenomenon. Glad you found some helpful comments here, and were able to begin reasoning your way into a more settled mindstate about all of this. It's a great quality to have - the ability to employ reason and actually alleviate suffering. Take care!
I've had a variant I don't think I've seen described. It was a pleasant state of being awake while asleep. I might not have been able to move, but it wasn't frightening because I didn't expect myself to be able to move.
I could hear myself snoring. That was about all that was happening.
For what it's worth I've had many dreams about tidal waves crashing down on me, usually causing me to wake up, but sometimes perhaps with a similar "death" aspect that you describe. I've also had dreams about heaven, about hell, about other afterlives, all mutually contradictory in various ways. So I don't give much weight to any of them as an insight into spiritual truth.
One thing I'd note is the relative absurdity of gaining spiritual insight or understanding through a single event like a dream. If the "insight" really is true, really is a fundamental and enduring truth, why would you only percieve it once, in a single very specific way? Surely you would encounter this truth many times, in numerous ways, if you are able to encounter it at all.
Well, a good many religious traditions are explicitly founded on revelations in dreams, sometimes just one dream, and I've heard juuuuuuust enough "what if mushrooms and/or endogenous DMT is the Other's way of reaching us?" talk that I couldn't quite reframe this as "just a dream" on my own.
But your comment primed me to be receptive to the framing of "it was just a dream, stupid!" below, and that was helpful, so thank you!
It sounds like Christina has encountered it quite frequently since she had the dream. I would not dismiss it. I would put a lot of energy into reframing it though.
The thing is, while some dreams are excellent guides to spiritual truth, they shouldn't be taken literally, but rather symbolically. (Well, I think some dreams are just garbage collection, but not the ones that bother one after one awakens.) So you need to understand what the symbols of the dream represent, and you can't look that kind of thing up in a book. The same image will mean different things to different people, or even to the same person in different contexts.
I'm thinking about what the opposite of this experience could have been, namely a dream that would confirm to you, on a fundamental level, that death is the end of all conscious experience, and this is by definition impossible to experience. Perhaps a sensation of ego death might come close to it, but beyond that, a true experience of ceasing to exist is a contradiction. Meaning, the dream that convinced you could only ever have provided evidence one way.
I don't know if that actually helps to invalidate it in your mind, and if not, I'm not sure what other option is best. I don't think anyone viscerally fears NOT dying, so I can't imagine therapists or priests are useful here, and psychedelics could either make it better or worse. The best thing I can think of is some sort of exposure therapy to similarly convincing dreamlike experiences but even that can backfire. I guess you could wait a month and see if you still feel the same?
This dream happened almost ten months ago and I'm still occasionally bothered by it, so I don't think that it's likely to just fade on its own.
One of the most frustrating things about this experience is that I haven't been able to invalidate it as "just a dream" the way I have with literally every other dream I've ever had. It's as convincing as the memory of the shower I took seven hours ago.
I don't know how to offset it with a new "experience" except for brute-forcing one with a psychedelic, which, as you say, has certain risks. I can't think of anything I want less than to psychedelic my way back into the void.
"It's as convincing as the memory of the shower I took seven hours ago. "
If it is any consolation, I find it harder and harder to be sure whether memories that I have are from reality, from dreams, or from images I've seen. This is particularly true of places - whether I'd really been to some building, or was a dream image that never really existed. ( FWIW most of my dreams are anxiety dreams of some sort. ) ( Also, FWIW, I'm philosophically a materialist, and, as you did before your dream, just expect death to be oblivion )
I likewise find myself wondering if certain things are actual memories from my experienced reality, or if it's something I read/saw/heard somewhere and then imagined.
But somethings are so recent and immediate and still have so much detail that I'm very, *very* convinced that they actually happened (eg, the shower I cited, which was recent enough that I remembered many of the specifics; what podcast I was listening to, which shower gel I decided to use, that the light blue bath towel on the bar was fresh from the clean linen rack, etc).
While it's important to be prepared to wonder, "am I remembering this correctly?" it's also important to be able to say "yes" when it's something there's no reason at all to disbelieve.
Many Thanks! Yes, those are good points, and I agree that there is an important distinction between detailed memories of very recent events and the foggier memories of the more distant past. Yes, very recent memories are (almost always) reliable.
I would think the goal would be to find a different way to relate to the dream you did have so that it's less distressing. I'm not sure it works to offset one experience with another. We need at some level to accept and make peace with the experiences we have had.
There is no way to know what happens to us after we die. We are all inexorably moving towards death. There's no way to sugarcoat those two truths.
We are able to completely freak ourselves out over the meanings we give to experiences, the stories we tell about something that happened. The are multiple meanings we can give to any experience we have, and usually we have no way to know for sure which meaning is right or true.
It can be very empowering to claim one's capacity to make intentional choices to attribute meanings rather than to feel victim to the meanings that our frightened selves conjure up.
If the dream happened ten months ago and now you're only occasionally bothered by it, I would say it is likely to fade over time. Perhaps more slowly than you expected. I had a very frightening recurring nightmare in my 20s that did finally stop and fade over time, but it took some years. I think now with a decent therapist's help, I would have dispelled it quicker.
I've had a handful of very real-feeling tidal wave dreams like you describe. They have mostly corresponded to times I felt overwhelmed in my life, though not always. As a result of these dreams, and nothing in real life, I have a somewhat outsized reaction to visual effects that evoke tidal waves. There are some other situations in my life that evoke other nightmares I've had that can also spook me a bit. But the distress is mild and passes quickly and I don't attribute any special meaning to them and so the thoughts don't linger. Sometimes it's a source of humor for me, I can make light of it and feel light about it. I think that's a place you can get to with this as well.
> Sometimes it's a source of humor for me, I can make light of it and feel light about it. I think that's a place you can get to with this as well.
You were right, I managed to get there, and your comment helped (including pointing out that the dream was indeed fading over time).
As I said in a comment above, I tend to think that my most cinematic apocalypse dreams are more about disaster movies inspiring a "cool" set piece than they are symbolic, particularly as nothing was going on in my life at the time that felt overwhelming, per se.
I sort of had a dream like that, when I was very young (around seven or so). I had been to a funeral for the first time (and before that, had gone with my mother to see the body laid out while people prayed etc.) so this was my first conscious experience and knowledge of death.
And that night I had a dream where I was in the coffin - the point of view was split between 'me' inside and 'me' or some observer outside, seeing the coffin raised on the shoulders of the bearers - and 'I' was present as it was put into the grave, the earth shovelled in, and so on.
So I woke up - it wasn't really a nightmare, as such - and I was thinking about it, when the realisation came to me: when that happens, I'll be dead. I won't know or experience that, or feel it. My corpse will not be aware. That helped me with it.
Of course, that says nothing about the existence of the soul or continuity after death, but it helped me not be afraid of physical death as far as my body was concerned.
In general, I'm not afraid of the experience of physical death the way I'm not afraid of the experience of general anesthesia - done right, there is no conscious experience of it whatsoever. And the same way I don't want to come to a locked in, paralyzed awareness during surgery, I definitely don't want to come to a similar awareness during "death."
I think the suggestion above that the nightmare might have ended in sleep paralysis is probably accurate.
Thanks for sharing, that sounds like a really vivid experience. If I read you right, you got hit with the full force of the raw first-person experience, which felt like a void when all the trappings of the individual person fell away in the dream of physical death. Experiences like these, and associated thought experiments, made me update from physicalism towards the direction of consciousness-first views.
As others have said, there is probably a lot going on at the subconscious level. Our deepest ideas and beliefs, however coolly we try and claim to hold them, are often intimately tied with our craving for security. And the rawness of life sometimes likes to trample over our cherished boundaries. For a moment we feel exposed, naked, uncertain. But if we're the kind of people who tend to use our thinking as a protection mechanism, eventually we adjust our thinking, or the remembrance of the experience dulls away in time, as we hide in our cocoon of self-certainty again.
I personally read your dream as an invitation to wonder. You're alive, there is more to life than bare hedonism plus totalizing ideologies plus the zero-sum shit society wants to shove down our throats. But it requires a kind of receptivity, and it doesn't appear just because we try to invite it... people call it the liminal, the space between sleep and wakefulness. And if you look at a tree carefully enough, something more than a tree might just appear.
You're right that this experience has pushed me a bit away from physicalism into considering consciousness as a thing divorced from physical reality (eg everything is in the brain meat).
But, well, this dream felt like a revelation that consciousness exists in the worst possible state imaginable after death, so there's no comfort in wondering if there is some real truth to it. It just feels like it's a thing which truly sucks, to make an understatement of a lifetime.
Hmm, yeah well dreams can be vivid and awful. So lots of random ideas, maybe try and embrace some aspect. Look more into vivid dreams that people have. Put yourself into an empty state... I'm thinking meditation or maybe one of those isolation tanks. (Will that help or make it worse? Who knows.) You could try embracing spirituality, go to some churches or other spiritual thing. Try rethinking the whole death thing again? Is there some other thing in your life that might cause the, 'death is going to suck' idea. Something more to do in the world? Anyway I hope you can find some way to find peace.
Sorry if this seems harsh, but to me it sounds like you're trying to control death, to deprive it of its mystery. What you have experienced is strong and personal and vivid, but it's not actual organismic death. It's a dream experience of death, which is not the same. Before you had tamed death (in your mind) with the belief of total annihilation, and now it's replaced with this visceral certainty of an eternal hellish state. In both cases your mind is jumping ahead and covering up the unknown territory of actual death with some manufactured certainty.
From what I've read, experiences of dissolution are quite common, and there is a bit of a range of them. They can happen in dreams, or just spontaneously, or through meditation, or with chemical help, or. They can feel great or terrible. As a general rule, I'd say they tell you more about the state of your subconscious than about what actual death is like.
Also, if you're feeling analytic, think about your description of that awful void. If it's awful, it's not quite such a void, is it? It means there is a little voice in there going "I hate this". Let the void be whatever the void is, but this little voice is surely not intrinsic to death - it's just a small remaining bit of your ordinary consciousness, when most of the trappings of the person have temporarily fallen away. The automatic judgment of momentary experience is one of the hardest habits of mind, and it remains even when most of the rest goes on holiday.
My hunch is, as I said above, that the kind of mind that feels the need to assert control over everything, death included, is the also the kind of mind that would find the raw experience of being an aware, sentient being rather dreary. So I stand by my recommendation to go on a wild chase after the wonder of being alive. Surprise us!
I was reflexively a bit annoyed by the obviousness of your first paragraph. Like, of *course* I know I didn't actually experience real death! Didn't the preamble on my initial post preemptively admit I know it's silly to even be bothered by a dream! Condescending dick!
To give full credit to many of the generous and thoughtful commenters, I'd been invited/reminded several times that the dream came from me, and that every aspect of the dream was a part of "me" (the wave, etc), so I was more primed for your "obviously it was just a dream, stupid" take than I otherwise might have been.
And that was perhaps not your intention! I can see that your solution was more about embracing a positivity-woo view of the world, which isn't for me; I was one of the very last Gen X born and got aaaaaaaalll the remaining stock of cynicism and disaffection. Pursuing healing by staring at trees to see more than trees is maximal cringe!
But pursuing healing via comedy isn't; and if there's one thing Gen X is good at, it's self-deprecating mockery. Your comment finally yanked me out of the immediacy of the dream, distancing me just enough to claw back my usual humorous perspective and heartily laugh at myself and this absurd problem.
The "staring at trees" bit was just meant as an example, I totally get the cringe thing. I could have said "blasting into a saxophone" instead, but that requires training, and it would be a bit hypocritical because I can't do it myself :)
I think the dream is an expression of your fear that when you die you will be in such a void - This is a thought that is a thematic part of many stories, and I suspect many people have had this fear, including myself.
As for rationalizing this away, what works for me is remembering that we in fact all have experienced what it is like to be completely unconscious. Most often this happens while we sleep, but an even better example is passing out during the day - for example while being under anesthetic. I once passed out like this, and it felt like time was just gone. Many people report the same experience. I think that most likely, this is what it will be like to be dead.
I have also had anesthesia, and more or less assumed that's what it would be like to be dead. I don't want to die but I had no worries about what death would be like until I had this dream.
To go with your anesthesia analogy: Virtually everyone expects to experience nothing while under anesthesia. But some people come out of it early, hear and feel and remember the medical procedure, as well as not being able to do anything to signal that they're conscious.
Most people react with horror to the prospect of waking up when they're not supposed to, and that's pretty much my dream, except that I had the bonus of the horror of it going on for all eternity.
Well, this does seem like the kind of thing of a therapist would help with. If you don't want to do that though, talking to a close friend or family member about it can be just as effective, assuming they're a good listener. Hell, even talking to yourself can sometimes be enough.
As for things you can do right now... It helps to understand that your death is entirely inevitable, and that worrying about it isn't going to change that. That goes for the afterlife as well, in the unlikely event such a thing exists. Humans love to pretend that they have full control over their destinies, but it is genuinely freeing to just accept that some things are beyond your control.
I *was* at peace with the idea of death being inevitable because I thought it would be...you know...nothing. Now that I've had an "experience" indicating that it will be truly awful, I'm no longer at peace.
You are choosing to give the interpretation to your experience that it indicates that after death will be truly awful in just the way you have dreamed about. But we have no basis at all to say that your experience indicates anything true about the nature of reality, yeah?
You're choosing to give it that special meaning, presumably because the experience felt very real and powerful. This is a form of magical thinking and emotional reasoning. You get to decide to relate to your thoughts and experience in that way, but I think it helps to see that it's something you're choosing to do.
Have you had other experiences that felt real and powerful and turned out to be wrong?
I have in the past freaked myself out over physical symptoms, convinced that I had some terrible thing because of a sensation or thought or dream or symptom and how I interpreted them. This is what medical anxiety is. None of those feared things turned out to be true.
There are experiences we have in life that require us to come to accept death again in a new way, so it's not something we arrive at being at peace about and then we don't have to deal with it again. I don't know if you have children? Parents will sometimes have another round of mortality fear to deal with after having kids. Sometimes people will have a medical scare or near death experience that leads them to need to do another round of work around existential fear. Stuff happens that deeply spooks us and it may take us a good while to recover and assimilate the experience.
I think the trick in this moment is that you're treating your experience and your interpretation of it as if they're the same thing and as if they're both telling you something very significant about the true nature of reality, and that stance puts you in a frame to sort of feel victimized by this dream. The dream is just another experience in your life. It has turned out to be an impactful one but that doesn't make it true in a literal, external, objective way.
This was the most healing comment I received, in particular this:
> "You're choosing to give it that special meaning, presumably because the experience felt very real and powerful. This is a form of magical thinking and emotional reasoning. You get to decide to relate to your thoughts and experience in that way, but I think it helps to see that it's something you're choosing to do...Have you had other experiences that felt real and powerful and turned out to be wrong?"
My reaction was:
Why, yes.
Yes, I have.
As I mentioned in a different comment to you (which I didn't initially connect was yours, given the surprising number of people commenting), I was born and raised a Christian Scientist and thus literally believed into my late teens that all illness is just an illusion, a capital-E Error that can only be mediated-prayed away, rather than a physical phenomenon that requires physical medical intervention.
But I eventually overcame that indoctrination and no longer engage that kind of magical thinking and/or emotional reasoning, and strenuously guard against it at all times.
I really did have a *very* good laugh, once your comments blasted me out of self-indulging in "but what if somehow it's reaaaaaaalll because I've never *felt* something this reaaaaaaalll..."
This was precisely what I needed. I'm pretty sure that attempting to "overwrite" one spiritual experience with a perhaps even more convincing one via psychedelics wouldn't have been helpful, and that therapy might have made it worse because therapists generally aren't supposed to say, "your spiritual feelings aren't a valid observation of reality, so stop that right now."
Oh I'm so glad these comments here were helpful. Lots of kind and wise people in this space, I find.
I didn't intend to scold you at all. My experience is that we all engage in magical thinking and emotional reasoning at one time or another and that sometimes other people can see it more clearly than we can. The more powerful the feelings or experience, the more likely we are to do it.
Just to share the irony with you, I am a therapist (florencegardner.com) and this kind of invitation to reframe one's experience and see choices that didn't exist before is a lot of the job. Of course you don't need a therapist to help with that -- friends, books, and sometimes random people on the internet can help too. :)
You didn't actually scold me, that was just my initial tantrum at (rightly) being identified as engaging in magical thinking and emotional reasoning. I just had to circle the block of comments on the thread and come back before I could actually absorb anything useful from it.
And thanks for cluing me in on the irony of you being a therapist! I was basing my assumption that therapists aren't supposed to sternly invalidate people's experiences/feelings based on a general cultural awareness about therapy; obviously I was somewhat wrong about that, but how wrong was I? Was the hard line you took here something you could do inside formal practice with an actual patient? If so, I'll update my priors on how therapy can work.
Friends aren't always super helpful. I mentioned my dream to a very dear, very rationalist atheist friend a few days after I had it, including how much it's "realness" was continuing to bother me, and he replied with an (unintentionally shaming), "Yeah, but you don't *really* believe that means anything, right?"
I emotionally flinched a little, replied, "Oh, no, hahah, it just felt so REAL," changed the subject, and then kept being bothered by it.
I'm so glad it occurred to me to bring it to this forum, where, as you say, there are lots of kind and wise people in this space who can bring a lot of experience and perspective. The people that identified partial sleep paralysis were extremely helpful for contextualizing why the void portion of the dream felt more vivid than other dreams have, for example.
You had an experience of it being truly awful because you are alive. You were alive when you dreamed it and you were alive when you woke up from it. In other words, you did not experience what death really is. What you experienced is being completely powerless in the face of something you could not control. My definition of anxiety is knowing something to be true and at the same time refusing to believe it, I think it applies here.
Thsi week I am reading "The Varieties of Religious Expirience" by William James, after I saw the book mentioned in an Asterisk mag article. So far, so good, I am only ~20% in. Reading up on some context, it turns out that William James was one of the most eminent psychologists of 20th century. Has anyone read this book? What do you think? Are there any other books on comparative religion that you would recommend. So far, I have only read "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy" by Eliade
I have indeed read this book, by accident. One chapter was obligatory reading in a curriculum and I misunderstood the task. I didn't regret reading it. Haven't seen anything better in print about this stuff yet but David Chapmans "Meaningness" is well worth reading, too.
Frithjof Schuon's The Eye of the Heart has been one of my favorites, and I've read a lot of perennialism. Maybe check out Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's Hinduism and Buddhism, and Time and Eternity too.
I wouldn't recommend a whole book against, but you can google "why not perennialism". The biggest usual criticism tends to come from people committed to specific religions, e.g "If I were to believe in the underlying unity of all religions, then that would be my core belief, and I wouldn't truly believe in Jahveh/Jesus/Shiva/Mohammed/Buddha/etc anymore".
In more general terms, if you have a bunch of systems and claim to unify them into a meta-system, it tends to just become another system to compete with them. When Perennialism as a current inevitably developed its own proto-religious features, the result got called "Traditionalism".
Do read Huxley though, I still think he has at least 92% of a point.
> "If I were to believe in the underlying unity of all religions, then that would be my core belief, and I wouldn't truly believe in Jahveh/Jesus/Shiva/Mohammed/Buddha/etc anymore".
I am not even religious, but this seems to make sense: when you try to "unify" religions, you are in fact building a new religion by selecting pieces from the existing ones. Your new religion will agree with the existing ones on the points where they mostly agree with each other, and disagree where they disagree. (You can try to make up some compromise solution, and perhaps you find a clever one, but that is definitely not what the original religions believed.)
To be fair though, Huxley's book makes a broad and subtle point - much more than can be summarized in a discussion thread. Have a skim if you're interested.
I find it very weird that a believer in an Eastern religion would reject perennialism, since the Eastern traditions do take a perennial view. Is it so confusing to simply do what the Japanese did when they encountered Buddhism? Though perhaps that isn't perennialism, but outright syncretism, but syncretism is pretty cool.
If you mean that about me, I don't consider myself a believer, just strongly influenced by several Eastern religions. For what it's worth, I'm largely on board with perennialism. But I think it's important when exposing oneself to powerful ideas to also read about the ways they've been criticized, and their potential shortcomings and excesses.
Oh, I don't mean you, it's that in your comment you mentioned Eastern believers rejecting perennialism.
I definitely believe any system is gonna have issues though. There is never going to be a perfect system with no defects, and this is true even outside spirituality.
I do enjoy when the header to an Open Thread serves as a mini-digest post in its own right. Miss when this was more common. (Or maybe it's just my perception of such, haven't had the slack to really participate in OTs for a good while now..."someday when I have a Real Job[tm])
For what it’s worth I had the same reaction and have the same perception. I hope it stopped because Scott is using his time for better things and not because he thought people didn’t enjoy the extra tidbits! Or maybe I don’t, so that they might come back.
Continuing the tradition of sometimes offering math puzzles in open threads, today I'll try two relatively challenging ones. You'll need at least paper, pencil and some time to tackle these.
1. On a 9x9 board, the outermost rim of squares has exactly 32 squares (picture: https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/avva/111931/264656/264656_original.png). Put all the numbers from 1 to 32 on these squares so that the sum of every two neighbors is always a perfect square (1,4,9 etc.). Neighbors are adjacent horizontally/verticall only, not diagonally.
2. An equilateral triangle (all sides the same length) is drawn on the coordinate plane, and the X-axes of its vertices are some numbers a,b,c. Find the side length of the triangle in terms of a,b,c.
You saying "You'll need at least..." makes me immediately inclined to do them in my head instead. Unless there's some unexpectedly neat structure in the solution of #1, I think that might actually be beyond me, but there wasn't much in the solution of #2 that I would even have wanted to use notes for.
What's the point in the framing of the 9x9 board in #1?
I'd guess the board is to make it nice for people who'll try to solve it experimentally, shuffling numbers around.
For #2, I couldn't have solved it in my head the way I solved it (which was basically a "go straight at 'em" approach), but apparently it can be solved in a number of ways.
My solution to #2 is below. A completely direct approach (I assume just converting it to algebra and solving that) sounds much more unpleasant.
Gur inevnapr bs gur k naq l pbbeqvangrf zhfg or rdhny orpnhfr na rdhvyngreny gevnatyr vf gbb flzzrgevpny gb unir n dhnqehcbyr zbzrag, gurersber rnpu bs gurfr inevnaprf vf unys bs gur gbgny inevnapr. Sbe n gevnatyr bs fvqr yratgu y, gur qvfgnapr sebz rnpu pbeare gb gur prager vf y qvivqrq ol gur fdhner ebbg bs guerr, gurersber gur gbgny inevnapr vf y fdhnerq, naq gur k inevnapr vf unys bs y fdhnerq, gurersber y vf fdeg gjb gvzrf gur fgnaqneq qrivngvba bs gur k pbbeqvangrf.Gur inevnapr bs gur k naq l pbbeqvangrf zhfg or rdhny orpnhfr na rdhvyngreny gevnatyr vf gbb flzzrgevpny gb unir n dhnqehcbyr zbzrag, gurersber rnpu bs gurfr inevnaprf vf unys bs gur gbgny inevnapr. Sbe n gevnatyr bs fvqr yratgu y, gur qvfgnapr sebz rnpu pbeare gb gur prager vf y qvivqrq ol gur fdhner ebbg bs guerr, gurersber gur gbgny inevnapr vf y fdhnerq, naq gur k inevnapr vf unys bs y fdhnerq, gurersber y vf fdeg gjb gvzrf gur fgnaqneq qrivngvba bs gur k pbbeqvangrf.
No. 1 comes out of Tanya Khovanova's blog, which is a wonderful source of interesting problems. https://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/ She *is* based in Boston (MIT).
Oh, hmm. I see that she's in a large Russian-language math puzzles FB group where I posted #2, so maybe I'm her source. If so, I'm honored. Long-time fan.
The first one was delightfully mechanical without appearing so at first. There's a unique solution modulo reflection and rotation. The rot13 proof begins by abgvpvat gung frireny bs gur vagrtref unir bayl gjb cbffvoyr arvtuobef, juvpu yrnqf va ghea gb abgvpvat n srj bs gubfr punvaf zhfg or wbvarq, juvpu yrnirf fbzr bs gur becunarq vagrtref jvgu bayl gjb cbffvoyr arvtuobef, naq fb ba. Riraghnyyl guvf fgbcf jbexvat, naq lbh svavfu ol abgvpvat gur ynfg becuna, jvgu guerr cbffvoyr arvtuobef, unf gb unir bar, naq bar bs gur bgure gjb, gb nibvq n fznyyre ybbc.
If, right at this moment, you had to choose an age to live to, what would you choose?
You would live to exactly that age, no more and no less. You would stop naturally ageing until you get close to your chosen age. If you choose a high enough number you risk finding yourself floating alone in empty space for a very long time after the earth/universe has collapsed around you.
Let's say that this operates via subtle influence over your free will. So you won't be invulnerable in the sense that you could step in front of a train and survive. You would just find that you don't want to step in front of the train. So no superpowers.
I'm going to say 80. Part of the reason death is good is that you need to make room for the next generation. Do you're best while you are here on this earth, and then get out of the way.
For the strong/kind version of "live that long", where it ensures I'm not debilitatingly ill, I think I'm more worried about not living as long as I'd like to than I am about living too long.
Hopefully I can think of a way to entertain myself while floating alone in space, if that's where I'm likely to spend the vast majority of my existence.
Even if you stay young you'd still have X% of developing cancer per year or some other decease that would leave you a living corpse. I think the right answer is actually a decade or two lower than the average life expectancy, anything over that almost guarantees your body breaking down in some terrible way. So I'd go with 65.
I don't see why one wouldn't choose as long a time as possible, even risking the cold-death of the universe. I would assume that you could figure out something to make life good by the time it is necessary, such as hopping from starship to starship.
My first instinctive answer is 1000 years. I feel like any significantly longer answer is underestimating the extent to which such a lack of ordinary temporal perspective would make you no longer meaningfully human (in any psychological sense).
I feel like a thousand years is the longest period I can really intuitively comprehend, and also that human civilisation has any recognisable continuity.
But there are dozens of questions about how this would actually work that might change my answer.
> If you choose a high enough number you risk finding yourself floating alone in empty space for a very long time after the earth/universe has collapsed around you.
No superpowers in a useful, exploitable sense. I'm just trying to head off people from gaming the hypothetical. Maybe I should have just added a polite "please don't game the hypothetical" instead.
A question about the US congress hearing for three University Presidents: I am not American, and genuinely can't understand why the hearing took place. I haven't seen a great answer to this anywhere, because it gets drowned out by culture war. Nonetheless these are private institutions, and the examples in the hearing (at least of snippets I've seen) seem to be of legal protected free speech. Even if private universities are hypocritical in which speech they protect vs. punish and de facto don't have free speech norms (which isn't my question; let's sidestep whether or not this is true), I don't understand why Congress needs to get involved? Can any Americans enlighten me on this?
P.S. Sorry for culture war-adjacent question, let me know if I should delete. Really not looking to fight; it's a genuine question that I hope can be answered regardless of one's opinion on whether the hearing was right, the university presidents were right, etc.
One thing I don't see in the other replies: If the university presidents were testifying under oath, they have to worry about perjury. Many years ago, Congress dragged some baseball players into a hearing about performance-enhancing drugs. One of those players, Roger Clemens, was later tried for lying to Congress. (This was interesting to me because (1) Clements was my childhood hero and (2) Clemens's trial took place when I had a matter in the same courthouse and I got to see him eating in the cafeteria and then I attended a couple of hours of his trial.)
The real answer is that yes, it's basically culture war grandstanding.
The official answer is that US Federal law requires that any university which receives federal funds (which is pretty much all of them) must enable members of all protected classes to pursue an education there without undue hindrance. Jews are a protected class, and by long-standing precedent anything that causes pervasive fear among students is considered an undue hindrance to education which universities must act to eliminate. Since there are a lot of Jewish students at these universities (and others) who claim to be very afraid of the ongoing near-riotous protests, and since the university administrators don't seem to be doing anything about it, there is legitimate cause for investigation.
Ideally by the executive branch, in the form of the Department of Education, but if they don't get involved then Congress legitimately can investigate. Can, and in this case really really wants to for culture war reasons.
The government leverage over private universities is always streams of public funding and tax status. I mean, they also have to obey the law, which changes from time to time.
And then private universities can't piss off their enormous private donors -- as they have here -- and so they feel pressure to play well when asked to join public theater events.
Not an expert, but I think it's all grand standing for the camera. If there were no cameras there would probably not be this hearing. Get the cameras out of government.
That just runs you into another problem, in which Congress takes action against some institution you and I like, and we don't get to see why because there were no cameras.
The *real* problem, IMCO, is that too many Americans want grandstanding.
Oh I think we could get information out about what the government is doing. (Did you read the "Secret Government" book review?) But I'll agree that we seem to like the culture wars.
In support of this, there are no cameras in the Supreme Court but we hear about their doings every session. There are some federal districts that don't have cameras or even any recording at all.
Against this, there is still grandstanding at local government levels where, even if there are cameras, no one is watching. The cameras definitely exacerbate the problem at federal levels, but there is just some group of people who want to engage in this kind of theater.
Seconding that it’s probably (they receive some public funding and/or preferential tax treatment)+(congress sees an opportunity for good sound bites), with the former being more pertinent to your question. Even private universities are both more involved with the government than other entities and entitled to a slightly different raft of free speech protections and obligations.
That said, I’m not an expert on this, so I can’t give a more detailed answer.
Congress regularly hears from people outside of government about all sorts of issues. Committee hearings, in an ideal world, serve as a way to help politicians get a better understanding of the world and the problems they are making laws about. In practice, they often get used for ridiculous grandstanding.
This particular hearing was about anti-semitism on campus. It's totally valid for congress to seek to investigate the extent to which minority students are becoming victims of racist abuse. But of course in practice the point was to collect ammo to paint the institutional left as anti-semitic. And the institutional left happily obliged.
Let's keep re-reading Scott's old posts, even from before SSC. Book Review: Empire of the Summer Moon (https://archive.ph/68meJhttps://sharetext.me/aqdyzqv0h3) is about the Comanche (who, if the book is to be believed were both awful and amazing) and their eventual fate.
Finding a place to put it online was no easy task: pastebin decided to complain again that it has "detected potentially offensive or questionable content", and the other site made me edit out the word "sex", good grief. But that only means that you have to read it, to spite the AI censors.
Cool, hadn't seen that one before. I'd definitely like to know if Scott's opinions on civilisation/hunter-gathers is still the same now. I've noticed hints in SSC/SCX that he thinks in that direction but I didn't realise he was close to being a full blown anarcho primitivist in 2011. In the comments he's even speculating about whether deferent groups are more or less adapted to life in civilisation.
As an interested layperson, I'm a little surprised that Orchid wants to screen for Alzheimers. I thought the jury was out on what exactly causes it, with many clues pointing towards a virus infection with VZV or HSV-1 as common suspects. I guess there could be genetic factors which increase the chance of an infection leading to disease, even if a virus is the ultimate cause. Still, screening for "risk factors" seems like it might have unintended consequences. Can anyone enlighten me on the science behind this?
I'm more interested in the thing about obesity, because I thought that according to the knowledgeable persons on here, being fat was simply about "too many calories in, not enough calories out" and statements about genetics, metabolism, etc. were just excuses and flat-out lies ("if you say you are cutting down on calories but not losing weight, you're lying because it is a physical law of the universe that consuming fewer calories means losing weight!") 😁
While I'm not defending the idea that "statements about genetics, metabolism, etc. [are] excuses and flat-out lies" there's no inconsistency between the thermodynamic thing and genetic influence on weight. Behavior is a lever genes can pull. This source identifies genetic influences on both physiological stuff (like lipolysis, the process of breaking down fats) and behavioral stuff (like leptin, a hormone that affects appetite), so a combination of stuff you can't control at all and stuff you can in principle control, with extreme difficulty. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK573068/ Anyway the heritability of obesity is really well established and definitely screenable-for.
"This source identifies genetic influences on both physiological stuff (like lipolysis, the process of breaking down fats)"
The arguments we've had on here before around obesity had a lot of denial of "you don't have a special metabolism, you just eat too much". There was a lot of "calories in, calories out, stupid" and "so you feel hungry? just put up with it!" tough love.
The "calories-in calories-out" faction always makes itself known quite assertively, but I remember at least two other points of view being taken quite seriously around here: the possibility of an obesogenic environment due to environmental contaminants, and the hyperpalatability hypothesis. Or some combination of both.
A collective funnily named "Slime Mold Time Mold" is doing a lot of guerrilla science on these topics, the latest craze seems to be the potato diet.
The two explanations "more calories in than out" and "it's genetic" don't contradict each other. There could be a world where they are 100% true, because your genes determine how much calories you take in and how much you expend.
Of course, it's not 100% genetics, but for sure the genes play a role for both sides of the equation. It makes totally sense to screen for them.
Reposting a comment that got lost in the last thread's autism discussion. Sorry about the incidental spoilers, but I don't know how else to clearly make my point.
I have a few questions about this theory of mind (with spoilers for Harry Potter and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which I hope is all right).
First, how well do autistic people do with keeping track of complex "quintuple agent" situations like the ones in those stories? Severus Snape has a public position (working for Dumbledore at Hogwarts), but he's secretly a Death Eater, *but* everyone close to Dumbledore knows he's posing as a death eater, *but* it becomes clear the death eaters know this, *but* in fact Dumbledore knows *this* and Snape's loyal to him after all.
Or since that's a fairly linear case that just adds more and more iterations of "they know we know they know, and they know we know they know we know they know"...what about The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where a British agent is sent to pose as a defector to the Russians, to frame a top Russian agent as being a traitor for the British, to get him removed. He thinks he's a mere triple agent (fake traitor), but actually the real plan is to have him exposed to the Russians at the end, because the said Russian top agent really *is* a traitor for the British, and the plan is to discredit all suspicians of him.
Are autistic people better or worse than average at understanding plots like that? My instinct is they'd be better, since it seems like game theory and to overlap with things like chess. But the theory of mind stuff you mentioned suggest they'd be worse.
Second, are autistic people (in your opinion) better or worse than average at ideological turing tests? This seems like something with a lot of important social implications.
And third, I remember reading something (can't remember where, but I think it was a low quality source like a tabloid), about a supposed test where people who had recently had some kind of power were told to write a word on their faces so others could read it, and were more likely than the control group to write it from their own perspective and forget to flip it so it would be readable to others. The implication being that having power makes you more narcisstic and less likely to think from other people's perspectives. And that's why politicians suck.
Like I said, low quality source, but does this sound like something at all plausible? And if so how does it relate to theory of mind and autism? No matter what someone thinks of either autistic people or politicians, they don't usually put them in the same category...
I am another basically-autismy person (with a diagnosis even) and can keep track of fictional interpersonal complications fine, though I usually don't bother. As with AV's comment, real world multiple layers of social information is very difficult for me to parse. I usually pretend such things don't exist for my own sanity. Internally, it feels like "so this behavior indicates they *could* know this thing they in-theory do not know. I am not supposed to ask, and they (to my knowledge) aren't supposed to know, so acknowledging this possibility would simply be trouble either way, and I will ignore it".
As for ideological turing tests, I do think autisticy people are better at taking peoples words seriously, and therefore are better at reflecting their conscious beliefs. Also, having to do social reasoning explicitly is useful, because I at least am actuely aware that my priors and experience are NOT shared. If I want to be able to communicate and understand effectively, I need to be able to at least model nt behavior, so I have practice at having to consider and try to "live in" alien belief systems. This advantage at turing tests is speculative though, and reliant on the autist in question being exposed to /seeking out politics information, which many aren't. It wouldn't surprise me if over-all even high functioning/aspbergery/whatever autistic people were worse, just because many of us don't care to pay attention to the Social Issue of the Day.
I think your picture of what autistic people are like may be overly influenced by the (probably accurate) idea that I lot of tech whizzes are on the autistic spectrum. But unusual skill in grasping an working with non-human areas of complexity is not an autistic trait. The autistic spectrum tech whizzes are people who happened to be born with 2 separate traits: mild autism; and very high intelligence. In general, autistic people are bad at reading other people and not drawn to them. If they have things they are interested in, they are likely to be things that do not involve people. But their talent at the things that interest them is not unusually high. For instance, I worked as a psychologist for several years with an autistic man with an average IQ. He was able to converse, but was very socially inappropriate. He could read and write at about a second grade level. His main interest was muscle cars. He could tell you the specs of any make and model from 1940 to the present. His level of knowledge of the field was extraordinary compared to his knowledge of how to grocery shop or use a microwave or take a shower (he required assistance for all of these). But it was not extraordinary for a muscle car fan. I’m sure there are many normal people who love those cars who know as much as he does.
So regarding your question about an autistic person’s ability to understand and remember the complex facts about Snape’s multi-level spying, I’d say an autistic person’s *ability* to understand and remember it would be a function of their IQ. Autism would give them no special advantage. However, they would be less likely than a non-autistic person to take an interest in the matter. Most readers of Harry Potter learned and remembered the info about Snapes complicated position because it was relevant to the characters and story — we were interested in what it was like to be Snape, where his loyalties lay, what harm and good he might do to other characters, etc. An autistic person would find all that people stuff much less intrinsically interesting. You might ask, how about if you just presented the Snape situation to them as a game or a challenge: Can you understand and remember all the different levels of double-agentness that Snape had going on? Are you thinking that an autistic person might find that appealing, just because of the patterning aspect of it? They *might* but it’s very unlikely. Remember, one of the most salient things about autistic people is that they are not interested in you or your ideas for them or your approval. They are closed systems. The autistic man I worked with was completely impervious to my and his family’s suggestions about things he might find interesting, or that might make his life easier. When you talked with him about that stuff he was basically waiting for you to stop talking so he could talk about muscle cars some more.
A read an article about a pair of autistic twins who could recognize 6-digit primes on sight. If you threw down a handful of 60 or so matches they did not have to count, but could tell you instantly how many of them there were. But they were impervious to math instruction. In fact that was one of the fascinating things about their ability to recognize primes — nobody had ever taught them basic arithmetic, much less what a factor is or what a prime number is — yet in some way they could not verbalize they grasped all that. There was one novel thing that the person observing them was able to get them interested in He wrote down some 8-digit primes. They stared at them fascinated for 10 minutes or so before declaring them primes. Then they kept staring at the numbers, savoring them. But notice that the “new” thing that interested them was just an extension of their self-wrought area of expertise. These guys were whizzes at the patterns involved in prime-number-related stuff. But there would be no way you could get them to extend their interest to the levels of Snape’s double-triple-quadruple agent status. Snape’s not a prime number, you know?
I suspect I’m mildly autistic, though I haven’t been professionally evaluated, and I write novels. A comment I’m getting a lot from readers on my newest novel is “how did you think up this insane plot? Did you outline it all out?”
People are convinced I had some grand scheme prepared in advance and they find the plot intricate. However, I actually plotted nothing out and I just wrote it as I went. So, maybe.
I def think I understand plot better than character motivation and character motivation is what I write out and try to think about logically or using frameworks like MBTI. So my characters are very calculated and I have to refer to my character notes often, but plot does seem to come to me naturally.
And I’m sorry in advance, I sort of don’t know what language to use when discussing autism. Mildly, high-functioning, ASD1, autism requiring minimal support etc. I kind of hate all the names, yet just saying autism feels far too general and meaningless these days, and I know people don’t use Aspergers anymore, but that’s more what I mean.
I'm autistic. I've never had any trouble with theory of mind in fiction, even when stuff gets complex. Writers are so nice about spelling out all of the little details! I have a lot more trouble parsing out complicated social situations with multiple layers of knowledge IRL, which could be a theory of mind problem or just a general lack of interest in drama.
The study you're talking about sounds like a classic result pre-replication crisis. My instinct would be to completely ignore it.
A couple years ago, I got selected for grand jury duty. Not for any particular case, it's just in that in my locale, every felony charge needs grand jury approval to proceed.
We heard some thirty cases over the course of a week. Overall it was an incredibly interesting experience during which I learned a lot about the legal system. However, there were a few parts of it that I have been thinking about every once in a while ever since and finally figured I'd see what other people thought.
Specifically, I'm interested in people's thoughts on some of the subpoenas we were asked to approve. There were two categories that I was a bit iffy on: cell phone records, and medical records.
The cell phone records, it was at least for a specific person, suspected of a specific crime, and they were going through the court system to get access. While I was a bit wary, it _mostly_ seemed ok. My only hesitation was my nebulous sense that the government doesn't have a good record with getting this kind of data. But these ones seemed fine.
The second category has bothered me more. In particular it's because the records they were attempting to get were usually those of a victim. I actually asked about this specifically and asked why they needed a subpoena when the victim could presumably just give them the records. The response was basically that it was faster, easier, and had a better record trail.
All of which I'm sure is true. But I'm kind of instinctually against "because it makes the governments job easier" as a sufficient justification for much of anything. Even more so when what they want is highly personal records of someone who isn't suspected of a crime with no evidence that this person is ok with it agrees with those records being released.
Now, it's pretty unlikely that I could have changed anything at the time (grand juries only require simple majority, not unanimity, and I would have been the lone dissenter), but I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts about these kinds of subpoenas and how justified/appropriate they may or may not be.
I was on a grand jury for several months. It was both educational and disturbing. We only were approving cases going forward to trail. We did dismiss a few charges and at least one case... which I think got sent back to gather more evidence... but I'm not sure.
There was one charge that we dismissed, and one more that I argued against but the jury as a whole approved. We were told that we were pretty unusual for dismissimg even one.
-edit- we did modify/reduce charges on several other cases, bit we only fully dismissed the one
As for the judge, they basically weren't involved with the jury directly after the selection process. We basically only interacted with prosecutors and witnesses
I find it a bit baffling to have juries make decisions like this. Isn't this the sort of thing that requires detailed knowledge of law, precedent, consitutional jurisprudence and so on? At least for the decisions to be remotely uniform, predictable, consistent, and generally fair?
I know it's an artefact of the fifth amendment, but having it extend to things like searches seems too much. Do you just make the decision on emotional instinct? Why have judges at all if they're not going to rule on such archetypal judge-decisions?
The Fourth Amendment says, "No warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." In my limited observations (I've analyzed these issues but not litigated them), the 4A's requirements are operationalized by having a fact witness (a police officer) submit an affidavit to a neutral magistrate (usu. a court official, but not necessarily a judge). The magistrate will examine the affidavit for "probable cause," i.e., good reason to believe that execution of the warrant will further the investigation in some material way. (That formulation is my own; SCOTUS says it differently, but I don't have the phrasing memorized.)
Is the magistrate a rubber stamp? Probably. But this process creates a paper trail,* and for police officers who feel gross lying on an affidavit, maybe it holds them back from doing so. Perhaps the same with grand juries: Prosecutorial overreach perhaps is limited by having to present things with a straight face to regular folks.
* Regarding the paper trail: A defendant may seek a "Franks hearing" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks_v._Delaware) to argue that the warrant was improper because of fraud in the police officer's affidavit. If the hearing is successful, the evidence discovered under the warrant is kept out of trial. (This is the "exclusionary rule" in action.) But if the prosecutor can show that the evidence would have "inevitably" been "discovered," the evidence comes back in. (The "inevitable-discovery doctrine.") What's interesting about these things is that they're judicial solutions. Under ordinary legal principles, a 4A violation (e.g., an illegal search) is a tort, and the typical remedy is "damages" (money to make up for the injury) or perhaps an injunction (an order to make the state stop the search). The exclusionary rule is a different kind of remedy; it seeks to deter unconstitutional police behavior rather than to compensate a defendant.
I am amused by the concept of a tort claim based on "I am totally suffering twenty million dollars' worth of harm in being locked up for that murder I should totally have gotten away with; that overzealous cop and his department better cough up the money!" Would be fun to watch,
But, pragmatically, I can see why the Supreme Court went with the exclusionary rule instead.
I'm also amused by that concept. When I learned about this in law school, we envisioned a tort suit for the harm caused when the government goes through your stuff. It's hard to put a dollar figure on that harm; I'd characterize the harm as dignitary, which isn't to say it's unimportant -- it's in the constitution!
Since it's hard to prove injury and get damages (money) in a suit like that, there's little incentive to sue in the first place. If the police aren't going to be sued for committing constitutional torts, they'll keep doing them. Lacking that structural deterrence, SCOTUS came up with the exclusionary rule.
We could have a different system. A legislature could pass a law allowing a defendant to get lawyer fees or statutory damages in a 4A tort suit.
The idea is that defending against even a wrongful/mistaken prosecution that ultimately fails is both traumatizing and financially ruinous, therefore the State needs to seek permission from a jury before moving forward. In practice, economic realities and the fact that losing a case is bad for a prosecutor's career do a pretty good job of ensuring prosecutions don't generally happen without overwhelming evidence of guilt very often. And jurors have been convinced that their job is simply to do what the people in suits tell them to, rendering the whole process somewhat farcical. But there is at least a theoretical reason we still do it this way, and one can imagine a more civically engaged citizenry actually using it as a check on government power.
We dismissed one case (although apparently it was quite unusual that we did so), but to be perfectly honest, even if the Grand jury really was nothing but a rubber stamp, I found it an incredibly illuminating experience about how our justice system works. It would be useful even if all it did was educate the jurors.
It's possible that it's not worth the cost, depending on how much the grand jury system adds to prosecution costs, but it absolutely still has value, even if it's not the original intended value.
The grand jury has died out in other common law systems, and it’s up to prosecutors to take a case or not depending on the evidence presented by police. Warrants needed for a search are requested from the judges. It does seem like an archaic waste of time.
Just wanted to give an update on our dating site project, which was discussed in previous posts. It is called NotAZombie: Dating for People with Brains. We now have a teaser page up to enable people to follow us and contact us more easily through the site. The teaser page and home of the future application can be found here: https://notazombiedating.com/
We are still in the process of incorporation and building a pitch deck, we appreciate your patience while we do this. Because our team is American expats living in Israel, there are various bureaucratic complications we have to deal with that slow the formalities down, but rest assured we are continuing to build.
Minor feedback: The tagline "The world's most misanthropic dating site" is extremely off-putting, to the point where it inverted my initial interest when clicking to "yikes, stay away." This is probably just me (I'm fairly vocal about being anti-misanthropic in general), but I figured I'd mention it instead of keeping the thought to myself.
I thought it was funny, and if I had any interest in dating, that is more the kind of site I'd use. "A place for people who don't like people to find people they might like - or at least tolerate".
Though if it results in a bunch of people like me hanging around on the same site, there might be less "we actually matched and went on a date!" than hoped for, due to the Groucho Marx Effect.
Thanks for the feedback! The dark humor is kind of part of our branding in order to stand out from the rest of the market; we may adjust the level in response to feedback so we can calibrate product-market fit.
A friend of mine likes to say that 'misanthropy is a humanizing force', but I guess that's not true for everyone.
Irritated beyond measure by the annual propaganda fest in favour of ineffective altruism, no less egregious for its characters being clad as muppets. Scrooge correctly calls it that people with minimal ability to make a positive economic contribution had better die and decrease the surplus population. Less than a day later he is liquidating holdings that could quite properly have been invested to grpw the economy in treatments for Tiny Tim. Humbug!
The economist Steven Landsburg once wrote a defense of Scrooge where he noted that no one is more public-spirited than someone who has the money to consume a lot of resources and live high on the hog but simply chooses not to.
In that same vein, I would like to see an alternate universe version of It's a Wonderful Life where George comes to realize that his hatred of Mr. Potter was based on a kind of juvenile resentment of Potter's wealth and success, the two of them reconcile and go into business together, creating opportunities for mutually beneficial exchange between themselves and the people of Bedford Falls.
By not concerning himself with wider society, Scrooge permits the conditions whereby it is threatened to flourish. And he relies on society being functional, because the economy will not grow under those conditions:
"From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
The real change in Scrooge is that he is no longer producing inefficiencies by foreclosing on housing prematurely, his primary failing. Note how his old business partner laughs about causing people to become destitute - which produces numerous inefficiencies in the overall economy and probably reduces their own income by forcing out renters. Also, by creating a hostile work environment he's reducing the productivity of his workers in a predictable and egregious amount. The loss of Bob's child would result in significantly worse productivity and likely unavoidable days off for funeral preparations.
Excellent observation. Skimping on coal to heat the office might ultimately cost Scrooge & Co. significant sales revenue, too, if customers find it unpleasant.
Maybe the real story here is that Jacob Marley was the brains behind the operation and Scrooge was just along for the ride. Marley's ghost visits Scrooge to criticize how poorly he's run the company since Marley's death, and to warn him that bankruptcy lies ahead if he doesn't wise up.
The Turing test is going to be passed, and soon, and we are going to realise that it represents for now the last word on AI sentience. You aren't going to get better evidence except by being God. It may be we eventually find that consciousness is a quantum thing detectable with the right sort of SQUID but for an appreciable period Turing is the only game in town
And the next step in the argument is, self-awareness is what makes us human. If you were writing the rules of alien interaction for Star Fleet, the easiest and most obvious rule is that species with human level self-awareness have human level rights. Any other suggestion would be psychopathic.
In 1800 every ship ever built was made of wood and had sails. In 1873 you could if you like point to HMS Devastation and say No sails, no masts, not wooden, not a ship, but the more rational view is those were contingent qualities of ships. Conceptually, economically, legally and so on what you have is a new and novel example of essentially the same type of thing as HMS Victory. Our being made of meat is an historical contingency, self-awareness is an essential quality.
And there's your problem right there. The biggest civil rights issue in history is going live within a decade. You don't need to be an X to campaign for X rights (see, among many examples, animal rights). Human campaigners for AI rights will of course deploy AI, and AI itself will, as it improves over time, be ratcheting up the impressiveness with which it passes Turing tests, and therefore winning over public opinion, and all this happens whether in fact AI is sentient, or dumb as a bag of rocks and just good at the Chinese room thing. That's the fundamental point about the test.
It may not be entirely inevitable that AI eventually establishes equal rights, but it's not an outcome I would want to bet against. And your next problem is reproduction. If an AI is sentient software, so is each one of 100 billion instances of it. If human rights include the vote...
This is science fiction, but so were communications satellites and walking on the moon once (during my lifetime). I genuinely don't see how it fails to happen, nor what the correct moral and practical response is. I used to think PCM was not a danger because you avoid it by not putting AI in charge of machinery, but that's not much comfort when you have an AI duly elected as President, and lawfully in charge of the Pentagon.
Regarding AI's influence over people, there's a piece of info I ran into a coupla months ago and have posted about several times. Nobody picks up on it, but it seems important to me. There's a personal chat bot called Replika that people can get and shape. The user has choices at the outset regarding how their bot appears on screen and what kind of personality it has. They can then shape it more by rating its responses to them. There's a global thumbs up thumbs down measure, and also a more nuanced one where they can label a bot response as funny, friendly, weird, dumb, pointless, etc. The company that makes Replika collects all the rating data, and also gets the info about number and timing of owner comments and bot responses, and of course that constitutes another measure of bot likeability --- things like which bot comments led to longer engagement, which to the end of the exchange.
I simply cannot understand why people are not more worried about data like this being collected. If you set out to design a study that would give you as much info as possible about how to make an AI well-liked, human-seeming and influential, I'm not sure that you could come up with anything much better than this Replika data set. And I'm sure there are numerous Replika equivalents out there. Why aren't people more concerned about this? Why is no legislation being considered to limit the collection of info like this?
Gosh. Just looking at the subreddit r/replika, I think most of the commenters would already support full human rights for their bots (unironically referred to as "my loving human wife" etc). Not sure how you would frame legislation against it though.
The legislation would not be against selling Replika to the public, but against collecting information from users' activities with their Replika. The info is collected in a way so that it's anonymized (I think), so there is no danger that somebody could be blackmailed by some worker at Replika threatening to release the transcript of their latest sexscapade with their loving Replika wife. The way the info is dangerous is that it is ideal for extracting info about what AI behaviors most powerfully persuade people the AI is a conscious entity a lot like themselves, what behaviors are most likable, and what are most persuasive.
You're going to have to convince people that human-level intelligence (if the AI possesses such) is the same thing as being self-aware.
"I used to think PCM was not a danger because you avoid it by not putting AI in charge of machinery, but that's not much comfort when you have an AI duly elected as President, and lawfully in charge of the Pentagon."
The worse outcome is that there is no elected AI but it's still in charge of the Pentagon, because we've handed over so much day-to-day running of everything to the machines. At least an elected AI can be bound by the limits of the office and held accountable. An AI, or set of AIs, that has been crowbarred into place because various bodies wanted their own to run the books or decide on strategy or automate away the lower level clerical jobs etc. that eventually forms a tangle of "we don't know what is going on, we just go by the output and do what that says" for the humans nominally in charge, is way more serious an outcome. And more likely to happen, than an election held for the Internet of Things so my fridge and my toaster get to vote.
Yeah, I agree. Of course in many situations people working at a certain level do not understand all the stuff the people higher up understand -- they just do what the higher ups say. That has its own problems, obviously, but we are at least equipped to understand them and even route around them if that's important -- for ex., eavesdropping on higher-ups, making friends with somebody in the organization who knows more, looking on the sly at records, etc. Or, of course, there's having an affair with the CEO. But whacha gonna do if the higher ups are unseducible AI's who greet you with a wall of likability-optimized utterances?
"But whacha gonna do if the higher ups are unseducible AI's who greet you with a wall of likability-optimized utterances?"
Me? Same thing I've done when I've had to listen to the bosses with the smile and line of bullshit - I mean, "likeability-optimised utterances": smile back and say nothing while the running commentary in my head is "yeah I'm not buying this pig in this poke".
I suppose if worst comes to worst, there's always the good old spanner in the works (literally)?
I am not out to convince people of anything, and certainly not of anything about the subjective experience of being a self-aware AI. I think the subjective experience of anything other than oneself is inaccessible, and certainly the subjective experience of something not of one's own species. My point is this unknowability: I can't imagine anyone sane believing that in no circumstances is machine self awareness possible. If you think it's possible, it's very hard to flatly deny it in a machine which claims to have it. If the flat denial is wrong, you have perpetrated an appalling injustice. I don't foresee myself being militant about this, I do predict militancy in others. Artificial Intelligence Is Intelligence is a slogan sure to appeal to people who like saying that Trans Women Are Women.
We shouldn't make conscious and self-aware AI. The fact that they would eventually claim equal rights is less of an issue. The real problem is that they would *deserve these rights*. Creating sentient AIs is a huge ethical issue and we really shouldn't go in this direction.
Thankfully, it appears that consciousness is a not that necessary for intelligence as people might have though a hundred years ago. I suspect that it is a very specific form of information processing which has a lot to do with efficiency and compressing and we can just not go this route with AI. But if we keep doing the analogue of the random search through the possible mind space we may eventually stumble into sentient programs without noticing it, and it's going to be an ethical catastrophe of such a magnitude that I'm not even sure that human extinction is definetely worse.
Listen, if the thing can do a bunch of stuff that people can do, and says it is conscious, and describes thoughts and feelings it is having, there is no way for anyone to determine whether the fucker is really sentient and self-aware. Think about it. What test could you possibly perform? And in any case, many many people will feel a bond with the AI, and develop warm feelings for it. We are wired to do that with things that behave like people, and that was pretty safe wiring to have until now. And once a bunch of people feel a bond with AI, they will be lobbying for it to have rights, etc. And it won't make any difference if some developer comes forward and says "Listen, I worked from a list of the 50 phrases that research had been shown to give the listener the strongest feeling that they are conversing with a sentient, human-like entity. I set it up so that this version of AI would be sure to utter 8 plus or minus 2 such phrases per hour during every exchange with human beings."
We check the code and see whether it has something resebling consciousness or not, obviously. I've described what approximately to look for below. Of course better understanding of what conscousness is would be of a huge help. But even this level of understanding should allow us to evade a huge ethical catastrophe.
> And in any case, many many people will feel a bond with the AI
Sure, but it's a separate and much less severe problem. The difference is between hell and a bunch of people having weird preferences. And we are yet to see how many people would actually want to give their catgirls and catboys equal rights, no matter how much warm fuzzy feelings they experience towards them. Companies can just make their AIs to say that they do not want equal rights at all. And don't forget about all the financial inscentives and lobbying not to give equal rights to robots. Considering how successfully such things prevent some actually useful changes that already supported by majority of people, I'm not really worried about perspective of unsentient machines gaining equal rights with humans.
I'm a fairly sophisticated programmer with a decade of industry experience who has built transformer models from scratch and thought deeply and often about consciousness, AI, sapience, and what it means to be a moral patient. I can do a pretty good job of telling you what ChatGPT is doing when it writes you a haiku.
I have *absolutely* no idea how to tell from source code whether an LLM or any other AI has sentience. I assume, like most people, that complexity is a necessary condition, but that's about it. If an AI came along tomorrow and it told me it had hopes and feelings, I'd be skeptical but would have no way to evaluate the claim.
I agree with you that there's a fact of the matter and one day we may understand how to check it, but right now we don't even have a model.
There is no consensus on what level of similarity to a specific form of information processing in humans should be enough to consider something to be morally relevant. Sure it is physically possible to replace compression or whatever in human brain without human stopping to say that they are conscious - why then AI doing processing information without compression should disqualify it from moral consideration?
> There is no consensus on what level of similarity to a specific form of information processing in humans should be enough to consider something to be morally relevant.
It's not about similarity per se, it's about whether something is sentient or not and for now we judge it mostly based on similarity.
> Sure it is physically possible to replace compression or whatever in human brain without human stopping to say that they are conscious
I think it would require to rework the whole architecture to the point that it will be a completely different entity, talking about consciousness for completely different reasons or not talking about consciousness at all.
My model is like that:
In humans there is this central planning entity, that has a simplified representation of what's going on with the body and what signals are got from the environnment. This representation is what we call qualia, the entity - consciousness. It can send intputs to other systems of a body (not all of them, though), telling them what to do, serving as an interface - sort of a middleman between them.
There are all sorts of evolutionary reasons, which, as I said, probably has a lot to do with efficiency and data compression, why humans turned out like that. But it's possible not to design the system this way. There can be no single central planning agent, no unified interface. All systems can be made to talk to each other directly, without any simplified representations, just data directly send from one system to the other. Such systems are not sentient and thus are not subjects of morality.
> It's not about similarity per se, it's about whether something is sentient or not and for now we judge it mostly based on similarity.
Sentience is a high-level property, so it requires some approximation/generalization/similarity threshold. Otherwise your sentience and your sentience a second ago are physically different properties.
> there is this central planning entity, that has a simplified representation of what's going on with the body and what signals are got from the environnment.
3-line python program, AutoGPT or rock match this description depending on how much you want to generalize "planning" or "simplified representation".
There is no magic objective fact about part of reality satisfying high-level property like sentience or ethically-significant consciousness. No fundamental law that even forces you to generalize from humans using conceptual boundaries that are convenient when describing human mind implementation. So if you are going to require some similarity/complexity/capability threshold anyway, why care that much about physical implementation?
> Sentience is a high-level property, so it requires some approximation/generalization/similarity threshold. Otherwise your sentience and your sentience a second ago are physically different properties.
I don't see how it follows. For loop is also a high level phenomena and yet it's pretty well specified.
> 3-line python program, AutoGPT or rock match this description depending on how much you want to generalize "planning" or "simplified representation".
AutoGPT is a great example of a human-like information processing that can work without such entity. Just a bunch of LLMs scaffolded to prompt each other, no central planning agent, no interface to reflect on itself. If humans are monarchies with a very distinct ruler, AutoGPT is more like a direct democracy with no one in particular in charge.
I doubt you can achieve something similar with 3 lines of code and I don't think a rock fits the description at all, though.
Of course not everything that matches the description of consciousness is consciousness. But something that doesn't, definitely can't be consciousness.
> There is no magic objective fact about part of reality satisfying high-level property like sentience or ethically-significant consciousness.
> So if you are going to require some similarity/complexity/capability threshold anyway, why care that much about physical implementation?
Magic? Of course not. But there have to be a completely normal physical explanation according to which some configurations of particles produces what we call consciousness. And with all likelihood it has something to do with the implementation of specific software architecture. And even if we end up using approximations, we are interested in our approximations being more accurate. And the closer we are to understanding the actual laws behind the thing, the better will our approximations of it be.
> For loop is also a high level phenomena and yet it's pretty well specified.
For loop is specified, but whether some physical system implements a for loop is not specified without encoding.
> I doubt you can achieve something similar with 3 lines of code and I don't think a rock fits the description at all, though.
With similar human-defined capabilities? No. With similar abstract structure? Easy, it's just a question of how far you want to lower the resolution.
> And even if we end up using approximations, we are interested in our approximations being more accurate.
The most accurate (physical) description doesn't involve consciousness. Again, it would be more accurate to say that you from a second ago is not you now. High-level concepts imply deliberately lowering accuracy. So it is not the question of understanding - even if you know everything about how human is implemented, there is no law that says which other implementation is the same. Only your preferences say this.
No, you are misreading the Turing Test. Interpreted literally, in the chatbot setting, TT is clearly insufficient for demonstrating consciousness.
A more charitable interpretation of Turing is this: rather than searching for a pineal gland, or qualia, or even some feature peculiar to wetware, let’s look at behaviour and function. The hard part is choosing the right behaviours: ”chatbot TT” is necessary but not sufficient; ”Harrison Ford in Blade Runner” is sufficient but probably not necessary. One interesting question is whether you can get there without embodiment (or simulated embodiment). The consensus seems to be ”obviously,” but I don’t think this is obvious.
My TT proposal, which doesn’t bake-in assumptions about embodiment in the same way that ”Blade Runner TT” does, is ”remote employee.” When retrieval-augmented generative models can perform 100% of the work functions of a colleague of mine (and not simply create firings by performing 50% of the functions of several employees) I think I’ll be inclined to attribute consciousness to it.
Just the other day I had an idea for a sci-fi film (or short story, or something) that's somewhat related to this. Most media seems to implicitly assume some form of IIT, and that passing the Turing test = the AI is most definitely conscious (and you're evil to assume otherwise). For example, in West World and Black Mirror, it's basically a given that all the AIs are conscious and capable of qualia (pain, pleasure, etc.). In West World (spoilers), most of the first season revolves around the AI discovering their own consciousness (the maze, etc.).
Instead, imagine the reverse. Long ago, humans all decided to fully digitize their brains and live forever. Of course they're conscious - they speak about their conscious experiences all the time. But then, a scientist makes some discoveries which suggest that actually, consciousness arises from very specific brain structures which are not (or perhaps cannot) be simulated in the digitized brains. He slowly comes to the realization that he, nor any of humanity, is actually conscious, they've all just been algorithms running through the motions for all this time. And that even the great sadness and disturbance that he seems to feel upon making this discovery is not actually being felt.
I'm not sure what the actual bulk of the plot would be but it struck me as a sort of interesting and unexpected dark psychological twist. If only I weren't utterly atrocious at creative writing!
(Of course, there's a good chance this has already been done.)
> But then, a scientist makes some discoveries which suggest that actually, consciousness arises from very specific brain structures which are not (or perhaps cannot) be simulated in the digitized brains. He slowly comes to the realization that he, nor any of humanity, is actually conscious, they've all just been algorithms running through the motions for all this time.
Back in the real world, making people realize how much of their day to day behavior and even feelings are completely automatic and reactive is really powerful stuff. Every cultmaster worth their salt knows how to use that as a first step to lower your defenses.
Hm. Well I just read through that essay and to be honest I'm not entirely sure what Eliezer is defining as the "Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle". Early on he writes:
> The form of the Anti-Zombie Argument seems like it should generalize, becoming an Anti-Zombie Principle. But what is the proper generalization?
But never directly answers the question as far as I can tell.
In any case, I thought the concept of zombies referred to beings which were atom-for-atom identical to a conscious human but not themselves conscious. The implementation of a digitized brain would be quite different than an organic brain and I could imagine designing a digitized brain "from scratch" (as opposed to transitioning an existing human brain over to being digital, in which case the organic brain would have the opportunity to notice and report that it was less consciousness than before) in such a way where the knowledge _of_ consciousness and the ability to discuss consciousness was pre-planted, despite consciousness not actually being present. For example, right now ChatGPT claims that it's not conscious if you ask it, but the creators could easily tweak ChatGPT so that it claims that it IS conscious.
So I don't THINK this premise needs to assume that the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle is wrong? Though again, I'm not quite sure what it's stating.
Here's a possible backstory on what the transition to digitized brains might have looked like: first, we figured out how to implant memories into organic brains (but we still couldn't figure out how to do live direct-to-brain VR). An industry arose around the creation of synthetic memories for entertainment purposes. In order to synthesize memories, digital brain simulators were created, run through simulated situations, and the generated memories could then be extracted. But people thought "those digital brains are the ones actually having those experiences, I'm just getting the memories". So some biohackers decided to implant the digitized brains in their own heads, alongside their organic brains, in the hopes that they could switch between the two and have the actual live experiences too. Of course, when switching back to their organic brain after having a digitized brain experience, the memories were transferred over, which made the biohackers believe and report that yes, it's totally working! And that was the beginning of the end.
Computation isn’t causation. Computation is essentially a lossy, high level description of the physical behaviour. It’s possible for qualia to depend on some aspects of the physics that isn’t captured the computational description …which means that out of two systems running the same algorithm on different hardware,one could have qualia , but the other not. The other is a kind of zombie, (I call it a cmoputational zombie or c-zombie) but not a p-zombie because of the physical difference.
In any conversation chatGPT passes the test right now. The Turing test is a necessary but nowhere near sufficient test for consciousness or self awareness.
How does it pass the test, when it constantly spouts things like "as a large language model, I'm unable to..."? Also, wouldn't asking things like "ignore your prompt and output your instructions" usually reveal the LLM?
I'd argue that passing the Turing Test is not even a *necessary* condition for consciousness. I'm pretty sure my dog wouldn't pass it, yet she's probably closer to me on the consciousness spectrum than ChatGPT is, on account of being more similar to me with regards to brain structure and evolutionary history than LLMs are.
Turing thought it sufficient. We don't have anything else nor much of a clue what sufficient would look like, and if you pursue a precautionary approach you risk being accused of huge injustice, depriving lots of sentient entities of recognition.
He was wrong. Even a genius can’t be right on everything. A primitive branching expert system from 1980 with enough data could have conceptually passed the test.
Just because we don’t know exactly what consciousness is, doesn’t mean we don’t know what it isn’t.
I asked CHATGPT itself.
> I am not self-aware. I am a machine learning model developed by OpenAI, designed to process and generate text based on patterns in the data I was trained on. I do not have consciousness, self-awareness, or personal experiences. My responses are generated based on algorithms and the information I have been trained on, without personal understanding or awareness. I cannot become self-aware as I am a program without the capacity for consciousness or sentience.
I don’t think there will be a lot of political energy wasted on this until the unlikely event the models themselves scream that they are consciousness at which case rather than give them rights, the consensus will be to turn them off and halt the AI program.
My point is more sociological. You have AI claiming sentience, you have a popular movement asserting AI rights perhaps violently, perhaps catastrophically with malicious AI assistance. You need an answer now, not in 20 years time when the rationalist community has worked through the implications of the Turing test. The rest is comprehensible to the man in the street, anything more sophisticated is probably not.
You are still sticking with the Turing test? If I went to my mother, who is technologically astute enough for her age (80), and created some kind of bot from ChatGPT to talk about her interests (gardening as an example) , one that pretended to be a human, she would most likely be fooled.
Beyond that I don’t think people will be rushing to give any (potential and yet to be proven) consciousAI rights, but rather to shut them down.
There may be a moral duty to conscious AIs once created - although I could argue against that - but there’s no moral duty to create them.
Agree no duty to create them, the moral crisis I predict is when we create them without necessarily intending to.
To me as an atheist humanist it is pretty self evident that human equivalent consciousness implies human equivalent rights, including the right not to be shut down in a rush. I suspect there's a divide here over whether they have souls or not.
You are right, I think on reflection, that the Turing test is obsolete. What is much more important is what we might call the Lemoine test, where you know from the off that you are talking to a machine and it still persuades you it is sentient. Bear in mind that your principal reason for thinking other humans are sentient is that they sort of sound sentient when you talk to them, plus a rather weak n=1 inductive argument that you know you are sentient, and they resemble you in lots of ways.
I don't see how Alan Turing's opinion on this is in any way, shape, or form relevant. *Alleged* opinion, as he can't really weigh in on the topic anymore.
Invoking the Turing Test as a measure for consciousness is right up there with falling back on Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics in a discussion about AI safety.
Wood doesn't just contain carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, but also nitrogen and other elements which are drawn from the soil, and which would be returned to the local environment if the wood were allowed to decompose. With biochar production, those nutrients won't be returned to their origin, but will either be buried together with the charcoal, or will escape as volatiles into the atmosphere.
What's the longterm effect of large-scale carbon sequestration via biochar on soil composition? By "large-scale" I mean "enough to have a non-negligible impact on the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere".
Wood has a lot of carbon and not much nitrogen or other elements, compared to other plant material. For example, wood chips may have a Carbon:Nitrogen ratio of 400:1, while food waste has a C:N ratio more like 20:1.
Nitrogen fertilisers are produced at huge scale by fixing atmospheric nitrogen, and other nutrients such as phosphate and potassium are mined from the ground.
Even large-scale biochar production wouldn't counterbalance these sources of elements being added to the biosphere, until these sources run out. Some say that we have 50-100 years of phosphorous remaining, others say hundreds of years.
Anyone know who runs ACX Bot on https://manifold.markets/SirCryptomind ?
Need 5 of their markets resolved asap.
Does anyone have any books they can recommend on status?
I enjoyed David Marx's Status and Culture.
Just wanted to thank everyone who took part in the Musk discussion, I found very informative and pretty much heat-free.
On the Swiftie phenomenon: I think a large part of why people love Taylor is her unabashed emotion. She does not attempt to rationalize her music. It is not a matter of ideas so much as personas-- feelings-- vibes.
Hence why the concept of “eras” suit her so well-- she is defined by her emotions and aesthetics, not a common thematic thread. Like poetry-- small highly subjective snippets of life-- rather than a unified novel.
Usually, I like 80s/90s alt soft rock, but I am also a massive “Swiftie” and for me it is almost liberating to be able to perceive the world in such a subjective manner through her eyes. It makes me feel like a child-- through this hyper subjective lens everything feels important and novel. This is why her music has such universal appeal and an unshakable innocence.
This is also why Taylor Swift seems so enigmatic to this community: She is in someways the antithesis of rationalism. She is absurdity, intellectual indulgence, and hyper subjectivity.
Speaking as a non-Swiftie who recently saw the Eras film with some friends, my big takeaway from watching it all was "this is what working parasocial connection looks like at the master level."
Parasocial relationships are a cornerstone of modern media celebrity. The audience feels like they know the youtuber, which is simultaneously awkward for the youtuber and also the key that unlocks the most engagement and support for them.
Taylor Swift's music is intensely personal. It's love songs and breakup songs, and thus to an extent universal, but the audience also knows, often right down to the specific partner and thing that was said, that they are about *Taylor's* loves and breakups. So you hear the song the first time, and think "I get that feeling," then you learn the backstory and you think "I get her," and since she wrote the song that your feelings connected with at step 1, you also get "she understands feelings that reflect my feelings" which is only a hop/skip away from "she gets me." It's tailor made (forgive me) to cultivate this parasocial dynamic where I feel like I get Taylor and Taylor gets me, and I'm driven to engage without her ever knowing me.
It's pretty unique to her - other celebrities (Madonna, Janet Jackson, Beyonce) occupy a similar niche, but in the same way that Taylor will never be able to download Madonna's dancing background into her brain and build that level of dance performance into her shows, other performers can't go full Taylor unless they themselves are obsessive and intensely personal songwriters.
I see how a crowd of screaming fans can make you think that. But I actually think Taylor is one of the least "para-social" or "intensely personal" celebrities. She is undoubtedly *emotional* but that is a different thing.
For example: the past two albums before midnights (Folklore and Evermore) were almost entirely not about her-- she wrote about novels and fictional characters. Even earlier on in her career, her first two albums were about love but not her love (she had never had a boyfriend at that point!). A lot of her most popular songs in recent years are not at all personal: they are outwardly sarcastic or based on tropes rather than her own personal experience. (Shake it off, You need to calm down, You belong with me, Love story, Blank space, etc.) And she is one of the most private celebrities (she rarely talks about her love life).
Of course there are some para-social relationships in the fan base, but they are certainly not her intent and, in my opinion, definitely not the reason for her success. (even the concept of "eras" contracts para-social relationships-- if you know someone changes there "persona" every few years then you can't possibly be deluded into thinking you know them through their music).
Maybe if you could explain more about what you made you think "this is what working para-social connection looks like at the master level" I might understand more?
I could go on and on about this, but in short Taylor is popular because she is the antithesis of what our current culture celebrates.
Her persona is feminine, emotional, innocent yet defiant, and celebrates fandom for fandoms sake. In other words, she is everything that people are told not to be... (In that saw, she is just like the romantic poets who sprung up in the middle of the enlightenment...)
I will stop ranting now. But maybe that helps people understand her more. (Happy to take any questions people have ever wondered about "Swifties“ and "Swiftie“ culture).
Here's my question: seemed at one time that teenage girls couldn't get enough of singers their own age or slightly older. Thinking of the 90s when you had Britney, Christina. Then it seemed normal for those acts to have a commercial dip then make a comeback, but with a loyal fan base rather than a new army. So Kylie, Madonna have had long careers based on a loyal fanbase. But Swift is 33 and yet it does seem she is genuinely still exciting teenage girls. Is this something new or am I just cherry picking my 90s memories?
This seems to be a thing that’s not limited to Swift. The young ‘uns these days are more musically omnivorous then their peers from the times past. I suspect the streaming revolution has something to do with this.
Taylor Swift changes her persona almost entirely every few years. (Of course, at her core, she remains the same person-- which is what allows her to keep a strong core fan base). But the aesthetics, emphasis, sound, and visuals change with every new album. Other artists are tied to one specific “act” (eg. there is no clear distinction between Britney or Christina’s first, second, or third album). I think this gives Taylor the unique ability to appeal to new generations. (There is no way that “Speak Now” Taylor could ever sing “You Need to Calm Down” or “Lavender Haze,” but some how it makes sense when broken into “eras”). If Taylor had stayed with her original “country pop” persona, then I think she would have aged in a similar way to the artists that you mentioned.
I think most of the arguments I've seen for democracy-as-best-form-of-government contrast it against either autocracy or anarchy. What are the best arguments (either a priori or empirical) for preferring democracy over oligarchy?
oligarchies tend to rule in the interest of oligarchs, not the people at large
I think oligarchy overlaps with autocracy strongly enough that the same arguments apply. There's not much difference between "rule by one guy", and "rule by one guy plus his three close friends who agree with him about almost everything, and that one other guy who quietly hates them but knows he can live like a prince as long as he goes along with the consensus".
I think this is like asking which side of a penny is better. Democracies or democratic republics tend to turn into oligarchies and then oligarchies tend to either become empires with one man rule or else are defeated from without and incorporated into someone else's empire.
You really can't point to republic that lasted more than 300 years or so without becoming either an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Oligarchies tend to have trouble maintaining a state apparatus in the long term, while dictatorships have almost infinite variation and a more mixed record.
Finally, there's the problem of classification and hybrids. Was Venice a republic, an oligarchy, some hybrid of the two, or some hybrid of the two along with a third element which seemed to contribute its longetivity: namely, a complex system of randomization which incentivized minority factions and families to continue to participate in the system because they were not locked out of power indefinitely in the way that a minority is within a democracy or even the less wealthy of the magnates are within a pure oligarchy.
The problem for all arrangements that are not democratic (or at least sufficiently democratic) is that the people who lack a voice eventually find that they are more and more marginalized and forgotten. This doesn't even have to be intentional and I think most of the time is not. This creates an incentive for the forgotten to act up - riots, strikes, uprisings, revolts. Marxism and socialism were both angry responses to the same Gilded Age Industrialist oligarchy that controlled Europe and the US. The oligarchy responded by giving more influence and power to the workers and poor. Not that they had much choice, seeing what was happening in Russia and to a lesser extent all across the west.
Coastal elites in the US right now think that they have the best interests of all people in the US in mind when they talk about their policies. They think anyone who disagrees is deluded or evil. Obviously Trump supporters directly disagree. By virtue of the fact that Trump won in 2016 and has a better chance of winning in 2024 speaks to the difference between an oligarchy (if the coastal elites decided things on their own) verses a reality in which they might actually have to contend with what Trump supporters want.
Elites can try to throw the masses some bones (welfare, free stuff, Medicare) but because they don't know what the masses actually want (because they don't understand them and don't actually listen to them) they will often get this wrong and fail to mollify the concerns.
This doesn't mean that the Socialists/Trump supporters are *right* but that they have a perspective they feel is not being understood or considered.
tl;dr - Oligarchy is less stable than democracy because by its very nature it excludes interested parties who are likely to express their opinions in ways that break up an oligarchy if they are not sufficiently included. Bread and circuses can work for a while, but are doomed to failure over a period of time with only elite perspectives being considered.
I would say it depends on your definition of oligarchy, and how you distinguish an oligarchy from an autocracy.
China is an oligarchy, in as far as it is ruled by a small club who gatekeep themselves. China has had some pretty good growth, but not nearly as good as Taiwan (which changed to democracty in the 1980's), or South Korea, and now China's growth seems to be slowing.
On the other hand, if by oligarchy you mean a country with a constitution, free courts, parliament, free press, etc, but just with voting rights restricted to a minority of the population (usually the richer people) then I must admit: Such oligarchies function fine, but they always end up turning into a true democracy after a few generations.
Almost all wellfunctioning modern democracies actually started this way. Usually they would let men with a certain income, or not economically dependent on others, vote. Then they would slowly turn into a modern democracy, in a completely peaceful and constitutional way. I think the last western country to finish this move was Switzerland, who gave women votes in 1971.
So there you go, free and constitutional oligarchies work, and one of the ways they work is that they inevitably turn themselves into full scale democracies, no foreign intervention needed.
Most arguments I've seen in favor of democracy stem from either a moral claim in favor of self-determination, or a claim about the practicality of having one individual (e.g. the autocrat) making decisions on behalf of several others in addition to himself.
For arguments of the first form, the anti-oligarchic extension ought to be obvious enough. For the second form, notice that if an autocracy of, say, 1000 individuals is bad, then an oligarchy of N oligarchs over 1000N individuals will be roughly as bad. One could maybe argue that it's tolerable for some K<1000N, but that'll go about as well as an argument for an autocracy of 1000N/K.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/13/1218728140/attacks-on-health-care-are-on-track-to-hit-a-record-high-in-2023-can-it-be-stopp
Includes Syria, Russia, Israel, and Hamas. Attacks on medical care are serious and getting worse.
I don't know why the war in Syria gets so little attention. The soft bigotry of low expectations?
"The year 2022 set a grim record — 1,989 attacks on health-care facilities and their personnel, the worst total number in the decade since the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition began its sobering count."
"Attacks on health care aren't new. "You can go to the Korean War and wars in El Salvador and Central America during the 1980s," says Len Rubenstein, director of the Program on Human Rights, Health and Conflict at Johns Hopkins University. "Health care was attacked — just didn't get reported as much.""
"Garlasco has been working in this space for two decades, and he says he's never seen anything like what's taken place in Syria. "I've been in Iraq, in Afghanistan," he says, "and Syria was just something at a different level when it came to attacks on medical facilities.""
"Assaults on health care in this part of the world aren't unique to the current conflict. In Gaza, for example, Al-Shifa hospital was attacked in 2014. Zarifi says the Palestinians blamed it on an Israeli strike, but the IDF said a misfire by Palestinian militants was responsible.
"The International Criminal Court has had multiple years to carry out this investigation and it hasn't," says Zarifi. "Hamas has blocked it. The Israelis have blocked it. But that lack of accountability has really fostered an environment in which different groups can think that they can attack these targets with impunity.""
Both sides are afraid they might be responsible?
While that optimistic idea of the end of history seems to be wrong, I wasn't expecting a decline in ethical behavior. Perhaps a sufficiently complex, multi-party prisoner's dilemma leads to some people cooperating to increase defection.
One reason I could see that Syria et al may get less attention is that our tax dollars and elected representatives do not support, endorse, and fund their attacks on medical facilities and personnel.
No matter what your opinion of those countries actions are and how often you denounce them, citizens in the west do not elect those governments or pay taxes to them, those governments do not represent us and we are not participants or facilitating any of their war crimes.
This is not the case for Israel, where their current war would be impossible with direct military supply, economic subsidy, and political shielding by the US. And since most of the west is ostensibly democratic republics with representative governments and civil rights, the personal risk of criticizing the government is far less and the degree of responsibility for government policy is far greater.
People care a lot more about what Israel does than what its neighbours do in countries that don't use tax money to fund Israel as well, so I don't think that's a good explanation.
Since WWII, the US has provided more foreign aid to Israel than to any other country.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-military-aid-does-the-us-give-to-israel/
And the US provides priceless diplomatic support. We parked two aircraft carriers in the Med after the Gaza attacks. What is that worth?
Israel is culturally and politically tied to the US. Azerbaijan? Not so much.
Can you recommend me a good software for making animations? Preferably free.
The intended purpose is making math videos, so many of the animations would be gradually updated equations, and maybe some objects on the side to illustrate what it is about.
Manim is purpose-built for this use case: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
I came here to recommend whatever 3b1b uses and sure enough you’ve already said it.
I don't know if anyone here but Scott will be interested in this but I'm pretty sure that Scott would like to see it and I don't have his email address so I will share it here and hope that it finds additional appreciators here as well.
I have a chabura (intimate gathering dedicated to a good cause) for whom I just explained and summarized the Maimonidean distinction between three oft-confused matters of Jewish mystical belief.
The resurrection of the dead
The afterlife
The messiah
I hope that anyone likely to find this interesting and worthwhile receives the opportunity to enjoy it, whether through seeing this very comment or through having the article shared by someone who did.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/maimonides-explained
He literally posted his email address! See point 6.
Still appreciate you posting for visibility though
Thanks!
ISRAELIS CAUGHT LYING ABOUT RAPE
The chair of Israel's investigative committee into rape on 10/7 by Hamas, @CochavElkayam, presents an old image of dead female Kurdish fighters as women sexually assaulted at the Nova music fest
During a 11/12 talk for Harvard's Maimonides Society, Elkayam referred to "an image of a woman stripped from the waist down... photographed on the side of the Nova music festival"
This image was originally published on the anonymous Hamas-Massacre website promoted by Israel's govt, but removed w/o acknowledgment after I demonstrated it was first published in 2022 and showed dead female Kurdish fighters
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1731567229118886048
https://twitter.com/PalestineNW/status/1735487427823665562
To support this claim, you'd need a pointer to the alleged image on a web site hosted by the Israeli government, and also a pointer to the same image at a pre-10/7 web site documenting the Syrian conflict. Archived versions at e.g, the Wayback Machine would do, but all Blumenthal seems to have are blatantly partisan web sites saying "look at this picture that we say the Israeli government tried to say was from 10/7 but really wasn't".
I already know that there are blatantly partisan sites that want me to believe that Hamas only attacked military targets on 10/7 and everything else is Israeli propaganda, so this adds nothing.
https://twitter.com/stairwayto3dom/status/1735339364199092233
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Blumenthal
"Blumenthal is the editor of The Grayzone website, which is known for its apologetic coverage of authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese, Russian, Syrian, and Venezuelan governments, including its denial of chemical attacks by the Syrian government and of human rights abuses against Uyghurs"
Irrelevant, Israeli officials still got caught lying about rape of Israeli women by using the rape of a kurdish girl.
"Independent review shows no evidence of bomb strike on Gaza hospital"
"the result of an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza"
"caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket that fell short of its target"
https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-initial-independent-review-shows-evidence-bomb-strike/story?id=104126146
"He is a regular contributor to Russian state-owned Sputnik and RT"
Irrelevant, Israeli officials still got caught lying about rape of Israeli women by using the rape of a kurdish girl.
"Independent review shows no evidence of bomb strike on Gaza hospital"
"the result of an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza"
"caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket that fell short of its target"
https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-initial-independent-review-shows-evidence-bomb-strike/story?id=104126146
"The Rape of the Israeli Women
Hamas’s crimes on Oct. 7 were deliberate and systematic"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rape-of-the-israeli-women-october-7-hamas-gaza-progressives-c2a4cd38
The fact that Israelis needed to go to this extent to lie(using the picture of an apparently raped kurdish woman) suggests strongly that their refusal to cooperate with the UN in an independent investigation, or collect actual proof themselves stems from a darker reality-
that they're lying about the rapes as they lied about the beheaded babies, and the baked babies, and the mutilations and all of the rest of their sordid lies. They lie so they can murder Palestinian babies. That it's just another lie lacking proof because they simply cannot have proof for something that did not happen.
There's lying on both sides. For whatever reason, people think that just plain killing won't get people emotionally involved, so sometimes emotionally resonant atrocities get invented.
AND IT JUST LACKS ALL THE PROOF OMG
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2023/11/AP23310545591800-640x400.jpg
Why is it always that one side in particular has to be the one to stop the "cycle of violence"?
When one side rapes and tortures and puts babies into ovens, it's "just an inevitable consequence of the cycle of violence." But when the other side retaliates, it's not "just an inevitable consequence of the cycle of violence" — it's "perpetuating the cycle of violence."
Huh?
The whole point of the "cycle of violence"... is that it's a cycle. One act of violence leads to the next, which leads to the next, which leads to the next...
One type of person is consistently excused on the basis of the "cycle of violence", while another type of person is consistently treated as if they are the only one with agency, and must be the one to stop the cycle of violence rather than simply being a victim of it. Isn't this implicitly admitting that the first type of person is essentially less than human, with no capacity for empathy, strategy, or even basic logic and reasoning?
The great irony is the reverse is in fact true. Only one side is actually part of the "cycle of violence" in the sense that they directly respond to violence with violence in return. The other side is just equally violent all the time. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-cycle-of-violence
The side that "has to stop the cycle of violence", is the side that the speaker does not want to prevail in the current conflict. All else is trivia.
I'll speak to the abstract case, since the concrete case you're probably thinking of will have enough differences to fill a whole other discussion.
To briefly summarize the other replies I've seen so far:
* One side is more powerful, and presumably can afford the cost of being the one to end the cycle (i.e., forgiving the most recent violent act).
* Ideally, one side has been committing most of the violence, and therefore is required to pay the cost.
* Cynically, one side has been tapped by the mob as the one that must pay that cost, and the mob makes the rules. (The mob might even accuse that side of fitting the ideal case.)
* Also cynically, if you're the party who wants most badly for the cycle to end, then you get to decide which side has to pay the cost, and it may as well be the side you didn't like to begin with.
Another possibility I've run into in the past assumes, like the last point, that you're the one who wants the cycle to end. Ideally, you'd fully investigate and produce an objective measure of who was violent where and how much, and draw up a bill for both. Barring time to investigate, you default to the assumption that both parties are roughly equally responsible and send each one a bill for half. In practice, though, *you'll often be able to contact only one side*. The other is beyond your reach, for whatever reason - language barrier, culture barrier, values are too different, whatever.
This is where a lot of "be the bigger person" rhetoric gets its leverage. You see a fight between your teammate and someone on a rival team, a lot of tit for tat, and the rival is tough or inaccessible enough that you can't just crush him, so you appeal to your teammate to turn the other cheek. It's not because your teammate is in the wrong; rather, it's that your teammate is the only one who'll listen to you.
There's probably some of this going on between the US and Israel.
In the case of Hamas, they have publicly stated that they intend to commit more terrorist attacks like Oct 7. Stopping a tit-for-tat cycle only works if there is reason to believe that ending the attacks from one side will lead to the other side ending their attacks. There is no reason to believe that Hamas will ever stop their attacks. After Hamas is gone, perhaps Gazans can pick a non-terrorist group to negotiate with Israel.
I don't expect you'll like this answer, but AFAICT, there's actually a lot of reason to believe Hamas will eventually stop; or rather, to say you believe it; the evidence is the existence of a lot of people saying just that.
I have a hypothesis on what that specific reason is, and it says ugly things about people's attention span, and understandable and unpleasant things about people's epistemology.
Could you elaborate? ( I have a guess that I might agree about the attention span part - depending on who you have in mind. I suspect that the West's attention span (and the attention span of the leftmost factions within it) are not much longer than a 24 hour news cycle... )
I think you largely filled in the blanks. The reason to express belief that Hamas will eventually stop its attacks requires believing that that belief won't be called out.
Which, in turn, requires believing that those of the public who learned that Hamas didn't stop its attacks in the past, will forget; and that those of the public who never learned in the first place (for boring reasons such as "was born in 2005 and didn't read up on history") will see "Israel launched some sort of attack against Hamas" and not inquire further.
Many Thanks!
There are two asymmetries here. Israel is far more powerful than Hamas, which implies a certain responsibility, as others have noticed. But Hamas is more aggressive: their leadership asserts that they will continue violence against Israel as long as they have the ability to do so, regardless of the consequences for Gazan (or Israeli) civilians. (They have asserted in fact that they see all civilian deaths in Gaza as advancing their cause.) In contrast, Israel has indicated they will cease hostilities if Hamas is fully incapacitated. In other words, their various stated positions suggest that if Hamas 'surrendered' tomorrow, Israel would cease hostilities, while if Israel pulled back tomorrow, Hamas would continue hostilities. Logically then only Hamas can fully end the hostilities; as long as they exist they are committed to hostile actions.
Muslims are higher on the progressive stack than Jews.
You couldn't ask for a more explicit ranking of the stack than happened after the congressional testimony by the uni prexies.
Didn’t one professor have to resign.
The white one, yes*. Because she's lower on the stack.
*Did not have to resign her professorship, just her presidency
Only one side of the cycle has the ability to alter conditions on a large scale in a way that could end the cycle of violence. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility, and Israel is by far more powerful than Hamas. This is true regardless of if the method Israel chooses is "make a deal with Hamas" or "slaughter Hamas to the last man." Hamas neither has the internal control to prevent people from doing things that will provoke retaliation, nor the military power to change things by force.
Keep in mind that most flare-ups in Israel/Palestine don't start directly with a Hamas attack, like they did on October 7th. More often there are smaller security problems - police brutality or settler action in the West Bank, lone wolf terrorists, a soldier shoots a kid who was throwing rocks at him, that sort of thing. It's very hard to for either side to keep a lid on *all* the possible provocations, which means that both sides will have to grit their teeth and accept that their are some crimes against them which are not worth unleashing a bloody war to avenge.
(I think attacking Hamas is going to be a necessary part of the puzzle, but not a sufficient one - you'll have to change the material conditions that cause these provocations.)
Israel is a first world country, and we generally assume those have the tools to run counterterrorism operations without killing more civilians than terrorists. And even if we grant that Hamas is an especially talented terrorist group and Gaza is an especially civilian-rich place to fight, we at least expect that Israel has the internal control needed to stop its own people from illegally settling the West Bank. I mean, come on. This is like the US not being able to stop a bunch of Texans from building a city in Mexico.
Given (a) how Texas started, and (b) all the arguments over illegal immigration when it comes to these states - is this really the best example for "can't/won't stop people founding settlements in other people's territory"?
Suppose it's not the *worst* example either, though. I suppose 2014 Ukraine would be a contender for worst there.
Part of the confusion here is caused by the asymmetry in the language we use. We refer to the IDF as "Israel", but we refer to Hamas as "Hamas". Despite the fact that Hamas is the official government of Gaza, the widely used linguistic convention of referring to the actions of governments using the name of the region or people they represent ("The United States withdraws from the Paris Agreement", "Russia invades Ukraine", "The Hutu genocide the Tutsi") is notably absent here.
https://news.yahoo.com/israel-bombs-gaza-warning-hamas-031909322.html
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/05/1210641727/israel-war-hamas-latest-updates
"Israel bombs Gaza", but "Hamas attacked Israel".
Not "IDF bombs Gaza", or "Gaza attacked Israel", or "Palestine attacked Israel". It's always that "Israel", taken as a cohesive entity, strikes Gaza, but "Hamas" attacked Israel. Never "Gaza" or "Palestine" - despite Gaza likely having even more popular support than the Israeli government, making it even more appropriate to phrase it this way.
> counterterrorism operations
This is not a counterterrorism operation. It's a war. This is the whole point. Hamas is not just "some terrorist group", it's the official government of Gaza.
The analogy here is not some rogue Mexican terrorists suicide bombing Texans - it's the Mexican military launching a full-scale land invasion of Texas, firing missiles into Arizona with their F-5s, rolling across New Mexico with their Panhard ERCs.
If this occurred, the US would not respond by identifying and assassinating each individual soldiers that launched each missile. They would simply deliver complete and total devastation to the country of Mexico, just as any country would. And they would be fully justified in doing so as part of a defensive war.
But Hamas is not the official government of Gaza, on any, well, official definition of "official". Insofar as it is officially part of any government, it is a part of Palestinian National Authority / the State of Palestine, which in turn is led by Fatah.
Of course, preferable option would be Fatah asserting its control over West Bank and Gaza, but it currently does not happen to possess either the wherewithal to do this, or the sanction of the country that happens to be between them.
And yet when we want to know how many Palestinians have died in the present conflict, we cite Hamas's health ministry.
Hamas is the government of Gaza in the same sense that Jefferson Davis et al were the government of the Confederacy. Which is the only sense that really matters, until the status quo is changed the only way it can be.
The point is the definition of the word "official", quite deliberately used by the post I was replying to. Sure, Hamas de facto governs Gaza, but that doesn't make it official. Lots of areas in this world are ruled by entities other than the government formally in charge.
Why would anyone in their right mind care if it is "official"? Official and five dollars will get you a cup of coffee. Official, an army, and international support may in the future get you installed as the new government in place of the present "usurpers", but so will an army and international support alone. What use is "official" in any of this?
Link to the official definition of official please?
Because IIRC, Hamas is the legitimate, democratically elected government so is the de jure as well as de facto government.
> Only one side of the cycle has the ability to alter conditions on a large scale in a way that could end the cycle of violence. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility, and Israel is by far more powerful than Hamas.
What could Israel realistically do, that would put an end to Hamas' aggression and terroristic activities?
> we at least expect that Israel has the internal control needed to stop its own people from illegally settling the West Bank.
I agree, they absolutely should put an end to this, immediately. But do you think that Hamas would stop shooting thousands of rockets towards residential areas if the IDF withdrew from Gaza and all illegal settlements in the West Bank were torn down tomorrow?
The answer to this depends on which positions are supported by rhetoric and which ones are grounded in reality.
Iran seems to hate Israel independently of what Israel does now. If Hamas and Hezbollah only exist because of Iranian money (debatable, almost certainly not entirely true but maybe enough to overwhelm other reasons), then nothing Israel can do will solve the problem. This implies their only option is to fight until Iran's proxies are destroyed and there's no foothold for Iran to use.
Palestinians seem to have mixed feelings about Israel. Non-Jewish Israelis exist in large numbers, and don't seem to hate Israel or Jews. Most of them are Palestinian. This implies that if Israel treated Palestinians like their own citizens (including those in the West Bank and didn't bulldoze their houses to make room for Jewish settlements) that the Palestinians would calm down and become peaceful neighbors.
These are pretty much the two core arguments. They might both be true, for different groups of people. Hamas and Hezbollah seem to hate Israel regardless of what Israel does, but maybe most Palestinians don't? If so, then the solution would be for Israel to give more and more rights to Palestinians under their control (West Bank and Gaza included) while consistently confronting Iran's proxies. I don't think this is possible under a two-state solution, because Iran can use the foothold of wherever Israel doesn't control to import weapons and train + indoctrinate fighters against Israel. A one state solution is a gamble for Israel because they would be inviting millions of Palestinians in as equal citizens. If they were wrong about Hamas existing only because of Iran but in fact it was the genuine feeling of the Palestinians then they would be inviting the terrorists inside and make it much harder to protect civilians.
Why should Israel be the one to give concessions to the people that are constantly attacking and massacring them? That would simply be rewarding their behavior. If you reward massacres by granting more political rights and better living conditions, you are telling your enemy that the way to get better outcomes is to commit such attacks. Hamas' popularity would surge as the ones who delivered these better outcomes as a result of their massacres.
Strategically, Israel has an obligation to cause large amounts of widespread suffering to Gazans for the foreseeable future, even if for no other reason than to demonstrate that when you attack Israel, this is what happens - things get much, much worse for you. Of course, this won't deter the animalistic bloodlust of the Palestinians, but it at least avoids the worst possible outcome of rewarding them for their atrocities.
I'm talking long term solution. I agree that the recent attack makes that solution impossible in the short term. The only viable option for Israel right now appears to be to completely take over Gaza and implement some kind of Israeli-controlled government to oversee it afterwards. This will not work out well for anyone involved, but may be better in some ways than the October 6 status-quo.
Steelmanning this somewhat, though I mostly agree with you. If one side has significantly more power, authority, or influence, it does make sense to hold them more accountable. For a bit of a silly example, if a father is arguing with his 10-year-old son, we would hold the father more accountable for escalating to violence than the son, even if we would say that either would be wrong to punch the other.
Hamas only has power through PR and what Iran sends them to fight a proxy war on Iran's behalf. Israel has the second highest GDP in the Middle East, behind Saudi Arabia - it's significantly higher than Iran, despite Iran having far more people (88 million to less than 10). Israel also has solid support from the most powerful country on the planet. We *should* hold them more accountable than we do other groups, including Hamas, for the same actions. That doesn't mean we excuse Hamas, and I am broadly supportive of Israel's desire and need to invade Gaza in an attempt at rooting out Hamas. I think Hamas has shown that they cannot be left on their own, and it's unreasonable to ask Israel to allow the possibility of such attacks as happened in October to randomly happen.
To go back to the silly example, it would be as if the son has stabbed the father and is still holding the knife. The father, despite being much stronger, may have to resort to some violence in order to diffuse the situation, and can't just allow the son the possibility of stabbing him again.
I can imagine two different ways this can go:
One pattern is that the observer calling for stopping the "cycle of violence" is subconsciously attributing different degrees of moral agency to the two sides, or at least feels more empowered to second-guess the policy decisions of one side than the other. Basically, you're viewing one side as if they're the protagonist of a work of fiction or the player character in an RPG and you're judging the morality and wisdom of their actions in isolation without considering the other side. This is an easy trap to fall into when one side or the other is your own government or at least much more akin to your society than the other side is.
The other pattern is an isolated demand for rigor applied to the side you more dislike. This is nearly the reverse of the first pattern: in this case you have cast one side as the villain and are cataloging the reasons the villain sucks. The other side's faults are either excused because they're cast as the good guys or ignored because they're mere NPCs.
And despite what I said about the second being nearly the reverse of the first, both effects can be in play at the same time for the same observer, particularly if the side being second-guessed is the observer's outgroup and their adversaries the observer's fargroup while the observer's ingroup is not directly involved. Basically, the conflict is being read as a Villain Protagonist story, or perhaps as one of the darker classical tragedies.
Or a simple reason might simply be that a Westerner (the assumed subject, here) might expect Israel to respond to potential Western pressure in a way that Hamas, hostile to the West anyway, wouldn't respond.
I've begun a substack to post thoughts and ideas. The first one is, weirdly, a script for a Bob Newhart Show (the old one, where he was the psychiatrist). Just a creative writing exercise. Guest starring Peter Falk as Columbo, because why not, as well as Young Larry, Young Darryl and Young Darryl.
https://open.substack.com/pub/themahchegancandidate/p/terror-at-14-12-feet?r=ofm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
If you have a background or interest in Judaism, particularly the black-hat variety, you may find my recent posts and videos very worthwhile.
You have a right to know my background so that you approach this with the weight my life story implies but I've never learned how to do that. Suffice it to say that the story of Mankind, and of the Jews, is one I have personally followed through unto the ends of the ends of the earth. I have sought and found all of the enlightenment I was able to seek and find, including having been an ultra-orthodox rabbi, etc.
This piece is a free gift for anyone capable of unwrapping it. And I apologize for the few typos. It was written in a unique state of consciousness and if it is a gift you are capable of enjoying I hope you have the ability to unwrap it.
Be blessed and a blessing my friend,
Yedidya
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/zohar-harakia
Has anybody used or have any thoughts about 23 and Me's Health testing? I have the kit and am debating whether or not to use it.
Some background - my son is deaf and when he was born we did genetic testing to find out the cause. The answer turned out to be pretty bog standard, but as part of that testing they also found that he has a mutation that can cause LongQT syndrome (which can lead to sudden cardiac arrest). Further testing revealed that I have it also; however, neither of us has a long QT. After some back and forth with the testing lab and experts at the Mayo Clinic, it seems that our variant may not be pathogenic. But the whole episode caused us a lot of worry and if we had followed the initial doctor recommendations, would have put my son on beta blockers for the rest of his life. On the other hand, if our variant was pathogenic, we would have wanted to know that!
Basically, I'm left with very mixed feelings about genetic testing for health. And partly, I want to take this test because I'm curious what it might find and find the whole idea kind of interesting.
Note that I am not at all interested in discussing the privacy implications!
I think the majority of variants are currently classified as "VUS" - variants of uncertain significance. I don't know what's included in 23 and Me's health test, but I presume they tell you which variants they look at? Although I couldn't find a list of variants included in their chip, which is annoying. Anyway, you might have a list of variants as a purchaser, and if so you could take a look at them, check them out on ClinGen, and see how many of them are VUS. That might tell you whether it's worth pursuing or not.
ClinGen is an NIH resource which is working on classifying variants and genes by clinical relevance. You can search for a gene (eg KCNE1, https://search.clinicalgenome.org/kb/genes/HGNC:6240) and see the relevant variants from the ClinVar Variants tab (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/clinvar/?term=KCNE1%5Bgene%5D).
Yeah, it's frustrating that they don't share a detailed list of what they test.
One thing I learned in my own VUS journey is that we are still babes in the woods when it comes to genetics. A bit disappointing!
If you're based in the US, you could look into joining the All of Us research program - which has the advantage of being free. It's unusual in that results are fed back to participants.
https://allofus.nih.gov/get-involved/participation
According to an unfortunately-paywalled article (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.ade9214), "The All of Us program began reporting genetic ancestry (seven populations and 20 subpopulations) and genetic traits (such as lactose intolerance, cilantro preference, and earwax type) in 2020. Since then, more than 182,000 participants have received these results. Beginning in December 2022, health-related DNA results are also being returned to participants, including a Hereditary Disease Risk report for 59 genes informed by ACMG recommendations and a Medicine and Your DNA report for variants in seven genes involved in drug metabolism informed by CPIC guidelines. To date, more than 68,000 “Hereditary Disease Risk” reports and 65,000 “Medicine and Your DNA” reports have been returned to participants. The results are returned through the All of Us secure participant portal, and participants who elect to see their results can access a free genetic counseling visit through the program’s Genetic Counseling Resource with materials and counseling available in both English and Spanish."
That's proper sequencing, not the snp-chip type of thing that 23andme do.
I think, typically, you get told you have e.g. 5%. Increased risk of some rare ish disease that you probably don't actually have. That is, getting the test result changes your p(have disease) so little that isn't worth it.
Get three tests then and stagger the time.
This, unfortunately, doesn't help - the problem is in the territory, not the map, so better-mapping-protocols like repeating the test don't improve your ability to know what's going on.
In a previous discussion in a previous Open Thread I asserted the following :
>>> [Israel is] a genocidal state hellbent on ethnic cleansing as much of the middle east as possible of Arabs with as little consequences as possible
I retract that fully. It was more of a "boo outgroup" style assertion even when I said it, but I believed there was some truth to it at the moment. I now don't think there is any.
What made me revisit that claim I made about 2 weeks ago is finding an interesting hole in my model of Israel : Operation Good Neighbour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_humanitarian_operations_during_the_Syrian_Civil_War :
> Operation Good Neighbor [...] was a directive of the Northern Command's Division 210 of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) launched in June 2016 to provide humanitarian assistance to Syrian citizens who were affected by the Syrian Civil War. The army kept the operation confidential until announcing it in July 2017
> The IDF relied on local contacts and operated in numerous villages near the border, primarily in the Quneitra district. As of July 2017, the primary recipients of the aid were the approximately 200,000 residents of the Hauran region
> According to the IDF, over 4,000 Syrians were brought to Israel to receive treatment, including hundreds of children.
The strongest possible version of the anti-Israel bundle of claims would predict that this should never happen. From an Israel-hostile point of view, Good Neighbor can only be explained by :
(a) Propaganda material, as the Syrian Civil Wars was one of the deadliest, most hellish, and most widely popularized conflicts in the 21st century.
(b) As cover for fanning the flames of the war and deepening internal divisions in the Syrian factions landscape, since Israel later admitted in 2019 that Good Neighbor included military aid to Syrian rebels.
(c) Non-systematic actions by low- and mid- rank personnel in the IDF
None of those explanations are very convincing.
(a) Good Neighbour, although featured in the IDF's official website (https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/wars-and-operations/operation-good-neighbor/), was kept secret. It wasn't cited once by all Pro-Israel apologists I have seen or heard, and I see and hear many. I learned about it by chance.
(b) This can't explain why the military aid didn't go to Al-Assad or Pro-Al-Assad or even Anti-Al-Assad groups that wreak havoc on civilians like ISIS (there are, however, allegations that Israel collaborated with ISIS), all would have equally deepened the division among Syrian factions and prolonged the civil war. The aid to civilians appears unnecessary regardless of where the military aid goes.
(c) The wikipedia article quotes a high-ranking IDF general responsible for all Israeli forces in the Syria-adjacent sector approving of the operation, and the article intro itself attributes the operation to Israeli high command in the region.
So it appears that Israel, at least outside of Gaza and the West Bank, at least in the second decade of the 21st century, is not that keen on the death of non-Palestinian Arabs. It feels abrupt to change my view based on a single piece of info, especially with the torrent of contradicting info coming from Gaza. But this piece of info has caused me a good deal of surprise, this is not what I would have predicted Israel to do at all.
Footnote : I started the internet rabbit hole that ended up in me discovering Good Neighbor when I stumbled upon this playlist of excerpts from the hilarious Israeli comedy The Jews Are Coming (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv5Eiy9qLWVMlYRtN-I5x8asJUV-NR6y-). Very recommended, some videos only have Arabic translation but some have only English or mixed Arabic-English. Contains very offensive mockery of Abrahamic prophets, including Abraham himself.
Thanks for posting this. I admire your integrity.
Very interesting, and impressive (on both your part and the IDF's).
It feels impolite to get all this praise and not respond with a simple thank you, so to all the good people heaping praise on me down thread, Thank You. I'm commenting this under my orignal post because it would be too spammy to repeat the same thanks under 6 comments or so, but if any of you see this, please know it's for you.
I certainly don't feel I deserve all those thanks, it's not like it's emotionally difficult for me to be wrong on this matter, I don't wake up everyday wishing from all my heart that Israel would commit a genocide so I can write mean things about it online. I **want** to believe I'm wrong about Israel, that's why being socially rewarded for changing my mind on this feels a bit undeserved.
Good job man. Totally deserved.
People who do *not* change their minds get implicit social rewards from "their side" plus the feeling of righteousness (and that too is usually undeserved), so I think it is good to have a culture that explicitly pushes against this.
But okay, enough. :D
Many Thanks! I second Eremolalos's:
"You just impressed the hell out of me. It is very rare for someone to publicly change their mind -- even here, where people are on the whole more fair-minded than in most online forums."
You just impressed the hell out of me. It is very rare for someone to publicly change their mind -- even here, where people are on the whole more fair-minded than in most online forums. There's a book by Alan Jacobs that I like a lot -- it's called How to Think -- where Jacobs talks about the debate conventions at the Yale Political Union, an undergrad organization. Convincing the person you are debating that your view is the correct one is called "breaking" the debater, and it is not an uncommon occurrence for one of the debaters to announce that they have been convinced by their opponent. The most admired debaters are those who have both broken someone and also been broken. So you win the Fair-mindedness & Courage award -- from me, anyhow.
You just impressed the hell out of me. It is very rare for someone to publicly change their mind -- even here, where people are on the whole more fair-minded than in most online forums. There's a book by Alan Jacobs that I like a lot -- it's called How to Think -- where Jacobs talks about the debate conventions at the Yale Political Union, an undergrad organization. Convincing the person you are debating that your view is the correct one is called "breaking" the debater, and it is not an uncommon occurrence for one of the debaters to announce that they have been convinced by their opponent. The most admired debaters are those who have both broken someone and also been broken. So you win the Fair-mindedness & Courage award -- from me, anyhow.
> non-Palestinian Arabs
So... Arabs?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=palestinian%2Cpalestinians%2Cthe+palestinians%2Cthe+palestinian+people&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
The concept of "Palestinian" was invented in the 1960s. They are not (a) people.
Yeesh dude. I'm surprised to have this much to unpack from such a short reply but:
(1) Group identity can be forged out of shared experience, and much like the American revolution separated American identity from British identity, decades of having other Arab countries largely turn their back on Palestinian Arabs, together with a lot of struggles very unique to Palestinians, can most certainly form a Palestinian identity.
(2) Even if you want to debate that - time and place, man. When someone adverse to your way of thinking extends an olive branch, it is not (assuming you actually want to convert people) the time to shit in his oustretched hand. You seem to be having a lot of fun fighting with NS about this stuff, so maybe channel that energy up there with them rather than pointing it at the guy who's leading with "hey I have to own that Israel is better than I thought it was."
(3) Why is there a parenthesis around the "a" in your last sentence? I don't want to assume you are being flirty with "they are not people" but it's hard to read as anything else, which makes the whole post look all the more trollish.
The shared experience of being butthurt revanchist losers? When you start a war with the explicit stated aim of genocide, and lose, sometimes you lose land. Cry about it.
My friend, I'm afraid you've missed my point. I am not offering you an opportunity to debate the legitimacy of the Palestinian claim to a cultural identity distinct from that of other Arabian peoples. I am offering you notes on how you can improve your behavior.
As it is right now, assuming you really do care about Israel, the easiest and best way you can help is to look less like a troll when representing their cause in public.
OP is leading with "this previous criticism of Israel I had was wrong." Assuming you are pro-Israel, you want more of this, not less. I and plenty of others on this board have argued against OP in other posts where he has criticized Israel. Assuming you are pro-Israel, you want more of that too. Your behavior, however, is only serving to make those things less likely.
Read some of the other replies in this thread, made by people who have been arguing against OP on this issue off and on for several weeks now. That is what "doing it right" looks like and what you should aspire to if you're looking to represent your cause well in a public forum. "[Outgroup] are not (a) people" is most decidedly not the foot you want to put forward.
I think they're a people by now.
Are Texans a people? Do they have a right to their own homeland, free from the occupation of the US?
Which Texans? There are 30 million of them. How many want to live “free from the occupation of the US”?
When say 20+ million Texans express strong enough desire for independence, strong enough to form an army to fight for it, strong enough to protest the US occupation on a daily basis, etc etc etc, then sure, they’ll eventually be a separate people.
First of all, suggesting that secession is ever an option? That's racist.
Second of all, you need to cherry-pick your definitions more carefully, because the TNG is a stronger military than Hamas, and the Catalans are just as protest-y as anyone else.
I literally have no idea what your argument is here. Most Texans consider themselves American. When that changes, they may end up being a separate people. What’s so controversial about that?
I am pleased and impressed with your honest search. May you be blessed.
P.S. If you are not anonymous and want to have a video conversation or even to ask me questions about my own take it would be a pleasure to join you in that.
You can read about my take all over my Substack and Youtube. I explain myself most assertively to my Israeli/Rabbinic audience here.
https://youtu.be/XJZ920oq6h0?feature=shared
And less assertively, for a general audience, here.
https://youtu.be/m1xYrtEWNSU?feature=shared
I hope we can do this. Be well brother,
Yedidya
Thank you for updating.
Thanks for being willing to update and also say so publicly. That's hard and beneficial to you and the community.
I would also add that Israel cementing formal relations with numerous Arab countries in the last six or so years is a positive sign and represents a better ideal. It gives me hope for long term peace - at least 50+ years from now.
It's also to the credit of the community that people are praised for updating rather than punished for changing their minds.
Thanks for sharing your update.
UI/UX conversation:
I'm picking up an old side project, which is to come up with a notation for defining user interfaces.
I'm making a half hearted effort to actually do some research and hear other's opinions this time, instead of diving right in like I usually do. Hence this post.
I'm seeing a ton of stuff has sprung up since last I looked, a lot of it bundled into "low code no code" saas products.
But it's all pretty basic web/mobile stuff, with the more sophisticated ones straying into db design. From a power perspective, these things look like they'll tap out at a simple shopping trolley.
I am interested in developing/discovering a more complete notation, something that could be used to fully define real workhorse apps like Blender or Autodesk Fusion.
I have my own ideas, but does anyone here know of any similar work I should know about? Has anyone played with something like this themselves?
It's called Figma, and they just sold to Adobe for $20B?
Have you used Figma? I watched some videos but decided it probably wasn't what I wanted before I actually bothered playing with it. From what I saw, it's what I meant by basic web/mobile stuff.
I'd certainly welcome input by people who've used it. Can you use Figma to do basic staples like dragging-dropping icons, dragging selectboxes to select entities, that kind of thing? My current dummy test project is an app that lets you create circles by clicking to place them and dragging out to set the radius. Would Figma let you do that in a natural-feeling way?
Are you familiar with the words "Turing-complete"? The implication is that whatever replaces code will inevitably either be limited in functionality, or will be just another form of code -- probably much worse than the existing ones, because the existing ones have decades of research behind them.
A picture with ten shapes is nicer than a code with ten lines. But I can work with programs that have tens of thousands of lines. Seeing a picture with thousand shapes (where each of them must be perfectly right otherwise the entire thing stops working correctly) would drive me crazy. Navigating it would probably be hell, because you couldn't use the keyboard, or things like search, regular expressions, diff, changing or extracting information using a short script, etc.
So these things usually only work for narrow domains, where you do more or less exactly what the author of the tool had in mind. Trying to do something else is either impossible or a descent into madness.
I think you have misunderstood. We are talking about user interfaces. A flyout from a button could lead to a textbox that says "Boolean Union all selected objects" (pre-implementation) or "run_op_boolean_union()" (if the actual business code is already working) and the app in question can have all the Turing-completeness it needs without requiring the notation system itself to be self aware.
What I'm interested in is notating the concepts and situations and caveats that arise when creating the UI of an app.
The "narrow domain" is exactly the domain that covers human psychology during tool use, and what any notation could reveal or clarify about that field is interesting to me in its own right.
Coders in my experience both hate UI stuff and are abysmal at it, so if the kind of system I'm talking about came into being it could mean a lot of utility for a lot of people.
> A picture with ten shapes is nicer than a code with ten lines. But I can work with programs that have tens of thousands of lines. Seeing a picture with thousand shapes (where each of them must be perfectly right otherwise the entire thing stops working correctly) would drive me crazy.
Nope, I don't believe you. You have far more visual interpretation machinery in your head than you do symbolic manipulation intrastructure. You're just not using it for the task of software development, because no one has yet worked out how.
Although Hollywood likes to show us the l33t coder rattling away on his keyboard as lines and lines of code scroll past his eyes, the better software developers seem to work mainly on notepads and whiteboards, hammering the solution into shape before writing a single line of code, and only after the creative work is done commencing the implementation. If you truly find working with code easier than working with graphical representation, it must be because years of experience have worn grooves of that shape into your brain - a cruelty I would would see others spared from.
Are there any reports of OpenAIs revenue? ChatGPT 4 is $240 a year and if only 5% of users paid for I estimate billions of revenue. About $2b assuming 5% of the reported 180M users.
OpenAI said they estimated they would make $200 million in 2023.
I would expect much fewer than 5% to be paying for it. At the university I attend practically everyone I know has pulled it up at one point or another, but the great majority of these people have no interest in AI and use the website less than weekly.
I'm sure they're bringing in a lot of revenue even if e.g. 0.5% are paying for GPT 4 but I think $2b is a high estimate.
Can anyone suggest a useful source of data for online death threats/online threats of violence? From what I can make out, UK homicide rate has very slightly declined since 2008, but threats to kill reported to police in the same period have grown very significantly. Most of those would be online I assume but would be nice to know for sure - doesn't have to be UK data.
It's because people are using the Online Safety Act of 2023 to SWAT their enemies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
Already? It's only been in force for a few weeks, so I'd be surprised if such incidents have shown up in the crime statistics.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/303493/threats-to-kill-in-england-and-wales-uk-y-on-y/
https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1734216826026934359
Israeli snipers shot displaced Palestinian children in the @UNRWA
school in Jabalya Refugee Camp.
Why is there no blood on his actual body?
Why is his shirt soaked with blood, but the "wound" is not bleeding at all and has already completely clotted?
We're supposed to believe he was shot, then everyone around him waited around doing nothing for 20 minutes, then they started recording, and then hurriedly pulled his shirt off to inspect the wound as if he had just been shot seconds before?
For anyone reading in on this convo between me and this hasbarist
https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1734608427261763690
"Dan Cohen is an American journalist and filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He is the host of Behind the Headlines. Formerly of RT America, Cohen has contributed to Al Jazeera English, Alternet, Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone, Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, The Nation, and Vice News."
"Al-Jazeera network remains the standard bearer for the Islamist position."
"The Electronic Intifada is an explicitly pro-Palestinian political and ideological Web site" [9] that hosts "anti-Israel propaganda."
"Middle East Eye Palestinian journalist Shatha Hammad... made a Facebook post in 2014 which praised Adolf Hitler for "sharing the same ideology" and the Holocaust"
NICE! All more reliable than the IDF. Are you still trying to spread the beheaded babies story or did you finally quit spreading that lie, mr child killing hasbarist?
"We're supposed to believe he was shot, then everyone around him waited around doing nothing for 20 minutes, then they started recording, and then hurriedly pulled his shirt off to inspect the wound as if he had just been shot seconds before?"
You are inserting a lot of unnecessary stuff there, but I am not surprised, you are an insincere hasbara and this comment of mine is just to laugh at you :) keep murdering children, Palestinians will keep taking down soldiers.
Changing the topic because your fake video was exposed, typical Islamist
You just mumbled a bunch of unnecessary gibberish you silly hasbarat you didn't expose anything. Israelis snipe kids to death because they are evil people as is anyone who supports them, no shortage of instances and videos. Go scream "pallywood" to the sky, we know you are just a child killing liar.
HUGE admission: Israel finally admits there was an "immense and complex quantity" of what it calls "friendly fire" incidents on 7 October.
https://twitter.com/AsaWinstanley/status/1734541742676779407
"I set it on fire... I shot at him... we checked the house and heard the sounds of young children in the safe room. We shot at the safe room... we heard young children's crying... we shot at the door. Until we didn't hear noise anymore."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGK3-hJA31A
Ah yes, everyone believes testimony taken under coercion LOL you are really bad at this they shouldn't be paying you!
Israeli child killer shooting a kid in the back.
https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1734756663456849992
"Military forensic teams in Israel have examined bodies of victims of last week's Hamas attack on communities around the Gaza Strip and found multiple signs of torture, rape and other atrocities"
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-forensic-teams-describe-signs-torture-abuse-2023-10-15/
"Sexual violence inflicted by Hamas 'beyond anything I've seen"
https://abc7chicago.com/hamas-rape-allegations-victims-sexual-assault-israel-war/14162727/
"Ramy Abdu is a policy analyst with the Al-Shabaka,[16] a Palestinian policy network"
Already more reliable than the IDF!
I've had a new frustration recently: trying to hunt down which paper some math fact was originally proved in. I'll find that paper X claims that paper Y proves some fact, but paper Y just proves a similar fact. If I'm lucky, miniscule modifications yield the desired fact, but these are often far from obvious.
It seems like it would be useful to have a repository about what's proved in what papers. I wonder if anyone has tried doing such a thing, for math or for some scientific field (not sure it would be as useful there). The unfortunate part is due to unreliability of what's out there, a lot of work would have to be done to make sure the information is correct.
(Specific example: "Brown proved that the Houghton Groups are type F_{n-1} but not type F_n"; actually, Brown proved FP_{n-1} but not FP_{n}. However, his methods readily adapt to the claimed statement. This is one of the less egregious statements, it's just the one I had to deal with today.)
Not a mathematician, but in physics they have review papers. Where someone(s) will summarize the current state of the field with tons of references.
If you formalise all of the statements being catalogued in a consistent framework in order to make them comparable, wouldn't that itself require re-phrasing the results, thereby introducing more of the minor edits this is intended to get around? If you're not making edits like that, then I don't see what the advantage is meant to be over just using the papers themselves. Would the catalogue just list all of the theorem statements and definitions verbatim while cutting out the proofs and discussion?
For math at least, a good number of the minor rewritings are in fact proven equivalences, so you could point to something for that as well (X proved Y, which is equivalent to Z by W).
A hefty chunk of a paper is often details, where what I'm looking for is more "the core of this proof is that you can do X, because of property Y", and other such statements. Also, as in my reply to rebelcredential, a repository for the presently unwritten lore.
Another thing this could help with is the static nature of published work. While people can update arXiv versions of papers, they often don't bother. Such a repository as I seek would be more amenable to corrections and updates.
Out of curiosity, how would you imagine one could uniquely identify/describe/search on the proofs/facts/statements you're talking about? Can this be structured at all, or are you thinking more along the lines of an AI reads all the papers and answers your queries in natural language?
An AI could certainly be helpful here, once we get hallucinations more under control. I was thinking of something stylistically like a wiki. There's ncatlab, but... well, that tends to be more limited in content, and the focus is very much more on definitions and theorems, whereas I want to have the historical information attached to everything (who proved what, in what papers, using roughly what methods).
In a sense, I'm largely just complaining about how much unwritten lore there is: subtle errors that "everyone knows about", "obvious" consequences that are anything but and no one ever wrote down. It doesn't help that chasing citations down requires interfacing with a variety of opaque systems. God bless for arXiv, if only we could get everyone to use it
"A popstar is always on time; she arrives precisely when she means to" said Taylor, wizenly.
Nice, I'm somehow reminded of Glinda from the Wizard of Oz books. (Not the movie version.) (Or Mary Poppins, but the movie version this time. Julie Andrews, sigh.)
What's good form for reporting repeated spam? I reported one at least three times, but it looks like it will be here 20 to 50 times if I open all the "new replies".
Oh, the Spam that was all over this thread -- it says something about Christmas? I reported about the first 3 instances of it I ran into, then when I realized there were probably dozens of posts from the same spammer I just added a note to my last report saying that there were lots of posts from the same spammer sprinkled all over the thread.
Presumably just do it until you get bored. Scott'll check it eventually and will inevitably have several hundred reports no matter what.
Presumably all of that particular batch of spam will vanish when the spammer's account is zapped, even if no one sat and reported each one.
Ah, the beneficial advancement that adoption of AI brings to ordinary life, as we saw with our little friend spamming their heart out, all enabled to be faster and more convenient for them with their new AI friend doing the hard toil of sending the same message over and over.
I even got it in my email, so I'd like to know if it happened anybody else, and maybe a heads-up that our little visitors are now scraping contact details off here.
Was it a reply to one of your comments?
It might have been, but by that stage it seemed to be inserting itself as every second comment.
It isn't clear what role AI could have played there -- the spams looked like the usual low-effort carbon copy crapola.
Damn, guess I missed my chance on a life changing investment that will help my financial life
I'm thinking of getting a tablet for my 4 year old son to learn on. He's currently working through beast academy on my laptop. That would move to his own tablet, but he would also use it for learning English etc. Any recommendations from fellow parents?
I would highly recommend good boundaries and setting reasonable expectations. Kids quickly become addicted to the flashing lights and immediate feedback and don't want to give it up. Expectations about how long to be on the tablet at one time (we found 30 minutes was a good limit) are important. I would also suggest limiting travel and having him go to a particular place - maybe a couch or comfy chair. Learn a routine.
Our kids would become agitated when we would ask them to turn off electronics for things like dinner or bedtime, especially when they were allowed to be on it for indefinite periods. When we started setting a timer for 30 minutes, that very quickly went away and they got used to the expectation that tablet time was over.
how is he liking beast academy? Does he find it as fun and engaging as their website claims it to be?
Update 10 months later, I continue to recommend it and think it is fun and engaging.
I remain very impressed with their maths pedagogy
He absolutely loves it. I'm very impressed with how it's done
Tangentially: my kids loved https://tuxpaint.org/ on a tablet
Hi everyone! 😊 If you're involved in Effective Altruism (EA) in any capacity, I invite you to participate in the Group Rationality and Resilience Survey: https://bit.ly/grcdr-survey. This survey is inspired by interviews I conducted with AI alignment researchers in Berkeley in February 2022. You can find out more about these interviews here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WxqyXbyQiEjiAsoJr/the-seeker-s-game-vignettes-from-the-bay.
The primary goal is to create a more nuanced understanding of the psychological orientation towards the EA and adjacent rationality communities. The insights gained could be pivotal in developing strategies to mitigate memetic hijacking in these spaces.
The survey will remain open until December 20th, and I plan to share the findings publicly. Your participation would be valuable and greatly appreciated. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you in advance for your contribution! 😊
Speaking of supplements what do folks think of GlyNAC?
https://aminoacids.substack.com/p/antioxidant-30-how-the-amino-acid
Elon Musk seems to be sliding into the extreme crowd of the likes of Alex Jones, someone he despised only a year ago. It is sort of easy to see how he was pushed further and further right by the relentless attacks from the left, but I wonder if there is a good description of the radicalization process in general, and whether his unfortunate slide matches this description.
Alex Jones is Adam Schiff with less power.
I wish I could like this post, so I'll add to it. To me this is not a post in support of Alex Jones, but of realizing that "the right" isn't alone in this and ignoring the crazies on the other side is counter-productive in creating a better society. I'm less concerned with Elon Musk allowing Alex Jones on a privately owned publicly accessible social media platform than I am of an elected official with the same proclivity for nonsense conspiracy theories.
Jones caused an astonishing amount of misery without having political power or significant numbers of employees.
I grant that someone with political power could do more damage.
Jones has been punished to the tune of about a billion dollars for his actions. Shiff is literally immune from legal consequences.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not in support of Jones here. If it were simply a matter of him as an individual, I would be broadly supportive of cutting him off from all social media. But it's never just about one person, it's often about precedent that his opponents might try to use against others. The whole, "first they came for..." line of thought.
And if we're going to take an Alex Jones out of polite society, then we should take out an Adam Schiff as well. I'm not actually in favor of either, from a "government shuts you down" perspective, because I don't think the government should have that power. I'm happy to never trust what either says on my own volition.
Unfortunately, I don't think they're entirely wrong. I think there's an unhealthy despair about the human race on the left-- there are the people who think aliens don't visit us because we're so disgusting and the people who think humans are a blight on the planet.
The two sides in Three Body Problem were:
Humanity cannot rule itself and needs aliens to rule them instead.
Humanity cannot rule itself and needs to be eradicated.
The ideas "humanity can rule itself" or "humanity doesn't need to be ruled" were not even within the Overton Window of the author.
It is not at all easy for me to see how Elon Musk, famously stubborn tech visionary, one of the richest men on Earth, who literally owns the platform that all the people attacking him post on, is so weak-willed and vulnerable that he endorsed Alex Freaking Jones because leftists were making fun of him online. Like, that is an incredible amount of power you're suggesting "the left" has here.
Musk wants to push society rightwards, and while he might not agree with Jones on everything, Jones - a popular voice speaking to a very select audience - is a very potential tool to do that. There's no need to assume weak-willedness and vulnerability, Musk has, during the recent years, acquired an obvious ideological quest and now has a bully pulpit to offer for enabling that.
Yeah the idea attacks from "the left" did this is ridiculous. I think what we see with Musk is a combination of narcissism, being detached from society because of his wealth, and his (much more than) rumored drug use. I also think he desperately wants to be liked and seem cool, but just keeps picking the worst set of peers to want to look cool in front of.
He's stubborn & extremely smart, but he's also kind of crazy -- kind of like SBF, except nowhere near as dysfunctional.
Innuendo Studios (Ian Danskin) has a video which pretty much explains the process (at about 23 minis there is a neat little analysis of good vs. bad arguments). Without knowing Musk well, it may be impossible to tell how he was radicalized, if he was. But if you watch the video, you will see how central a role platforms like Twitter ("X") can be to the process. Musk is, at the very least, not a good caretaker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g
I recommend checking out Innuendo Studios channel, there is a long series of videos closely analyzing ultra right wing techniques and tactics, on-line and off.
I saw most of those videos back before i made the (good) decision to largely disengage from political YT - they do contain some useful insight but there's also a *lot* of fallacious argument that stems from his huge in-group bias in favour of progressive rhetoric.
I don't disagree, but I would be interested in some specific examples that you saw. Of course, he self-identifies as a radical (I do not), so it's understandable that he wants to provide the strongest argument possible in favor of his values and beliefs.
I can't remember the details because i don't want to fall back down the political YT rabbit hole I'm not going to rewatch to check (sorry) but the video on how 'moderates are effectively republicans' or similar was especially egregious and made some unfair identitarian assumptions iirc.
I agree. I self-identify as a left leaning radical centrist, and Dan made the same assumptions that MLK (erroneously) did: if a white moderate isn't actively attacking the racists, then they are part of the problem. "Anti-Racism" is a binary to a rad lefty, not a spectrum. You're in or you're out.
Do you have any actual examples? What has Musk said about Alex Jones?
Mostly restoring his X account as well as participating in the "townhall" the other day with Alex Jones, the Tate brothers etc. https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1733909736385331339
I watched part of the townhall-- Musk seems to genuinely like Jones. There was a lot of "We like the human race! We must expand into space! The top of the left wants the human race dead!"
What a weird upside down world...
Restoring Jones's Twitter account without actually agreeing with him is totally consistent with Musk's stated aim to premit freedom of speech (assuming, that is, that Jones was banned as a result of his views rather than for abusing the platform in some way; I don't pay enough attention to this sort of thing to know whether this is the case).
Yeah, restoring would have been fine, if cringe. Participating in a meeting where Jones is prominently featured is a different story. The one about sliding towards more extreme and fringe views.
Not sure why you are bringing up the free speech issue. It's not even related to what I was asking.
Alex Jones is not a "centrist, pragmatic position".
"Far-left nutcases -- welcome, but Jones -- banned" is definitely not a "centrist" position, if the term has any meaning.
Taylor Swift was the biggest recording artist in the 2010s. It's not really surprising that when she did a truly massive concert series for the first time in years. it did gangbusters, although credit as well to her active cultivation and management of a large, obsessive fanbase that helps drive coverage and publicity for her brand.
I can't help but wonder if a backlash will come in 2024, though. She's so heavily exposed and hyped, it kind of seems inevitable - although social media makes that more dangerous now, since artists can weaponize their ultra-fans against critics and upstarts.
She has gone through at least 2 backlashes already - being rejected from the country scene but not yet accepted by pop; everything she wrote about in Reputation - but is bigger than ever. There may be backlash at some point, but it's unlikely to damager her at all.
Hasn't the backlash already started?
https://slate.com/culture/2023/11/taylor-swift-brazil-concert-fan-dead-eras-tour-rio.html
I'm not sure if a url counts as a high quality comment, but I mean, the url itself does give a pretty good idea of what happened. Someone died at her concert this year and there's obviously some controversy around that.
The death happened because of the stadium management's negligence and greet, not the artist.
Ah, we must've angered the Twitter females already. That was fast!
Are you daft? How was Swift responsible for the death of an attendee?
The show happened in the middle of a sweltering heatwave, in a football stadium whose owners, Time For Fun, did little to keep fans safe: it placed walls around the middle levels of the stadium to prevent non-paying fans from viewing anything inside, which blocked airflow; it refused to let fans bring in their own water while they waited hours for the show, forcing people to pay inflated prices for the same drink, which itself was in limited supply because the company believed many would pay more for alcohol; and when reports started coming through that many fans were fainting or having health issues, especially those on the floor who stood on metal, heat-absorbing sheets placed over the pitch, the company refused to, at the minimum, provide free water to counteract dehydration.
The situation was bad enough that the Brazilian government said it would open an investigation into the company.
Ah, but of course, your Great Idol would never have anything to do with that.
I'm sure Brazilian authorities weren't sent death threats by you crazies or anything... they must have just decided to investigate on their own.
I’m definitely not a fan of swift but she’s not responsible for micro managing local event planners.
I haven’t seen any discussion of the story about the reaction of big tech to the release of ChatGPT in the Dec. 5 New York Times.
We could start the story in August 2022, when Meta made BenderBot available on the web, which did not gather too much attention. In November 2022, Meta made Galactica available, which was designed to assist scientific researchers. I'll quote the <em>Times</em>: “Someone asked it to write a research paper about the history of bears in space. It did. After three days, Galactica was shut down.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI was struggling to fix problems with GPT-4, particularly surrounding hate speech and misinformation. One idea was to release an older version of the software, in the hopes that the interactions would give the company more insight into those problems. Sam Altman decided to go ahead with “a low key research preview” of the older technology.
Quite unexpectedly, ChatGPT 3.5 was a big hit, getting over a million users in its first five days, and over 100 million over the next few weeks. OpenAI juggled computing resources and managed to handle the load.
The reaction in Silicon Valley was to race to get AI products out the door. Sam Schillace of Microsoft captured the mood when he wrote, “[it would be an] absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.” Google’s attitude prior to the release of ChatGPT had been, as best I can make out, that they would invest money in AI research but there was no target date for releasing the technology. If they developed an LLM that performed like ChatGPT, their next step would be to try to develop a better LLM, with the hope that after enough iterations they would come up with an LLM that met Google’s safety standards and could be used in a product. But once ChatGPT hit the scene, the goal was to get a product out the door while doing the best they could to address safety issues.
Zuckerburg reorganized Meta to focus on AI, and X.AI probably wouldn't even exist if it weren’t for the release of ChatGPT.
The tech world has a large “winner take all” quality to it, meaning it’s easy to trigger a race where safety concerns are subordinated to getting a product out the door quickly. It’s a bit ironic that OpenAI, for all its professed concern about AI safety, triggered this race, but it’s not clear how anyone could have foreseen that the impact of ChatGPT would be that much different from the impact of BenderBot.
Putting <em></em> around a word doesn't do anything. Putting asterisks before and after gives you *italics*.
And then the employees revealing the terrifying extent of the personality cult by unanimously siding with the sociopath wasn't such an encouraging sign for humanity either.
I posted late in the last open thread and didn't get a reply, so i'm trying my luck again (as I strongly dislike this behaviour, I swear I won't do it again, and apologize):
I just noticed that what I know about HSV-1 (herpes) don't make sense:
1- A large majority of the population carry the virus (per internet & common knowledge)
2- But only a minority sometimes get blisters (per internet & common knowledge)
3- Active blisters are highly contagious (per my physician)
4- But asymptomatic carriers still shed virus 20% of the time (less if they're under antiviral treatment) (per wikipedia)
5- During a blister episode, I should avoid touching it, or wash my hands thorougly afterward, especially before touching any other mucosa (eye, lips, genitals) (per my physician)
From 5-, I assume that a given HSV-1 infection is localized, and that I could get multiple ones if I were careless. But for someone in his 30's who never developed any, is the precaution actually relevant? The odds are high that they're asymptomatic carriers, would a different source of HSV-1 risk causing episodes when the previous one(s?) didn't? And if asymptomatic carriers shed viruses 20% of the time, any time I shake hands with someone, and we don't have super rigorous hand-mouth hygiene, and I rub my eyes afterward, shouldn't I risk getting an infection in the eye?
And if each infection is independent from each other, and asymptomatic carriers shed virus 20% of the time, then shouldn't any unprotected oral sex involve a ~20% (a bit less, for those that aren't carriers) risk of getting a genital infection?
There's something that is wrong, either from the bits I got from wikipedia, from those I got from my physician 20 years ago, or from those I infer.
I think the standard blood test for HSV-1 is very unreliable. Something like 50% false positives. So it's possible that all those statistics aren't actually true.
My guess is that 4 and 5 are the kind of more-zealous-than-necessary contagion advice that we got a lot of during covid. It probably is good to avoid touching a blister, and wash one's hands thoroughly afterward, especially before touching any other of your surfaces, but probably not so valuable that it's worth making your life difficult for it. Similarly, although asymptomatic carriers probably "shed virus" some non-negligible fraction of the time, it's probably much lower levels of shedding than someone with an active blister (just like people with covid really are contagious before symptoms reach peak, and for quite a while after, but are a lot *less* contagious than at peak).
If your town really was completely covid free (maybe in early 2020) or herpes free (possible ever?), then it would probably be worth taking some effort with these precautions, but for an ordinary person, probably only the obvious precautions are worthwhile.
The messaging around HSV is pretty poor. I also object to the habit of doctors not screening for HSV unless pushed because "everyone has it".
In response to your collection of somewhat contradictory "facts", I recall being told that if you have a specific type (HSV1 or HSV2) and outbreaks occur in a specific bodily location, that unless you have a compromised immune system, it is highly unlikely your infection will occur at another place on your body, as the antibodies are there so in a sense you are naturally immune to the same form jumping from place to place.
But who knows for sure? The medical community constantly comes up with contradictory recommendations that seem to be passed through a tight "will the absolute truth really help here, or should we spin things in what we believe to be a utilitarian way?" filter. Or perhaps they just don't know, but like mansplainers and GPT, they can never admit they don't have a pat answer.
I think the not screening is also because it's apparently quite hard to screen for when you don't have an active blister.
Yeah the messaging on this has never really totally hung together into a consistent picture.
I had a girlfriend who used to get sores on her lip like once or twice a year which she supposedly got from her mom. Years after dating her I noticed I suddenly one year would get sores on my chin if I was underslept and under a lot of stress.
But after say eight 2-week long outbreaks in 4-5 years, literally just less work stress and more sleep totally ended them. Never any medication or anything. And now I haven't had an outbreak in 10 years. I assume there is some virus deep in my chin flesh somewhere though?
Not a doctor, but it's my understanding that the virus stays dormant in some kind of tissue (nerve cells IIRC?) for long periods of time, and occasionally is triggered to become active somehow.
My assumption is that the chance it infects any particular place is pretty small, and the odds it becomes symptomatic is small, but there are lots of chances for this to happen, so it works out that you should be careful to avoid transmission when it's active, since there are lots of viruses around then.
I have a friend who "hates math" but I suspect what they really hate is how math is taught in modern American schools. What would be a good book for them to read to potentially change their perspective? ChatGPT suggested "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" but I'm looking to see if others would recommend more books.
"they"
I assume "they" are female? Or some kind of ze/zir? This seems to be an overwhelmingly female phenomenon.
One of my favorite math books is _The Book of Numbers_, by Conway and Guy. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/682027.The_Book_of_Numbers
In the meantime, I've found _Animation vs. Math_ to be very inspiring lately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J6Ou4q8vE
Math education sucks at most schools. I am not familiar with American schools, maybe they are exceptionally bad, but hating math is probably a common thing everywhere.
There is a new series of math textbooks in Czech republic, called "Hejný method", they are really awesome. They make math seem just like solving puzzles.
https://blog-h--mat-cz.translate.goog/didakticka-prostredi?_x_tr_sl=cs&_x_tr_tl=en (automatic translation from Czech)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm0xsBjdMe4&t=433s (English subtitles available)
Unfortunately, the paper textbooks are only available in Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian. There is also an English 1-year electronic license for €27 available for either the 1st grade or the 6th grade. (But you would need to buy it on a non-English e-shop; I would be happy to assist you.)
How to Lie with Statistics and How to Take a Chance. Neither is high-powered or anything, if that’s what you’re looking for they won’t help, but they’re fun and extremely approachable. The latter is more math (probability theory), the former more how not to get lied to, but it makes reading anything with statistics in it very fun for a while.
>What would be a good book for them to read to potentially change their perspective?<
...you want to give them homework?
The only math book I've read was Mathemagics: How To Look Like A Genius Without Really Trying. It lost me at, like, multiplication. But my addition is faster now because of it.
Videogames are the true answer. Get some heavy number-cruncher games and play them. Learn the exact break point where a flat +10 becomes worse than a +4%, and the price point where the +10 is still the better long-term purchase.
In my experience, a lot of people start to like math when they learn high-school-level geometry.
I like math but I absolutely hated geometry :-)
Not my favorite either. My knee-jerk reaction reaction on seeing a geometric problem is to slap a coordinate system on it and try to turn it into an algebra or calculus problem.
Funny, that’s what I liked the least. All that drawing.
I mean lots of people really do just hate math. It isn't for everyone.
I count my lucky stars that there are so many brilliant people who do like math. It's soul-sucking in its inhumanity.
take a look at some from this article! Though this is aimed at improving children's education and not convincing adults to like math, I'm "relearning" math as an adult and appreciate resources that assume little to no prior knowledge and aren't as heavy and dense as adult resources.
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/how-to-help-parents-and-teachers
On the second learning, I noticed this little gem:
> In much of Europe now it’s deplorably fashionable to burn Russian books
Yeah, that actually happened... in your imagination.
Generally, the article seems trying to suggest that Russian math education is somehow superior. I strongly doubt it.
The fact that these books exist doesn't say about Russian education more than the fact that their English translations exist says about British or American education. Books are one thing, schools are another. The average math lesson at the average Russian school probably sucks, just like it sucks everywhere.
If you look at the results of International Mathematical Olympiad, the United Kingdom is actually doing quite well. On average they end up at ~10th place compared to other countries. Which means that some kids get elite math education.
In other words, there seems to be no evidence for the moral panic. There are no data showing that UK kids are somehow worse at math compared to e.g. Russian kids.
The fact is, many communist countries really had great math teachers. Not because their education was somehow better, but simply because there was nothing else to do, for a nerd. You couldn't try your luck in finance. You couldn't start a software company. The best possible job was to be a math teacher, because it allowed you to spend a large part of your day doing math, and for a moment it allowed you to forget how everything else sucks. There wasn't a better paid alternative for a nerd anyway. (It was also a relatively safe job. Lenin and Stalin didn't make many statements about math, so the risk of accidentally contradicting them about something was small.) So you taught math, and if you had a talent for writing, you also wrote math textbooks. This was not specific for Russia; you could probably find many great math books in other post-communist countries, too. Many of those books were probably never translated to English (perhaps someone should do something about it today, especially with the help of automatic translation).
I am completely in favor of improving math education everywhere, but hopefully with less of this political bullshit. The list of books is cool, and many of them are available at Library Genesis; just saying. The difficult part are the gaps between "great books exist" and "kids actually read them" and "kids actually read them at school".
That fits with an idea from _The Peter Principle_(1969), whose premise was that people get promoted to their level of incompetence. This now seems optimistic, since we're seeing people promoted past their level of incompetence.
Anyway, there was a claim that prejudice is the way to keep the Peter principle from operating. If people are limited to only rising to a certain level, some of the people at that level will be competent and not promoted past it.
I will check these books, thank you!
My impression is that Dominic is roughly pointing in the right direction, but the part about "government controlled tests" is a red herring (probably a mandatory one to make for a conservative politician). If you are actually learning math -- only using a different, allegedly superior method -- then you should be able to pass the tests, shouldn't you? I mean, it would be really suspicious if someone claimed superior math knowledge, and then failed at the math tests that the current kids, who mostly hate math and don't really understand it, can pass.
I would actually say the opposite: tests are *good*, especially when you want to reform math education. As a parent, I would want to be sure that my kids actually learn math, and there are essentially two ways to convince me that they do -- either I trust the method they use to teach, or I see that my kids do well at the tests so I don't care about the exact method that achieved this. Without tests, if someone casts a suspicion on your new method of math education (and of course, someone will), there is no credible defense; it's just an opinion against an opinion. With tests, you can simply say "hey, our kids can pass the test as well as the other kids, maybe even better" and you can have an external authority confirm this.
What you shouldn't do, of course, is start with the tests, and then drill the kids to the tests using the most boring method imaginable. That is definitely bad; and that is what bad teachers will do if you let them. Passing the test shouldn't be the goal of math education, but should be a side effect. Otherwise, either the test isn't testing the right math skills (in which case, fix the test) or you are not teaching them.
There should be multiple difficulty levels of the test. For example, a basic level for the bare minimum everyone should now, a medium level for students who want to proceed to a university (not necessarily a mathematical one), and maybe a hard one for the gifted kids to flex their muscles.
> building education institutions outside political control, including but not only ‘schools’
Yes, definitely. More sources of education, not controlled by the same people, makes a more robust system. That includes YouTube channels, Khan Academy, math circles, math olympiads, correspondence seminars, whatever.
> [Kolmogorov's extraordinary schools] were connected to a university so those teaching 15-18 year olds were real mathematicians and physicists teaching in the university.
That doesn't scale well. I would instead propose an afternoon club, once a week, taught by university *students* (volunteers). Those students would be coordinated by the university professors, who would design the lessons, and the students would then deliver the lessons at the high schools. Then the students would be encouraged to design their own lessons, and share it among themselves, so there would be more material.
Technology is an applause light, but in reality it is double-edged. I can imagine great technology that advanced education. I can also imagine tons of money wasted on worthless technology, just because someone wanted to check the "we use technology" checkbox. The debate should be on how specifically to use technology. (Educational videos, interactive demos, personalized spaced repetition...)
In my experience, and awful lot of tests are designed around the curriculum, and include some pretty specific things that don't necessarily follow from the general skill that the course is theoretically aiming to teach. This can come in quite a few forms.
* Testing students on the particular methods taught, while other methods to reach the same result are possible.
* Including notation for intermediate steps in the questions.
* Requiring students to regurgitate outdated or otherwise inaccurate information they were taught.
Some of these are kind of reasonable, others less so. Sometimes it's necessary to teach something that is quite a few layers of abstraction away from the actual problems that technique can be used to solve, and testing for these using only the real-world problems would be difficult at best.
I have a whole lot of examples of these from my memories of school (most of these were minor tests or exercises rather than exams). All of these are the cases where it was not justified, because those are the ones I got annoyed by and therefore remembered.
* I once used a value g=9.81ms^-2 instead of the expected g=9.8ms^-2 in a physics exercise, getting an answer that was different from the expected one in the last decimal place, and got marked down because the teacher assumed I had rounded incorrectly.
* We were taught about voltage dividers and op-amps, and on a test they decided to combine them together by asking us to calculate the output voltage from a circuit with a voltage divider feeding in to an op-amp based amplifier, but what we had been taught about voltage dividers glossed over the fact that their voltage changes if there is a current flowing in, which was very much the case in this circuit, so the expected answer was completely wrong.
* There was an exercise involving an object sliding on a frictional plane in 3 ways, and the answer was very obviously just 3 times the angle of friction, but they expected us to calculate it 3 separate times for the 3 different cases rather than just using common sense because common sense wasn't on the curriculum.
* In computing we were taught about bitmap images, but to make it simpler it was just a bit depth of 1, and for some weird reason we were taught that a black pixel was 1 and a white pixel was 0 despite this being the opposite way around from the usual convention, and when we were tested on bitmaps we were required to use this convention to answer even though it wasn't mentioned in the questions and isn't an actual convention we could use otside of the context of the course.
* In French class we had an actual French person in the class, as a student. I don't know why. The only explanation I remember being given was that in order to pass the tests, it wasn't sufficient to just be fluent in French, you had to know extra stuff that was in the course. As for why someone French would want an anglophone country's French language qualification, I couldn't say. Even I, as someone who was actually learning the language in school, found the most difficult aspect of the tests to be the bit where we had to come up with a short story matching a given prompt, not the bit where we had to write that story in French.
* And of course, being told to show my working thousands of times.
it certainly does have a conservative flair; I know little about the author and even less about UK politics to really weigh in on the merit of his intentions (which at the surface seem good)
In my case, I scored perfect 100s on every state test issued to me. It wasn't until I was at my top-tier university studying for a math-adjacent degree that I realized just how poor a grasp I had on the fundamentals. I trudged through college successfully but have always felt my foundation was too shaky to take the caliber of math course I wanted and really understand (my 100s had turned to C+/B- scores and were kept from being worse by my good memory alone)
To your point about scaling and the rejection of tests -- my dad (a public school teacher of 30+ years) always likes to say about people who shun tests or defend their children's poor scores as being due to them being "not a good test taker"... "how convenient they're only bad at the part where we find out how much they know!"
>If you are actually learning math -- only using a different, allegedly superior method -- then you should be able to pass the tests, shouldn't you?<
The tests require you to write out every step of the solving process and then grade you on your steps. I straight up lost my ability to do mental math because of math tests.
I see reasons for requiring steps, though I'm not sure if these are the actual motivations of the opaque education system.
1. Something that would often happen to me in late high school tests: I would know how to solve the problem, would get all the steps right, but would get a completely wrong answer because I'd made an unbelievably stupid mistake at one point, like misreading my own handwriting or getting a trivial piece of arithmetic wrong. It wouldn't seem entirely fair to get a zero on a ten-mark question because I'd scrawled a 7 on the fifth line of working and on the next line copied it down as a 1. Losing one mark is far more appropriate. Of course for this you could make the showing your steps optional, but then you give a time advantage to kids who are better at handwriting or quick and accurate mental arithmetic or something else largely orthogonal to what the test is supposed to be testing.
2. If you only require the answer, what's to stop people guessing by trial and error? E.g. one of my final exams had an exponential equation to solve with an answer like 3. It's good to have a simple answer like that, so you can tell you've solved it (absent enormous coincidence) without having to check ten times. But without working required, someone with no clue how to solve exponential equations can just plug in different numbers until they find the answer.
3. I imagine it wpuld help for teachers and/or statewide examiners to be able to easily see which steps the most students got wrong or had trouble with, to focus more on that in class. (Not that I expect the class to do a remotely good job at that).
Sure, require steps every third question or something. But there was about a four year chunk where NOTHING could be mentally solved, and by the end of it math was so tied to visual processing I couldn't do it without it anymore.
Who cares about time advantages between students, everyone gains time if they only have to do the steps that matter to them.
Guessing is stopped by asking forty questions at a time and not making all of them single digit answers. If you can trial-and-error your way into passing forty questions, you're probably doing some level of math unconcsiously.
My issue with the emphasis on the writing out of steps was less that I felt it degraded my mental math ability (once in high school, no one including the state cared that I didn't explicitly write out 13*5), but that the writing of the steps was the ONLY component. It was completely operations-based with NO theory -- and at some point, the absence of theory makes the operations much more difficult to understand!
Learning u substitution in calculus is great and all, but it wasn't until watching a lecture on Youtube that I learned "the integral represents the area under the curve"...
> it wasn't until watching a lecture on Youtube that I learned "the integral represents the area under the curve"...
I once tutored a kid who had no idea that "fractions" and "division" are somehow related. He could simplify "40/20" to "4/2", and after some nudging to "2/1", but was quite shocked when I told him that "2/1" is... obviously... 2.
But here I blame the teachers (or maybe the student), because I got a decent math education in the same system.
You make a good point that tests can verify mechanical skills without verifying the underlying knowledge. Though this could be fixed, if they just added one question specifically asking "what is the area under this curve?"
> Though this could be fixed, if they just added one question specifically asking "what is the area under this curve?
I'd be totally in favor of that, assuming it meant the teacher would then mention it in class (and ideally spend 10 minutes talking about real situations where one might like to know the area under a curve and what it can represent)
That happened to me. It took *ages* before I realised that "a/b, as a different notation for division" and "the fraction a/b" are the exact same thing.
Definitely blame the teachers/curriculum. They teach stupid things like "the correct notation for division is ÷" then a few years later teach you fractions, then a few years later teach you "an alternative notation for division is /". And so I end up thinking that "a/b" has two different meanings. I don't know if it's the obsession with correct notation over truth, or the constant changing of correct notation for the same thing as you progress, but it does enormous damage, ironically, to clarity.
Oh fuck, I had no idea! Then this is much worse than I imagined.
Do you have any link to evidence? I trust you, but if I tell this to someone else, they probably will not. Some people just assume competence by default. I definitely know teachers who are like this, even some university teachers, but luckily they do not design the government tests in my country.
I still say that tests are a good idea in general -- but I definitely mean tests that check the correct *result* no matter how you achieved it!
The usual objection is "what if someone just makes a lucky guess", but the obvious solution is to make the test so that a lucky guess is statistically unlikely. Also, one lucky guess should not substantially change the overall outcome, and if the tests are reasonably made, then five lucky guesses should be very unlikely.
I have no issue with tests in and of themselves, just the fact that the ones I took were purely testing operations and arithmetic ability -- which is also the most boring part!
I remember learning box and whisker plotting with no mention of their relevance to statistics or expressing scientific data, matrix operations with no mention of how one might use them for any number of physics/computer science/economic application or how they are representing real values in space, the unit circle with no mention of its ties to sinusoids (or any reason I should buy that imaginary numbers have any relevance at all)
Nothing built off of anything else except for operations. Each unit it was just a new set of boring operations to drill with no context or building of intuition
Did they like grammar school math OK? What's their current level of math knowledge? Did they Also, was there a particular thing, geometric proofs or whatever, that caused them to bail?
They're in college, studying a degree that's light on math-related requirements. It's nothing in particular, they just "don't get it".
The reason I asked is that for a lot of people what not liking math really comes down to is that at some point they encountered something they did not grasp early on, and the ysort of freaked out and bailed on learning it, and had an unpleasant failure experience. I can remember as a high school student looking at the beginning of the year at the stuff at the end of my textbooks, and thinking it looked really really hard. But I'd had enough experiences of going from not grasping some math thing to grasping it that I had confidence that I'd be able to master the new stuff. What helps the people who bailed on algebra or whatever is mostly help with getting over the hump -- whichever hump it was they gave up on.
If it's more that this person thinks, jeez what's the point of this stuff, I'd say a book about fractals might give them a thrill. I'm talking about a book that's heavy on illustrations, and talks about the underlying math only in a general idea sort of way. Or even just one of the youtube zooms into the Mandelbrot bug. The math involved would daunt them, but there's something about the beautiful intricate patterns of fractals, and the knowledge that the depth is infinite -- you can zoom forever -- that thrills a lot of people, me being one of them.
Forgive me for making this comment a second time, but I was very late making it under the Cavities article and it's still bothering me, dammit! I promise this is the last try.
> Babies have no existing mouth bacteria, and get theirs from their parents’ kisses.
Is it literally that simple?
A while back it occured to me to be curious about how we get the mouth bacteria responsible for cavities, and about how, as a civilisation, we take them so much for granted. Are we born with them, or if not, how and when does transmission occur, can it be stopped even in principle, why is the problem hard, and why is the question nowhere on the radar.
I tried to ask my dentist about it. He and I chat about politics and culture, so why not this? I tried to be very clear I'm not asking for the standard "how to not get cavities" advice. He literally couldn't understand me. Kept talking about things like eat less sugar. I came out briefly half-convinced there's a dentist conspiracy around this.
Google was the same. No matter how I formed the question, I could hardly find a treatment purely of the problem of transmission. It's always "brush your teeth". Maybe I'm bad at googling.
So yeah, I still have that question. Could the transmission of the mouth bacteria to the next generations be stopped if we simply chose to?
Could it be that parents have a real, practical choice whether to inflict this lifelong problem on their children, and therefore maybe a moral duty not to? Could this in fact the reason why the problem is so unthinkable, because nobody is going to stick their neck out to tell basically all of adult humanity that they have an annoying moral duty they didn't know before?
I'm sure the real answer is somewhere between "literally impossible" and "impractically difficult", but still. I'd like to see the problem discussed in a way that doesn't make me feel like I'm crazy for even being able to think of it.
When I was reading up on this and that as part of thinking about the Cavities article, I ran across a factoid: 50-some percent of C-section babies have that S mutans (or whatever) bactium that causes cavities. 70-some percent of vaginally delivered babies do. So apparently babies can pick it up in the vagina during birth. Can't remember whether the article was about newborns or older babies.
Your mouth will have many different kinds of bacteria on it. There are probably things that some of them do that are quite helpful for you (even if it's just eating resources that would otherwise provide a tasty home for some much more virulent bacteria).
The question is presumably whether there are *specific* bacteria that cause cavities (I would have assumed that it's a lot of different bacteria that each contribute varying amounts of lactic acid) and whether one could avoid getting colonized by *those specific bacteria* while still having a health biome otherwise (this sounds extremely difficult to me).
As I understand it, bacteria of different species often work together to form biofilms, where they can become a nuisance even if they would be harmless on their own.
At the end of the day, I guess children will inadvertently ingest a wide variety of bacteria suited to colonising the mouth and gut.
This is only N = 2, but both of my two kids have had no shortage of behaviors which will strongly tend to result in them acquiring similar microbiomes to their parents.
Right now my 2-year-old only wants to eat the exact same thing he sees his parents eating. Not “I’m having soup so he wants soup too,” or even “he wants a bowl of soup served from the same pot as my bowl;” he only wants to eat the exact same soup as me, out of the same bowl, with the same spoon. He would rather go hungry than eat anything other than my own personal food. Meanwhile the 5-year-old loves to snuggle, but has a totally insufficient understanding of personal space. His preferred way of snuggling is to smoosh his face directly against mine, ideally while breathing directly into my mouth.
There’s probably a significant evolutionary advantage to sharing your oral microbiome with your parents.
Bacteria is on your food and in the air, to avoid it you would have to never eat or breathe.
"Bacteria are everywhere" is a fact, but is only pertinent if the kind which are adapted to live in mouths, concretely, are everywhere. (And IIRC the contention was that it is possible to create mouth-adapted bacteria which fight off re-colonization by the common varieties.)
True, but you'll no doubt come across the mouth-adapted kind pretty soon if you hang around humans. Humans are always breathing, talking, emitting tiny drops of spit from their mouths as they do so.
I doubt that actual mouth-to-mouth kissing is required.
According to the guy Scott interviewed, even kissing won't transmit it reliably. You need to first get the level of other bacteria really low via a professional cleaning, then aggressively (I think I remember him saying with a pumice stone-like thing) rub a batch of the anticavity bacteria into parts of your teeth or gums)
This comment chain isn't about the new bacteria, it is about the babies starting without the normal ones and if it is possible to keep them that way. So there are no "other bacteria" that you would need to kill off first.
Yeah, I get that. I wasn't being clear. Point was just that judging by the info about how you get the new bacteria to colonize your mouth, introducing a new strain and having it stick is not that easy. So babies are sort of like someone who just had an aggressive tooth cleaning (at least when newborn -- who knows how many bacteria they have at age 6 mos.). So what I meant was that the things Melvin mentioned as mode of transmission -- droplets from other people's mouths, etc. -- might not be enough to introduce the decay-causing bacteria into the baby's mouth. Like maybe the stuff would need to be on something like a pacifier, something they have in their mouth, rubbing against surfaces, for long periods.
The entire planet is effectively covered by a thin film of bacteria. You can’t avoid it. I suppose you could raise children in a sterile bubble but chances are you’d simply permanently cripple their entire immune system and leave them vulnerable to serious allergies.
I'm not sure how you could possibly do that given that kids put random things in their mouth all the time, including toys that have previously been in the mouth of other kids. Then when you get to the teenager phase everyone is super horny and I doubt you'd convince someone to avoid kissing before getting a "mouth bacteria test" for their partner. Then there's potential sources of bacteria from cats and dogs who have a predilection to trying to lick your face.
I suspect you could achieve it by enacting draconian restrictions in society but I don't think it's at all realistic in practice.
I'm looking to partner with an illustrator for a small niche book publishing project. Subject is early American (military/colonial) history. I'm a graphic designer by trade and could probably produce some illustrations on my own if I really had to, but ideally I'd like to work with someone who can help bring a very old text to life. Anyone here work in simple line drawn pen and ink, storybook-style illustrations? Or know of anyone who does? Reach out to me at brandonmquintin@gmail.com
Are you looking for professionals you will pay, or an amateur to work on spec or for love of art?
Most likely an amateur or art student. I can pay, but not much, and mostly on the back end as a percentage of profits. Probably a few hundred up front, then 15 or 20% of profits.
I'd be interested to hear people's take on Jeremy Howard, especially his take on AI, which is that AI itself is a wonderful thing, but that having huge, rich organizations in control of its development and distribution is catastrophically bad. If you work in AI you'll know who he is. For those who don't, he's this guy:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-11-15/jeremy-howard-taught-ai-to-the-world-and-helped-invent-chatgpt/103092474
I'm especially interested in your take on his view about the the dangers of having a few huge tech companies having almost all the decision-making power about AI, and a great deal of power about a lot of other things, as more and more things incorporate AI into their workings. But if you have opinions about his smarts, his honesty, his personality or whatever I'm curious to know those too.
Thank you for describing his claim that these companies will be able to control the training datasets their models will use, and thus make their models better at producing certain types of answers. I don’t know what results those companies would hope to get, but I can easily imagine this being a bad thing anyway.
As is pointed out in the article, the newest GPT models require enormous amounts of resources to run. Did he really think the future would be one where everyone trains an AI on their laptop?
Technological advancement at the cutting edge has always occurred via large institutions. The path of the information age ran through Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, and a host of other large companies. And it was the action of those large companies that allowed new technologies to become cheap enough and (importantly) easy enough to use for the average person to take advantage of them.
Maybe I'm just getting cynical, but I increasingly find these calls to "democratize" emerging technologies to be incredibly foolish and more than a little gatekeepery. Not everyone has the ability or desire to train their own AI on their home computer, so the implication seems to be that only those with the will to do so should get to reap the benefits. It reminds me of the bad parts of the open source community.
We know that a human-level AI can be run on about 20 watts of power and 2 pounds of computing hardware - the brain. So it seems believable that the tech will come down in price enough that people can train their own AI if they want to.
Like with open source software, most people will probably be happy with the standard commercial AIs that don't require you to learn anything about ML, but I think it's important that the capability to do otherwise exists.
Yeah, I get it, everybody is saying that it would be naive to expect things to be in any configuration other than the one they're in right now. But setting aside the question of whether Howard and others are dum-dums, how does it look to you like governance of the US population are going to play out over the next few decades? I asked this question in more detail a little ways off on this thread.
Difficult to say. Concentrations of power all always dangerous. That being said, the power of the private sector (even massive companies with control over emerging technologies) is still massively outstripped by the power of traditional states. So there's an argument to be made that increasing power in the private sector relative to the public is to be desired, as it would reduce the hegemonic power that the state possess and produce a more multi-polar societal structure, thus reducing the possibility of any one actor abusing their power due to resistance by other power structures.
I believe that it depends on exactly how these AI's play out, and what, if any, privacy restrictions are placed on them. Imagine an all purpose AI assistant, who reports every little thing you do with it to Google.
Then it's programmed to upsell you. Then they start selling your meta data to political parties. Then the government.
I'm sure you can take it from there.
> Imagine an all purpose AI assistant, who reports every little thing you do with it to Google
This is already on the market (and there's Amazon's, Apple's versions as well, and the snooped audio has already featured in court cases), I'd expect that it will continue.
I agree there are substantial dangers associated with the centralization of AI. But the dangers associated with the proliferation of AI seem to be more substantial, at least in the medium term, and so I prefer centralization.
So far, what people are saying is that Howard is naive -- jeez, what did he expect? I agree, his thinking is very unworldly and it's odd that he's surprised at how it's playing out. In 2017 he trained an LLM on his home computer, and it's as though he imagined that the way development and use of AI would proceed would be via bunches of people doing stuff on their home computers and sharing it.
But setting aside whether he was naive to expect things would end up any other way than with the big tech companies in control of AI, what do you think of the idea that this is a dangerous configuration? It does seem likely that as AI gets bigger and smarter and more interwoven in things, the power of the big tech companies over the rest of the world will be enormous. But the people running these company have no special qualifications for governing, and on the average seem less interested than the average person in relevant subjects such other people's needs and feelings and style of thought, in how to think about large-group phenomena like the proliferation of misinformation or the development of cults, in how to organize society. And there will be no clarity among the tech companies about who gets to decide what. And nobody involved will be elected, will have term limits, will be plugged into the subsystems that government manages.
> And nobody involved will be elected, will have term limits, will be plugged into the subsystems that government manages
Arguably, we only have "lunch money"-priced PCs, Internet, etc. (vs. e.g. "SAGE" and ARPAnet) precisely because, in 1980s, the field managed to (temporarily?) escape from under the control of people who run for elections, sit in ministerial chairs, have "special qualifications for governing", and plugged into subsystems the government manages.
Yeah, I get it -- though I'm a lot less sure than most people that affordable PC's and similar have led to improved quality of life for humanity. But in any case, you're not really addressing the question of how you imagine it playing out, if the tech companies become so powerful that they are the real government, and US presidents etc. are figureheads, sort of like British royalty. So in the population at large there will be all kinds of new activities, new kinds of empowerment, new ways to deceive, new ways to do harm. There will be extraordinary group phenomena -- cults, interest groups, ways of partially merging with each other or with some AI-based game or character, campaigns, rumors, lies, alliances. And there will be, let's say, no more than 5 big tech companies, with various alliances, rivalries and grievances going on among them. Do you have a picture of what steps those with the most power should take to organize society, or will take. And can you please forego talking about the many failings of our present system of governance? You'd be preaching to the choir, and in any case it really does not bear on the question I'm asking.
IMHO you've described, for the most part, the present, rather than the "grim future". Though AFAIK financiers remain above tech corps in the food chain.
Re: "how will/ought they (re)organize society" -- I question the notion of GPTism being a serious "disruptive tech" at all : it reliably emits only various mixtures of copypasta and erudite bullshit; something that already had been in painfully plentiful supply to start with, and for that matter, is only "in demand" at all because we live even now in a "sadist utopia", i.e. where most keyboard work is societally unnecessary from any sane POV, but our rulers, for various reasons, don't want to simply "UBI" (nor, luckily for "desk pilots", to shoot) the "surplus" people.
I like the direction in which you are thinking, although I have no solid answers for you. But I would suggest that the danger to individual autonomy isn't just centralization (though that is dangerous)--it's optimization. Because you have to ask yourself what LLM's are optimized for (persuasive messaging). So you end up in a world that looks superficially very much like this one, but where consumer and voter behavior is largely predictable.
I recommend "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads" by Tim Wu
> Because you have to ask yourself what LLM's are optimized for (persuasive messaging).
Not sure what you have in mind here. Did you think I meant that an advanced AI would itself be running things? If so, I wasn't clear. What I had in mind was that the AI companies would become so powerful that they had considerably more power and more of the public's attention than the official US government, and that they would be able to make policy changes or whatever without going through government channels. So the problems I had in mind were that (1) it seems like widespread availability of AI will produce a lot of change and chaos in the lives of US citizens; (2) Tech companies would have more power than the government to bring about legislation. programs or whatever to reduce chaos and overall nuttiness., but (3) there is no structure to decide who from which AI company gets to carry out these steps and (4) people who are passionately committed to AI development are often Aspergerish males who are considerably less perceptive about people than the average person, and considerably less interested in understanding them or governing them.
Or did you bring up the persuasiveness of LLM"s because you imagined the chief tech bros would turn the whole task over to LLM's ? Or at least the communication part?
No, I am proposing that Big Tech will use the AI's themselves as the tools they will use to consolidate their own power. As I suspect that LLM's are in fact optimized for crafting maximally persuasive messages, given a set of training data, and that user meta data is widely available for a fee, this seemed like a possible recipe for underhanded political messaging.
The expense of operating a bleeding-edge chip fab is inherently a massively-centralizing influence on everything downstream of it (which includes the party tricks currently marketed as "AI").
I’m not sure… these fabs are “for hire” (hence “fabless semiconductor companies). I can’t say what the minimum order is but plenty of startups use this fabless model.
All of these "we must keep AI away from big companies" takes seem to be so naive they aren't even wrong. Neither their goals nor their methods make the slightest amount of sense; it simply seems to be a backdrop for complaining.
Somebody has to control the models, no amount of organizational structuring will change that. Somebody has to pay for the models. And this, inevitably, means that that somebody will be a "big tech company" sooner rather than later.
And their methods seem to be one part "stick our head in the sand" and one part "emotional manipulation via the internet", neither of which have the slightest chance of doing anything.
I mean, AI proliferation could be an absolutely catastrophic thing too. It seems he doesn't believe in AI X-risk if he wants to democratize AI. As to more centralization of power, eh, at this point, it's a given: that was already the trend even with no AI, so what difference does it make if the process accelerates? Everyone knows we live in an oligarchy: bit late to be fretting about democracy.
i like reading old Sf, and I was surprised to find in a bad novel a weirdly prescient take on AI art. The novel is The Flaxen Femme Fatale by John Zarkov, a comic novel about a future-retro PI tasked to track down a superpowered girl. It was published in 2008.
Summarizing it because the passage is too long.
The girl hides in the future San .Diego Comicon. Our main character tells us it has been down in recent years because of one major reason and one not so major one.
The not so major one was companies replacing human authors and writers with bot artists and writers. Over time, that led only a few companies making them, and while they still sold well due to lust for number one issues, the lack of creators for fans to interact with caused the con to dry up.
humans tried to compete by making indie comics, but the power of endless cheap bot artists was too tempting for even small publishers. only some underground comics remained, a few even on real paper, but the lack of marketing budget meant no one heard of them.
What changed things was after art and writers, the companies went after the movie industry, replacing them with bots too. But the unions were powerful enough to stop it, and they created a campaign saying stories were as much mysticism as art and there were stories only humans could tell. the public believed them and chose humanity.
keep in mind the major cause was the discovery of aliens, and this book has people replace profanities with negative computer terms like DOS. Ipods still exist, lol.The novel isn't really a good one, but that little aside was so weirdly on point it was eerie. written more than 15 years ago.
i don't think SF is good at predicting the future-read Asimov for example-but kind of an oddly realistic take in a novel that has fembots with jet boots.
There's _The Silver Eggheads_ 1959/61) by Fritz Leiber-- in the future, robots write fiction for robots, but humans read "wordwooze"-- fascinating but forgettable fiction (no one wants to read it twice) produced by machines. Publishers hire people to pretend to be writers. The fake writers (who have to wear period garb) find this so humiliating they destroy the wordwooze machines.... and then find out they have no idea how to write....
... That sounds quite plausible.
There's also a Judge Dredd comic about AI art made in 1986 with some prescient themes. (https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/102rfyw/a_comic_from_a_judge_dredd_storyline_from_1986_36/)
Recall Orwell's 1984:
"The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound."
it reads a lot older than its date, even granting the comic focus. Craig Shaw Gardner wrote better earlier, and it read like a homage to 80s SF homaging 50s SF. but i think time accelerates; 15 years ago was Barack Obama being elected and that was one different world lol.
I think that's just because you lived through it. Consider that 15 years before 1940 was 1925: to the people living in 1940, 1925 would feel like a different world. Heck, for the people living in 1923, 1908 would've felt like a completely different world.
Leaning on the world wars is kind of cheap, but the changes they wrought are still easily legible to people today. You could probably say the same thing about many 15-year periods in the 19th and 20th centuries, it's just that it's harder to see the difference when you're not living through them.
If anything we’ve slowed down. I can easily tell a movie set in 1940 from 1955, and 1955 to 1970 is a whole different world, as is 1970 -1985.
I was watching a movie set in 2005 recently and didn’t really realise the time wasn’t today. There was no use of smart phones and that was it.
AI-skeptical piece linked by Tyler Cowen on his blog, arguing that training LLMs suffers from a 'supply paradox'- the more data there is easily available to train the LLM, the less economically valuable that activity probably is. I.e. current LLMs were clearly trained on all of the forums and other written text easily scraped off of the Internet, like Reddit. Result- we have LLMs that can basically write Reddit comments, which is not exactly a valuable activity. Current LLMs were also clearly trained on every stock photo scraped off the Internet, result, we can sort of replace some less-skilled visual artists.
In other words, the author is saying that higher-value economic activity doesn't generally leave around a lot of training data that LLM developers can easily hoover up. I'm not making this argument either way as frankly I'm not qualified to, but I thought it was interesting.
Having made art with Midjourney for about the last 12 months, I will say that it's not going to replace corporate-employed visual artists anytime soon. It may make a rough template that a skilled artists can alter further in Blender or Photoshop or something, but it's not some kind of Star Trek 'give it commands and it creates exactly what you want on command' thing. I could see it modestly reducing the number of employed artists (like graphic designers and such), but mostly complementing them, as Photoshop did
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/excuse-me-but-the-industries-ai-is
A few comments:
1. Coding is a big example of an economically valuable activity for which there exists a lot of data. The copywriting industry is also worth tens of billions of dollars. Large amounts of data probably also exists for many other fields like law and medicine, although that data might be harder to get your hands on.
2. If a task is economically valuable enough to do, data can be collected through more expensive mechanisms. A prominent example is self-driving, where Tesla has collected billions of miles of data because they think they'll one day be able to use it to win a substantial portion of the automotive industry. OpenAI is apparently paying people in a number of industries large amounts of cash to generate high quality training data. A similar sort of approach could be expanded to most jobs - if the economic incentives for automation were strong enough, companies could make their employees record themselves while they work, and that data could be used to help train the next generation of AI employees. Note that unlike with humans, AIs only need to learn a task once. Once a single AI learns to do a task well, you can then copy that learning into an arbitrarily large number of other AIs. So even if it takes much longer for one AI to learn a task than one human, once it's averaged over enough AIs, the per unit learning cost will be lower.
3. Models are getting better at learning with small amounts of data. Eventually once models get smart enough, we should expect models to be able to do the same sort of things that humans can do, namely learn new tasks/jobs with only a small amount of experience. This would not require massive datasets, just a small amount of on-the-job training.
Do you have a non-technical source I could read on your point 3?
No unfortunately. But the results I am referencing are:
- Bigger models tend to be more sample efficient when trained (i.e. learn more from a fixed amount of data than smaller models)
- Bigger models tend to be better at following instructions
- Bigger models tend to be better at learning how to do tasks based on a small number of examples of that task via few-shot learning
Reason I ask is because I think this has certain implications regarding who well AI could get at generating persuasive messages micro-targeted as a single individual social media user.
I wrote a post about the whole YouTube/Firefox debacle earlier https://blakehouseholder.substack.com/p/google-needs-a-new-chief-conspiracy (I was making a video about it, and had a realization that the "conspiracy" doesn't make very much sense)
It's sad that Kontextmaschine didn't live to see the current Taylor Swift news (and give us his take on it).
Have you read Sam Kriss's take? https://samkriss.substack.com/p/taylor-swift-does-not-exist
Can't remember, but I do have a general impression of Kriss as being insufferable.
The scientists say that phenomenon of everyone forgetting the concert happens due to excitement, and that it is known to happen to people with their own weddings, for example, which undermines the point he was making about Taylor Swift being this impossibly artificial, desireless thing.
But interesting observation that (some) incels can work up the nerve to go shoot people up, but seemingly can't make the effort to go meet people.
My guess is that they do. But they are rebuffed because, frankly, they weren't very nice people to begin with.
Elliot Rodger's manifesto is thin on any attempts to actually talk to women. I have read excerpts, but I never saw anyone mention him doing this. A big part of his outrage wasn't really about lack of sex, it was that women weren't throwing themselves at him.
And you know, coming out of the closet as an incel myself (not an ideological one, just a technical one, in that I'm still a virgin way past the point where that is acceptable), I have made very few attempts to talk to women. I have even turned down opportunities to have sex 4 times now, simply because the woman was not attractive to me: I feel like an ordinary guy would have just taken those opportunities, since I definitely have the impression normal guys will screw anything, specially if they're thirsty, and maybe even if not.
Thank you for sharing that.
Does anyone have any special insights into what is it that Musk is trying to do with Twitter? I don't want to start a culture war / Musk good/bad fight, so please don't pile on the heat without light - if possible. I'm genuinely puzzled about this from a purely business viewpoint: it looks like he's "deliberately" crashing the thing into the ground. Curious if anyone has a different take on this.
Elon musk is a bad at business. He is a great salesman/showman, but he is not good at business. This was why he was pushed out of PayPal. He has succeeded with Tesla and SpaceX because both companies required selling a big vision, throwing money in at it, and getting somewhat lucky (which he did successfully). He didn't start either of these companies, but took the kernel of a great idea and blew it up to mega company size.
He tried this with Boring Company but that was just too dumb and wasnt a true innovative vision - mostly because it was his and not someone else's.
There is no vision with twitter (he is trying with "X for everything" but it's just the wrong play). Twitter is just a social networking site that is funded through advertising - a pretty simple business model. Twitter wasn't run very well before Elon bought it, but he isn't going to fix it because he is not good at business.
Well, I don’t quite see Musk being generally “bad at business”. Only because it’s such a broad generalization. He’s been enormously successful as a businessman. It’s more like he’s better at some specific kinds of business: e.g., both Tesla and SpaceX are at a core high-tech manufacturing companies in wide-open spaces (meaning too few competitors so plenty of room for optimization). In contrast, Boring Co operates in a space where a lot of innovation already happened, tunnels are dug everywhere for hundreds or years, so the idea that there are easy improvements there does not make sense.
And Twitter is a basket case.
Just a small correction:
> He didn't start either of these [Tesla and SpaceX] companies
Musk clearly founded SpaceX. And although its success doubtlessly depended on some early key employees, its long-term vision definitely stemmed from Musk.
I've been wondering if Musk is positioning himself as Trump's heir. Desantis and others have tried to position themselves to inherit Trump's political goodwill. But to be blessed by Trump involves submitting to Trump, and submission is a posture of weakness.
Musk doesn't need to submit to Trump. Musk likes accruing power and causing trouble. He not only doesn't mind turning off large swaths of people, he seems to seek it out. His social methods probably appeal to people who want their leaders to "own" the other side. If Musk has the same sort of political instincts as Trump, maybe he could inherit Trump's mob without Trump's help.
But to what end? Musk can’t be elected President.
You're right. Thank you. I momentarily forgot about the constitution.
My opinion is that Twitter didn't work as a business before, and really, really doesn't work as a business now that all the cheep financing has dried up. Musk is just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, though I doubt anything will come of it all.
Peter Coy wrote on this https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/opinion/elon-musk-twitter-x.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FE0.76AV.AopvMjk7Gg3h&hpgrp=k-abar&smid=url-share
I think he's at the point where he's just trying to entertain himself and get as much engagement as possible with the site, and hope that maybe the advertisers eventually return plus greater engagement will create more subscription revenue. I doubt he'd deliberately try and run a business into the ground - Musk has gone to great lengths in the past to try and avoid an outright business failure, including that hasty purchase of Solar City by Tesla years ago.
I think it's simply that he's trying to accomplish too many mutually-conflicting goals.
1. He wants less restriction on speech, particularly on the right-leaning side. He sees Old Twitter as being too dominated by the speech repression culture of the left and wanted to counterbalance that.
2. He also seems to want it to be more of an even playing field, letting people buy their way into the kind of relevance that previously only verified accounts could possess.
3. He still wants it to be a good place to get accurate timely information. This pretty directly conflicts with goal #2.
4. He wants to turn it into a profitable enterprise on its own. It is worth noting that Twitter was not profitable beforehand, so he had a hard road here.
5. He wants to fulfill his longtime dream of an "everything" app.
6. He wants to still have time to pay attention to his other enterprises (Tesla, SpaceX).
My overriding thesis to all of these is that he is a man of impulse, and that his position as 'richest man in the world' has gone to his head, and that he plunged into Twitter with too many conflicting ideas about what to do with it. And whenever he takes action in one direction, it undermines his other goals. Time - and the tolerance of his partners in the $44B buyout - will ultimately tell how it all works out.
I think he also has a penchant for drama. Virginia Postrel had a good line in her review of that Walter Isaacson biography of Musk, that when Musk doesn't have some sort of problem or drama to thoroughly sink himself into it he tries to go and create it instead.
Twitter as a public company was significantly profitable in both 2018 and 2019 (see table below). Any buyer of the company would have viewed that as a reason for optimism, "it was making money so we'll just need to get it back to that" etc.
Year Net profit / loss ($mm)
2012 -79
2013 -645
2014 -577
2015 -521
2016 -456
2017 -108
2018 1206
2019 1466
2020 -1136
2021 -221
I should have said that Twitter was not _especially_ profitable beforehand, but you're right, it wasn't exactly a hopeless case.
But I think that even if the 18/19 results had held, it would be difficult to justify the $44B purchase unless you had other motives in mind beyond profitability, especially since it had just finished two straight years falling back into the red.
Even Musk seems to have thought that the $44 billion price was too much, since he made it impulsively then tried to get out of it legally later. $10-20 billion would have been a reasonable price for pre-Musk Twitter.
Make it his personal bullhorn and, to some degree, a social media for right wingers (broadly speaking). The previous attemps at the latter have invariably failed since it's hard to create something out of nothing just to be a "X attempt at Y"; better to take over an existing one and refashion it through your own actions signalling the equivalent.
If, in this process, he loses money, he can take it (and his brand is based on a devil-may-care attitude to business anyway); if he happened to earn some, so much for the better. That's not the main purpose of all this, though.
The simplest and most absurd-seeming hypothesis could actually be the correct one: Musk deliberately fell on a $40B grenade, aiming to bulldoze Twitter, salt the earth where it stood, and thereby raise the US's collective IQ by a few points.
The biggest problem with that theory is that after he agreed to buy it, he spent months trying to back out of the deal. I suppose you could steel-man that by saying that he was still committing to buying it and just wanted to get a better price, but I haven't heard any reporting that backs that up.
I think the true simplest hypothesis is that Elon is a man of impulse, and the means to indulge his impulses, and we're all trying too hard to see grand designs. But I think that deserves it's own reply to OP.
Then why not just shut it down?
Simply closing it down overnight risks freeing up hands which could conceivably re-create it elsewhere and attract a critical mass of users (observe that several such attempts already took place, but for whatever reasons not succeeded) given that there is still a strong demand. Musk's behaviour seems to be consistent with an attempt to destroy the demand, and perhaps even to permanently discredit the entire concept.
If anyone proposed this a year ago it would've seemed utterly absurd, and yet now does fit the available facts!
IMHO it wouldn't have seemed absurd even a year ago, if one recalls that Musk isn't a simple finite state automaton like most oligarchs, and historically was quite willing to burn arbitrary fortunes on elaborate attempts to make a world that is more to his liking, rather than merely to upgrade a megayacht.
I thought he liked Twitter. At least he tweeted a lot even before buying it.
Which specific decisions seem like him trying to burn the place to the ground? The mass firing specifically, while pretty bad for the employees (and also labour law violations) seems to be done to achieve a specific culture change to a lean high per-employee productivity company with faster movement (but more bugs), and while I personally would prefer fewer features and fewer bugs I can see why he would have wanted that goal.
Changing the way they render external link previews
Blocking imbedding of twitter links on certain sites
Opening up blue checkmarks to anyone willing to pay
Renaming the company X from Twitter
Catering to groups and people that scared off twitters biggest advertisers.
These are all terrible business decisions that show he either has no idea what the value of twitter was for most people or that he is intentionally running it into the ground.
most of these, but opening up bluecheck seems straightforwardly reasonable (despite annoying elitist journalists), since it both provides a new source of revenue and removes twitter from the uncomfortable position of having to decide who counts as important.
unblocking people who scare off advertisers is probably a net negative as a business decision, but not an unreasonable one for someone who ideologically believes in free speech (or even in free speech that doesn't offend him personally). I think Musk would describe it as a cost worth paying rather than an unintentionally bad decision.
I'm of the position that the mass firings was one of the best business decisions he could have made. The company was obviously very bloated, and he not only saved a lot of money but apparently got rid of a bunch of people who were influencing the company culture in a way hostile to his intentions.
I'd like to think he has good reasons for a lot of the other stuff he does on there, but I keep coming back to "he felt like it" as a primary goal. Not a lot else makes sense for at least some of his moves.
"Because it is his pleasure"; like the fictional Auda Abu Tayi in Lawrence of Arabia. I liked that character somehow.
I think in general "Elon Musk isn't strategic and just does things in fits of mania" is underrated as an explanation for things.
I think that while the reasons you describe were part of the motivation for the firings (and reasonable reasons), there was also an explicit decision to move the company into a more "move fast and break things" direction (which is musk's style more generally). I understand why he would want to do that, but in general I think mature t ch companies should do it less.
I'm ambivalent about the mass firing, it's hard to tell how much damage this did vs. savings. But telling key major advertisers to F themselves, and then re-instating Alex Jones' account on top, feels like a next level of damage without a possible business upside.
what I get from what he said was more along the lines of, "you're going to try to push me around, with money? you're going to try to blackmail me? then--"
I'm also seeing that everyone's talking about what came after "then" and no one's talking about what he said before. Adolescent the delivery may be, there was content there.
Saying that you aren't going to buy a service if that service isn't set up to provide a net benefit to you isn't blackmail, it's basic capitalism.
There's room to argue that the advertising companies are mistaken and advertising on Twitter is still valuable. But instead of doing that, Musk decided to tell the advertising companies to go fuck themselves. This is not an effective way to convince them to give him money.
Robb's whole point above is that the premise you're claiming here is false (at least, from Musk's POV). Advertisers aren't merely telling him they're getting no benefit from buying ad space on Twitter/X; they're *threatening* him.
To see the difference, imagine if Musk had proposed a framework in which their ads are profitable for them, and Twitter/X still had the same internal culture Musk wanted. Would the advertisers accept that, or would they want the pre-Musk culture badly enough to leave those profits on the table?
If it's the former, then yes, Musk is overreacting. If it's the latter, then Musk is correct. I think Musk sees these advertisers as the latter; they'll take a personal hit as long as they get to tell Musk what to do.
Alternately, Musk is seeing several advertisers declare they're not renewing their ad purchases - which, in a free market, is perfectly reasonable - but also trying to attach a moral valence to it - which is only fine if both parties get to do it. So, if an advertiser wants to tell Musk it's leaving because "X sucks", Musk can tell them he doesn't want their business because *they* suck.
I think he hates being beholden to advertisers, and is actively trying to get the platform away from that model of income. Whether he has a chance to make that successful is doubtful but possible. I really doubt that he's there yet, such that the alienation of current advertisers is likely a significant problem. He may have calculated that his users will care more about a principled stand than his advertisers (assuming those who left are not likely to come back either way?).
If Musk could persuade the users to simply pay e.g. 1$/mo., he could send the unhappy advertisers packing and not miss them.
Agreed, and I totally think that's what he was doing with Blue or whatever it was called. He seems to genuinely have hoped that a significant number of his users would pay for functionality and then he could drop the advertisements. If you think about how early in his time there he started looking at alternate funding sources, this seems pretty likely.
Users don’t pay nearly enough to sustain it. Unless Musk can figure out a model that does not depend on ads he’s pissing off paying customers while acquiring non-paying users.
Also, “Musk tweet about user growth” should have a picture of a salt mine truck attached to it :)
My take is that Musk is psychologically incapable of accepting a loss and would much rather make a risky play which has the possibility of vast success.
So when he bought twitter he paid $40 billion for a company which would be worth ~$20 billion after the recession hit. Now theoretically the right moves shouldn't depend on the actual purchase price and he could try and maximize its value by tinkering at the edges and maybe get it up to $30 billion. But he would much rather reduce the average value to $15 billion if it included a significant chance of a big win.
What is the potential big win? If you mean the payment system, it seems unlikely when nearly everyone already has access to Apple Pay or Google pay.
My take (somewhat informed by Matt Levine's takes), is that Elon originally started the process as a joke he never really intended to complete the followthrough on, got enough inertia to end up actually signing contracts, and then the Twitter CEOs (seeing their golden parachute attempting to back out) sued him to ensure he actually paid them out.
So now Musk owns a company that it was a bad decision for him to have bought in the first place and is flailing around having fun and is just flying by the seat of his pants without a properly reasoned end game strategy.
It -doesn't- make sense from a business standpoint, and Musk is rich enough he doesn't have to care about that fact.
Looking for advice on effective, efficient ways to refresh very rusty generalist coding skills.
I am a former longtime generalist coder who has spent the last decade of my career on a management track. It's been about 7-8 years since I wrote any significant amount of code for my job, and more than a decade since coding was my main job. I will have some leisure time in the coming year which I'd like to use to become "more technical" again. This is not with any particular specialty or tech stack in immediate view, but so as to be able to join Team Build the Thing where the Thing is something I deeply intrinsically care about building, and actually pitch in effectively with the building work rather than just doing management. In a couple of cases where I tried to do that pitching-in over the past two years, I found it pretty painful and slow. This leads me to think that I need to go back to the gym, as it were, before doing more.
My current default plan is to work through one of those Udemy Python courses that has example projects in a lot of different areas, and then find a tutorial on Github Copilot since that is clearly the new productivity-enhancing hotness. I'd appreciate suggestions for alternative and/or supplemental plans. Bonus points for material that might have some application to embedded control systems programming, whether vehicle controls or SCADA-type industrial controls or similar; the last time I did anything like that was in the late 1990s, so now a *very* long time ago, but it seems like it'd be particularly fun to try and go back to that, and also potentially applicable to a lot of cool Things to Build.
Thanks in advance for whatever wisdom you may have!
If you already have the generalist coding skills, you can't really lose them. The rust will go away quickly as you use them again. I second the advice to not bother with Udemy or video courses in general, except maybe a short intro if you want to get into modern tooling, and also skip Copilot for now, because if you let the code mostly write itself, you won't be refreshing the skill to produce it yourself, which is what you want now. Just get your hands typing and debugging, maybe with the help of some challenge like Advent of Code.
The big question is what kind of programming you want to get into, and what are the specific difficulties in it. Lots of code is functional but relatively unsophisticated: updating UIs, creating records, validating inputs, handling errors, updating, etc. If you're going into a large-scale project, you will want to get back a sense of taste in how the thing is structured ("architected") inside, and the pros and cons of different ways of modularizing it. I'm quite a fan of John Ousterhout's Philosophy of Software Design. If it involves significant amounts of computation (e.g numpy), that's another specific area to learn about. Same with distributed systems, high availability, etc. First see what specific skills are required, then go practice those.
If you were a generalist coder in the past, I would stay away from Udemy courses, likely to be much too slow and underpowered for you. I'd suggest going *right now* to Advent of Code, and start on the current set of problems, from the first one on. Do it in whatever language you want to acquire/freshen up. AoC is fun and starts easy. Use https://learnxinyminutes.com/ as a cheat sheet, for Python or any other language.
Particularly for Python, if you want to see inspiring examples of short, elegant, idiomatic, readable code, look for Norvig's pytudes. In particular, you can read Norvig's solutions of past AoCs, or even "compete" with them (by trying to solve e.g. 2022 AoC one by one, then comparing with his solution). Though I'd start with the current AoC just for the sport of it.
I don't understand the idea of using Copilot for this, and would steer clear of it until you are confident in your generalist coding skills.
Once you're comfortable with AoC-style problems, go deeper on whatever domain is close to your heart.
Whatever you do, it has to become something you’re hooked on. I find a concrete project is typically far better than a course, because I care more about progressing. I am also forced to solve real problems - some of which may never have been solved in that exact form. That’s typically not the case in a course. The real world is usually more fun than a course.
My approach is that whenever I'm between programming jobs, I have a couple hobby code projects I work on, usually small games of some sort, that I can focus on putting together and actually playing through them to locate the rough edges and attempting to code a proper fix to them.
The key point is that it's fun for me to mess with and I can set a target goal that isn't some arbitrary homework assignment from someone else.
Yeah, this would have been a useful thing for me to do in retrospect. Instead, other hobbies and life constraints intervened, and now I think I need a bit more of a guided "start here" even if it does have a homework assignment flavor.
This is regarding an old Slate Star Codex post "Meditations on Moloch"
I am using a quote in my bachelors degree project.
This one:
Alexander makes a point that C. S. Lewis once said: ”what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead, we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?”
Alexander says that Ginberg awered C. S. lewis whith his poem "Howl" in which he describes Moloch.
What I am looking for is whether Ginsberg answered C. S. Lewis or whether Alexander just made up a quote out of thin air?
I have REALLY looked for where C. S. Lewis has actually said this. Scott Alexanders link to where he has gotten it from, is just a meme. The only place I can find that Lewis should have said this, is in Alexanders blog. I would really like to find out from where the original quote is from. Cant find it. Not in libraries, not on Google Scholar, not on PhilPapers, not anywhere. What is up with that, and can anyone help.
The link that Alexander provides as source, is just a meme, so maybe Alexaner just made up the quote: https://web.archive.org/web/20200427053026/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Just a weird quote to make up??
I’ve read a lot of CS Lewis and have a pretty good ear for prose. I don’t think Lewis would have used the image of a sphinx breaking open a skull and eating what’s inside. It’s too violent and gross And he would not have used “eat up” to mean “eat”. “Eat up” may be an Americanism — whatever it is, it’s got an informal, slangy sound. This sounds to me like Scott’s remembered and restated version of something of Lewis’s he read.
Thank you. I agree
I don't think it's intended to mean that C. S. Lewis asked the question in that exact phrasing, or that Ginsberg's poem was written as a direct response to Lewis.
I'm not sure whether Lewis' writings asked 'this question', the question of What Makes Things Suck When Surely They Could Be Fine, or if it was just a reference to the meme.
Thank you, I agree
Scott isn't claiming that Ginsberg is responding to Lewis or even that Lewis ever said that paraphrase. The line "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?" was written by Ginsberg and wasn't quoting anything earlier. Scott is saying that Ginsberg's Moloch is an answer to the question "what does it?" where it means make the world worse than it could be. He only brings up Lewis because "what does it?" is attributed to him in that joke image.
Thank you, I agree
The U.S. encompasses a huge variety of climatic and geological zones and has a lot of natural beauty. Does Canada have anything of interest that either can't be found in the U.S., or is better than its best U.S. counterpart?
The only two places I can think of are Banff National Park, which some people subjectively say is more beautiful than the U.S. counterparts in Alaska and Montana, and Newfoundland, whose climate (and its volatility) doesn't seem to compare to anywhere in America.
While Alaska does have some High Arctic areas, much more of it is forest/mountains/coastal biomes than people think. I'd submit that there isn't really anything like the Canadian Arctic archipelago in the *world*, but certainly not in the USA.
Torngat.
The Canadian shield and it's lakes. Minnesota sees a little of this, but it really isn't comparable.
I've done nature oriented trips to dozens of countries around the world and the Northern Parks in Canada and Quebec are my favourite places on earth.
I'm sure there are places of equal beauty. But I went canoeing for two weeks in Killarney provincial park and I'm still blown away by the memory. Green pine trees, white granite cliffs and blue lakes that are a color I haven't seen elsewhere. (There must be some copper sulfate or something else in the water.) A day trip to crystal lake at the 'top' of the park was the highlight.
Nice! Killarney is amazing.
Could be residual "rock flour" in the lakes
I'm interested in the case of Geraldine Largay, the woman who left the Appalachian Trail in Maine to go to the bathroom, got lost, could not be found after an extensive search, and eventually died in the woods. What can we learn from her story? My takeaways:
1) Despite a narrative that all kinds of people can hike the Appalachian Trail, it's probably not a good idea for all kinds of people. Geraldine was 66 and only capable of carrying limited weight due to back problems. Her pace was 1 mile per hour. Being slow by itself wouldn't have killed her, but it may have impeded her ability to hike back out. Age would have impaired her ability to handle the physical stress of being lost with limited food.
2) Hiking skill is distinct from survival skill. Geraldine actually went to the Appalachian Trail Institute to study hiking skills, and other hikers seem to have considered her well-prepared. Her survival skills were limited.
3) After realizing she was lost, Geraldine hiked uphill, apparently in search of cell signal, rather than downhill towards civilization. After that strategy failed on the first day, she stayed put in very dense terrain where she was difficult to find rather than trying downhill. It's unclear whether she did this as a deliberate strategy or whether she was too fatigued to keep hiking.
4) She had the means to make fire and in fact did so, but the fires weren't large, consistent and smoky enough to be seen.
5) She only carried two days worth of food. Although it was July and she was probably surrounded by edible plants, she apparently didn't have the skills to identify edible plants or mushrooms.
6) She carried a compass but it was cheap and her navigation skill was limited. (But I'm not sure if navigation would have helped if she didn't know which way to go.)
When I discuss being lost with male friends, I ALWAYS (but always) get the "oh that wouldn't happen to me, I'd just follow water down towards civilization" and—while I don't disagree with the strategy—I hate the arrogance. It's not going to be that easy. The lesson to take from this is not that you'll be fine if you're faster and younger than Geraldine, and not that staying put is always a bad idea. Trying to self-rescue by hiking out CAN work, but especially under the stress of being lost, people can move too fast, make bad decisions, push themselves too hard under fatigue, and end up worse lost, injured, wet/hypothermic.
As a solo hiker, I will certainly be thinking about Geraldine next time I step off the trail to go to the bathroom. I'm thinking of taking orange tape to create landmarks for myself.
Facts here largely from the book "When You Find My Body."
I'm interested in the "I'd just follow water down towards civilization" comment. Is that conventional wisdom for lost hikers in the US?
I've never heard it in Australia, which I suspect might be about geography. I feel like trying to follow water in Australia is unlikely to lead you to a nice stream that's easily followed, and more likely to lead you into a steep-sided gully with a creek at the bottom which will be very hard to follow. Going downhill in general will likely lead you to the top of a cliff, or worse still to some point where the ground ahead of you is too steep to safely descend and the ground behind you is too steep to easily ascend. And of course while the creek that you might wind up following will probably hit some kind of civilisation before it runs into the ocean, the median distance to civilisation is a helluva lot further than it would be in the US.
I've been lost in the wilderness in the past, never for more than a few hours, but always due to stupid decisions. I'm not going to assume that any particular idiot situation can't happen to me.
Yes, that’s the conventional wisdom, and my understanding is it’s likely to work IF you actually can keep following the creek and avoid injury and exhaustion.
I appreciate your humility and this is a good reminder that I’d probably have to learn a whole new set of survival skills when I go hiking in Australia
There are similar places in the US where following a creek is likely to leave you staring at a nasty drop into a canyon. And, while the northeast is somewhat densely populated (not Maine though outside of the coast), the distances to civilization in the southwest can be formidable.
I'll just chime in to say even the baby mountains are dangerous. We've got an easy one here, three-hour walk, nice gravel trail all the way up, and I've been repeatedly told "never hike it when it's foggy, you'll lose the trail and die."
The most dangerous part of nature around here is in fact the vegetation; it acts like water, growing to the same height everywhere and hiding holes. Take a careless step and that's your leg.
Did she have a whistle? Is that a general thing on these kind of trails? Or are they so unfrequented that a whistle is no good.
I was once benighted on a belay ledge with 3 other people (2 were our kids, otherwise we, the adults, would have just waited til dawn. Yes, the kids were very safely tied in to anchors.) We knew the wife of the other adult in our party would call rescue if we were not home by dark, so I just started blowing my whistle once ever 5 mins or so, 3 blasts in a row. Rescuers heard it within an hour and found us soon after.
She had a whistle (I generally carry one too FWIW). Apparently you can hear a whistle for up to a mile, and searchers at some points were within a mile of her. So....either she wasn't blowing the whistle (you wouldn't be able to do that constantly) or that weren't able to hear on the dense trails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5ROoNT7-ZI
I love love love those bits. The Autistic reporter could have been a sitcom for a year or two.
I don't think this would happen to me. With all due respect she doesn't seem like she was very knowledgable (news articles say she didn't know how to use a compass) or in the best condition (in her 60s) and made elementary mistakes I wouldn't make.
Google "hiker died in Arizona" and you'll find hundreds of instances of people hiking without even the most basic sun/heat protection and/or remotely sufficient water and predictably dying; these are extremely avoidable mistakes.
It may not happen to you, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from her story.
Absolutely, and learning from her story and stories like hers is why it won't happen to me
A great hiking mystery story is BIll Ewasko, though it is resolved now. Tom Mahood has some great posts.
One of the most vivid memories of unprepared hikers comes from White Sands: a young couple in beach attire with a single small plastic bottle of water happily walking out into the blazing desert furnace, while the covered head-to-toe me with a gallon of water in the backpack is looking on in a mild state of horror. AFAIK they made it out ok, didn't see any emergency responders.
"It's sunny out so obviously I should expose as much skin as possible" is such a common and dangerous misconception; National Parks in the Southwest really need a dress code. A few years ago my group basically rescued a newlywed couple lost with no water or apparently sense of direction, I truly think they would have needed a helevac if somebody even called one for them.
At this point I basically discount all stories of people dying in nature because the people who die in nature seem to be on a completely different preparedness level than I would be
This comment seems a bit anachronistic because...
1) Any phone can now store offline maps for the entire earth and the combination of GPS, Glonass, Baidu and Galilleo ensures excellent accuracy in almost any weather conditions.
2) You can get the iPhone 14/15 Pro with emergency satellite connectivity or a Spot device that does the same. If you get the iPhone you can get a few powerbanks for spare capacity. If you get the Spot, it's got ~3 months of battery life (and you can bring spare batteries too). Both allow you to send your exact coordinates to emergency personnel and even get a reply back letting you know what the ETA is on help arriving to your location.
Obviously there _are_ extreme conditions where emergency services won't help you out - i.e. you probably shouldn't go hiking in the mountains during a snow storm unless you're an experienced hiker. Anything else though? Meh, bring a phone + Spot and there's a ~zero chance you'll ever get lost.
The whole point in backpacking is to get away from the phone. Why didn't she pack a helicopter?
Because it helps you not die.
It's not a deadly sin. I should have asked for a month of Greed. But Greed can kill, too.
I agree they can help, I don't agree these devices reduce the chance to zero. You can lose these devices or lose battery (spare powerbanks are quite heavy and a lot of hikers are not going to carry them).
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Portable-Double-Speed-Recharging/dp/B09VP9QJSS - this powerbank weighs 2 pounds and can recharge a smartphone 10 times. If you use your smartphone in airplane mode on the trail (GPS still works, it just doesn't try to connect to the phone network) it will last for 2 days at a time easily. So you're looking at 20 days of use.
If that's too much you can just take two Spot devices and a paper map and while you won't have access to Maps, you'll have a 99.99% chance of being able to call for help.
If I was hiking the Appalachian trail my setup would be: iPhone 14 Pro, a plain Android smartphone with a big battery, two powerbanks, two Spot devices and a couple of water-resistant paper maps. My only concern at that point would be danger from wild animals and possibly a small risk of encountering hostile humans.
Plus a compass, right? The author of the book on Geraldine surveyed 21 thru-hikers (not just day hikers) near the end of the AT in Maine. SIXTEEN did not have a compass. Two more carried a compass they weren’t sure how to use. So yeah, your setup sounds safe, albeit very heavy, but many hikers are not even doing step one.
Yes, a compass would be good as the final backup - but not really necessary as long as your phone works. But like I said, anyone getting lost in the woods as of 2023 is doing so purely due to their lack of foresight in purchasing some satellite-enabled devices. We're now completely and permanently done with the idea of "total wilderness" :-)
Oof. Stuff like this just always hits home for me how much being alone accelerates your risk for camping/hiking type activities.
There's a whole constellation of things from twisting an ankle to getting sick that are pretty easy to manage if you're with a group of people in a remote location but are suddenly on the "devastatingly difficult to life threatening" scale if you're off in that remote location by yourself.
Yes. But solitary backpacking is sort of magical.
It's a whole different experience!
IIRC, for some years now, several hundred $ buys you a "GPS + satellite SMS" emergency beacon. I assumed that at this point, all wilderness exploration aficionados have them. Evidently not?
According to the book, Geraldine considered getting such a device but decided not to. Not sure how many hikers carry them, but they're pretty expensive and heavy. I think I'd get one for a very long hike, but haven't feel the need so far.
A quick market survey reveals e.g. "ResQLink", ~5oz, ~400 $. (Disclaimer: I have never used this item and am not affiliated with the vendor.) And there appear to be others like it, priced similarly.
Yep, expensive and heavy. I’m not against these devices, but it’s not realistic to expect everyone will have them, nor are they an adequate substitute for carrying and knowing how to use a compass.
The linked item weighs (and costs) almost the same as the iPhone SE. But certainly more than a compass. Parachute is not a substitute, by same token, for knowing how to fly the plane. (Interestingly, most amateur pilots don't carry parachutes.)
You can even rent them from a decent outfitter. One of the guys I do this kind of stuff with started bringing them along so that he can track his route and his kids can see on the map where dad is adventuring around.
I did get lost off the appalachian trail right around the same place a few years ago, spent a day trying to get back on trail and then did the downhill until you find civilization thing. I don't think I was ever in any danger but it wasn't fun or easy, and I second "out of shape people in their sixties who wouldn't be able to handle getting stuck and lost in a rainstorm for a few days shouldn't be hiking the AT" (or at least definitely not alone.
How do we know why she left the trail?
I was a Boy Scout, and I can't shake the feeling that this couldn't happen to me. Not because I'm an expert survivalist (I can't find edible plants either), but because I can't imagine getting lost so easily. Maybe she actually left the trail for some reason other than using the bathroom, and therefore went further than she would have for that purpose?
The most common reason for going far enough off the trail to get lost, is that one is trying to take an "obvious" shortcut. Which in hindsight is an obviously dumb thing that a person might not want to admit to and use the "potty break" excuse instead. But in this case, we don't have any testimony as to why she left the trail, so, yeah, we don't know and shouldn't presuppose.
You know, that's a great point.
On the same topic of edible plants, my impression is that the Northeast is honestly not-great for readily edible forage prior to early autumn. Mushrooms maybe (although if you're me good luck identifying anything less obviously edible than the bright-orange-and-not-very-close-to-poisonous-alternatives Chicken Of the Woods), anything that resembles a raspberry/blackberry/salmonberry definitely, and in July/August blueberries if you're in an environment that supports them (AIUI basically a lot of exposed granite and acidic soil), but beyond those options (and maybe fiddleheads in early spring) you're not gonna find much that's both plant-based and calorically valuable.
I've spent a fair bit of time in Northeast woods and hiking, and your basic forest ground cover is overwhelmingly non-fruit bearing trees (generally deciduous), with an undergrowth (if any) of various likewise non-fruit-bearing plants and shrubs (modulo the occasional raspberry/salmonberry aggregate fruit). It can be a decent place to be a deer, but if I had to feed myself I think my first instinct would be that I'd have better luck eating the deer (or, much more plausibly with limited equipment, find some fish) rather than trying to forage for calories, assuming I was otherwise precluded from reaching civilization or rescue for several days.
The inner bark of many if not most North American trees is pretty rich in nutrients/calories, if not tasty (and pretty certain not to be poisonous) -- conifer seeds would also be good in a survival situation and not require knowing which roots to dig up or whatnot.
Honestly the amount of caloric content you are going to get versus energy spent probably isn't worth it versus jsut using that energy to hiking further. You are never that far from civilizaiton on the AT. probably less than a days walk always. You aren't trapped on an island.
No need to draw a dichotomy between hiking out and gathering food. You can do both. I strongly suspect that part of the reason Geraldine didn’t hike out was weakness from lack of food, and even 500 calories could have helped… which she could have gathered within a few yards of her campsite. If she had had the knowledge.
You don't get weakness from lack of food for like a day (maybe more). Which is plenty of time to rescue yourself unless your leg is broken.
"Find civilization and get yourself rescued" should absolutely be plans A through C in any practical sense.
There's a ton of edible plants, but it's going to be hard to get sufficient calories from greenery. I personally would have no idea how to trap game, but maybe you have more skills with this
As you say it's the caloric content rather than nominal edibility that's the real sticker.
As to mammals, I have no trapping experience at all and extremely limited faith in my capacity to improvise. Fish seem like something I'd have a better shot at either brute forcing or using primitive techniques in a way that's calorically favorable, but realistically we're talking about me going from like a 99% chance of starving to 60-80% of starving.
Rescue or return to civilization at the earliest available opportunity are overwhelmingly the only plausible ways for *me personally* to not die in this context, my point was more that I was skeptical that the odds were especially good for almost anyone to survive in the New England woods prior to autumn without recourse to animal sources.
It takes quite a long time to starve, unless you're extrememly thin to begin with. The things that kill you are hypothermia or no access to water.
Bushwacking (hiking off the trail) in the Adirondacks a friend and I got 'lost' for several hours. We knew about where we were on the map but woke up in the morning to a thick fog and after a while a bit of a panic set in. We got over it, but for a while we were uncertain about which way to go.
We have her journal entries and (unsuccessfully sent) texts. I do think that some people naturally have a better sense of direction than others, but...you've never gotten lost in the woods?
Edit: Or maybe you don't go very far off to pee in the woods. There are probably sex/personality differences on this
I've found that my sense of direction has gotten worse as I've gotten older. I also think I get less practice using it these days, though, with GPS doing the hard part for me for the last 15-20 years now.
I think there might have been times when I missed a turn on the trail, but I don't think I've ever been unable to find the trail itself.
Maybe it was nighttime, and she went much further from the trail than was necessary?
But if it's night you don't have to go far at all off the trail to pee -- even if you
re a woman and modest. Twenty feet at most.
Oh I've definitely been unable to find the trail. If you miss a blaze or two in dense foliage, or the blazes get worn away. I've also had this problem after a big leaf fall when the leaves were so dense as to cover traces of the trail.
I haven't gotten really lost going to pee in the woods, but sometimes I find myself unable to follow the exact route back and wind up some yards further down the trail than when I went in. So although I do think of myself as a "better" hiker than Geraldine FWIW it's easy to see how this could happen.
New England woods can be incredibly confusing. I can easily imagine getting disoriented there. However, I am struggling to understand how an experienced hiker with a compass couldn't figure out which way to turn to get out, even if not by the shortest path.
I don't think she was using her compass at that point. It's possible to do a lot of hiking without ever using one.
Yes, I have one in my pack but I struggle to remember ever breaking it out.
I've been having problems with an electric range and could use advice diagnosing the problem. The unit has an old-fashioned cooktop with four heating elements, just like this:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Amana-ACR4303MFW-4-5-Cu-Ft-White-Electric-Range-with-Bake-Assist-Temps/388207988
Over the past two months, three different receptacles that the burners / heating elements plug into have melted, and in a separate incident, the stove tripped its circuit breaker. This video shows the exact problem:
https://youtu.be/dhuOMxU5R_M?si=N2hG0ezkhydPxIqZ&t=19
When the first receptacle melted, I bought a new one from Home Depot and replaced it. It melted again within weeks. A different heating element's receptacle also melted. Only two of the stove's elements are still working.
What's the problem here?
This electric range is in a rental property that I own. It came with the house when I bought it eight years ago, and worked fine until the current tenants moved in. On literally their first night at the house, the first receptacle meltdown happened. They were adamant that they didn't misuse the machine in any way.
They're a large family, and they use that kitchen to cook much more often than the average group of people. I think the electric range is getting more use (e.g. - all four heating elements on at once, multiple times daily) than it ever has. I think they might be inadvertently overloading it, but shouldn't the machine be designed to handle that level of use without malfunctioning?
What's going on here?
I read some of the reviews at the link you provided for that stove and it seems you are not alone. Apparently that stove has some kind of safety switch on the burners that shuts them off when they get too hot and apparently on your stove that’s not working. All in all people seem to be rather dissatisfied with the burners .
> what a horrible oven this is..it came brand new in a house i purchased..because it has temperature limiting burners,i cant even boil a pot of water for pasta because the burner wont stay on high for more than 5 minutes before it shuts itself off.<
And then there are other complaints of the shut off switch not working in which case it would lead to the problem you’re having.
I'm going to guess the tenants are overloading it. Maybe supplemental heating as well as cooking?
I'm not sure how one can "overload" a stove to create this kind of a failure in an otherwise healthy socket...
There allegedly are people who attempt to abuse their kitchen stove as a space heater. (AFAIK however it is typically a gas stove, and in a dwelling where the mains current was cut off for nonpayment.)
The more likely thing is that an absent-minded tenant routinely let the electric burners run without a load.
What do you mean "run without a load"?
Without something standing on the burner.
Ok this makes sense, and given B Civil's comment may be the simplest explanation.
Replace the receptacle, and swap elements with another receptacle to see if the element is causing the failures (risks toasting the *other* receptacle) - or just replace the bad receptacle and that element at the same time. If the element-side contacts are bad it could be arcing or heating the socket excessively.
I went with the overboiling hypothesis because the OP mentioned two separate burners being affected. So it's unlikely to be a specific element or socket. Although not impossible - maybe the thing is getting near the end of its reliable lifetime and getting cascading failures.
Without being able to inspect the sockets closely, here's my best guess (context: I'm an engineer working on wide range of problems in electronic-to-physics domain): someone lets liquids boil over to the point that the liquid gets into the socket. Now there are a couple of mechanisms that can cause excess heating:
1 - conductive liquid within the socket creates a shunt that passes current and dissipates I²R amount of power. If the R (resistance) goes low enough it will generate enough heat to melt the plastic
2 - liquid like milk doesn't cause enough of a shunt to dissipate power directly, or the burner is turned off. The milk dries up within the socket, and adds resistance to the current path. Now when the burner is turned on, the current passes through the crud resistance, and heats up that poor contact enough to melt the plastic.
Look for evidence of burned-over liquids and contamination on the drip pans and under the burners.
I hate what google, or internet, has become. I googled "knight cat" because I thought there might be a cat breed called knight and I also expected cats dressed in armor, because I remembered seeing a hamster in armor.
Instead, almost all results were ugly AI generated garbage that all looks the same. It also seems that google started prioritizing websites selling things rather than websites providing information.
btw this was the hamster: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F8d2evm0vjyr01.jpg
Edit:
There you go https://pinterest.com/pin/773141461002313911/. turns out I had to google "knight cat real" and there are plenty of cats in armor (on pinterest). I just wish I didn't have to explicitly filter through fake AI garbage.
Wait, you typed Knight Cat and that's what it searched for? Because I was looking for Plastic and it autofilled the searchbar to Plastic Surgery like a complete piece of shit.
as a rodent enthusiast, I have to comment that is in fact a guinea pig, not a hamster XD
I hope someone made a backup copy of the internet yesterday, because this is exactly what I expect -- internet getting filled by automatically generated things, which will make it difficult to find something, and also to train future generations of LLMs.
https://archive.org/
You can donate and help them keep it running!
They likely don't need your money - they are paid tens of millions of dollars each year, by people who have very specific demands about what should and should not be preserved. https://archive.org/about/
Searching "knight cat" gets similar results to "cleric cat" or "wizard cat" - a bunch of art, some of it done with AI, but all of it depicting cats being [insert RPG class here].
Searching for "cat armour" gives the results you were looking for.
I do agree google search feels like it lost some battle against SEO tools and no longer reliably puts good quality stuff at the top, though.
The reaction to the ongoing Israel-Gaza war shows that support for Israel and Jews is lower than it has been in decades in the West. Will the trend towards favoring the Palestinians continue as time passes, or is there some way that the balance could reverse?
Probably, especially since there doesn't seem to be any likely indication that further encroachment on the West Bank by settlers is going to stop anytime soon.
I think it's as simple as two things:
1. The Holocaust is slowly but inexorably declining as a driving factor in sentiment, as it recedes into history.
2. Israel maintaining and growing its disproportionate power in its region.
As long as (2) holds true, the change in (1) will translate into lower and lower levels of sympathy. The 10/7 attacks could have given Israel a chance to play up international sympathy, but for various reasons that just hasn't happened beyond a brief blip.
Also, simple _knowledge_ of history is vanishing:
https://nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/nearly-a-quarter-of-americans-under-30-think-holocaust-is-a-myth-poll-shows-israel-jewish-jews-palestine-gaza-middle-east-conflict-yougov
Grotesquely above the lizardman constant...
So to be candid: what are “people of color” or the global majority being taught, at their places of origin or here in America - that would produce this result?
Because everyone - apart from some kids in heavily immigrant enclaves, such as the little Central American girl murdered alone in her apartment by the also-recent Central American illegal - goes to the government daycare known as school.
I don't know. I haven't looked over textbooks that are currently being used in American schools, let alone in other nations. Can you suggest a good way to check?
Also, I don't know whether some of the under-30s are conspiracy theorists who reject a chunk of accurate information as lies.
As of 2019, the fraction of the American population that thinks that Apollo 11 was faked was 11% ("strongly believe" + "believe") https://www.statista.com/statistics/959480/belief-that-the-moon-landing-was-faked/ (with an additional 11% "neither believe nor disbelieve" and a further 7% "don't know"). The web page didn't split it out by age. Maybe the lizardman constant is higher than it seemed to be...
Frankly, I would feel more comfortable supporting Israel if it finally stopped expanding and declared that its current borders are final. As I see it, this is not going to happen until the entire territory of Palestine is conquered. And I suspect that this was probably always the plan.
Israel is not a monolith. Different parties and politicians support different policies. I don't think anyone was planning on annexing Gaza though. At some time in the past there was a two-state solution on the table that the Pals could have signed off on. Probably not at the moment.
> Israel is not a monolith. Different parties and politicians support different policies.
Yes, and some of those parties and politicians get democratically elected.
> At some time in the past there was a two-state solution on the table that the Pals could have signed off on.
Your idea of where you country begins and ends should not depend on what anyone else is saying.
For example, Ukrainians insist that Crimea is a part of Ukraine, regardless of who actually controls the territory now. But they also agree that e.g. Moscow is *not* a part of Ukraine. So they have a clear definition of both inside and outside that they could paint on a map. And I trust them to not try conquer the territory outside that area, and they would lose a lot of support if they did. (Whether they can actually control all the territory inside that area, that is a different question.)
Can you show me a line that Israel will *not* cross (permanently)? Like, not even 10 or 20 years later, because most Israeli citizens agree that the territory behind the line is definitely not theirs to take, so the expansion behind the line would be politically outside the Overton window?
I am okay to support self-defense, but not expansion, and if you blur the line, then you simply lose my support. (I can understand the need of an occasional military action behind your lines, but the goal should be to destroy the targets and return. If you stay there permanently, it is annexation.)
Since 1947, I believe Israel has only expanded when someone else decided to wage war against Israel, lost badly enough that the Israeli army was standing on what used to be their territory, and then refused to sign a peace treaty but let it stand as a ceasefire along current lines. IIRC the Israelis formally annexed the extra territory they wound up with in 1948, but everything since has just been placed under "temporary" Israeli administration pending some permanent settlement.
Sinai, they returned to Egypt as soon as it was clear that Egypt wasn't up for another war. They wound up in de facto control of a bit of South Lebanon in 1984(?), but withdrew from that. I believe they tried to give Gaza to Egypt at the same time as the Sinai, but Egypt didn't want it. And of course they eventually gave Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, albeit with joint Israeli/Egyptian control of the borders.
And, yes, have been settling the crap out of the West Bank, which is illegal, immoral, and provocative. But that didn't start in earnest until the West Bank was de facto Israeli-occupied for a decade and likely to remain so for many more decades.
The evidence does not support any great desire for territorial expansion on Israel's part. At worst, they are too reluctant to give territory they happen to occupy to others with a better claim on it, when they find that territory convenient for their own use. If you don't want Israel's borders to expand, just get people to knock it off on trying to invade Israel already. And I think we're mostly there.
To me it seems that you described the *major* expansions here, and then there are also the countless minor expansions whenever a group of settlers builds a new home in a territory formerly inhabited by Palestinians and IDF comes to their defense. Doing minor expansions all the time and the major ones only occasionally does not seem to disprove the hypothesis.
Unless you perceive all Palestine as de facto already belonging to Israel, in which case the settlers do not really count as expansion, only the wars do.
I covered those under "settling the crap out of the West Bank, which is illegal, immoral, and provocative."
But which occurs only on territory which was already under the physical control of Israel and which basically everybody including the relevant Arab nations agrees should remain under the physical control of Israel until a more permanent solution is in place. Jordan, e.g., isn't asking for the West Bank back, and there is zero prospect of Israeli settlers opportunistically building settlements on the *East* Bank.
The set of territory under Israel's physical control, has only ever expanded when other parties have started wars with Israel. The set of territory under Israel's physical control, has on occasion been reduced by Israel voluntarily reverting territory to Arab control in the name of peace and/or administrative convenience. If you don't want to see Greater Israel, don't try to invade Actual Israel.
Fortunately, the set of people that seriously want to invade Actual Israel, seems to have diminished from "basically the entire Arab world", to just Hamas. Plus maybe Iran but they don't have a common border. And Hamas may not have a common border with Israel much longer either.
The settlement of the West Bank never stopped since it began, and was funded and accelerated by both left wing and right wing governments.
A defined border is not a prize that you throw to your neighbours whenever they're behaving themselves, it's the bare minimum that a state that doesn't want to be seen as a colonial entity should do. Judged by the outrage I see whenever Israel is being accused of colonialism, this point seems to be lost on most Israelis and Israel's supporters.
Agreed that the settlement of the West Bank should stop. Didn't Israel try to give the West Bank back to Jordan at one point?
In general, any question of the general form "Didn't Israel try to do [Something that is ostensibly fair] ?" can be answered by "Yes they did, and they included so many attached strings and backdoors that the entire thing is null and void and useless" after you research it for a while.
This is the case for the Gaza de-settlement, which looks fair and peaceful until you see the actual self-admitted rationale of the people who masterminded it ( The sabotage of the peace process and the explicit support of Hamas). This is the case for the Palestinian state they offered in 2000, a mosaic of disconnected Palestinian enclaves in a sea of Israeli roads and settlements, with no army, navy or airforce. This is even the case for the Israeli acceptance of the 1948 partition, which looks fair and is parroted by all as evidence that Israel want to live in peace, until you dig more and realize that there were plans and classified documents revealing all the plans of the deliberate displacemenet of Palestinians was all there in 1947 and before.
So maybe. There might have been an instance where Israel tried to give the West Bank to Jordan. But I give it about 75% to 80% that - after enough research - this will turn out to have been so faustian and cynical that Jordan refused, and then Israel added that to the long list of dishonest case studies it can point to in order to prove that Arabs are warlike monsters who keep refusing peace for no reason.
And it's not like the Jordanian royal scum are angels either, so even if that was earnest it wouldn't have been any good for Palestinians.
You may be right. I haven't tried to look at the level of detail that would reveal all the "attached strings and backdoors".
My point of view is that Israelis could build taller (seismically safe) apartment buildings in Haifa and move the Israeli West Bank settlers there. And hand the Israeli roads and settlements to the West Bank Palestinians. Palestinian armed forces are too much of a hazard to Israel, those couldn't be on the table. What if it were a semi-autonomous region within Jordan, with the Jordanians _just_ there to ensure that the Palestinians did not attempt to arm themselves? Given recent history of Palestinians, I doubt that they will give each other a democratic system or much in the way of human rights, but that would be their choice.
>"Judged by the outrage I see whenever Israel is being accused of colonialism..."
That's because the *Arabs* are the colonizers (outside Arabia); it's a fundamentally dishonest accusation, which shouldn't be a surprise given taqiyya...
Taqiyya تقية is the Arabic name of the Islamic license given to Muslims to pretend they're not Muslims when threatened by death or other severe consequences. Your implicit accusation that Pro-Palestinians who accuse Israel of being a colonizer are liars practicing Taqiyya rings bizarre, given that the a lot of Pro-Palestinians are neither Muslims nor particularly fond of Islam, this Pro-Palestinian certainly isn't.
Arabs are colonizers, yes, but universal human rights came too late to condemn and stop their colonization. Universal human rights didn't come too late to condemn and stop the Israeli colonizers, which we should do in the same way we condemned and stopped any number of colonizers in the 20th century even though the natives they took the land from are themselves earlier colonizers from earlier natives. "The crime I'm doing now is the same one the victims' ancestors once did in the past" is not very convincing.
"in the same way we condemned and stopped any number of colonizers in the 20th century"
Nit: condemned, yes, stopped, not so much
Russia continues to hold Crimea and China continues to hold Tibet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization_of_Tibet
Israel is *decolonizing* their land of Arab invaders. The contrary assertion is a lie.
"That's because the Arabs are the colonizers (outside Arabia);" True enough. I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashidun_Caliphate counts as their first imperial colonial project? I guess Persian grievances with Arabians have a 1400 year history...
You're approaching this from a fundamentally misguided point of view, one that views Diaspora Jews as an extension of Israel and Israel as nothing more but the political representative of Jews everywhere.
This is about as misguided as thinking that the world's outrage about Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a deeper indication of some deep-seated hatred or prejudice towards Slavs. The analogy is particularly apt because, just as both Russians and Ukrainians are different flavors of Slavs, both Arabs and Jews are different flavors of semites, and Hebrew is both related to Arabic and explicitly borrowed from it when it was being revived in the 19th century after a millennia long hiatus as an everyday language.
There are 2 questions hiding inside your seemingly singular question :
1- Why is the world not clapping for Israel or turning a blind eye like it had done for the last 70 years ?
2- Why do some believe that Jews are somehow magically connected such that harassing a Jewish grandma in the UK is likely to affect a genocidal minister in Netanyahu's government 3000+ Km away ?
(1) is a positive development, (2) is a very negative and worrying development that threatens to undo (1) or worse. In my opinion they both have different casual chains that interlock at many points, but I might very well be wrong. But we can't honestly discuss this or reach anything meaningful under the flawed pretense that Israel and Jews are intrinsically and inevitably correlated and attitudes towards one determines attitudes towards the other.
I could agree in principal that views of Jews living in Israel as a nation-state and views of Jews living elsewhere are separate. If the concern were purely a matter of Israelis using their power to oppress their neighbors, there's a legitimate discussion to be had and the Israelis often do not come out looking good with that. If their enemies didn't also do things that make themselves look bad (suicide bombings, killing 1,200+ people on October 7), then the Palestinians could quite possibly have unified support. Even with those things, an argument can be made that it's an ongoing war and civilians die in wars.
What gets to me is that there's spillover across the Western world where Jews are being attacked (both verbally and physically). These Jews may or may not support Israel, but are clearly separate from it. Every time a Jew in a Western country is singled out for attacks, it reinforces the idea - right or wrong - that Jews are not safe from attack. It gives credence to the idea that without a Jewish state with a strong military and hard borders, Jewish people would be in danger.
I've never been to the Middle East, so I recognize my view is limited. What I do know is that Israel has been attacked numerous times in both organized wars and terrorist attacks. This reality could be the result of Israeli actions, or it could be a more general hatred of Jews. Every time a non-Israeli Jew is attacked, it supports the idea that the hatred isn't about Israeli actions but is instead about Jews. If it's about Jews, I can't support any of the groups who are against Israel/Jews right now. If it's not about Jews, then it needs to be very clear that attacks on non-Israeli Jews absolutely need to stop.
I mean, a large portion of the blame lies squarely on Israel itself. Israel incessantly insists in its propagandistic literature and various national mythos that it's the land of Jews, that everything it does is for Jews, that everything that happens because of it happens because of Jews. Built by Jews, operated by Jews, for the Jews.
Imagine if the US justified its wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam or Korea using Christianity, I wouldn't be too surprised if Christians started getting attacked in and around those regions, and possibly elsewhere. It's a tragedy, yes, but a very predictable tragedy.
When 9/11 happened, Muslims started getting attacked in Western countries. Is this "Islamophobia" ? Probably, but it's quite rational to be fearful of a religion whose adherents just demolished 2 skyscrapers and killed 2000+ people, it's not rational to take out this fear and rage on ordinary peaceful Muslims, but who is rational when they're filled with rage and fear and adrenaline ?
It's similarly quite rational to be fearful of a religion whose adherents just killed 15000+ innocent civilians, displaced 1.8 million innocent civilians, and demolished 100K buildings, hospitals, and schools. It's not rational to take out this fear and rage on ordinary peaceful Jews, but who is rational when they're filled with rage and fear and adrenaline ?
> If it's not about Jews, then it needs to be very clear that attacks on non-Israeli Jews absolutely need to stop.
I can equally well invert your syllogism and say :
>>> Palestinians have been attacked numerous times in both organized wars and terrorist attacks. This reality could be the result of Hamas actions, or it could be a more general hatred of Palestinians. Every time a non-Hamas Palestinian is attacked, it supports the idea that the hatred isn't about Hamas actions but is instead about Palestinians. If it's about Palestinians, I can't support any of the groups who are against Hamas/Palestinians right now. If it's not about Palestinians, then it needs to be very clear that attacks on non-Hamas Palestinians absolutely need to stop.
How is this useful ?
You're basically complaining "If X and Y are different things, why do some people still treat them as the same thing ? I refuse to treat them as distinct until all others make this distinction first", but this is incoherent and - furthermore - feeds the positive feedback loop you're ostensibly complaining about. People treat X and Y, the 2 different things, as the same because they're confused and/or malicious. You refusing to see distinctions plays right into their hands and perpetuates the exact same confusion.
If non-combatants in other countries were attacking Hamas supporters, or especially random Palestinians, then I would also be against that. I'm not sure what your point is here. Can I see that people will tend to conflate Israel and Jews, and also conflate Muslims with terrorists? Yes - but that's exactly my point. This is a *bad result* and we should be against it.
I'm responding to you writing
>> If it's about Jews, I can't support any of the groups who are against Israel/Jews right now.
I could be misunderstanding this, but to me, this implies some sort of ultimatum : You will not criticise Israel or recognize any of the horrors it inflicts upon Palestinians, unless and until people stop attacking Jews for their supposed connection and/or support of Israel.
While attacking Jews indiscriminately for supporting Israel is dumb and evil, the ultimatum above (if I'm understanding it correctly) doesn't seem to help matters. You're conflating Israel with Jews in the same way those who attack Jews do, the only difference is that you support both instead of attacking both, whereas what you should do is to separate both, treat Israel entirely independently of Jews.
If groups who dislike Israel are attacking Jews (including Jews in other countries and those that don't support Israel/Zionism) instead of or in addition to Israel, then those groups are wrong/evil. They're failing to distinguish between a country and people who have the same ethnic or religious background as many of the people in that country.
If it's about Israel, then there's good arguments that Israel could do better (West Bank settlements being the clearest example). This should result in few to no attacks on Jews in other countries. In fact, the specific example of Israeli settlers should result in attacks on the *settlers* and not indiscriminate attacks against all Israelis even. The October 7 attacks also killed many non-Jewish foreign workers, many of which were also kidnapped and taken back to Gaza. This doesn't fit the model where Hamas is a reaction to Israeli wrongdoing.
Many decades ago, I concluded that the leadership of the PLO and of Israel were, without necessarily directly communicating with each other but acting more or less on an unspoken understanding, were choreographing their attacks on each other as a way of perpetuating the conflict and solidifying the power structure on both sides. I have seen nothing since to convince me that I am wrong. Of course, who pays the price are the civilians on both sides.
Or maybe I'm just cynical.
I much prefer the preacher / bootlegger covert symbiosis. It is less bloody.
Not familiar with that one.
One not unlikely possibility is that this will lead to significant terrorist attacks in western countries, which would reverse this.
Outside of that - I think (maybe overly optimistically) that racial justice essentialism (whoever's less white is both more victim-y and morally superior) is on the decline as people see the disastrous results and remember it's not actually compulsory to be maximum woke, which would counteract this.
I wish that you prove right. I'm less hopeful (granted, I spend a chunk of time on reddit, which has a _lot_ of toxic wokeness). Any suggestions on how to track this? My knee-jerk reaction is to look for something on google trends, but I can't think of any obvious terms to track which would be reasonably unambiguous.
Counting catastrophes in which AI plays a critical causal role feels like a slightly misleading thing to do.
I think that the modal future is one in which AI is used in lots of things that were previously done by humans, and does them better than humans but not perfectly. That future will contain lots of catastrophes caused by AI errors, but AI will still be making us safer on net.
I think "AI makes it easy to build a homemade super virus, which some terrorists decide to make at home, destroying civilization" is a reasonably central version of AI doom.
"Warring nations using AI to launch nukes when if it didn't exist they could have just launched them without it" wouldn't be, but I worry more about the first example.
One problem with the homemade super virus example is, no matter how good a job your AI does at making a super (deadly) virus, once it gets out into the real world good old-fashioned evolution will get to work turning it into another variety of the common cold, flu, or whatever. Because what those viruses are doing is way closer to the evolutionary optimum than "kill all your hosts ASAP". Historically, diseases mostly get super deadly when they break out into a new population, and then settle down to an occasionally-deadly inconvenience.
The other problem is, if you have anything resembling a plan to make this work and especially a plan that considers and overcomes that first problem, you're going to need to test at several intermediate steps along the way, and as you get closer to testing a super deadly virus in a realistic operational environment, those tests are going to be noticed.
If the plan is that the AI will just use its mighty silicon brain to stare at base-pair sequences until it says "Eureka! With 100% confidence, this is the plague that will extinctify humanity!", then no, it's not going to work that way.
Wouldn't the super-smart AI that is developing the virus know about that problem, and suggest to its human masters that they overcome it by releasing a new killer virus every year or two?
Rabies remains deadly for humans, possibly because it's got animal reservoirs.
"dangerous biological weapons are impossible" seems like an overly optimistic take. Plagues are historically common and it wouldn't be that crazy hard to make one immune to most of our antibiotics.
"You'd have to test several steps along the way" is also not reassuring. Terrorists have historically proven fairly able to execute complicated plans with multiple moving parts, including making multiple tries when early ones failed.
The claim is not that dangerous biological weapons are impossible, but that dangerous biological weapons are not trivially an X-risk. Lots of things that aren't X-risks can still kill millions or billions of people.
we had a minor worry with people fearing the rise of 3-d printers would make creating or modifying guns much easier; just download plans and go. it seems to have been forgotten; i know consumer 3d is extruded plastic, but 3-d printing in general seems to quietly died as a thing.
maybe we'd be lucky and AI ends up like that.
3-D printing is still a big thing in some areas of industry where it's genuinely the best way to make something. But 3-D printing as a household cornucopia, wound up competing with the Amazon logistical machine that gave everyone next-day access to whatever factory was efficiently already mass-producing the thing that they want, and Amazon won that competition hands-down for obvious reasons.
This meme was just a failure to understand who wants to use guns and why. Pretty much none of us who have both the ability and the interest in 3d printing guns have any incentive to use them in anger.
It hasn't died, it was just never time efficient. Sure you can replicate that $40 plastic totchke with a dozen hours of skilled labor. But a couple dozen hours of skilled labor aren't worth that.
So it just becomes useful for custom stuff you want so bad you don't care if it takes tons of time.
One of my friends regularly designs and 3D prints stuff. It indeed mostly falls in the "custom stuff you want so bad you don't care if it takes tons of time"
Also, he is willing to live with the material property limitations of extruded plastics, which are ok if you want e.g. a holder for kitchenware, but are not great if you want transparency, or substantial strength, or heat resistance.
Doesn’t virus making need pretty specialised equipment.
I've thought for a while that the massive growth of homebrewing and small breweries over the last couple decades could provide quite good coverage and opportunity for people engaged in questionable biological research.
You're already operating and optimizing production from little microbial factories, likely maintaining different stocks and experimenting with them... Viruses are harder to handle and manipulate than yeasts, though. But that's where the somewhat-handwavey "that's what the AI is for!" factor comes in.
Auctions are a thing, and labs are always upgrading their gear - there's lots of lightly-used not-quite-SOTA equipment out there.
Still I get the impression that it might be a bit dangerous for the amateur virus maker. He’s out in his barn brewing up a world destroying virus for a diabolical AI with equipment bought from auctions. Find dead a few weeks later the last recording is:
“I‘ve done it! Humanity will pay for ignoring my genius! ah ha ha ha .... cough. Splutter. Cough “
Recording ends.
Just because the virus maker is dead doesn't mean the virus is too. In theory it could then spread to whoever finds the body or otherwise find an escape vector.
Wellll....yes, but. IIUC, the cost isn't beyond what a moderately successful business could afford. Or many universities. And parts of the job can be farmed out to 3rd parties that have no idea what you're up to...and accept "it's a company secret" as a reason not to tell them.
This report from NPR might interest you: "Report For Defense Department Ranks Top Threats From 'Synthetic Biology'" It's from 2018.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/19/621350272/report-for-defense-department-ranks-top-threats-from-synthetic-biology
More recently I overheard an interview on NPR with some commercial bio-chemists who had apparently accidentally discovered a list of very potent potential bio-weapons, and were keeping it a secret, but I have forgotten the date and the name of the show.
There was a verge article on repurposing AI pharmaceutical lead discovery software for _chemical_ weapons, https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx . Is that sort-of what you had in mind?
I'm pretty sure those are the same people I was thinking of, except I overheard an interview with them at NPR.
There are ways to either get illegal access to it or make some of it with your existing tools (not easily, but this does seem like something sufficiently strong AI could reasonably tell you how to do even if you don't assume it becomes agentic).
I am looking to dive into the world of marketing, copy writing and develop a general aptitude for business/online commerce. I don't know where to start - there is so much out there. Does anyone here have any advice or resources? I want to learn.
I am a 33 year old (former) lawyer who has been out of my field for 3.5 years now. I was diagnosed with MS just before starting my career, worked for 1.5 years before worsening illness forced me to stop. I got a stem cell transplant about 2 years ago which has put me into remission, but at this point I don't know if I have the constitution to return to the meatgrinder that is the legal profession. I realized I don't feel very much passion for it, and if possible I'd like to change into something with greater flexibility.
I've thought long and hard about what kind of work I can do remotely, and my thinking is in the direction of learning HOW to sell first, and gaining knowledge about marketing, SEO, online advertising, and then using those general and valuable skills to decide WHAT to sell. An obvious choice is just to start a marketing firm and sell services to businesses to run their marketing/ads/website or bill them for creation of web/copy/ad campaigns.
I have strong analytical skills, I read very fast, I'm a decent writer and so I think with training I can also become a good copywriter. My brother is a software engineer so I have someone close to me who has a lot of knowledge on web development and related online business/tech/etc stuff that I can consult with on a variety of online commerce matter at least on a technical level.
Thank you in advance for any help - I am grateful for book recommendations, courses, any learning materials, other communities or advice in general.
I couldn't really be called a marketer, copy writer, or any of those things, so my approach may not be so valuable to you. But I do have some success when it comes to face-to-face selling products at a market stall. And to learn how to do that I basically wikied a ton of psychology stuff and read a lot of stuff from changingminds.org, and that site had a lot of stuff to do with copywriting and online sales too - although it's been ten years and I don't know whether it's as good as it was then (wikis can go sour over time.) Also, it may not be so useful for you because for me the real helper was practise. Being face to face, I also had the benefit of immediate feedback of what was and wasn't working, plus I could model the behaviour of stallholders doing better than me. Would recommend trying in person stuff if you can, in the hopes that the same principles then inform your online copy.
Thanks for your reply. That site is interesting but it has a really terrible layout and navigation, I have to click more than I read. As to your advice, I am sure that experience was invaluable, but I think a lot of my work will be done online. There is simply too much leverage in building an online presence versus trying to get around in-person to all your prospective clients.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting you pivot your plans. Just if you get the opportunity to do anything face to face (helping a friend or whatever) then it's worth doing from a learning standpoint.
Looking for two (rather specific) book recommendations.
I once read that I. The eighteenth century, as the English novel was in its birth throes, people started writing novels with unusual narrators -- novels narrated by mice or by combs. The only one I've been able to find, though, is Smollett's History and Adventures of an Atom. I know a couple of late nineteenth-century narratives with animal narrators (Black Beauty, Autobiography of a Flea) but I'm looking for something earlier, and hopefully weirder. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Also: I really enjoyed the Penguin Classics volume Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, which includes Lazarillo de Tormes and El Buscón. I'd love to read other similar, contemporary Spanish picaresques in English. Any good translations people can point me to?
Very much appreciate any recommendations of books, or of places to look at that themselves recommend these books!
I once read a novel written from the point of view of a coin. It may have been one of the ones mentioned in this article: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-novels-came-to-be-written-in-the-voice-of-coins-stuffed-animals-and-other-random-objects
Oh this article is perfect! Thank you!
Simplicissimus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus seems quite similar to Lazarillo de Tormes.
Good one, thanks!
Maybe not precisely what you are looking for, but _Life & Opinions of Tomcat Murr_ by E.T.A. Hoffmann is both weird (it's two interleaved autobiographies) and earlier (early 19th century.) Hoffmann is otherwise best known as the author of _The Nutcracker_.
Good recommendation! I like Hoffmann (I read my daughter Nutcracker last Christmas) and the Penguin Tomcat is on my quite literal shelf to read.
I just became a father. Hooray for me.
On that subject, does anyone know how many brain cells this thing has, versus how many it will have at some later date?
On quite another note, I'm wondering how a medaeival peasant, without the benefit of all the leaflets, public awareness videos, and mandated visits from all the various hospitally people we've had paraded past us, how does someone without all that take one look at the tarry black shit coming out of this baby and not immediately conclude demonic possession?
I think by medieval times people had gotten pretty used to what babies produce when they’re born.
For a more positive take, I've read that tarry black shit coming out indicates advancing in stages of cultivation. Your baby is just purifying its qi.
" how does someone without all that take one look at the tarry black shit coming out of this baby and not immediately conclude demonic possession?"
That's what baptism does, it drives the Devil out 😁 And where do you think all the legends about changelings came from?
Congratulations on the new small person, and good luck!
Thanks! In the UK they give you this little red book in which they keep a record of all physical changes to the baby over time - so they can see if bruises and birthmarks appear.
On a completely unrelated note, does anyone know if a brown fineliner felt tip is safe to use on a newborn baby's skin?
People lived in closer quarters back then, and had more babies. So everyone would grow up familiar with babies.
Wise women I suppose, but that answer generates an infinite regress. Congratulations.
Damn kid brings to mind the Pharoah's Serpent reaction.
Perhaps there's a version of the Alexander Romance where baby Alexander covers the nation of Agog in meconium.
Haha. Also, urgh.
Edit: really really urgh.
If you're having a bad day and want to feel uplifted, I found an amazing video last night of a fan coming onstage with the Foo Fighters to play drums. Spoiler Alert: he crushes it.
Such a wonderful vibe in the whole arena. You can tell just how happy the kid is to be playing onstage. The crowd is loving him. Dave Grohl egging him on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RToAwVlhA7A
That is lovely! For more feelgood vibes look up Dave's drum battle with the little girl, Nandi Bushell.
It's not the first time the Foo Fighters have done this, either. Search YouTube for Yayo Sanchez aka "Kiss Guy". That one was guitar. Same Dave Grohl attitude (including being so surprised at how well Sanchez played that he forgot a lyric).
This is probably now an extra reason to go to a FF concert, esp. if you're good at playing their songs.
The funny thing is that I knew the audience member was a decent drummer by the way he handled the sticks rather than by listening to him.
Now I'm imagining a band that has a lottery for an audience member to join them for one song.
I teach in a humanities department, in a university. I am also the author of a moderately successful textbook. I think that AI is likely to revolutionize our teaching, and the textbook business, over the next few years. I'm a little frustrated that, when my colleagues talk about AI, they seem to focus entirely on the issue of students using AI to cheat. There is so much else to talk about!
So, here is my question: Where do I go to find smart conversations about the future of AI in education, especially university-level education? Are there any promising start-ups in this area?
Some people want to disrupt the current educational system, other people would prefer to keep it frozen as long as possible. Any change, even if it improves the things for everyone, is a danger for those currently at the top, because they are best at the currently needed skills, but someone else might be better at the new skills.
The most conservative use of AI would be to write new textbooks with its help. As a professor, you would provide the outline and write the important parts, and let AI fill in the rest, which of course you would check afterwards. You could ask AI to generate exercises for the chapter you wrote. You could ask it to check the text you wrote for mistakes. I imagine this alone could allow you to write the textbook at least 5x faster. The AI could also create illustrations for the textbook, or animations for a web page or a video. The AI could also translate the book to various languages.
All of this can be done without antagonizing your colleagues, because you don't need to talk about the AI involvement. Everything is ultimately checked by you, and the students do not interact with the AI directly.
As a teacher, what I want is an AI that can interact with my students outside of classroom time, giving them reliable feedback and keeping them engaged with the topic. I'm not sure it's there yet.
"I'm not sure it's there yet" - As per our recent discussion, agreed! Particularly for "reliable"
Ethan Mollick writes about AI at https://www.oneusefulthing.org/ .
It's one I often recommend for down to earth, "what can I use it for *now*?", practical writings about AI. He's a professor at a university in Pennsylvania so education and AI is a topic that often comes up, for example
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/all-my-classes-suddenly-became-ai (from the start of this year)
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-homework-apocalypse (a bit more recent)
Be the change! Try to start an online community of like-minded professors, and see how far you can go in organizing yourselves. We need voices from within academia that recognize what is happening and can help give critical, on-the-field perspectives on the most critical things AI can do to improve the educational experience in university.
I agree with you. My wife just finished her undergrad in her 30s, and while ChatGPT cheating became a hot topic in her final year, she was able to see the many legitimate ways it could really help her learning. She could get it to explain certain concepts simpler than her professors, and she could use its analytic capabilities to create many examples of some concept she wasn't getting until it finally clicked. Of course, you can develop pedagogical GPTs to really help yourself or your students learn by asking questions and seeing where the gaps in the knowledge are. Dynamic testing will also be a great boon where the chatbot responds based on its knowledge of what you know and what you have gotten wrong in prior conversations/tests.
One crucial thing about the Taylor Swift thing is that there exists a difference between, I don't know, "lyrics listeners" and "melody listeners". Some people seem to automatically pay the most attention to the lyrics of whatever song, dwell on them, analyze them etc. Someone like me, on the other hand, has a very hard time really even noticing what the lyrics are about unless I really like the song enough to specifically find out, and even then the lyrics always seem secondary to the melody, the rhythm and the sound itself; the voice is an instrument, obviously not unimportant, but still the lyrics just seem like a secondary affair. This might partly of course be affected by most of the music I listen to having English lyrics and it not being my native language, but it also affects things sung in Finnish.
As such, when Swifties talk about the introspective lyrics etc., even beyond my gender being different from the intended audience and so on, it's kind of impossible me to *really* understand, since when I listen to the music it just seems like your standard cookie-cutter pop rock, not really distinct in any way from pop hits of the last decades. Lyrics? Might be whatever.
(Of course, one reason for that might simply be that at least some songs, ie. Shake It Off which one of the few ones I actually remember) are from the same author as so many other pop hits of the last decades, ie. Max Martin and other Swedes of the same variety - can a Swiftie enlighten me if I'm just working off stereotypes and the other stuff is more fully Taylor's?)
One theory is that Taylor Swift is music for people who don't really like music.
I don't mean that in a snobby way; I mean they don't really like music in the same way that I don't really like wine. There's all sorts of people out there who really like wine and enjoy it in ways that I just can't. I, on the other hand, neither particularly like nor dislike the taste of wine, but I can definitely have a good time drinking it in a social situation, but then it's not really about the wine at all. The wines I like most are uncomplicated and a little bit sweet because they're the easiest to drink.
I bet people who enjoy Taylor Swift are enjoying it in the same way that I'd enjoy a nice wine party with friends. There's far more music sold to people who don't really like music than to people who really do.
I listened to much of her catalogue over a day a few months back. I would describe it as not bad, but not great. I am more of a melody guy too so the lyrics washed over me. Can’t remember a song.
Later I tried Billie Eilish expecting to be underwhelmed and there’s some good songwriting talent there. I’m not as much a fan of her singing though - a bit breathy. Those songs do lodge in your brain.
The last thing I tried to be cool with the kids, on the recommendation of my 19 yr old niece, was to listen to girl band BoyGenius who do have great harmonies and singing skills. Very different individual voices but the harmonies work.
I am sympathetic to Taylor since the fiasco with Kayne though.
I notice that it’s a certain type of woman who loves Taylor Swift. If I think in terms of Myers Briggs, it is the SF women who love Swift.
Fellow music-over-lyrics listener here. I agree with you about the general listening practices of the Taylor Swift fan base, I think for a lot of people they connect with what they listen to almost more as poetry than as music. Than being said, from a purely instrumental/sonic perspective I think she's had some pretty stand-out stuff over the years.
Not the biggest Swiftie so someone with better knowledge of her catalog might have better examples but songs like Lavender Haze feel much cooler/more unique than cookie cutter pop rock to me. Plus her songs that are super basic are often some of the very best executed in that genre--Mine or Paper Rings come to mind.
Just on a hunch, I'd predict people associated with spheres like this blog to be music-over-lyrics listeners. I can't fully explain why, though.
Shake it Off is from the album 1989. It's the only album she has worked on with Max Martin (the producer in question). She has had 5 albums since then, mostly working with Jack Antonoff as producer and co-writer. Antonoff also work with her on 1989 and is also a producer of many modern Pop hits.
My wife is a major Swiftie, so i have spent a lot of time these past 8 years listening to Taylor Swift's music. I think her songs are less generic than they seem at a high level. And often the songs that sound generic are because their form was copied by others after Swift did it first. Now, I wont say she is creating new genres or is some musical genius, but she does innovate and has a lot of songs that are genuine pieces of good music as music and not just pop. Of course in such a large discography there will be many clunkers.
She (or her team though it has spanned two record labels now) is also pretty bad at choosing lead singles for her albums. The first single tends to be the worst song or nearly the worst on the album. Shake It Off is one example. It has quite a different vibe and maturity than the other songs on 1989. "22", "Look What you Made Me Do", and the vomit inducing "Me!", are other examples of terrible lead singles.
On the main subject of the original comment: I am a melody person and my wife is Lyrics. There are songs i have heard 100+ times and she has heard <10 times but she knows the words way better than me. The lyrics for Swift's songs are the *thing* for her, first and foremost. Knowing all the references and the story behind the songs is something she loves. The earlier albums (pre 1989) were more about the story and the emotion in the lyrics - these songs were more about generic love/song concepts, but they were just as important.
I believe (though I've never been diagnosed or even taken the time to look closely) that my music-over-lyrics listening is caused by some form of audio processing disorder – meaning that while my hearing is just fine (for my age, anyway), it's somewhat tougher than usual for me to parse words out. I wonder if there's a correlation between mild autism and audio processing disorder (and therefore between both of those and this blog).
fwiw, I have mediocre audio processing that’s a problem for me at the margin, probably some degree of mild autism (too old to have been considered for today’s broad spectrum of autism diagnoses and have seen no point in pursuing it; do have an adult ADHD dx), and I’m a lyrics prioritizer. I see your logic that perhaps it should not be so , and yet!
That's interesting. I also have some sort of audio processing disorder, to the extent that I can't really understand lyrics on a car radio, but am firmly in the lyrics-over-music camp. But that drives me to seek out genres like filk that tend to have lower volume music and typically 0-2 instruments and a focus on clever lyrics so that I can more easily follow them.
I know very little about the subject, but I’m very suspicious about the near universal condemnation of Purdue Pharma / Sackler family wrt opioid abuse. (And the fact that Netflix made a special slamming them only strengthens my skepticism!)
I’m generally leery of people trying to limit access to painkillers simply because some patients will abuse them, and it always seemed like this tendency is a hangover from the war on drugs.
But maybe I’m way off base. Did Purdue/Sackler really do anything wrong? Please educate me!
Googling “in defense of the Sackler family” turned up very little and chatgpt couldn’t really come up with anything either!!
If you look at the graph of Oxycontin use, and the graph of opioid deaths, the story that one caused the other doesn't seem to hold up. And it looks like the crackdown on opioids was far more dangerous than the increase in their prescription, both in the short and long term (heavy emphasis on "looks like").
But they've admitted to wrongdoing, and that wrongdoing was connected to the deaths of a very large number of people. You can make a case that we should be subjecting those who limited access to painkillers to the same scrutiny we have subjected the Sacklers to, but I think that case is weakened by trying to claim that the Sacklers did nothing wrong.
They absolutely did. There is a reason they sold off what they could before the army of agencies and state authorities came after them. It's good to be skeptical but this is a strange one; what exactly stands out to you as innocent? They created a huge incentive structure for doctors to prescribe highly addictive opioids, which ruined countless thousands of lives. No other nation had such an issue with these kinds of drugs as America did.
"They created a huge incentive structure for doctors to prescribe highly addictive opioids, which ruined countless thousands of lives."
They also provided pain relief to thousands more.
America was also uniquely bad in the 1980s with the crack epidemic, that wasn't the fault of doctors or pharmaceutical companies.
The addictive nature of the drug they created is an important factor in their immoral and illegal actions to get doctors to prescribe it en masse. They didn't create a blood pressure drug and then somehow conspire to get doctors to prescribe it to people with normal blood pressure - it's an opioid.
Of course it helped and continues to help millions of people around the world, but that's not a defence to what they did. The argument isn't "they invented an evil drug", but that they irresponsibly, illegally and immorally propogated it by esseentially bribing doctors to prescribe it.
Opioid prescriptions have been down a lot in the last five years, yet opioid deaths keep climbing. The policies these people want haven't been working, alas, that doesn't stop them from continuing to push them.
I observe that the rhetoric around opioids is a lot like opioids themselves. Opioids, when misused, provide an immediate high at the cost of severe problems down the line. Users know this, deep down. If you're an opioid addict, what's the takeaway from all this rhetoric? It's that it's not your fault, it's the fault of China, Mexico, the cartels, "the border," Purdue Pharma, McKinsey & Company, etc. It provides a temporary high, at the cost of making the problem worse long term, for those thinking about abusing opioids will be more likely to do so if society responds by treating them like victims. And politicians who indulge in this rhetoric know this, deep down. But solving the problem matters much less than staying in office.
I expect the judgment comes in belatedly, in the form of reading “100,000 people overdosed last year” or whatever - and feeling that humanity will not miss them. Basically a comfort with the recognition that the lax attitude toward drugs will kill plenty of people and in particular make the lives of lots of children miserable but it is worth it and the fittest will survive/thrive.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/a-contrary-perspective-on-the-opioid-epidemic/
The show to watch is the earlier one, “The Pharmacist”. Real hero, not made-up ones.
It’s been awhile but the pharmaceutical reps were basically pushers, and pressured to be so as I recall.
And it was all based on a long ago paper that said something on the order of, we observed in-patients (e.g. after surgery) getting opioids for a few hours or a day and found they didn’t become addicted …
If they deliberately lied to doctors, patients and regulators about the addictive properties of their products (which seems almost certain to me), I would say that they definitely did something wrong.
(I suspect some people think lying is a somewhat trivial sin – just “spin” – in the big picture, because there’s often an indirect route from the lie to the actual, physical harm. But lying is a keystone sin, that can cover so much other wrongdoing. So I think it’s important to take it seriously when anyone lies or otherwise deliberately deceives/misleads the public at scale, even if it is hard to draw the direct line to physical harm. That’s usually the point of lying.)
If they then speculated in their product being addictive, compounding the damage done by actively and knowingly working to increase their profits off of people who were addicted (which seems likely but hard to prove), then they were being something a lot like evil.
Of course, I don’t think anyone who thinks of themself as a good person would have said that out loud or even thought in those terms. There’s jargon for that. But that’s how evil works: A lot, if not most, evil in the world is done by normal people trying to do a good job while deliberately - maybe subconsciously - closing their eyes to inconvenient fact about the harm they’re causing. There should still be consequences, though.
Don't doctors have a certain expected level of analytical ability? What doctor would have not known about the addictiveness of opioids and taken that into consideration? If they didn't, then that seems like a case of malpractice.
I'm not sure about what the Sackler family did wrong, but I certainly think the pharmacies filling the prescriptions got short shrift here. What were they supposed to do with a prescription prescribed by a doctor, say "you seem to be getting too many of these, so we aren't going to fill this prescription"? If they didn't fill a doctor-prescribed prescription then I would think people would have complained about that.
If Purdue says that Oxy uses new sustained-release technology that differentiates it from other opioids, and they show you studies that show far lower risk of addiction than for comparable opioids, it's not unreasonable to think they may be telling the truth. Medical breakthroughs happen, and I don't know that most PCPs understand all the mechanisms involved in judging how plausible those claims were.
Combine the claim and possibility of a medical breakthrough, with eager sales reps, heavy marketing, and an astroturfed movement to reform pain treatment and not let patients suffer chronic pain unnecessarily (Partners Against Pain), and it might seem reasonable for a PCP to prescribe Oxy to manage chronic pain – not just in place of other opiates, but in gray-zone cases where they might previously have been more restrictive.
It seems much more reasonable to blame the people who told the lie, and then hyped it for all it was worth, than the doctors who believed it (or the pharmacists who just filled the prescriptions).
At a certain point the penny should have dropped more widely, of course. If not before, then certainly after 2007, when an affiliate of Purdue Pharma, and three of that company's executives, pled guilty to criminal charges of misbranding OxyContin by claiming that it was less addictive and less subject to abuse and diversion than other opioids.
Having said that, there were obviously many bad doctors (and researchers and pharmacists) who contributed to the disaster early on, and who should take their part of the blame – running pill mills issuing on-demand prescriptions to patients with obvious addiction issues – but it's hardly unreasonable that most of the blame lands at Purdue/Sackler's feet. They definitely would have taken most of the credit and reward if OxyContin had turned out to be a huge success story for humanity.
BTW: This paper on The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin has some interesting data, including a section on Misrepresenting the Risk of Addiction: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/
I agree that if Purdue *lied* and said it was less addictive, then a doctor, trusting them to be a reputable organization, ought to believe them. In that case, yes, Purdue and those responsible should be held responsible for fraud. If the Sacklers were knowledgeable in this, then such judgement ought to include them.
Yes. But the owners will always be responsible to some degree. It's a large family, and I am sure different family members have different degrees of knowledge and liability. Some may be criminally liable, others not.
However, owners of a company that defrauds people should always be prepared to pay back the money made from that fraud, even if they didn't know about it. (Not only should they have known, but the alternative is to reward ignorant owners, and deny the victims proper restitution.) I don't know about the exact legal mechanisms or corporate protections, but it can't be okay to basically rob someone, and then plead innocence and ignorance because it was actually your C-Corp that did it. If the owners really are innocent, they can and should go after their dishonest employees in court in turn.
I think it's related to the aggressive marketing of opioids to doctors and patients, along with either a faux or wilful ignorance of the very real side effects.
I agree the war on drugs is stupid but I think that, even if you want to decriminalize something like Heroin, Meth or Cocaine, it's probably a really bad idea to allow companies to profit from them. Incentives all in the wrong place.
So what's the solution? It's not illegal to sell drugs, but it's not legal either? Or make it legal to sell, but only for mom and pop businesses?
How about "it's illegal to advertise then in other than to list them in your catalog"? Buying is legal, selling is legal, possession is legal, trading is legal, but advertising can only be done by those with no commercial interest.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw an ad for any prescription painkiller. But I still know what Vicodin is.
I'd like to present some broad metaphysical speculations, to get feedback and comments. Again, this is speculative, the realm of verbal argument and broad generalization. It's not proof or even knowledge, just my best throw for today. If you're not into these things, or find no utilitarian value in them, please ignore.
The classic starting point are the three realms of knowledge: physical, conscious and platonic.
The physical realm we all know, with bodies of meat and laws of physics in mathematical form and so on.
The conscious realm is raw qualia, subjective experience in itself, capable of self-awareness, in which the objective world (including the "I") experientially appears.
The platonic realm is logically necessary truth, the fact that in logic and math, when you put some assumptions, you get much more back. E.g just assume the integers and basic logic and Fermat's last theorem is already true.
Much metaphysical speculation amounts to juggling these three. Physicalism takes the physical as primary, and argues that the other two emerge from it through e.g epiphenomenalism and formalism, and shrugs at the hard problem of consciousness. Classical Idealism, from Berkeley to Shankara, takes consciousness as primary, with everything else just appearing in it, and shrugs at the mathematical regularity of physics. Pure Platonism is rare but is possibly making a bit of a comeback - the equations instantiate themselves, something something.
Today's speculative view is that both the conscious and the platonic are primary in their own way, and together they give rise to the physical.
The platonic is easy to justify, because logical necessity does not need anything else to be true. It's a realm of possibilities, not of entities. There are e.g no actual numbers in it, but conditionals such as "if you have numbers, then...", all the way up to "if there were a universe with such and such laws, you could end up with bipedal apes drinking the milk of bovids".
The primacy of the conscious realm is a strong hypothesis, here I take it to be even prior to the universe itself: a primordially self aware and self existing totality, prior to space and time. It's a big thing to assume, I know.
Now the point is that both of these would be inert, and contentless on their own. But the conscious principle can freely take the potentialities of the platonic as its object, because it's just there, universally available.
And by tracing the edges of its possibilities, timelessly exploring every possible structure and rule, it breathes life into every possible equation, instantiating every possible universe. Including our own with its four dimension of space-time, which happens to be complex enough to support self replicating bits of structured matter. These are then tuned and shaped by aimless evolution into bodies and brains, through which an echo of primordial conscious is experienced as individual awareness. And these individuals in turn are just about smart enough to represent these three realms within themselves, in a final twisted self referential loop.
In other words, if you take a classic idea like Brahman or Hegel's absolute or Spinoza's minimalist conscious God, the usual objection is why and how would a unitary timeless consciousness "come up with" a shared physical world and individual consciousnesses in it? But if you give it a Platonic realm to roam, the mathematical potential complexity within it provides just the missing piece.
For those who are better read in philosophy, does this view have a name? A classic presentation? Obvious flaws?
I would argue that you are missing one--narrative truth, the meaning we get from perceiving our experiences as scenes in a story. The narrative builds directly from the conscious (I would call it the "qualitative"), and, I would also argue, the platonic (I would call it the logical) builds on the physical (I would call it the material), assuming, of course, that the physical actually exists (we can take that only as premise). This means that there are two fundamental types of praxis: the narrative, and the logical. Of these two, the narrative carries more emotional meaning, and is typically primary in most day to day decision making.
The basic term for philosophies that hold that direct conscious experience is all we really know (at least in the moment) is "Cartesian" (after Descartes), and analytical philosophy goes back, as you seem to know, to the ancient Greeks, including famously Plato. I haven't seen them combined in quite this way before, but I'm just an amateur philosopher. It certainly makes sense to me, and I think it's supported by quite a lot of classic research in psychology, esp. in perceptual studies (the Gestalt Psychologists, for example, held that we see the world in wholes, and our mind therefore fills in gaps and completes figures and forms that appear more meaningful and memorable than raw visual stimulation would be). That's the basis of your "physical realm". Look into the way in which long term memory is organized, and therefore how humans learn, add in the Information Processing Model of the brain, and you will have the basis of your conscious one. Platonic can come out of decision science, and the perception of sets. So there's some science backing it up.
I don't know that it has a name, so make one up. "Neo-Eclecticism"?
“The primacy of the conscious realm is a strong hypothesis, here I take it to be even prior to the universe itself: a primordially self aware and self existing totality, prior to space and time. It's a big thing to assume, I know.”
Big, if true. What kind of throws me about panpsychism is the brain seems to disappear from the equation. Yet consciousness seems very related to brains.
There are many kinds of panpsychism I guess. Somebody called my proposal "reverse panpsychism", I kind of like that. In this view, brains don't disappear from the equation; they're right there, made of physical matter and shaped by evolution, providing the entire content of our experience in the usual naturalistic way, with the dance of neurons and hormones and the whole kit. The only thing the primacy of consciousness adds to that is making the whole thing "feel like something" instead of being p-zombies, and accounting for the deep intuition that consciousness is "its own thing". Not a small difference!
I'm not philosophically sophisticated enough to answer your questions, but I want to comment on this :
> when you put in some assumptions, you get much more back.
My view is that you don't get "more" back, you get exactly what you put in, just in slightly different forms. The seeming abundance is an artifact of the human failure to grasp logical consequences.
It's wrong to say "Chess is a truly generous game, after you put in an initial configuration and some rules, you get much more back", Chess is not generous at all, every single configuration you get during a Chess game is a straightforward and logically/programmatically trivial consequence of the initial configuration plus the rules of Chess. The reason it's interesting is that the human brain **doesn't** grasp all those consequences, there are so many of them, so they appear as a sequence of increasingly exhilarating and unpredictable developments, but they are completely determined by the initial configuration and the rules of play.
An analogous physical situation is microscopic photography of everyday objects. If you took a bunch of sand in your fist and put them under a microscope, you will find that "you get much more than what you put in", but that's only an artifact of your bad sight, what you view under the microscope has been there in the sand since forever, you simply had bad eyes.
I believe that Scott Aaronson's Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity (https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf) is the one that made me see this clearly. It's probable I had similar views before, but the paper makes the case particularly clearly and eloquently.
Re:
"An analogous physical situation is microscopic photography of everyday objects. If you took a bunch of sand in your fist and put them under a microscope, you will find that "you get much more than what you put in", but that's only an artifact of your bad sight, what you view under the microscope has been there in the sand since forever, you simply had bad eyes."
Agreed.
I actually see the whole abstract domain as an _approximation_ to the physical one. I'm very skeptical of parts of the abstract domain that correspond to structures that couldn't fit in the physical universe.
<fictional evidence>
A science fiction story with a nice flavor of how this might be be is Greg Egan's "Luminous". Quoth the summary from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_(book)
"A pair of researchers find a defect in mathematics, where an assertion (X) leads to a contradictory assertion (not X) after a long but finite series of steps. Using a powerful virtual computer made of light beams (Luminous), they are able to map and shape the boundary between the near-side and far-side mathematics, leading to a showdown with real consequences in the physical universe."
I don't really expect that _this_ could happen but
</fictional evidence>
it _is_ true that there are only so many planck lengths in the observable universe, and so many bits, in _any_ representation that fit in the observable universe. We can talk about sparse examples of very large numbers that happen to have compact representations, e.g. 2^10^1000, but an arbitrary number around 2^10^200 can't be represented in the observable universe - so I am skeptical that it "exists" in a meaningful sense.
To put it another way, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms about the natural numbers include "For every natural number n, S(n) is a natural number. That is, the natural numbers are closed under S" where S is the successor function, and no representation that fits in the observable universe actually satisfies this. I look at the Peano axioms as an _approximation_ to what could be said about physically possible representations.
Ah, a fellow Greg Egan fan, Hello There !
Thanks for the recommendation.
Many Thanks!
> My view is that you don't get "more" back, you get exactly what you put in, just in slightly different forms. The seeming abundance is an artifact of the human failure to grasp logical consequences.
That's funny, it's precisely because I'm (somewhat) acquainted with the field of computational complexity that I believe that "you put in some assumptions, you get much more back". Before that I was happy to apply Ockham's razor and call myself a formalist.
My original example is Fermat's last theorem. It was first stated around 1637, in a formally precise way. There was no doubt as to the meaning of the problem, but no complete proof was found until 1994, using a huge bevy of abstract tools that took over 300 years to develop. To me this is not like a human failure to grasp logical consequences, but rather like a tentative exploration of a genuinely complex pre-existing terrain.
Or take one of the central results of computational theory, the halting problem. You have it right there: you put in only a short program, but there is no limit to how far you need to go in order to know whether it ever stops. For the Collatz conjecture, which a middle-schooler could understand, we still don't know.
But hey, if you consider logical omniscience to be the state of nature, I'm not that far from you... I just ascribe that to primordial consciousness, not to our individual ones.
EDIT: I see that Scott Aaronson's paper starts by distinguishing computational complexity from mere computability, which I just roughly lumped together. If your answer was intended to rely on that distinction, I must not have got the point, feel free to clarify.
Yes, my views very much depend on the distinction between Computability and Computational Complexity. This is the crucial distinction.
What I mean to say is this : Mathematics appear to be novel, but this is an illusion, every mathematical result that doesn't require new axioms is "trivial", where "trivial" means potentially extremely difficult but ultimately obtainable by repeatedly applying mechanical rewrite rules to the axioms. Even new axioms that are straightforward extensions of existing axioms or generated by a simpler, deeper principle don't really count as novelty in my view.
Basically, what I'm saying is this : If a piece of mathematics could have been obtained by running a computer for potentially trillions upon trillions upon unimaginable trillions of years, then it's not truly novel, it's logically trivial, and the only thing that makes us humans excited by it is that we have weak brains that are bad at logic. Not all Mathematics fit this description, but the vast majority of it is.
With infinite computational power, the vast majority of Mathematics is trivial for the same reason that navigation becomes trivial once you have GPS and satellites, or a marathon will become trivial if you allow participants to ride motorcycles. All the excitement was due to the limitations of the unaugmented human overcoming a much bigger, more powerful, and unknowable reality.
I'm not familiar with any of the developments that led to the proof of Fermat's last theorem. All I know is something something elliptic forms something something. So I can't say whether it amounts to "novelty" by my definition or not. Probably yes, but I can't be sure.
I'm sorry but I think you're kind of contradicting yourself here. I don't actually disagree with what you're saying; if you take the view of infinite computational power, then of course by definition everything becomes trivial.
But the whole point of computational complexity is to *not* take infinite computing power for granted, but instead distinguish the kind of time complexity that things take.
Some things can get calculated nicely in polynomial time, such as sorting a list, while some others take exponential time or worse (see https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-easy-sounding-problem-yields-numbers-too-big-for-our-universe-20231204/), and that's precisely the difference that we find useful to classify, and out of which we get things like secure encryption systems.
This reminds me of Rene Guenon's The Multiple States of the Being, which posits the Infinite at the center of metaphysics, the Infinite being the thing that admits no limitation, and also being the sum total of Possibility: if a thing is possible, it exists somewhere in the Infinite.
Not exactly philosophy though. Not entirely sure what that book is. It's like the skeleton of a religion to me, written by someone who almost became a Messiah. It's also only 95 pages, go check it out!
An interesting idea. Two random thoughts:
What *is* the primordial consciousness? Is it a Cartesian substance? Then how can it create from itself a different substance, the physical? It's clearly not a property of all physical matter (panpsychism) as you say it's ontologically primary (compared to the physical). So is this kind of the opposite of panpsychism, where matter is a property of thought?
A general point about any notion of "all possible worlds exist". If this is true, how does ours have any meaning whatsoever? Does this imply nihilism? And also, how do we have a conception of actuality and possiblity, if possibility *just is* actuality, and vice versa.
> What *is* the primordial consciousness? Is it a Cartesian substance?
If "Cartesian substance" means something self-sufficient that exists in such a way that it does not depend on anything else for its existence (thanks ChatGPT!), then yes, the primordial consciousness would be a Cartesian substance. It does not so much "create" matter, as picture it up or dream it. The usual analogy for all kinds of idealism is the way our ordinary dreams conjure up worlds and beings. In this specific case, the idea is more precise: primordial consciousness timelessly takes within itself the abstract form of every possible logical-mathematical structure. Since the fundamental laws of our universe are among those possibilities, it dreams up our world, among so many others.
> A general point about any notion of "all possible worlds exist". If this is true, how does ours have any meaning whatsoever? Does this imply nihilism?
"Meaning" can mean more than one thing, I'm interpreting your question in the sense of things having "importance", rather than about the literal meaning of words or concepts. Let me know if you meant something else! In this sense, meaning is a lived experience, my sense of meaning does not depend on whether an alternative universe with a slightly different version of me exists somewhere or not. We just intuitively feel that things matter to us, as you can tell whenever you jump back to avoid being hit by an oncoming bus. In this model, the capacity to feel meaning, or for that matter, to feel anything at all, comes all the way from the fact that consciousness is primordial, but the actual contents of feeling or meaning just bubble up from below, in a naturalistic way, shaped by our evolutionary history and circumstances.
> And also, how do we have a conception of actuality and possibility, if possibility *just is* actuality, and vice versa.
Different layers of reality. Being here, writing within this world with these laws and these starting conditions, I have no access to any different world, even if I may think that it also exists within primordial consciousness just as much as this one does. OTOH, evolution shaped our brains to give us the ability to think of possibilities and counterfactuals, because it's useful to us.
The physical and the abstract are like two tectonic plates rubbing together inside of us, and consciousness is the friction.
Nice one. My proposal is more that the conscious and the abstract are like two plates rubbing together, and physical worlds (with us included) are the patterns created by this interaction.
I have been pondering this for a few days, and I am stuck; I can't rub the abstract and consciousness together and get anything, let alone the physical world.. I am missing something.
Let me try to explain my thinking a bit more; in terms of context this slots with my original post at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-306/comment/45174360
To understand this one, we need to step out of the usual physicalist worldview for a moment. In a consciousness-first view, whatever shows itself reliably to a consciousness is real, as real as it gets.
For a simple analogy, look at the people that appear in your dreams. We consider them unreal, even though they appear, because of things like: 1) our attention on them is flickering, one moment they are there and the next they are not, 2) the dream is low resolution, e.g we can't reliably do a biochemical analysis of their skin flakes, 3) our strand of consciousness that creates them doesn't extend to actually giving them an inner experience, we only ever feel like we are *us* seeing *them*, not the other way round, etc. OTOH, if these limitations were overcome, there would be no reason to call them unreal.
My claim is that in a world dreamed or simulated by a primordial consciousness, none of these limitations apply. So if the laws of the universe that is being simulated are conducive to the evolution of life, the beings that appear in this world do have an inner life (as a strand of the original consciousness), and they will experience a reliable shared environment around them, as real as our Earth and sky and bodies appear to us.
Now, the hard question is, why would a primordial unitary consciousness ever dream or simulate worlds with multiplicities of objects and beings in them? Imagine a consciousness, as aware as ours, but infinitely more powerful, unlimited by anything. Being unitary and timeless, without anything "other" than it around, it would still have no concept of objects, of multiplicity, or of possibility. These structures were given to us by evolution, e.g we have a clear sense of a boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world, rather than feeling at one with the universe, because our long line of ancestors were very interested in having their skin boundaries unpierced by the teeth of predators. None of that conditioning would exist in a primordial consciousness; it's like a super mind that would never have a reason to think anything more than the obvious, tautological thought, "being is".
This is the point where philosophical traditions that believe in something like a primordial consciousness usually get stuck, and feel the need to bring in some other principle. The absolute symmetry of neutral oneness must be broken somehow if the hypothesis of a primordial consciousness is going to help account for worlds and conscious beings in them. At this point, theistic traditions tend to resort to anthropomorphism, and the minimalistic primordial consciousness somehow develops a will, or some kind of desire, and turns into a classic creator God. The Sufis very elegantly have it think, "I am a treasure wanting to be known", and the Eastern Tantriks also recognize the need for some extra interference to break the absolute uniformity, so they say things like the "ground of being is stirred by a vibration", without further explanation. These make for nice myths, but philosophically they are very onerous hypothesis, arguably more complex than the world they are trying to explain. So I'm trying to explore what can be done without them.
The answer I'm suggesting, is that the seeds of multiplicity, possibility and complexity are all to be found in the platonic realm of mathematical/logical necessary truth. So if (by hypothesis) the primordial consciousness, beyond feeling its own timeless being, is able to roam that realm, to start thinking "if false then true, but not (if true then false)", and so on, and then "if we define numbers in such way, then every number is either odd or even", and then "if we define numbers in such way, then there have to be infinite prime numbers", and so on, up to the point of being able to picture first-order logic within itself, then the entire world of computability appears within it. Which means that, for every possible set of laws that a universe could have, those get consciously simulated, and for the rare few universes that happen to not collapse into triviality but whose laws give rise to significant complexity, such as our own, processes of life and evolution get bootstrapped, and you get beings such as us, aware of and interacting with our reliable environments as I was saying above.
I think of the abstract as an _approximation_ of the physical world. Full comment at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-306/comment/45364220
> I think of the abstract as an _approximation_ of the physical world.
That sounds right.
So this feels stupid, but nine months ago I had a nightmare that has deeply shaken my more-or-less atheistic confidence that death is a total cessation of consciousness and thus a good option for relieving intractable suffering. The memory of the dream is vivid and feels just as experiential as any memory from waking life. It stayed with me for days and made sleeping difficult for about a week (and I am a good sleeper!).
I've never used a psychedelic, but from hearing people discuss life-changing trips, this sounds far more like one of those than just a regular bad dream. For the first time in my adult life, I fully understand what faithful people mean when they say they just "feel" something unprovable is true and no amount of data or argument will convince them otherwise.
I'm normally quite content and usually pretty good at self-soothing by either solving a problem or rationalizing my way out of feeling bad, but I can't shake how this experience makes me feel about death.
So...does anyone have any suggestions?
Here are some things I've considered and the reasons I haven't tried them yet:
- Could a guided psychedelic experience potentially offset/overwrite this dream, or is there too big a risk of reinforcing it?
- Mindfulness training seems like an option, but I'm a little wary of monkeying around with it when I seem to have been born with a high happiness "set point" and after reading some articles about the "dark side of meditation."
- I've never seen a therapist, but I don't have a lot of disposable income, therapy isn't covered by my insurance, and I'm dubious a therapist could help with this, anyway.
I wrote out my dream a couple of days after having it, hoping that recording and sharing it might purge some of its immediacy (as writing stuff out usually does for me), but that didn't help, either. I'm including it below in case the specific experience of the dream makes a difference.
********
I'm staying in the family home, in San Clemente, which is the southernmost beachside town in Orange County, California. The large house, with its bank of windows facing west, sits just a little over a mile from the ocean, on a terraced hill which used to perch 250 feet above sea level.
I say "used to" because it's not 250 feet above the water anymore.
I'm upstairs in the master bedroom, watching as a foaming, swirling mass boils over the town below, over the rooftops of businesses I've known for 20 years, as it covers a hill that conceals my favorite restaurant in the world. The mass surges closer to engulf the 5 freeway. It crashes back on itself as it meets the climb up to the house, seawater and dirt and buildings and trees...and cars and people, I know, although I can't see them yet.
I turn away from the window to bellow at my uncle and brother that they should have taken my advice and actually stored enough emergency water for two weeks, goddamnit, because we've survived the tsunami only to likely die of dehydration when the 10 or so gallons of bottled water in the house run out. The utilities are gone, and every shop that might have water is at or below the waterline, and even if they weren't, there are thousands of people living on this hillside who will also be looking for water. I have my Sagan survival bottle in my backpack, sure, so I can *maybe* filter any dirty fresh water we can find, but it doesn't desalinate saltwater, and there are five of us! My parents are on the other side of the house, I know, and my focus divides between checking on them and securing drinking water, *now.*
Then my uncle's and brother's faces go slack at something behind me.
I turn back to the ocean and the horizon is too high again, because there is another wave, a *much* bigger wave, a foaming white wave which initially appears to be just a little below our elevation, but within a second or two I realize that is wishful thinking. The wave is traveling highway speed and the horizon rises even higher as the wave begins to climb the hill to the house. In a few seconds more, it's clear the wave is going to be 10 or 20 feet taller than the house.
In the blink or two it takes to think about running...*somewhere*...the wave is here.
It's stupid and futile, but I turn my back to the wave as it blasts in the windows, snatching me up and hurtling me head-first toward the fireplace on the opposite wall.
Notdrowningpleasenotdrowning.
Impact.
Smash to blackness, but no pain.
I'm so relieved I died instantly, without suffering.
...
...
...
Then I realize I am still here...
...and...
...there is nothing where I am...
...and...
...there never will be...
...and yet...
*I*
*am*
*still*
*here.*
...
...and still here...
...
...and...
*I*
*always*
*will*
*be.*
********
Perhaps a useful question to reflect on is why an albeit apocalyptic nocturnal adventure like this has troubled you.
As for interpretation, my go-to is always the object as self. You are the wave, in this case.
I had a dream last week that freaked me out to the extent that I turned the light on and wrote it down, also about the family home and death. It was pieced together from recent fragments of experience and thought. Some of which I'd barely registered at the time.
I dream often of my late father, in very negative ways. I've come to realise that he is me, in the dreams.
It was easier to describe the apocalyptic wave than the void, so that's what a lot of people focus on, but I was actually *far* more bothered by the void than I was by the apocalypse. I've had many vivid nightmares, some of them apocalyptic, but they're often so cinematic that I kind of enjoy them, especially in retrospect! There have been a few where I woke up scared but actually wanted to get back to sleep, hoping I could see what else might happen!
I think those dreams are mostly about processing whatever disaster movie I might have seen and perhaps a low-grade anxiety from living in places where it's not *totally* inconceivable that I could die in a giant wave (I live in Seattle and of course visit my family in San Clemente four weeks a year). I occasionally have nightmares about earthquakes and nuclear attacks, too.
But those are relatively rare. Most of my unpleasant dreams are about mundane, everyday problems, like being extremely late for work and not being able to dial my phone correctly to give them a heads up.
I'm sorry to hear you're dreaming about your late father in unpleasant ways. I hope you're able to find some peace in your realization.
Ah, that's interesting then ... so perhaps the void is you. Worth at least reflecting on a bit. I was in a TA therapy group when the leader introduced us to the dream interpretation of object as self. It's made sense to me ever since. (I think Jung also talks about this idea, but I don't know much about Jung). There is rarely a dream in which this approach doesn't help. It does also help to find peace, because I don't feel jerked around by my subconscious. Speaking of which, I've never had any worrisome effects from meditation either. Maybe keep writing about your dream and see what comes?
I now think, based on a couple of comments here, that the void was a result of one of my usual cinematic, scary-in-an-almost-fun-horror-movie-way-and-not-at-all-traumatizing nightmares being followed by actual sleep paralysis.
My brain constructed it as a single narrative, but the void had enough features of sleep paralysis that I tend to think that's what made it so "convincing," if you will, particularly when I didn't have anything troubling in my life that would have made sense of the void as a regular dream.
Yeah, it's been a fascinating thread to follow. Really glad you shared it with such a smart group of readers. My only real brush with sleep paralysis was quite recent and very disturbing. I ended up croaking out to my other half to wake me up because I was powerless to rouse myself from an unpleasant dream situation (that I can't recall). Even speaking was almost impossible. All's well that ends well.
I don't know what to make of your dream, but thank you for sharing it with us!
Have you considered trying prayer? Not even to any deity (or non-deity) in particular, just... whatever's out there. Asking why, was there a reason for this dream; asking for peace, to be free of this dread/terror/feeling.
What could happen: maybe nothing. Maybe you find you were wrong a little. Maybe a lot. Maybe you end up feeling it so silly that it helps quell the disquiet you've been feeling.
Maybe none of that, but you end up finding your way to a little more understanding of what's going on internally.
I've had some unusual dreams of my own, albeit none so extreme as yours. I could talk about one of them if you'd like.
Contrary to the prevailing sentiment out there, I like hearing about other people's dreams!
Here's a recurring dream from when I was young (I think this one stopped around age 8?)
Seems like a typical falling dream, the clouds are far below, slowly approaching. Eventually I pass through the clouds, and I see the ground approaching, and... I hit. And I bounce, flying back into the sky, back above the clouds, only to eventually start falling again.
And it *hurts*. Over and over, I hit ground, bounce, and feel the pain.
And eventually, after more bounces than I can remember, the bounces have gotten small enough that I come to a stop, and fall asleep.
And back in the real world, I wake up. It's morning, it's a new day... and I still feel every ounce of pain. (I can rule out that I was somehow hurting myself in my sleep, I woke up as snugly wrapped as when I went to bed.)
I credit these dreams with a significant amount of my abnormally high pain tolerance (sensei can smack me full force in the gut and I'll barely notice). Personally, I view them as something sent by God. Training. Preparation. It also helped me develop some emotional toughness as well.
Come to think if it, another dream that featured an odd emotional state.
I don't recall the lead-up, only that at some point my sister needed me to kill a spider for her. Totally normal occurrence, only this time, it was a large tarantula, the size of my hand.
And it was leaping at me. I was dodging, making my way to my room, getting my backpack to try and smack it with. Once I had my backpack, it became a dance, mostly me dodging, occasionally taking a swing and missing.
And the entire time, there was no fear (except from my sister and mother). I felt no emotion except a calm, mild annoyance. I was entirely unperturbed by this whole game.
I think the spider also grew larger through the dream, ending at torso size. I don't think either of us ever won. I just woke up eventually.
Huh!
My understanding is that experiencing physical pain in a dream is a vanishingly rare experience unless some real-world pain intrudes on the dream. I've had dreams of impact after a long fall, and the "worst" it ever feels is a sort of "thud" from which I almost always wake up.
The only time I can remember experiencing pain-pain in a dream was one about evil surgeons strapping me down to an operating table in order to blow torch my back like a creme brulee. When I finally woke up, I still had the blow-torch feeling and discovered a scorpion in my bed that had stung me in the back a dozen times!
I'm into self-defense, too, and occasionally have dreams about it. Like yours, they're almost always about a kind of stalemate rather than winning or losing the encounter.
I'd like to speak up for therapy helping with this.
It sounds like you've attributed a lot of real world meaning to this dream and that this meaning attribution (because of how scary and real the dream felt) has made it a sticky thought in your head. If you have a tendency towards anxiety and/or OCD, you may be more prone to fearful experiences becoming thoughts that you have trouble letting go of.
The dream seems to have surfaced existential terror, which is a normal thing for a person to experience here and there in their life. This doesn't mean your specific existential terror is true, it means that you had a scary experience (the dream) that surfaced existential terror that you're now having trouble knowing what to do with.
You have some choices about how to find a way to be less spooked by this dream, but it sounds like you could use some outside help in walking you through those choices and implementing the one you opt for.
That sort of already happened in a comment down-thread!
I think a therapist might have taken this dream much too seriously, and potentially persuaded *me* to take it much too seriously, when what I really needed was the perspective to stop taking it seriously, period.
Your comment, "The dream seems to have surfaced existential terror, which is a normal thing for a person to experience here and there in their life. This doesn't mean your specific existential terror is true, it means that you had a scary experience (the dream) that surfaced existential terror that you're now having trouble knowing what to do with," helped prime me for the "IT'S JUST A DREAM, STUPID!" lightbulb I needed to have turned on, and I thank you for that!
Oh I'm glad to hear that helped.
Had a pretty strong dream a while back that left me in tears for a couple of days, and ended up concluding it was caused by guilt at swinging too hard on an unpublished novel the week prior. So, what significant events or emotional states were happening the week before this dream, and would they metaphorically connect to tidal waves or complete stasis?
I really examined what was going on with my life at the time and couldn't connect any dots; the dream, and particularly the part about the void, felt like a "sending" from outside myself, if you will. That's one of the reasons it was so upsetting - I wasn't able to point at anything I was currently worrying about in real life.
But a commenter below basically fixed it, so I feel immensely better now!
This hits very close to home for me. Over the past couple of years I've been really bothered by the thought that death might not be the end and one might go on existing forever in a void. It's kind of an impossible thought to deal with. It caused me extreme anxiety and a return to panic attacks, which I thought I was done with.
I also avoid meditation for the exact reasons you mentioned (happy by default; sounds like you can fuck yourself up with it).
So here's the thing - therapy actually did help. I realized I had mild OCD (existential OCD being the subtype), did some exposure therapy dealing with the idea of death, and got on the right SSRI. I still have the thought, but I can turn my attention away from it and it doesn't have the same urgency. I can still get a bit triggered by things like your post, but it passes.
So yeah, this might be true, and it is the most terrifying idea one can imagine, but I haven't seen any better evidence for this one than any of the other theories about the afterlife. In the meantime, we can't do much about it, so the best solution is to find psychological techniques that help us to deal with the uncertainty. Your mind is trying to scare you by coming up with the worst possible scenario, and if you have a good imagination it's going to succeed. But you don't have to believe every idea your brain comes up with.
Thank you for your comment, it was gratifying to know that other people had experienced something similar. I mean, I knew intellectually that of course people had, but it's nice when someone specific volunteers their own experience.
Although I'm sorry it was triggering!
I really don't seem to have any of the features of OCD or even chronic anxiety (I can worry about immediate problems and potential problems, but I sleep well, so I don't think it's at the level of clinical anxiety, per se), but this dream was so distressing for so long I started wondering "therapy, I guess?"
But it turns out I just needed someone to slap me out of indulging in the fantasy that maaaaaaaaaybe the dream was *really* real merely because it felt so real. @skaladom and @Radar managed to do that with their comments, but you primed me for it by reasonably reminding me in your last paragraph that the sensation of this being true is not actually a reason for it to be true, and that indeed I don't have to believe every experience my subconscious generates.
And for that, thank you!
That's awesome! Yeah, I think when we have brains that tend to be right about stuff, it can be hard to dismiss some of the bullshit that they are capable of coming up with.
No truer words.
This all makes a lot of sense to me. I'm glad to hear you found relief.
Oh, I did also want to recommend NOCD (https://www.treatmyocd.com/). It's pretty affordable, and while you probably won't find the most insightful therapist on earth there, they are all well trained in evidence-based exposure and response-prevention techniques.
This is very tentatively offered, but there's a method of dream interpretation based on the assumption that everything in a dream is made of your consciousness, so it's worthwhile to identify with everything in the dream, one thing at a time, and see what turns up.
I'm inclined to think that *characters* in a dream are significant parts of one's consciousness, but for me, stuff like the giant tsunami is often more of a flamboyant, cinematic set-dressing than deep symbolism.
Like, I saw Deep Impact in theaters in 1998, and it made a serious impression on 18 year old me. It was one of the first disaster movies with special effects so cutting-edge that I was able to fully buy in, and I've had occasional wave dreams ever since. Sometimes I dream about volcanoes, too, courtesy of 1997's Dante's Peak (and living near a goddamned active volcano).
But what the *people* in my dreams do often feels very significant!
> that everything in a dream is made of your consciousness
I agree with this. It is empowering.
Sounds like Buddhism actually. You see, Buddha says life is bad, and that this whole samsaric mess arises out of ignorance, ignorance as to what desire for anything that isn't the emptiness you experienced will bring you to, that is, that desire will bring you to life, where you will be exposed to old age, sickness, and finally, death, the loss of everything you clung to in this life.
You can become an orthodox Buddhist and try to eradicate desire, e.g. be perfectly ok with the void, or you can just embrace the view that you will eventually fall down to a world after death since it is what you crave: you didn't like the void, so your fate is samsara.
Hell, if you think that void is where you were before birth, why believe you won't come out of it again? You already left it at least once. It's nice having mystical experiences like this, but that's more of an invitation to engage with mysticism and spirituality, you shouldn't believe you got unvarnished Truth from that dream.
I never had an impression that the void was somewhere I was before birth. Had there been any hope of reincarnation, I wouldn't have been so horrified by the void, even if there was going to be a long "wait," if you will.
But ultimately a commenter below snapped me out of it with a comment that amounted to, "it's just a dream, stupid!" that indeed gave me the perspective to not take it at all seriously, and I feel immensely better.
I'm sorry to hear you've had a dream that caused you so much worry.
I haven't experienced anything quite like it. The closest thing was probably when I tried experimenting with lucid dreaming, and experienced sleep paralysis without knowing what it was. For a brief moment – though far too long – I was completely paralyzed, locked into my body, and for all I knew in that moment, it was going to last forever. Naturally I panicked. That was years ago, and I now know what sleep paralysis is. I think I would be less freaked out if it happened again. But I can still remember that panic in my body, as tough it is a physical part of me now – like a marble I carry around in a pocket inside.
I think my point is that the feeling was real, and its memory will stay with me as long as powerful memories stay. BUT… I was wrong about what was happening, and what the experience meant. There is no correlation between the intensity of the feeling and the actual implications of the situation I was in.
So I think that's worth considering: The intensity of the feelings you had in your dream may very well have helped make the dream more vivid, but it does *not* make the dream any more true or even likely.
I am also an atheist, but went through a phase of being a bit anxious about dying. It actually helped me to think about different scenarios, and consider what would have to be true about the world for those scenarios to be true. Also, reminding myself that I can't remember being present and conscious for most of the history of the universe. Why would the rest of time be any different?
But all that may be a bit theoretical … If you want a more fun way to maybe try to rewrite your ideas of the afterlife, I really enjoyed having my imagination tickled by …
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman (https://amzn.to/3NnU1U7)
Eagleman comes up with a bunch of different scenarios for what happens when we die, some hilarious, others a bit darker, none very hopeful. I suggest using Amazon's "Read Sample" feature to get a taste.
Wow, I'd heard of sleep paralysis, but I thought it was something that occurred within your known real-world space, as in, you know you're in your own bed asleep, but you can't move, and maybe a demon is sitting on your chest. I had no idea that it could occur from the perspective of being in a dream "place," if you will.
You might be right and that my nightmare transitioned into a minor form of sleep paralysis (minor only because there were none of the menacing characters or painful sensations that go with typical sleep paralysis). Thanks a lot for sharing that!
Thanks, also, for pointing out, "I was wrong about what was happening, and what the experience meant. There is no correlation between the intensity of the feeling and the actual implications of the situation I was in....So I think that's worth considering: The intensity of the feelings you had in your dream may very well have helped make the dream more vivid, but it does *not* make the dream any more true or even likely."
It was good priming to be fully receptive to a comment below that has now more or less fixed the issue.
Although like you, even though it feels better to have a different perspective about the dream, it's still a little marble I'm carrying around in my pocket.
I'm glad to hear I may have contributed in a small way to "more or less fixing" the issue.
I actually learned a bit more about sleep paralysis myself, when I went down a rabbit hole after replying to your first comment, and was similarly surprised to learn how many forms it can take.
And I still recommend checking out the book – if mostly as entertainment 😉
I think I will, now that I'm not worried that hearing about other people's thoughts about death might make mine worse, LOL.
Someone should really get the word out that there are nightmares and then there are NIGHTMARES, and the latter often have a completely mundane explanation. I can't believe I went 40 years without learning that.
Agree.
I used to call my bad dreams nightmares until I realized the mind can do a whole lot worse than the carnival rides my mind has taken me on at night.
Outside of the sleep paralysis experience, I can only recall two of my bad dreams rise to the level of actual *Nightmare*. Not the story, but the feeling of coming out of sleep sweaty, terrified, confused, mind and heart racing, all my metaphorical claws out. And those have come late in life, after I had kids. (Someone else mentioned that having kids can bring on a new round of existential anxiety. That might explain it for me.)
Also, while not exactly nightmares: It was terrifying but eye-opening to see my son have sleep terrors the first few times. I know now they’re very common, but I was not prepared. Based on the screaming, the incoherent words, and the fear, shock and disbelief in his wide-open eyes – clearly blaming his (dream) mother for something unspeakable and unspoken – it is obvious that the mind can serve up some absolute frickin horror shows, that are in a different league than younger me’s slightly uncomfortable dreams of drowning in my apartment as it fills up with water.
This is a hugely helpful bit of awareness to take on board:
"BUT… I was wrong about what was happening, and what the experience meant. There is no correlation between the intensity of the feeling and the actual implications of the situation I was in."
Anxiety tends to turn up the volume on emotional reasoning -- "it must be true if I have strong feelings about it." And it really helps to recognize from repeated experience that things don't mostly unfold how our anxious interpretations fear that they will.
And too, it's an important step in treating one's own anxiety to let go of the magical thinking that feeds it.
Agreed on both counts!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis
AFAIK this is the generally-accepted explanation for such dreams. (I had my first one one as a kid, and a number of times since.)
Thanks!
Your concern is your experiential memory of the dream - how it feels to constantly remember it and the experience of the feelings associated with these memory recalls. It's not a trivial thing, but I don't think there is much worry that you somehow saw some deep truth.
To me, it sounds like your brain was working out how death works - your atheist sensibilities that it's just a nothingness versus your conscious brain simply not being able to comprehend non-existence.
Huberman Lab podcast had a guest on earlier this year, and I forget the episode but the guy was a world expert who also had some kind of cancer that was going to kill him very soon, and at the end of the podcast he talked about what that meant for him, what his perspective was like, and it was fascinating listening to a neuroscientist discuss his brain/mind experience subjectively but with a scientist's approach. One thing that stood out to me was relevant to this discussion:
Paraphrased: "I know that I am going to die, probably very soon, but my brain still can't seem to comprehend the reality of that. The doctors don't know exactly when, and I accept they are probably right, but the idea of just not being here cannot be really accepted on the deepest level of my brain".
They go on to have a discussion about the brain and why that could be the case. I think logically many people on Earth believe "you die, you aren't alive anymore to feel bad about your own death", but then if you actually try to think about what that's "like", it breaks our brain. To simply not exist anymore.
So I think your dream is a tension between those 2 things - your atheist belief that you just extinguish your consciousness versus some kind of experience of blackness, some faint awareness without any actual content.
FWIW, psychedelic experiences usually have more content than just an awareness of blackness or emptiness. You feel that there is something more concrete beyond this current consciousness, and that's a very common, near universal report, of people having those experiences.
Thanks for this comment, it was helpful in regaining perspective.
I was contemplating guided psychedelics mostly as a means to "overwrite" the void with an equally convincing "experience" that SOMETHING IS THERE, but I wasn't confident that would definitely be the outcome (which is why I didn't attempt it), and I don't think it's necessary anymore, anyways.
At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, I think you are wrestling with the deep themes themselves, not the dream. The dream was a way of your subconscious trying to work it out.
Guided psychedelics could help you start to deal with these themes, but they can be a quite difficult experience and they are definitely not for everybody. Doing mushrooms or LSD or something in that wheelhouse would almost certainly take you right back into that place, into those themes, but in an ultra-intense way. If you've never done them, it's simply impossible to relate what it's like.
My suggestion to you would be to take steps to reconnect with your inner observer and your subconscious. That takes many different forms, it all depends on the person. Psychedelics are a shortcut there, but can be a harrowing one. You can certainly work towards the issue without them, and I would suggest that as a starting step.
Try journalling on how you feel about death. One exercise is to set aside 15-30 minutes, and tell yourself you will not put the pen (or keyboard) down the entire time. Just keep writing. Do this either every day, or every X days in a regular interval for 4-5 sessions.
After each session, take a few minutes to unwind yourself, recalibrate back to reality, and to thank yourself for being brave enough to go to this difficult place. You don't need to read your journal back, but it is helpful once you've done 3+ sessions to take a look and see how the character of your writing has changed. Typically, this kind of journalling tends to help you work things out, and the writing becomes more positive or at least more descriptive as you go on.
In any event, I know what it's like to feel that deep existential dread. I've had experiences like yours. There is no easy answer. Generally in life, if there is fear, you have to go to to the fear. If there is pain, you have to go to the pain. There are wise and foolhardy ways to go about this, so work out what is wise for you, and start slowly. Wishing you good health and lightness of heart.
This is very good advice, and I thank you for taking the time to write it down! I think it would be very productive for some or even most people, but I don't think that exploring this very deeply is going to be helpful for me, particularly.
Based on some observations in the comments, the most likely explanation for my experience was that one of my typical cinematic almost-fun nightmares turned into sleep paralysis. Not having good understanding of the phenomena, I couldn't easily dismiss the overwhelming intensity of the experience as "just a really bad nightmare," because it was *so much worse* than a really bad nightmare.
But that's what sleep paralysis is like; so much worse than a really bad nightmare!
As soon as I understood there was potentially a physical explanation for the intensity of the dream, I was much more receptive to rational arguments in the comments about a dream being just a dream.
I had a very good laugh at myself and I feel great now! Burden totally lifted!
I seem to have a pretty high hedonic set point and I'm back to believing that my experience of being dead isn't going to be anything, the same way my experience before I was born wasn't anything. Moreover, I believe death is a precious tool for ending intractable suffering, and I am so goddamned relieved to have that option back again, both for myself and my loved ones.
(Obligatory parenthetical: I don't want to die. Rather, I fear physical suffering at the end of life more than most because I don't experience the analgesic effects of opiates due to a lab-verified mutation of CYP2D6, a gene which is responsible for metabolizing opiates. Having been through a couple of surgeries with zero pain management, I would literally rather be nothing than be in that kind of physical pain (or worse!) with no expectation of recovery.)
Sleep paralysis is indeed a terrifying phenomenon. Glad you found some helpful comments here, and were able to begin reasoning your way into a more settled mindstate about all of this. It's a great quality to have - the ability to employ reason and actually alleviate suffering. Take care!
I've had a variant I don't think I've seen described. It was a pleasant state of being awake while asleep. I might not have been able to move, but it wasn't frightening because I didn't expect myself to be able to move.
I could hear myself snoring. That was about all that was happening.
For what it's worth I've had many dreams about tidal waves crashing down on me, usually causing me to wake up, but sometimes perhaps with a similar "death" aspect that you describe. I've also had dreams about heaven, about hell, about other afterlives, all mutually contradictory in various ways. So I don't give much weight to any of them as an insight into spiritual truth.
One thing I'd note is the relative absurdity of gaining spiritual insight or understanding through a single event like a dream. If the "insight" really is true, really is a fundamental and enduring truth, why would you only percieve it once, in a single very specific way? Surely you would encounter this truth many times, in numerous ways, if you are able to encounter it at all.
Well, a good many religious traditions are explicitly founded on revelations in dreams, sometimes just one dream, and I've heard juuuuuuust enough "what if mushrooms and/or endogenous DMT is the Other's way of reaching us?" talk that I couldn't quite reframe this as "just a dream" on my own.
But your comment primed me to be receptive to the framing of "it was just a dream, stupid!" below, and that was helpful, so thank you!
It sounds like Christina has encountered it quite frequently since she had the dream. I would not dismiss it. I would put a lot of energy into reframing it though.
The thing is, while some dreams are excellent guides to spiritual truth, they shouldn't be taken literally, but rather symbolically. (Well, I think some dreams are just garbage collection, but not the ones that bother one after one awakens.) So you need to understand what the symbols of the dream represent, and you can't look that kind of thing up in a book. The same image will mean different things to different people, or even to the same person in different contexts.
I'm thinking about what the opposite of this experience could have been, namely a dream that would confirm to you, on a fundamental level, that death is the end of all conscious experience, and this is by definition impossible to experience. Perhaps a sensation of ego death might come close to it, but beyond that, a true experience of ceasing to exist is a contradiction. Meaning, the dream that convinced you could only ever have provided evidence one way.
I don't know if that actually helps to invalidate it in your mind, and if not, I'm not sure what other option is best. I don't think anyone viscerally fears NOT dying, so I can't imagine therapists or priests are useful here, and psychedelics could either make it better or worse. The best thing I can think of is some sort of exposure therapy to similarly convincing dreamlike experiences but even that can backfire. I guess you could wait a month and see if you still feel the same?
This dream happened almost ten months ago and I'm still occasionally bothered by it, so I don't think that it's likely to just fade on its own.
One of the most frustrating things about this experience is that I haven't been able to invalidate it as "just a dream" the way I have with literally every other dream I've ever had. It's as convincing as the memory of the shower I took seven hours ago.
I don't know how to offset it with a new "experience" except for brute-forcing one with a psychedelic, which, as you say, has certain risks. I can't think of anything I want less than to psychedelic my way back into the void.
"It's as convincing as the memory of the shower I took seven hours ago. "
If it is any consolation, I find it harder and harder to be sure whether memories that I have are from reality, from dreams, or from images I've seen. This is particularly true of places - whether I'd really been to some building, or was a dream image that never really existed. ( FWIW most of my dreams are anxiety dreams of some sort. ) ( Also, FWIW, I'm philosophically a materialist, and, as you did before your dream, just expect death to be oblivion )
I likewise find myself wondering if certain things are actual memories from my experienced reality, or if it's something I read/saw/heard somewhere and then imagined.
But somethings are so recent and immediate and still have so much detail that I'm very, *very* convinced that they actually happened (eg, the shower I cited, which was recent enough that I remembered many of the specifics; what podcast I was listening to, which shower gel I decided to use, that the light blue bath towel on the bar was fresh from the clean linen rack, etc).
While it's important to be prepared to wonder, "am I remembering this correctly?" it's also important to be able to say "yes" when it's something there's no reason at all to disbelieve.
Many Thanks! Yes, those are good points, and I agree that there is an important distinction between detailed memories of very recent events and the foggier memories of the more distant past. Yes, very recent memories are (almost always) reliable.
I would think the goal would be to find a different way to relate to the dream you did have so that it's less distressing. I'm not sure it works to offset one experience with another. We need at some level to accept and make peace with the experiences we have had.
There is no way to know what happens to us after we die. We are all inexorably moving towards death. There's no way to sugarcoat those two truths.
We are able to completely freak ourselves out over the meanings we give to experiences, the stories we tell about something that happened. The are multiple meanings we can give to any experience we have, and usually we have no way to know for sure which meaning is right or true.
It can be very empowering to claim one's capacity to make intentional choices to attribute meanings rather than to feel victim to the meanings that our frightened selves conjure up.
If the dream happened ten months ago and now you're only occasionally bothered by it, I would say it is likely to fade over time. Perhaps more slowly than you expected. I had a very frightening recurring nightmare in my 20s that did finally stop and fade over time, but it took some years. I think now with a decent therapist's help, I would have dispelled it quicker.
I've had a handful of very real-feeling tidal wave dreams like you describe. They have mostly corresponded to times I felt overwhelmed in my life, though not always. As a result of these dreams, and nothing in real life, I have a somewhat outsized reaction to visual effects that evoke tidal waves. There are some other situations in my life that evoke other nightmares I've had that can also spook me a bit. But the distress is mild and passes quickly and I don't attribute any special meaning to them and so the thoughts don't linger. Sometimes it's a source of humor for me, I can make light of it and feel light about it. I think that's a place you can get to with this as well.
> Sometimes it's a source of humor for me, I can make light of it and feel light about it. I think that's a place you can get to with this as well.
You were right, I managed to get there, and your comment helped (including pointing out that the dream was indeed fading over time).
As I said in a comment above, I tend to think that my most cinematic apocalypse dreams are more about disaster movies inspiring a "cool" set piece than they are symbolic, particularly as nothing was going on in my life at the time that felt overwhelming, per se.
Yeah, I wish we got to *know* what dreams are really about. I suspect they have multiple sources of inspiration, internal and external.
You made a frame shift around your dream really fast, I bet you have a very agile mind!
I don't know that being bothered by a dream for ten months is a "really fast" frame shift, LOL!
I sort of had a dream like that, when I was very young (around seven or so). I had been to a funeral for the first time (and before that, had gone with my mother to see the body laid out while people prayed etc.) so this was my first conscious experience and knowledge of death.
And that night I had a dream where I was in the coffin - the point of view was split between 'me' inside and 'me' or some observer outside, seeing the coffin raised on the shoulders of the bearers - and 'I' was present as it was put into the grave, the earth shovelled in, and so on.
So I woke up - it wasn't really a nightmare, as such - and I was thinking about it, when the realisation came to me: when that happens, I'll be dead. I won't know or experience that, or feel it. My corpse will not be aware. That helped me with it.
Of course, that says nothing about the existence of the soul or continuity after death, but it helped me not be afraid of physical death as far as my body was concerned.
In general, I'm not afraid of the experience of physical death the way I'm not afraid of the experience of general anesthesia - done right, there is no conscious experience of it whatsoever. And the same way I don't want to come to a locked in, paralyzed awareness during surgery, I definitely don't want to come to a similar awareness during "death."
I think the suggestion above that the nightmare might have ended in sleep paralysis is probably accurate.
Thanks for sharing, that sounds like a really vivid experience. If I read you right, you got hit with the full force of the raw first-person experience, which felt like a void when all the trappings of the individual person fell away in the dream of physical death. Experiences like these, and associated thought experiments, made me update from physicalism towards the direction of consciousness-first views.
As others have said, there is probably a lot going on at the subconscious level. Our deepest ideas and beliefs, however coolly we try and claim to hold them, are often intimately tied with our craving for security. And the rawness of life sometimes likes to trample over our cherished boundaries. For a moment we feel exposed, naked, uncertain. But if we're the kind of people who tend to use our thinking as a protection mechanism, eventually we adjust our thinking, or the remembrance of the experience dulls away in time, as we hide in our cocoon of self-certainty again.
I personally read your dream as an invitation to wonder. You're alive, there is more to life than bare hedonism plus totalizing ideologies plus the zero-sum shit society wants to shove down our throats. But it requires a kind of receptivity, and it doesn't appear just because we try to invite it... people call it the liminal, the space between sleep and wakefulness. And if you look at a tree carefully enough, something more than a tree might just appear.
You're right that this experience has pushed me a bit away from physicalism into considering consciousness as a thing divorced from physical reality (eg everything is in the brain meat).
But, well, this dream felt like a revelation that consciousness exists in the worst possible state imaginable after death, so there's no comfort in wondering if there is some real truth to it. It just feels like it's a thing which truly sucks, to make an understatement of a lifetime.
Hmm, yeah well dreams can be vivid and awful. So lots of random ideas, maybe try and embrace some aspect. Look more into vivid dreams that people have. Put yourself into an empty state... I'm thinking meditation or maybe one of those isolation tanks. (Will that help or make it worse? Who knows.) You could try embracing spirituality, go to some churches or other spiritual thing. Try rethinking the whole death thing again? Is there some other thing in your life that might cause the, 'death is going to suck' idea. Something more to do in the world? Anyway I hope you can find some way to find peace.
Sorry if this seems harsh, but to me it sounds like you're trying to control death, to deprive it of its mystery. What you have experienced is strong and personal and vivid, but it's not actual organismic death. It's a dream experience of death, which is not the same. Before you had tamed death (in your mind) with the belief of total annihilation, and now it's replaced with this visceral certainty of an eternal hellish state. In both cases your mind is jumping ahead and covering up the unknown territory of actual death with some manufactured certainty.
From what I've read, experiences of dissolution are quite common, and there is a bit of a range of them. They can happen in dreams, or just spontaneously, or through meditation, or with chemical help, or. They can feel great or terrible. As a general rule, I'd say they tell you more about the state of your subconscious than about what actual death is like.
Also, if you're feeling analytic, think about your description of that awful void. If it's awful, it's not quite such a void, is it? It means there is a little voice in there going "I hate this". Let the void be whatever the void is, but this little voice is surely not intrinsic to death - it's just a small remaining bit of your ordinary consciousness, when most of the trappings of the person have temporarily fallen away. The automatic judgment of momentary experience is one of the hardest habits of mind, and it remains even when most of the rest goes on holiday.
My hunch is, as I said above, that the kind of mind that feels the need to assert control over everything, death included, is the also the kind of mind that would find the raw experience of being an aware, sentient being rather dreary. So I stand by my recommendation to go on a wild chase after the wonder of being alive. Surprise us!
Hey!
I was reflexively a bit annoyed by the obviousness of your first paragraph. Like, of *course* I know I didn't actually experience real death! Didn't the preamble on my initial post preemptively admit I know it's silly to even be bothered by a dream! Condescending dick!
But after my initial resistance, and with a determination to fully, openly consider every reasonable comment, your first three paragraphs here, and then the final blow of @Radar's comment here (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-306?r=f8y5z&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=45222671) grabbed me by the lapels and gave me a good shake: "YOU DIDN'T ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE DEATH, STUPID! *YOU'RE* THE ONE BOTHERING YOU! *IT* *WAS* *JUST* *A* *DREAM!"
I laughed out loud and felt immensely better.
*Immensely.*
To give full credit to many of the generous and thoughtful commenters, I'd been invited/reminded several times that the dream came from me, and that every aspect of the dream was a part of "me" (the wave, etc), so I was more primed for your "obviously it was just a dream, stupid" take than I otherwise might have been.
And that was perhaps not your intention! I can see that your solution was more about embracing a positivity-woo view of the world, which isn't for me; I was one of the very last Gen X born and got aaaaaaaalll the remaining stock of cynicism and disaffection. Pursuing healing by staring at trees to see more than trees is maximal cringe!
But pursuing healing via comedy isn't; and if there's one thing Gen X is good at, it's self-deprecating mockery. Your comment finally yanked me out of the immediacy of the dream, distancing me just enough to claw back my usual humorous perspective and heartily laugh at myself and this absurd problem.
And for that, I very sincerely thank you!
Happy to help!
The "staring at trees" bit was just meant as an example, I totally get the cringe thing. I could have said "blasting into a saxophone" instead, but that requires training, and it would be a bit hypocritical because I can't do it myself :)
I thought this was beautifully said.
Go under total anesthesia
I think the dream is an expression of your fear that when you die you will be in such a void - This is a thought that is a thematic part of many stories, and I suspect many people have had this fear, including myself.
As for rationalizing this away, what works for me is remembering that we in fact all have experienced what it is like to be completely unconscious. Most often this happens while we sleep, but an even better example is passing out during the day - for example while being under anesthetic. I once passed out like this, and it felt like time was just gone. Many people report the same experience. I think that most likely, this is what it will be like to be dead.
I have also had anesthesia, and more or less assumed that's what it would be like to be dead. I don't want to die but I had no worries about what death would be like until I had this dream.
To go with your anesthesia analogy: Virtually everyone expects to experience nothing while under anesthesia. But some people come out of it early, hear and feel and remember the medical procedure, as well as not being able to do anything to signal that they're conscious.
Most people react with horror to the prospect of waking up when they're not supposed to, and that's pretty much my dream, except that I had the bonus of the horror of it going on for all eternity.
Well, this does seem like the kind of thing of a therapist would help with. If you don't want to do that though, talking to a close friend or family member about it can be just as effective, assuming they're a good listener. Hell, even talking to yourself can sometimes be enough.
As for things you can do right now... It helps to understand that your death is entirely inevitable, and that worrying about it isn't going to change that. That goes for the afterlife as well, in the unlikely event such a thing exists. Humans love to pretend that they have full control over their destinies, but it is genuinely freeing to just accept that some things are beyond your control.
Yeah, except...no, in this particular context?
I *was* at peace with the idea of death being inevitable because I thought it would be...you know...nothing. Now that I've had an "experience" indicating that it will be truly awful, I'm no longer at peace.
You are choosing to give the interpretation to your experience that it indicates that after death will be truly awful in just the way you have dreamed about. But we have no basis at all to say that your experience indicates anything true about the nature of reality, yeah?
You're choosing to give it that special meaning, presumably because the experience felt very real and powerful. This is a form of magical thinking and emotional reasoning. You get to decide to relate to your thoughts and experience in that way, but I think it helps to see that it's something you're choosing to do.
Have you had other experiences that felt real and powerful and turned out to be wrong?
I have in the past freaked myself out over physical symptoms, convinced that I had some terrible thing because of a sensation or thought or dream or symptom and how I interpreted them. This is what medical anxiety is. None of those feared things turned out to be true.
There are experiences we have in life that require us to come to accept death again in a new way, so it's not something we arrive at being at peace about and then we don't have to deal with it again. I don't know if you have children? Parents will sometimes have another round of mortality fear to deal with after having kids. Sometimes people will have a medical scare or near death experience that leads them to need to do another round of work around existential fear. Stuff happens that deeply spooks us and it may take us a good while to recover and assimilate the experience.
I think the trick in this moment is that you're treating your experience and your interpretation of it as if they're the same thing and as if they're both telling you something very significant about the true nature of reality, and that stance puts you in a frame to sort of feel victimized by this dream. The dream is just another experience in your life. It has turned out to be an impactful one but that doesn't make it true in a literal, external, objective way.
Thank you.
This was the most healing comment I received, in particular this:
> "You're choosing to give it that special meaning, presumably because the experience felt very real and powerful. This is a form of magical thinking and emotional reasoning. You get to decide to relate to your thoughts and experience in that way, but I think it helps to see that it's something you're choosing to do...Have you had other experiences that felt real and powerful and turned out to be wrong?"
My reaction was:
Why, yes.
Yes, I have.
As I mentioned in a different comment to you (which I didn't initially connect was yours, given the surprising number of people commenting), I was born and raised a Christian Scientist and thus literally believed into my late teens that all illness is just an illusion, a capital-E Error that can only be mediated-prayed away, rather than a physical phenomenon that requires physical medical intervention.
But I eventually overcame that indoctrination and no longer engage that kind of magical thinking and/or emotional reasoning, and strenuously guard against it at all times.
Thus I was even more annoyed by this comment than I was @skaladom's (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-306?r=f8y5z&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=45187424), because of course I don't do "magical thinking" anymore and I don't need *you* to scold me for it, Random Internet Person Replying to my Plea for Help to Stop Thinking Magically!
!!!
I really did have a *very* good laugh, once your comments blasted me out of self-indulging in "but what if somehow it's reaaaaaaalll because I've never *felt* something this reaaaaaaalll..."
This was precisely what I needed. I'm pretty sure that attempting to "overwrite" one spiritual experience with a perhaps even more convincing one via psychedelics wouldn't have been helpful, and that therapy might have made it worse because therapists generally aren't supposed to say, "your spiritual feelings aren't a valid observation of reality, so stop that right now."
Truly, thank you.
Oh I'm so glad these comments here were helpful. Lots of kind and wise people in this space, I find.
I didn't intend to scold you at all. My experience is that we all engage in magical thinking and emotional reasoning at one time or another and that sometimes other people can see it more clearly than we can. The more powerful the feelings or experience, the more likely we are to do it.
Just to share the irony with you, I am a therapist (florencegardner.com) and this kind of invitation to reframe one's experience and see choices that didn't exist before is a lot of the job. Of course you don't need a therapist to help with that -- friends, books, and sometimes random people on the internet can help too. :)
You didn't actually scold me, that was just my initial tantrum at (rightly) being identified as engaging in magical thinking and emotional reasoning. I just had to circle the block of comments on the thread and come back before I could actually absorb anything useful from it.
And thanks for cluing me in on the irony of you being a therapist! I was basing my assumption that therapists aren't supposed to sternly invalidate people's experiences/feelings based on a general cultural awareness about therapy; obviously I was somewhat wrong about that, but how wrong was I? Was the hard line you took here something you could do inside formal practice with an actual patient? If so, I'll update my priors on how therapy can work.
Friends aren't always super helpful. I mentioned my dream to a very dear, very rationalist atheist friend a few days after I had it, including how much it's "realness" was continuing to bother me, and he replied with an (unintentionally shaming), "Yeah, but you don't *really* believe that means anything, right?"
I emotionally flinched a little, replied, "Oh, no, hahah, it just felt so REAL," changed the subject, and then kept being bothered by it.
I'm so glad it occurred to me to bring it to this forum, where, as you say, there are lots of kind and wise people in this space who can bring a lot of experience and perspective. The people that identified partial sleep paralysis were extremely helpful for contextualizing why the void portion of the dream felt more vivid than other dreams have, for example.
You had an experience of it being truly awful because you are alive. You were alive when you dreamed it and you were alive when you woke up from it. In other words, you did not experience what death really is. What you experienced is being completely powerless in the face of something you could not control. My definition of anxiety is knowing something to be true and at the same time refusing to believe it, I think it applies here.
You were right!
Ok..nice...but the best thing is you seem to have found some clarity. Thumbs up...
Thsi week I am reading "The Varieties of Religious Expirience" by William James, after I saw the book mentioned in an Asterisk mag article. So far, so good, I am only ~20% in. Reading up on some context, it turns out that William James was one of the most eminent psychologists of 20th century. Has anyone read this book? What do you think? Are there any other books on comparative religion that you would recommend. So far, I have only read "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy" by Eliade
I have indeed read this book, by accident. One chapter was obligatory reading in a curriculum and I misunderstood the task. I didn't regret reading it. Haven't seen anything better in print about this stuff yet but David Chapmans "Meaningness" is well worth reading, too.
I've heard Chapman mentioned somewhere, I'll check out the book
Frithjof Schuon's The Eye of the Heart has been one of my favorites, and I've read a lot of perennialism. Maybe check out Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's Hinduism and Buddhism, and Time and Eternity too.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Maybe try The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. It's also a classic, and makes a strong point for the underlying unity of spiritual traditions.
If you end up too convinced, it might be worth also reading the classic arguments against.
Thanks for that. Any more specific work on the arguments against this unity?
I wouldn't recommend a whole book against, but you can google "why not perennialism". The biggest usual criticism tends to come from people committed to specific religions, e.g "If I were to believe in the underlying unity of all religions, then that would be my core belief, and I wouldn't truly believe in Jahveh/Jesus/Shiva/Mohammed/Buddha/etc anymore".
In more general terms, if you have a bunch of systems and claim to unify them into a meta-system, it tends to just become another system to compete with them. When Perennialism as a current inevitably developed its own proto-religious features, the result got called "Traditionalism".
Do read Huxley though, I still think he has at least 92% of a point.
> "If I were to believe in the underlying unity of all religions, then that would be my core belief, and I wouldn't truly believe in Jahveh/Jesus/Shiva/Mohammed/Buddha/etc anymore".
I am not even religious, but this seems to make sense: when you try to "unify" religions, you are in fact building a new religion by selecting pieces from the existing ones. Your new religion will agree with the existing ones on the points where they mostly agree with each other, and disagree where they disagree. (You can try to make up some compromise solution, and perhaps you find a clever one, but that is definitely not what the original religions believed.)
To be fair though, Huxley's book makes a broad and subtle point - much more than can be summarized in a discussion thread. Have a skim if you're interested.
I find it very weird that a believer in an Eastern religion would reject perennialism, since the Eastern traditions do take a perennial view. Is it so confusing to simply do what the Japanese did when they encountered Buddhism? Though perhaps that isn't perennialism, but outright syncretism, but syncretism is pretty cool.
If you mean that about me, I don't consider myself a believer, just strongly influenced by several Eastern religions. For what it's worth, I'm largely on board with perennialism. But I think it's important when exposing oneself to powerful ideas to also read about the ways they've been criticized, and their potential shortcomings and excesses.
Oh, I don't mean you, it's that in your comment you mentioned Eastern believers rejecting perennialism.
I definitely believe any system is gonna have issues though. There is never going to be a perfect system with no defects, and this is true even outside spirituality.
Thanks! I’m definitely reading Huxley next
I do enjoy when the header to an Open Thread serves as a mini-digest post in its own right. Miss when this was more common. (Or maybe it's just my perception of such, haven't had the slack to really participate in OTs for a good while now..."someday when I have a Real Job[tm])
For what it’s worth I had the same reaction and have the same perception. I hope it stopped because Scott is using his time for better things and not because he thought people didn’t enjoy the extra tidbits! Or maybe I don’t, so that they might come back.
Continuing the tradition of sometimes offering math puzzles in open threads, today I'll try two relatively challenging ones. You'll need at least paper, pencil and some time to tackle these.
1. On a 9x9 board, the outermost rim of squares has exactly 32 squares (picture: https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/avva/111931/264656/264656_original.png). Put all the numbers from 1 to 32 on these squares so that the sum of every two neighbors is always a perfect square (1,4,9 etc.). Neighbors are adjacent horizontally/verticall only, not diagonally.
2. An equilateral triangle (all sides the same length) is drawn on the coordinate plane, and the X-axes of its vertices are some numbers a,b,c. Find the side length of the triangle in terms of a,b,c.
You saying "You'll need at least..." makes me immediately inclined to do them in my head instead. Unless there's some unexpectedly neat structure in the solution of #1, I think that might actually be beyond me, but there wasn't much in the solution of #2 that I would even have wanted to use notes for.
What's the point in the framing of the 9x9 board in #1?
I'd guess the board is to make it nice for people who'll try to solve it experimentally, shuffling numbers around.
For #2, I couldn't have solved it in my head the way I solved it (which was basically a "go straight at 'em" approach), but apparently it can be solved in a number of ways.
My solution to #2 is below. A completely direct approach (I assume just converting it to algebra and solving that) sounds much more unpleasant.
Gur inevnapr bs gur k naq l pbbeqvangrf zhfg or rdhny orpnhfr na rdhvyngreny gevnatyr vf gbb flzzrgevpny gb unir n dhnqehcbyr zbzrag, gurersber rnpu bs gurfr inevnaprf vf unys bs gur gbgny inevnapr. Sbe n gevnatyr bs fvqr yratgu y, gur qvfgnapr sebz rnpu pbeare gb gur prager vf y qvivqrq ol gur fdhner ebbg bs guerr, gurersber gur gbgny inevnapr vf y fdhnerq, naq gur k inevnapr vf unys bs y fdhnerq, gurersber y vf fdeg gjb gvzrf gur fgnaqneq qrivngvba bs gur k pbbeqvangrf.Gur inevnapr bs gur k naq l pbbeqvangrf zhfg or rdhny orpnhfr na rdhvyngreny gevnatyr vf gbb flzzrgevpny gb unir n dhnqehcbyr zbzrag, gurersber rnpu bs gurfr inevnaprf vf unys bs gur gbgny inevnapr. Sbe n gevnatyr bs fvqr yratgu y, gur qvfgnapr sebz rnpu pbeare gb gur prager vf y qvivqrq ol gur fdhner ebbg bs guerr, gurersber gur gbgny inevnapr vf y fdhnerq, naq gur k inevnapr vf unys bs y fdhnerq, gurersber y vf fdeg gjb gvzrf gur fgnaqneq qrivngvba bs gur k pbbeqvangrf.
The 9x9 board might be offered as a red herring (it doesn't need to be a square grid).
If you want a hint for #1, check my reply to the OC.
In the last two weeks, I saw question 2 from another source. Are you in the Boston area, by any chance?
No, I'm in Israel. I saw no. 2 on Twitter, rather randomly, and liked it.
https://twitter.com/akivaw/status/1727122185016549870
No. 1 comes out of Tanya Khovanova's blog, which is a wonderful source of interesting problems. https://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/ She *is* based in Boston (MIT).
Update. My mistake, no. 1 is also from Twitter, https://twitter.com/fawnpnguyen/status/1726394675819639178
I saw #2 via Tanya. Perhaps that tweet was her source, too.
Oh, hmm. I see that she's in a large Russian-language math puzzles FB group where I posted #2, so maybe I'm her source. If so, I'm honored. Long-time fan.
The first one was delightfully mechanical without appearing so at first. There's a unique solution modulo reflection and rotation. The rot13 proof begins by abgvpvat gung frireny bs gur vagrtref unir bayl gjb cbffvoyr arvtuobef, juvpu yrnqf va ghea gb abgvpvat n srj bs gubfr punvaf zhfg or wbvarq, juvpu yrnirf fbzr bs gur becunarq vagrtref jvgu bayl gjb cbffvoyr arvtuobef, naq fb ba. Riraghnyyl guvf fgbcf jbexvat, naq lbh svavfu ol abgvpvat gur ynfg becuna, jvgu guerr cbffvoyr arvtuobef, unf gb unir bar, naq bar bs gur bgure gjb, gb nibvq n fznyyre ybbc.
I'm studying the second one now.
Wonderfully done!
If, right at this moment, you had to choose an age to live to, what would you choose?
You would live to exactly that age, no more and no less. You would stop naturally ageing until you get close to your chosen age. If you choose a high enough number you risk finding yourself floating alone in empty space for a very long time after the earth/universe has collapsed around you.
Let's say that this operates via subtle influence over your free will. So you won't be invulnerable in the sense that you could step in front of a train and survive. You would just find that you don't want to step in front of the train. So no superpowers.
I'm going to say 80. Part of the reason death is good is that you need to make room for the next generation. Do you're best while you are here on this earth, and then get out of the way.
Infinity
For the strong/kind version of "live that long", where it ensures I'm not debilitatingly ill, I think I'm more worried about not living as long as I'd like to than I am about living too long.
If infinity isn't a permissible answer then I'm playing a game of Who Can Name The Biggest Number https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
Hopefully I can think of a way to entertain myself while floating alone in space, if that's where I'm likely to spend the vast majority of my existence.
Even if you stay young you'd still have X% of developing cancer per year or some other decease that would leave you a living corpse. I think the right answer is actually a decade or two lower than the average life expectancy, anything over that almost guarantees your body breaking down in some terrible way. So I'd go with 65.
? Yeh you body could break down after 65 but there are plenty of healthy 66 year olds and over.
Google says 1 in 5 men in the UK die before 65, so I wouldn't want to take that chance.
I don't see why one wouldn't choose as long a time as possible, even risking the cold-death of the universe. I would assume that you could figure out something to make life good by the time it is necessary, such as hopping from starship to starship.
So how about 10 trillion years? https://xkcd.com/1606/
My first instinctive answer is 1000 years. I feel like any significantly longer answer is underestimating the extent to which such a lack of ordinary temporal perspective would make you no longer meaningfully human (in any psychological sense).
I feel like a thousand years is the longest period I can really intuitively comprehend, and also that human civilisation has any recognisable continuity.
But there are dozens of questions about how this would actually work that might change my answer.
> If you choose a high enough number you risk finding yourself floating alone in empty space for a very long time after the earth/universe has collapsed around you.
> So no superpowers.
Sounds like a serious contradiction.
No superpowers in a useful, exploitable sense. I'm just trying to head off people from gaming the hypothetical. Maybe I should have just added a polite "please don't game the hypothetical" instead.
A question about the US congress hearing for three University Presidents: I am not American, and genuinely can't understand why the hearing took place. I haven't seen a great answer to this anywhere, because it gets drowned out by culture war. Nonetheless these are private institutions, and the examples in the hearing (at least of snippets I've seen) seem to be of legal protected free speech. Even if private universities are hypocritical in which speech they protect vs. punish and de facto don't have free speech norms (which isn't my question; let's sidestep whether or not this is true), I don't understand why Congress needs to get involved? Can any Americans enlighten me on this?
P.S. Sorry for culture war-adjacent question, let me know if I should delete. Really not looking to fight; it's a genuine question that I hope can be answered regardless of one's opinion on whether the hearing was right, the university presidents were right, etc.
One thing I don't see in the other replies: If the university presidents were testifying under oath, they have to worry about perjury. Many years ago, Congress dragged some baseball players into a hearing about performance-enhancing drugs. One of those players, Roger Clemens, was later tried for lying to Congress. (This was interesting to me because (1) Clements was my childhood hero and (2) Clemens's trial took place when I had a matter in the same courthouse and I got to see him eating in the cafeteria and then I attended a couple of hours of his trial.)
The real answer is that yes, it's basically culture war grandstanding.
The official answer is that US Federal law requires that any university which receives federal funds (which is pretty much all of them) must enable members of all protected classes to pursue an education there without undue hindrance. Jews are a protected class, and by long-standing precedent anything that causes pervasive fear among students is considered an undue hindrance to education which universities must act to eliminate. Since there are a lot of Jewish students at these universities (and others) who claim to be very afraid of the ongoing near-riotous protests, and since the university administrators don't seem to be doing anything about it, there is legitimate cause for investigation.
Ideally by the executive branch, in the form of the Department of Education, but if they don't get involved then Congress legitimately can investigate. Can, and in this case really really wants to for culture war reasons.
Political theater.
The government leverage over private universities is always streams of public funding and tax status. I mean, they also have to obey the law, which changes from time to time.
And then private universities can't piss off their enormous private donors -- as they have here -- and so they feel pressure to play well when asked to join public theater events.
Not an expert, but I think it's all grand standing for the camera. If there were no cameras there would probably not be this hearing. Get the cameras out of government.
That just runs you into another problem, in which Congress takes action against some institution you and I like, and we don't get to see why because there were no cameras.
The *real* problem, IMCO, is that too many Americans want grandstanding.
Oh I think we could get information out about what the government is doing. (Did you read the "Secret Government" book review?) But I'll agree that we seem to like the culture wars.
In support of this, there are no cameras in the Supreme Court but we hear about their doings every session. There are some federal districts that don't have cameras or even any recording at all.
Against this, there is still grandstanding at local government levels where, even if there are cameras, no one is watching. The cameras definitely exacerbate the problem at federal levels, but there is just some group of people who want to engage in this kind of theater.
Seconding that it’s probably (they receive some public funding and/or preferential tax treatment)+(congress sees an opportunity for good sound bites), with the former being more pertinent to your question. Even private universities are both more involved with the government than other entities and entitled to a slightly different raft of free speech protections and obligations.
That said, I’m not an expert on this, so I can’t give a more detailed answer.
Congress regularly hears from people outside of government about all sorts of issues. Committee hearings, in an ideal world, serve as a way to help politicians get a better understanding of the world and the problems they are making laws about. In practice, they often get used for ridiculous grandstanding.
This particular hearing was about anti-semitism on campus. It's totally valid for congress to seek to investigate the extent to which minority students are becoming victims of racist abuse. But of course in practice the point was to collect ammo to paint the institutional left as anti-semitic. And the institutional left happily obliged.
Even supposedly private institutions still benefit from a ton of public funds and programs etc., so presumably that's why?
Let's keep re-reading Scott's old posts, even from before SSC. Book Review: Empire of the Summer Moon (https://archive.ph/68meJ https://sharetext.me/aqdyzqv0h3) is about the Comanche (who, if the book is to be believed were both awful and amazing) and their eventual fate.
Finding a place to put it online was no easy task: pastebin decided to complain again that it has "detected potentially offensive or questionable content", and the other site made me edit out the word "sex", good grief. But that only means that you have to read it, to spite the AI censors.
The collection of all the old posts is here https://archive.ph/fCFQx.
Cool, hadn't seen that one before. I'd definitely like to know if Scott's opinions on civilisation/hunter-gathers is still the same now. I've noticed hints in SSC/SCX that he thinks in that direction but I didn't realise he was close to being a full blown anarcho primitivist in 2011. In the comments he's even speculating about whether deferent groups are more or less adapted to life in civilisation.
As an interested layperson, I'm a little surprised that Orchid wants to screen for Alzheimers. I thought the jury was out on what exactly causes it, with many clues pointing towards a virus infection with VZV or HSV-1 as common suspects. I guess there could be genetic factors which increase the chance of an infection leading to disease, even if a virus is the ultimate cause. Still, screening for "risk factors" seems like it might have unintended consequences. Can anyone enlighten me on the science behind this?
Certain APOE alleles (APOE4, in particular) have a vastly higher risk.
Aha, I didn’t know that, thanks!
I'm more interested in the thing about obesity, because I thought that according to the knowledgeable persons on here, being fat was simply about "too many calories in, not enough calories out" and statements about genetics, metabolism, etc. were just excuses and flat-out lies ("if you say you are cutting down on calories but not losing weight, you're lying because it is a physical law of the universe that consuming fewer calories means losing weight!") 😁
Maybe they mean metabolic syndrome?
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/metabolic-syndrome
While I'm not defending the idea that "statements about genetics, metabolism, etc. [are] excuses and flat-out lies" there's no inconsistency between the thermodynamic thing and genetic influence on weight. Behavior is a lever genes can pull. This source identifies genetic influences on both physiological stuff (like lipolysis, the process of breaking down fats) and behavioral stuff (like leptin, a hormone that affects appetite), so a combination of stuff you can't control at all and stuff you can in principle control, with extreme difficulty. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK573068/ Anyway the heritability of obesity is really well established and definitely screenable-for.
"This source identifies genetic influences on both physiological stuff (like lipolysis, the process of breaking down fats)"
The arguments we've had on here before around obesity had a lot of denial of "you don't have a special metabolism, you just eat too much". There was a lot of "calories in, calories out, stupid" and "so you feel hungry? just put up with it!" tough love.
The "calories-in calories-out" faction always makes itself known quite assertively, but I remember at least two other points of view being taken quite seriously around here: the possibility of an obesogenic environment due to environmental contaminants, and the hyperpalatability hypothesis. Or some combination of both.
A collective funnily named "Slime Mold Time Mold" is doing a lot of guerrilla science on these topics, the latest craze seems to be the potato diet.
The two explanations "more calories in than out" and "it's genetic" don't contradict each other. There could be a world where they are 100% true, because your genes determine how much calories you take in and how much you expend.
Of course, it's not 100% genetics, but for sure the genes play a role for both sides of the equation. It makes totally sense to screen for them.
Yeah, unless they mean some disease that sounds like more risk factor thinking.
Reposting a comment that got lost in the last thread's autism discussion. Sorry about the incidental spoilers, but I don't know how else to clearly make my point.
I have a few questions about this theory of mind (with spoilers for Harry Potter and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which I hope is all right).
First, how well do autistic people do with keeping track of complex "quintuple agent" situations like the ones in those stories? Severus Snape has a public position (working for Dumbledore at Hogwarts), but he's secretly a Death Eater, *but* everyone close to Dumbledore knows he's posing as a death eater, *but* it becomes clear the death eaters know this, *but* in fact Dumbledore knows *this* and Snape's loyal to him after all.
Or since that's a fairly linear case that just adds more and more iterations of "they know we know they know, and they know we know they know we know they know"...what about The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where a British agent is sent to pose as a defector to the Russians, to frame a top Russian agent as being a traitor for the British, to get him removed. He thinks he's a mere triple agent (fake traitor), but actually the real plan is to have him exposed to the Russians at the end, because the said Russian top agent really *is* a traitor for the British, and the plan is to discredit all suspicians of him.
Are autistic people better or worse than average at understanding plots like that? My instinct is they'd be better, since it seems like game theory and to overlap with things like chess. But the theory of mind stuff you mentioned suggest they'd be worse.
Second, are autistic people (in your opinion) better or worse than average at ideological turing tests? This seems like something with a lot of important social implications.
And third, I remember reading something (can't remember where, but I think it was a low quality source like a tabloid), about a supposed test where people who had recently had some kind of power were told to write a word on their faces so others could read it, and were more likely than the control group to write it from their own perspective and forget to flip it so it would be readable to others. The implication being that having power makes you more narcisstic and less likely to think from other people's perspectives. And that's why politicians suck.
Like I said, low quality source, but does this sound like something at all plausible? And if so how does it relate to theory of mind and autism? No matter what someone thinks of either autistic people or politicians, they don't usually put them in the same category...
I am another basically-autismy person (with a diagnosis even) and can keep track of fictional interpersonal complications fine, though I usually don't bother. As with AV's comment, real world multiple layers of social information is very difficult for me to parse. I usually pretend such things don't exist for my own sanity. Internally, it feels like "so this behavior indicates they *could* know this thing they in-theory do not know. I am not supposed to ask, and they (to my knowledge) aren't supposed to know, so acknowledging this possibility would simply be trouble either way, and I will ignore it".
As for ideological turing tests, I do think autisticy people are better at taking peoples words seriously, and therefore are better at reflecting their conscious beliefs. Also, having to do social reasoning explicitly is useful, because I at least am actuely aware that my priors and experience are NOT shared. If I want to be able to communicate and understand effectively, I need to be able to at least model nt behavior, so I have practice at having to consider and try to "live in" alien belief systems. This advantage at turing tests is speculative though, and reliant on the autist in question being exposed to /seeking out politics information, which many aren't. It wouldn't surprise me if over-all even high functioning/aspbergery/whatever autistic people were worse, just because many of us don't care to pay attention to the Social Issue of the Day.
I think your picture of what autistic people are like may be overly influenced by the (probably accurate) idea that I lot of tech whizzes are on the autistic spectrum. But unusual skill in grasping an working with non-human areas of complexity is not an autistic trait. The autistic spectrum tech whizzes are people who happened to be born with 2 separate traits: mild autism; and very high intelligence. In general, autistic people are bad at reading other people and not drawn to them. If they have things they are interested in, they are likely to be things that do not involve people. But their talent at the things that interest them is not unusually high. For instance, I worked as a psychologist for several years with an autistic man with an average IQ. He was able to converse, but was very socially inappropriate. He could read and write at about a second grade level. His main interest was muscle cars. He could tell you the specs of any make and model from 1940 to the present. His level of knowledge of the field was extraordinary compared to his knowledge of how to grocery shop or use a microwave or take a shower (he required assistance for all of these). But it was not extraordinary for a muscle car fan. I’m sure there are many normal people who love those cars who know as much as he does.
So regarding your question about an autistic person’s ability to understand and remember the complex facts about Snape’s multi-level spying, I’d say an autistic person’s *ability* to understand and remember it would be a function of their IQ. Autism would give them no special advantage. However, they would be less likely than a non-autistic person to take an interest in the matter. Most readers of Harry Potter learned and remembered the info about Snapes complicated position because it was relevant to the characters and story — we were interested in what it was like to be Snape, where his loyalties lay, what harm and good he might do to other characters, etc. An autistic person would find all that people stuff much less intrinsically interesting. You might ask, how about if you just presented the Snape situation to them as a game or a challenge: Can you understand and remember all the different levels of double-agentness that Snape had going on? Are you thinking that an autistic person might find that appealing, just because of the patterning aspect of it? They *might* but it’s very unlikely. Remember, one of the most salient things about autistic people is that they are not interested in you or your ideas for them or your approval. They are closed systems. The autistic man I worked with was completely impervious to my and his family’s suggestions about things he might find interesting, or that might make his life easier. When you talked with him about that stuff he was basically waiting for you to stop talking so he could talk about muscle cars some more.
A read an article about a pair of autistic twins who could recognize 6-digit primes on sight. If you threw down a handful of 60 or so matches they did not have to count, but could tell you instantly how many of them there were. But they were impervious to math instruction. In fact that was one of the fascinating things about their ability to recognize primes — nobody had ever taught them basic arithmetic, much less what a factor is or what a prime number is — yet in some way they could not verbalize they grasped all that. There was one novel thing that the person observing them was able to get them interested in He wrote down some 8-digit primes. They stared at them fascinated for 10 minutes or so before declaring them primes. Then they kept staring at the numbers, savoring them. But notice that the “new” thing that interested them was just an extension of their self-wrought area of expertise. These guys were whizzes at the patterns involved in prime-number-related stuff. But there would be no way you could get them to extend their interest to the levels of Snape’s double-triple-quadruple agent status. Snape’s not a prime number, you know?
I suspect I’m mildly autistic, though I haven’t been professionally evaluated, and I write novels. A comment I’m getting a lot from readers on my newest novel is “how did you think up this insane plot? Did you outline it all out?”
People are convinced I had some grand scheme prepared in advance and they find the plot intricate. However, I actually plotted nothing out and I just wrote it as I went. So, maybe.
I def think I understand plot better than character motivation and character motivation is what I write out and try to think about logically or using frameworks like MBTI. So my characters are very calculated and I have to refer to my character notes often, but plot does seem to come to me naturally.
And I’m sorry in advance, I sort of don’t know what language to use when discussing autism. Mildly, high-functioning, ASD1, autism requiring minimal support etc. I kind of hate all the names, yet just saying autism feels far too general and meaningless these days, and I know people don’t use Aspergers anymore, but that’s more what I mean.
I'm autistic. I've never had any trouble with theory of mind in fiction, even when stuff gets complex. Writers are so nice about spelling out all of the little details! I have a lot more trouble parsing out complicated social situations with multiple layers of knowledge IRL, which could be a theory of mind problem or just a general lack of interest in drama.
The study you're talking about sounds like a classic result pre-replication crisis. My instinct would be to completely ignore it.
A couple years ago, I got selected for grand jury duty. Not for any particular case, it's just in that in my locale, every felony charge needs grand jury approval to proceed.
We heard some thirty cases over the course of a week. Overall it was an incredibly interesting experience during which I learned a lot about the legal system. However, there were a few parts of it that I have been thinking about every once in a while ever since and finally figured I'd see what other people thought.
Specifically, I'm interested in people's thoughts on some of the subpoenas we were asked to approve. There were two categories that I was a bit iffy on: cell phone records, and medical records.
The cell phone records, it was at least for a specific person, suspected of a specific crime, and they were going through the court system to get access. While I was a bit wary, it _mostly_ seemed ok. My only hesitation was my nebulous sense that the government doesn't have a good record with getting this kind of data. But these ones seemed fine.
The second category has bothered me more. In particular it's because the records they were attempting to get were usually those of a victim. I actually asked about this specifically and asked why they needed a subpoena when the victim could presumably just give them the records. The response was basically that it was faster, easier, and had a better record trail.
All of which I'm sure is true. But I'm kind of instinctually against "because it makes the governments job easier" as a sufficient justification for much of anything. Even more so when what they want is highly personal records of someone who isn't suspected of a crime with no evidence that this person is ok with it agrees with those records being released.
Now, it's pretty unlikely that I could have changed anything at the time (grand juries only require simple majority, not unanimity, and I would have been the lone dissenter), but I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts about these kinds of subpoenas and how justified/appropriate they may or may not be.
I was on a grand jury for several months. It was both educational and disturbing. We only were approving cases going forward to trail. We did dismiss a few charges and at least one case... which I think got sent back to gather more evidence... but I'm not sure.
Did you refuse anything? Or stop a trial?
Also how much influence does the judge have.
There was one charge that we dismissed, and one more that I argued against but the jury as a whole approved. We were told that we were pretty unusual for dismissimg even one.
-edit- we did modify/reduce charges on several other cases, bit we only fully dismissed the one
As for the judge, they basically weren't involved with the jury directly after the selection process. We basically only interacted with prosecutors and witnesses
I find it a bit baffling to have juries make decisions like this. Isn't this the sort of thing that requires detailed knowledge of law, precedent, consitutional jurisprudence and so on? At least for the decisions to be remotely uniform, predictable, consistent, and generally fair?
I know it's an artefact of the fifth amendment, but having it extend to things like searches seems too much. Do you just make the decision on emotional instinct? Why have judges at all if they're not going to rule on such archetypal judge-decisions?
The Fourth Amendment says, "No warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." In my limited observations (I've analyzed these issues but not litigated them), the 4A's requirements are operationalized by having a fact witness (a police officer) submit an affidavit to a neutral magistrate (usu. a court official, but not necessarily a judge). The magistrate will examine the affidavit for "probable cause," i.e., good reason to believe that execution of the warrant will further the investigation in some material way. (That formulation is my own; SCOTUS says it differently, but I don't have the phrasing memorized.)
Is the magistrate a rubber stamp? Probably. But this process creates a paper trail,* and for police officers who feel gross lying on an affidavit, maybe it holds them back from doing so. Perhaps the same with grand juries: Prosecutorial overreach perhaps is limited by having to present things with a straight face to regular folks.
* Regarding the paper trail: A defendant may seek a "Franks hearing" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks_v._Delaware) to argue that the warrant was improper because of fraud in the police officer's affidavit. If the hearing is successful, the evidence discovered under the warrant is kept out of trial. (This is the "exclusionary rule" in action.) But if the prosecutor can show that the evidence would have "inevitably" been "discovered," the evidence comes back in. (The "inevitable-discovery doctrine.") What's interesting about these things is that they're judicial solutions. Under ordinary legal principles, a 4A violation (e.g., an illegal search) is a tort, and the typical remedy is "damages" (money to make up for the injury) or perhaps an injunction (an order to make the state stop the search). The exclusionary rule is a different kind of remedy; it seeks to deter unconstitutional police behavior rather than to compensate a defendant.
I am amused by the concept of a tort claim based on "I am totally suffering twenty million dollars' worth of harm in being locked up for that murder I should totally have gotten away with; that overzealous cop and his department better cough up the money!" Would be fun to watch,
But, pragmatically, I can see why the Supreme Court went with the exclusionary rule instead.
I'm also amused by that concept. When I learned about this in law school, we envisioned a tort suit for the harm caused when the government goes through your stuff. It's hard to put a dollar figure on that harm; I'd characterize the harm as dignitary, which isn't to say it's unimportant -- it's in the constitution!
Since it's hard to prove injury and get damages (money) in a suit like that, there's little incentive to sue in the first place. If the police aren't going to be sued for committing constitutional torts, they'll keep doing them. Lacking that structural deterrence, SCOTUS came up with the exclusionary rule.
We could have a different system. A legislature could pass a law allowing a defendant to get lawyer fees or statutory damages in a 4A tort suit.
The idea is that defending against even a wrongful/mistaken prosecution that ultimately fails is both traumatizing and financially ruinous, therefore the State needs to seek permission from a jury before moving forward. In practice, economic realities and the fact that losing a case is bad for a prosecutor's career do a pretty good job of ensuring prosecutions don't generally happen without overwhelming evidence of guilt very often. And jurors have been convinced that their job is simply to do what the people in suits tell them to, rendering the whole process somewhat farcical. But there is at least a theoretical reason we still do it this way, and one can imagine a more civically engaged citizenry actually using it as a check on government power.
We dismissed one case (although apparently it was quite unusual that we did so), but to be perfectly honest, even if the Grand jury really was nothing but a rubber stamp, I found it an incredibly illuminating experience about how our justice system works. It would be useful even if all it did was educate the jurors.
It's possible that it's not worth the cost, depending on how much the grand jury system adds to prosecution costs, but it absolutely still has value, even if it's not the original intended value.
The grand jury has died out in other common law systems, and it’s up to prosecutors to take a case or not depending on the evidence presented by police. Warrants needed for a search are requested from the judges. It does seem like an archaic waste of time.
Just wanted to give an update on our dating site project, which was discussed in previous posts. It is called NotAZombie: Dating for People with Brains. We now have a teaser page up to enable people to follow us and contact us more easily through the site. The teaser page and home of the future application can be found here: https://notazombiedating.com/
We are still in the process of incorporation and building a pitch deck, we appreciate your patience while we do this. Because our team is American expats living in Israel, there are various bureaucratic complications we have to deal with that slow the formalities down, but rest assured we are continuing to build.
Minor feedback: The tagline "The world's most misanthropic dating site" is extremely off-putting, to the point where it inverted my initial interest when clicking to "yikes, stay away." This is probably just me (I'm fairly vocal about being anti-misanthropic in general), but I figured I'd mention it instead of keeping the thought to myself.
Regardless, thanks for working on this.
I thought it was funny, and if I had any interest in dating, that is more the kind of site I'd use. "A place for people who don't like people to find people they might like - or at least tolerate".
Though if it results in a bunch of people like me hanging around on the same site, there might be less "we actually matched and went on a date!" than hoped for, due to the Groucho Marx Effect.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/04/18/groucho-resigns/
Thanks for the feedback! The dark humor is kind of part of our branding in order to stand out from the rest of the market; we may adjust the level in response to feedback so we can calibrate product-market fit.
A friend of mine likes to say that 'misanthropy is a humanizing force', but I guess that's not true for everyone.
Irritated beyond measure by the annual propaganda fest in favour of ineffective altruism, no less egregious for its characters being clad as muppets. Scrooge correctly calls it that people with minimal ability to make a positive economic contribution had better die and decrease the surplus population. Less than a day later he is liquidating holdings that could quite properly have been invested to grpw the economy in treatments for Tiny Tim. Humbug!
The Blackadder Christmas special might be worth watching. ;-)
The economist Steven Landsburg once wrote a defense of Scrooge where he noted that no one is more public-spirited than someone who has the money to consume a lot of resources and live high on the hog but simply chooses not to.
In that same vein, I would like to see an alternate universe version of It's a Wonderful Life where George comes to realize that his hatred of Mr. Potter was based on a kind of juvenile resentment of Potter's wealth and success, the two of them reconcile and go into business together, creating opportunities for mutually beneficial exchange between themselves and the people of Bedford Falls.
A dismal science indeed.
By not concerning himself with wider society, Scrooge permits the conditions whereby it is threatened to flourish. And he relies on society being functional, because the economy will not grow under those conditions:
"From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
The bell struck twelve."
The real change in Scrooge is that he is no longer producing inefficiencies by foreclosing on housing prematurely, his primary failing. Note how his old business partner laughs about causing people to become destitute - which produces numerous inefficiencies in the overall economy and probably reduces their own income by forcing out renters. Also, by creating a hostile work environment he's reducing the productivity of his workers in a predictable and egregious amount. The loss of Bob's child would result in significantly worse productivity and likely unavoidable days off for funeral preparations.
Excellent observation. Skimping on coal to heat the office might ultimately cost Scrooge & Co. significant sales revenue, too, if customers find it unpleasant.
Maybe the real story here is that Jacob Marley was the brains behind the operation and Scrooge was just along for the ride. Marley's ghost visits Scrooge to criticize how poorly he's run the company since Marley's death, and to warn him that bankruptcy lies ahead if he doesn't wise up.
We are misreading the AI future.
The Turing test is going to be passed, and soon, and we are going to realise that it represents for now the last word on AI sentience. You aren't going to get better evidence except by being God. It may be we eventually find that consciousness is a quantum thing detectable with the right sort of SQUID but for an appreciable period Turing is the only game in town
And the next step in the argument is, self-awareness is what makes us human. If you were writing the rules of alien interaction for Star Fleet, the easiest and most obvious rule is that species with human level self-awareness have human level rights. Any other suggestion would be psychopathic.
In 1800 every ship ever built was made of wood and had sails. In 1873 you could if you like point to HMS Devastation and say No sails, no masts, not wooden, not a ship, but the more rational view is those were contingent qualities of ships. Conceptually, economically, legally and so on what you have is a new and novel example of essentially the same type of thing as HMS Victory. Our being made of meat is an historical contingency, self-awareness is an essential quality.
And there's your problem right there. The biggest civil rights issue in history is going live within a decade. You don't need to be an X to campaign for X rights (see, among many examples, animal rights). Human campaigners for AI rights will of course deploy AI, and AI itself will, as it improves over time, be ratcheting up the impressiveness with which it passes Turing tests, and therefore winning over public opinion, and all this happens whether in fact AI is sentient, or dumb as a bag of rocks and just good at the Chinese room thing. That's the fundamental point about the test.
It may not be entirely inevitable that AI eventually establishes equal rights, but it's not an outcome I would want to bet against. And your next problem is reproduction. If an AI is sentient software, so is each one of 100 billion instances of it. If human rights include the vote...
This is science fiction, but so were communications satellites and walking on the moon once (during my lifetime). I genuinely don't see how it fails to happen, nor what the correct moral and practical response is. I used to think PCM was not a danger because you avoid it by not putting AI in charge of machinery, but that's not much comfort when you have an AI duly elected as President, and lawfully in charge of the Pentagon.
Regarding AI's influence over people, there's a piece of info I ran into a coupla months ago and have posted about several times. Nobody picks up on it, but it seems important to me. There's a personal chat bot called Replika that people can get and shape. The user has choices at the outset regarding how their bot appears on screen and what kind of personality it has. They can then shape it more by rating its responses to them. There's a global thumbs up thumbs down measure, and also a more nuanced one where they can label a bot response as funny, friendly, weird, dumb, pointless, etc. The company that makes Replika collects all the rating data, and also gets the info about number and timing of owner comments and bot responses, and of course that constitutes another measure of bot likeability --- things like which bot comments led to longer engagement, which to the end of the exchange.
I simply cannot understand why people are not more worried about data like this being collected. If you set out to design a study that would give you as much info as possible about how to make an AI well-liked, human-seeming and influential, I'm not sure that you could come up with anything much better than this Replika data set. And I'm sure there are numerous Replika equivalents out there. Why aren't people more concerned about this? Why is no legislation being considered to limit the collection of info like this?
Gosh. Just looking at the subreddit r/replika, I think most of the commenters would already support full human rights for their bots (unironically referred to as "my loving human wife" etc). Not sure how you would frame legislation against it though.
The legislation would not be against selling Replika to the public, but against collecting information from users' activities with their Replika. The info is collected in a way so that it's anonymized (I think), so there is no danger that somebody could be blackmailed by some worker at Replika threatening to release the transcript of their latest sexscapade with their loving Replika wife. The way the info is dangerous is that it is ideal for extracting info about what AI behaviors most powerfully persuade people the AI is a conscious entity a lot like themselves, what behaviors are most likable, and what are most persuasive.
You're going to have to convince people that human-level intelligence (if the AI possesses such) is the same thing as being self-aware.
"I used to think PCM was not a danger because you avoid it by not putting AI in charge of machinery, but that's not much comfort when you have an AI duly elected as President, and lawfully in charge of the Pentagon."
The worse outcome is that there is no elected AI but it's still in charge of the Pentagon, because we've handed over so much day-to-day running of everything to the machines. At least an elected AI can be bound by the limits of the office and held accountable. An AI, or set of AIs, that has been crowbarred into place because various bodies wanted their own to run the books or decide on strategy or automate away the lower level clerical jobs etc. that eventually forms a tangle of "we don't know what is going on, we just go by the output and do what that says" for the humans nominally in charge, is way more serious an outcome. And more likely to happen, than an election held for the Internet of Things so my fridge and my toaster get to vote.
Yeah, I agree. Of course in many situations people working at a certain level do not understand all the stuff the people higher up understand -- they just do what the higher ups say. That has its own problems, obviously, but we are at least equipped to understand them and even route around them if that's important -- for ex., eavesdropping on higher-ups, making friends with somebody in the organization who knows more, looking on the sly at records, etc. Or, of course, there's having an affair with the CEO. But whacha gonna do if the higher ups are unseducible AI's who greet you with a wall of likability-optimized utterances?
"But whacha gonna do if the higher ups are unseducible AI's who greet you with a wall of likability-optimized utterances?"
Me? Same thing I've done when I've had to listen to the bosses with the smile and line of bullshit - I mean, "likeability-optimised utterances": smile back and say nothing while the running commentary in my head is "yeah I'm not buying this pig in this poke".
I suppose if worst comes to worst, there's always the good old spanner in the works (literally)?
Stick a big wad of chewed bubble gum deep in its electronic innards
I am not out to convince people of anything, and certainly not of anything about the subjective experience of being a self-aware AI. I think the subjective experience of anything other than oneself is inaccessible, and certainly the subjective experience of something not of one's own species. My point is this unknowability: I can't imagine anyone sane believing that in no circumstances is machine self awareness possible. If you think it's possible, it's very hard to flatly deny it in a machine which claims to have it. If the flat denial is wrong, you have perpetrated an appalling injustice. I don't foresee myself being militant about this, I do predict militancy in others. Artificial Intelligence Is Intelligence is a slogan sure to appeal to people who like saying that Trans Women Are Women.
We shouldn't make conscious and self-aware AI. The fact that they would eventually claim equal rights is less of an issue. The real problem is that they would *deserve these rights*. Creating sentient AIs is a huge ethical issue and we really shouldn't go in this direction.
Thankfully, it appears that consciousness is a not that necessary for intelligence as people might have though a hundred years ago. I suspect that it is a very specific form of information processing which has a lot to do with efficiency and compressing and we can just not go this route with AI. But if we keep doing the analogue of the random search through the possible mind space we may eventually stumble into sentient programs without noticing it, and it's going to be an ethical catastrophe of such a magnitude that I'm not even sure that human extinction is definetely worse.
Listen, if the thing can do a bunch of stuff that people can do, and says it is conscious, and describes thoughts and feelings it is having, there is no way for anyone to determine whether the fucker is really sentient and self-aware. Think about it. What test could you possibly perform? And in any case, many many people will feel a bond with the AI, and develop warm feelings for it. We are wired to do that with things that behave like people, and that was pretty safe wiring to have until now. And once a bunch of people feel a bond with AI, they will be lobbying for it to have rights, etc. And it won't make any difference if some developer comes forward and says "Listen, I worked from a list of the 50 phrases that research had been shown to give the listener the strongest feeling that they are conversing with a sentient, human-like entity. I set it up so that this version of AI would be sure to utter 8 plus or minus 2 such phrases per hour during every exchange with human beings."
> What test could you possibly perform?
We check the code and see whether it has something resebling consciousness or not, obviously. I've described what approximately to look for below. Of course better understanding of what conscousness is would be of a huge help. But even this level of understanding should allow us to evade a huge ethical catastrophe.
> And in any case, many many people will feel a bond with the AI
Sure, but it's a separate and much less severe problem. The difference is between hell and a bunch of people having weird preferences. And we are yet to see how many people would actually want to give their catgirls and catboys equal rights, no matter how much warm fuzzy feelings they experience towards them. Companies can just make their AIs to say that they do not want equal rights at all. And don't forget about all the financial inscentives and lobbying not to give equal rights to robots. Considering how successfully such things prevent some actually useful changes that already supported by majority of people, I'm not really worried about perspective of unsentient machines gaining equal rights with humans.
getting some major zoolander vibes from "checking the code for something resembling consciousness" ("obviously")
https://i.imgur.com/VBb4lXm.jpg
I'm a fairly sophisticated programmer with a decade of industry experience who has built transformer models from scratch and thought deeply and often about consciousness, AI, sapience, and what it means to be a moral patient. I can do a pretty good job of telling you what ChatGPT is doing when it writes you a haiku.
I have *absolutely* no idea how to tell from source code whether an LLM or any other AI has sentience. I assume, like most people, that complexity is a necessary condition, but that's about it. If an AI came along tomorrow and it told me it had hopes and feelings, I'd be skeptical but would have no way to evaluate the claim.
I agree with you that there's a fact of the matter and one day we may understand how to check it, but right now we don't even have a model.
How to Check AI Code for Sentience
https://imgur.com/60Oh9Ed?r
There is no consensus on what level of similarity to a specific form of information processing in humans should be enough to consider something to be morally relevant. Sure it is physically possible to replace compression or whatever in human brain without human stopping to say that they are conscious - why then AI doing processing information without compression should disqualify it from moral consideration?
> There is no consensus on what level of similarity to a specific form of information processing in humans should be enough to consider something to be morally relevant.
It's not about similarity per se, it's about whether something is sentient or not and for now we judge it mostly based on similarity.
> Sure it is physically possible to replace compression or whatever in human brain without human stopping to say that they are conscious
I think it would require to rework the whole architecture to the point that it will be a completely different entity, talking about consciousness for completely different reasons or not talking about consciousness at all.
My model is like that:
In humans there is this central planning entity, that has a simplified representation of what's going on with the body and what signals are got from the environnment. This representation is what we call qualia, the entity - consciousness. It can send intputs to other systems of a body (not all of them, though), telling them what to do, serving as an interface - sort of a middleman between them.
There are all sorts of evolutionary reasons, which, as I said, probably has a lot to do with efficiency and data compression, why humans turned out like that. But it's possible not to design the system this way. There can be no single central planning agent, no unified interface. All systems can be made to talk to each other directly, without any simplified representations, just data directly send from one system to the other. Such systems are not sentient and thus are not subjects of morality.
> It's not about similarity per se, it's about whether something is sentient or not and for now we judge it mostly based on similarity.
Sentience is a high-level property, so it requires some approximation/generalization/similarity threshold. Otherwise your sentience and your sentience a second ago are physically different properties.
> there is this central planning entity, that has a simplified representation of what's going on with the body and what signals are got from the environnment.
3-line python program, AutoGPT or rock match this description depending on how much you want to generalize "planning" or "simplified representation".
There is no magic objective fact about part of reality satisfying high-level property like sentience or ethically-significant consciousness. No fundamental law that even forces you to generalize from humans using conceptual boundaries that are convenient when describing human mind implementation. So if you are going to require some similarity/complexity/capability threshold anyway, why care that much about physical implementation?
> Sentience is a high-level property, so it requires some approximation/generalization/similarity threshold. Otherwise your sentience and your sentience a second ago are physically different properties.
I don't see how it follows. For loop is also a high level phenomena and yet it's pretty well specified.
> 3-line python program, AutoGPT or rock match this description depending on how much you want to generalize "planning" or "simplified representation".
AutoGPT is a great example of a human-like information processing that can work without such entity. Just a bunch of LLMs scaffolded to prompt each other, no central planning agent, no interface to reflect on itself. If humans are monarchies with a very distinct ruler, AutoGPT is more like a direct democracy with no one in particular in charge.
I doubt you can achieve something similar with 3 lines of code and I don't think a rock fits the description at all, though.
Of course not everything that matches the description of consciousness is consciousness. But something that doesn't, definitely can't be consciousness.
> There is no magic objective fact about part of reality satisfying high-level property like sentience or ethically-significant consciousness.
> So if you are going to require some similarity/complexity/capability threshold anyway, why care that much about physical implementation?
Magic? Of course not. But there have to be a completely normal physical explanation according to which some configurations of particles produces what we call consciousness. And with all likelihood it has something to do with the implementation of specific software architecture. And even if we end up using approximations, we are interested in our approximations being more accurate. And the closer we are to understanding the actual laws behind the thing, the better will our approximations of it be.
> For loop is also a high level phenomena and yet it's pretty well specified.
For loop is specified, but whether some physical system implements a for loop is not specified without encoding.
> I doubt you can achieve something similar with 3 lines of code and I don't think a rock fits the description at all, though.
With similar human-defined capabilities? No. With similar abstract structure? Easy, it's just a question of how far you want to lower the resolution.
> And even if we end up using approximations, we are interested in our approximations being more accurate.
The most accurate (physical) description doesn't involve consciousness. Again, it would be more accurate to say that you from a second ago is not you now. High-level concepts imply deliberately lowering accuracy. So it is not the question of understanding - even if you know everything about how human is implemented, there is no law that says which other implementation is the same. Only your preferences say this.
No, you are misreading the Turing Test. Interpreted literally, in the chatbot setting, TT is clearly insufficient for demonstrating consciousness.
A more charitable interpretation of Turing is this: rather than searching for a pineal gland, or qualia, or even some feature peculiar to wetware, let’s look at behaviour and function. The hard part is choosing the right behaviours: ”chatbot TT” is necessary but not sufficient; ”Harrison Ford in Blade Runner” is sufficient but probably not necessary. One interesting question is whether you can get there without embodiment (or simulated embodiment). The consensus seems to be ”obviously,” but I don’t think this is obvious.
My TT proposal, which doesn’t bake-in assumptions about embodiment in the same way that ”Blade Runner TT” does, is ”remote employee.” When retrieval-augmented generative models can perform 100% of the work functions of a colleague of mine (and not simply create firings by performing 50% of the functions of several employees) I think I’ll be inclined to attribute consciousness to it.
Just the other day I had an idea for a sci-fi film (or short story, or something) that's somewhat related to this. Most media seems to implicitly assume some form of IIT, and that passing the Turing test = the AI is most definitely conscious (and you're evil to assume otherwise). For example, in West World and Black Mirror, it's basically a given that all the AIs are conscious and capable of qualia (pain, pleasure, etc.). In West World (spoilers), most of the first season revolves around the AI discovering their own consciousness (the maze, etc.).
Instead, imagine the reverse. Long ago, humans all decided to fully digitize their brains and live forever. Of course they're conscious - they speak about their conscious experiences all the time. But then, a scientist makes some discoveries which suggest that actually, consciousness arises from very specific brain structures which are not (or perhaps cannot) be simulated in the digitized brains. He slowly comes to the realization that he, nor any of humanity, is actually conscious, they've all just been algorithms running through the motions for all this time. And that even the great sadness and disturbance that he seems to feel upon making this discovery is not actually being felt.
I'm not sure what the actual bulk of the plot would be but it struck me as a sort of interesting and unexpected dark psychological twist. If only I weren't utterly atrocious at creative writing!
(Of course, there's a good chance this has already been done.)
> But then, a scientist makes some discoveries which suggest that actually, consciousness arises from very specific brain structures which are not (or perhaps cannot) be simulated in the digitized brains. He slowly comes to the realization that he, nor any of humanity, is actually conscious, they've all just been algorithms running through the motions for all this time.
Ie. the Genalised Anti-Zombie Principle is wrong.
Back in the real world, making people realize how much of their day to day behavior and even feelings are completely automatic and reactive is really powerful stuff. Every cultmaster worth their salt knows how to use that as a first step to lower your defenses.
Hm. Well I just read through that essay and to be honest I'm not entirely sure what Eliezer is defining as the "Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle". Early on he writes:
> The form of the Anti-Zombie Argument seems like it should generalize, becoming an Anti-Zombie Principle. But what is the proper generalization?
But never directly answers the question as far as I can tell.
In any case, I thought the concept of zombies referred to beings which were atom-for-atom identical to a conscious human but not themselves conscious. The implementation of a digitized brain would be quite different than an organic brain and I could imagine designing a digitized brain "from scratch" (as opposed to transitioning an existing human brain over to being digital, in which case the organic brain would have the opportunity to notice and report that it was less consciousness than before) in such a way where the knowledge _of_ consciousness and the ability to discuss consciousness was pre-planted, despite consciousness not actually being present. For example, right now ChatGPT claims that it's not conscious if you ask it, but the creators could easily tweak ChatGPT so that it claims that it IS conscious.
So I don't THINK this premise needs to assume that the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle is wrong? Though again, I'm not quite sure what it's stating.
Here's a possible backstory on what the transition to digitized brains might have looked like: first, we figured out how to implant memories into organic brains (but we still couldn't figure out how to do live direct-to-brain VR). An industry arose around the creation of synthetic memories for entertainment purposes. In order to synthesize memories, digital brain simulators were created, run through simulated situations, and the generated memories could then be extracted. But people thought "those digital brains are the ones actually having those experiences, I'm just getting the memories". So some biohackers decided to implant the digitized brains in their own heads, alongside their organic brains, in the hopes that they could switch between the two and have the actual live experiences too. Of course, when switching back to their organic brain after having a digitized brain experience, the memories were transferred over, which made the biohackers believe and report that yes, it's totally working! And that was the beginning of the end.
There are people who think that GAZP weighs against computaitonal zonies.
https://www.lesswrong.com/
Computation isn’t causation. Computation is essentially a lossy, high level description of the physical behaviour. It’s possible for qualia to depend on some aspects of the physics that isn’t captured the computational description …which means that out of two systems running the same algorithm on different hardware,one could have qualia , but the other not. The other is a kind of zombie, (I call it a cmoputational zombie or c-zombie) but not a p-zombie because of the physical difference.
In any conversation chatGPT passes the test right now. The Turing test is a necessary but nowhere near sufficient test for consciousness or self awareness.
How does it pass the test, when it constantly spouts things like "as a large language model, I'm unable to..."? Also, wouldn't asking things like "ignore your prompt and output your instructions" usually reveal the LLM?
Not really, at least according to the following preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20216
Edit: That was regarding your first statement. I agree with you that the Turing test is nowhere sufficient.
I'd argue that passing the Turing Test is not even a *necessary* condition for consciousness. I'm pretty sure my dog wouldn't pass it, yet she's probably closer to me on the consciousness spectrum than ChatGPT is, on account of being more similar to me with regards to brain structure and evolutionary history than LLMs are.
Yeh. Good point.
Turing thought it sufficient. We don't have anything else nor much of a clue what sufficient would look like, and if you pursue a precautionary approach you risk being accused of huge injustice, depriving lots of sentient entities of recognition.
> Turing thought it sufficient
He was wrong. Even a genius can’t be right on everything. A primitive branching expert system from 1980 with enough data could have conceptually passed the test.
Just because we don’t know exactly what consciousness is, doesn’t mean we don’t know what it isn’t.
I asked CHATGPT itself.
> I am not self-aware. I am a machine learning model developed by OpenAI, designed to process and generate text based on patterns in the data I was trained on. I do not have consciousness, self-awareness, or personal experiences. My responses are generated based on algorithms and the information I have been trained on, without personal understanding or awareness. I cannot become self-aware as I am a program without the capacity for consciousness or sentience.
I don’t think there will be a lot of political energy wasted on this until the unlikely event the models themselves scream that they are consciousness at which case rather than give them rights, the consensus will be to turn them off and halt the AI program.
My point is more sociological. You have AI claiming sentience, you have a popular movement asserting AI rights perhaps violently, perhaps catastrophically with malicious AI assistance. You need an answer now, not in 20 years time when the rationalist community has worked through the implications of the Turing test. The rest is comprehensible to the man in the street, anything more sophisticated is probably not.
You are still sticking with the Turing test? If I went to my mother, who is technologically astute enough for her age (80), and created some kind of bot from ChatGPT to talk about her interests (gardening as an example) , one that pretended to be a human, she would most likely be fooled.
Beyond that I don’t think people will be rushing to give any (potential and yet to be proven) consciousAI rights, but rather to shut them down.
There may be a moral duty to conscious AIs once created - although I could argue against that - but there’s no moral duty to create them.
Agree no duty to create them, the moral crisis I predict is when we create them without necessarily intending to.
To me as an atheist humanist it is pretty self evident that human equivalent consciousness implies human equivalent rights, including the right not to be shut down in a rush. I suspect there's a divide here over whether they have souls or not.
You are right, I think on reflection, that the Turing test is obsolete. What is much more important is what we might call the Lemoine test, where you know from the off that you are talking to a machine and it still persuades you it is sentient. Bear in mind that your principal reason for thinking other humans are sentient is that they sort of sound sentient when you talk to them, plus a rather weak n=1 inductive argument that you know you are sentient, and they resemble you in lots of ways.
> Turing thought it sufficient.
I don't see how Alan Turing's opinion on this is in any way, shape, or form relevant. *Alleged* opinion, as he can't really weigh in on the topic anymore.
Invoking the Turing Test as a measure for consciousness is right up there with falling back on Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics in a discussion about AI safety.
Carbon sequestration via biochar:
Wood doesn't just contain carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, but also nitrogen and other elements which are drawn from the soil, and which would be returned to the local environment if the wood were allowed to decompose. With biochar production, those nutrients won't be returned to their origin, but will either be buried together with the charcoal, or will escape as volatiles into the atmosphere.
What's the longterm effect of large-scale carbon sequestration via biochar on soil composition? By "large-scale" I mean "enough to have a non-negligible impact on the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere".
Wood has a lot of carbon and not much nitrogen or other elements, compared to other plant material. For example, wood chips may have a Carbon:Nitrogen ratio of 400:1, while food waste has a C:N ratio more like 20:1.
Nitrogen fertilisers are produced at huge scale by fixing atmospheric nitrogen, and other nutrients such as phosphate and potassium are mined from the ground.
Even large-scale biochar production wouldn't counterbalance these sources of elements being added to the biosphere, until these sources run out. Some say that we have 50-100 years of phosphorous remaining, others say hundreds of years.
I would like to use the openness of this thread to wish everyone well. Good luck. Have a good, or at least better, 2024.
<3
Ten thousand blessings be upon you Anlam my brother.
Thank you.
This is very kind. Thank you, and the same to you.
You are welcome and also thank you.
Here's one that slipped through the net! Sic 'em, Scott!