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.
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?
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.
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
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'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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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 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.
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'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 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.
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?
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 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.
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!
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?
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.
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?
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?)
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!!
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?
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.
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 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])
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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".
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Are there any EA-related grant programs other than ACX grants that are interested in mental health work?
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
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
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'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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1734216826026934359
Israeli snipers shot displaced Palestinian children in the @UNRWA
school in Jabalya Refugee Camp.
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.)
"A popstar is always on time; she arrives precisely when she means to" said Taylor, wizenly.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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!
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??
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.
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'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 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.
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?
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 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.
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 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?
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
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?
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?)
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!!
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?
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.*
********
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 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])
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
I would like to use the openness of this thread to wish everyone well. Good luck. Have a good, or at least better, 2024.