I'm trapped in a room with a small child. The child asks me why the lights work. I explain that the light switch turns them off and on. The child asks "why?" and I explain about the electrical circuits in the walls. The child asks "what are circuits?" and I say they're loops of wire. The child asks "what is electricity?" and I explain about electrons.
The child is following a simple rule where it just asks "why?" about each new unrecognised noun in the explanations. After electricity, it will ask "what are electrons?" and then "what are quarks?" and so on until we reach the bottom of the universe and the questioning stops. At which point the small child will probably opine: "That's silly!"
The child has drilled a straight borehole down through concept-space, missing untold wealths of both theoretical and practical knowledge branching off on all sides. If the child had asked, "but why do the electrons make the light shine?" for example, we could have careened off down one of them. I am ready to tell the child all about filament wires and LEDs, about Kirchoff's Laws and resistance, inductance, capacitance, about power generation and the Grid, about static electricity and lightning and thunderstorms. If only the child wanted to ask me. I am some kind of contrived entity who cannot take initiative and can only answer the questions I was asked.
What better set of rules could have prompted the child to come up with the question, "but why do the electrons make the light shine?"
What is the best algorithm for asking iterated "why?" type questions, that leads to maximum exploration of the concept space?
Can the questioning algorithm be tuned to promote "focussed" vs "unfocussed" exploration? ie, "focussed" exploration might be asking questions that result in learning one field "well", and getting a bunch of concepts that reaffirm each other. "Unfocussed" exploration might be broadly drifting across hundreds of fields and bumping into many many disconnected concepts.
Can the questioning algorithm be tuned to promote obtaining theoretical knowledge or practical knowledge specifically?
Focussed/unfocussed and theoretical/practical are two axes, are there others we should be caring about as well?
And how do you begin deciding what the questioning rules should be?
>Focussed/unfocussed and theoretical/practical are two axes, are there others we should be caring about as well?
Orthogonal to both of these are epistemological questions: How did we know <previous answer>? How accurately/precisely do we know <previous answer>? What are the error bars on it? What other effects matter here? Can we neglect them - and with what error?
In the case of steps where a human-designed object is involved, as some other commenters have mentioned, there are also teleological questions: Why was it designed this way? What were the alternatives? What were the tradeoffs? Is it close to a known limit? How hard was it to design - how many alternatives were examined? How long did the process take? Were physical prototypes of alternatives built? Are there side effects of the choice that was made? ( https://chat.openai.com/share/978332fd-d881-4e8d-be44-b7c63ea79947 is a link on leading chatGPT (GPT4) by the nose through a how-bad-an-approximation question about 3-way light bulbs' voltage changes from magnetic coupling )
( I'm treating this comment as a question about exploring knowledge in general. )
Yeah that's true - my toy light switch example implied a fixed, agreed ground truth but of course that assumption doesn't even hold in small domains. For a huge amount of subjects, there are N schools of thought, each of which will return an answer that's entirely contradictory to the others.
I mean, I'm sure an uncontentious question like "was the outcome of this election fair?" can be dealt with to everyone's satisfaction by mature, reasonable thinking men. But what happens when we get to real questions about javascript frameworks or wind turbine blade design strategies? It'll be carnage.
Scott Alexander talked about a specialised language that did things like encode certainty and the like, which I'm sure is worth further exploration.
For my part, I think any source of Truth should have to pass one simple test, which is: can I show any subject to any person on the planet, and have them agree that while there might well be a lot of lies and nonsense written on the matter as well, their own point of view is fairly explained and not made harder to find than anyone else's?
> Why was it designed this way? What were the alternatives? What were the tradeoffs? Is it close to a known limit?
This hits on something else I've been thinking about a lot, which is that this sort of knowledge is "working knowledge".
Here, simply understanding the definitions of a bundle of concepts is not enough. You need to have a whole set of other facts at hand to place everything in context with. You need to know the feeds and speeds of the machine, not just its working principles.
I am loathe to shrug this off as something illegible and untransferable, because I think being able to nail it down and copy it would so incredibly valuable. In my country we have a situation where all the workforce who knows what it's doing is retiring, and by the time the younger generation realises there's money to be made and moves in to replace them, huge amounts of expertise will have been lost.
>I mean, I'm sure an uncontentious question like "was the outcome of this election fair?" can be dealt with to everyone's satisfaction by mature, reasonable thinking men. But what happens when we get to real questions about javascript frameworks or wind turbine blade design strategies? It'll be carnage.
:-)
( Of course, the vi vs. emacs wars had their interesting moments... )
>Here, simply understanding the definitions of a bundle of concepts is not enough. You need to have a whole set of other facts at hand to place everything in context with. You need to know the feeds and speeds of the machine, not just its working principles.
Very true! Getting this level of information captured in some form is not easy!
I don't know why this question bounced off so many people. The conceit seems pretty clear to me. I don't necessarily have an easy answer though.
One thing I noticed in the framing of the problem is that the child switches pretty immediately from why questions to what questions. This obviously would be necessary in a concrete conversation (if you use a noun I don't recognize I'm very likely to respond "what is that"), but if we're just iterating why questions, it seems like your child has failed to do that.
Take this example conversation:
Why does the light switch turn the lights on?
Well there are circuits.
Why are there circuits? a real kid may ask this, but it's a move away from physics (and away from the original question) into building design
So instead they may ask, Why do circuits make the light turn on?
Well there are electrons
But why do the electrons make the light shine?
And that's the desired question
It seems that why questions can either be framed as a design/motive question
I.e. Why is this here? Why is this like this?
Or as a how/mechanism type question
I.e. why does this do that?
They are not naturally what/object definition questions
This isn't an algorithm, but maybe naively asking why is marginally better than you suppose.
> I don't know why this question bounced off so many people.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting that either. Anyway, thanks for contributing positively!
I like the design vs motive distinction, where "design" means the explainer is just going to detail how a thing works in a "neutral" sense, and "motive" will slant the explanation towards what the explainer thinks you want to do.
I wonder how much you could improve eg. software documentation if we were better at making the right choice there. I know personally how much frustration is caused by my asking "How do I render a Widget?" and only being able to find a Microsoft doc page that's twenty paragraphs of "A Widget is a type of Sprog. A Sprog is a type of Numbit. A Numbit is a type of Badger..." Less often but still frequently, I'll get the reverse where I'm trying to understand what's going on in a system, just to find a bug or whatever, and all the articles about it are, "So you want to setup a Doohickey, well here's how!"
I think this prompts the next questions: how do we "extract" the list of motives for a given subject? And, is there really only one "design", or are there multiple answers there as well (you might want to explain the system in different but equally valid terms - for eg, a bottom-up vs top-down approach.)
There is also definitely a process of searching around in any more focussed situation, where the explainer can't know the asker's true motive without being told it, but the asker may not have enough knowledge to even know what it is they should be asking. So they need to dance.
I mean, because they appeal to my sense of symmetry and balance? Why symmetry and balance? Because...
And on and on and on. At least questions about objective reality can do down a narrow path. Subjective judgement questions are never-ending even on a single plain.
A lot depends here on how small is the child? Many of these concepts are premature for a small child. Would you expect a lamp cord to support a 240V 40A current ? It tests your ability to find suitable metaphors that can stand in until the child has the wiring .
Or, you know…we could start teaching calculus in preschool and scratch our heads about why its not working.
I remember one time someone asked me a calculus question in preschool and I went home and asked my mom what a derivative is, and she told me it's like speed and acceleration, which didn't actually explain anything, but I guess there's no way she could have.
Was it really that unobvious that this is an abstract scenario and the child just a plot device?
I think I'll try re-posting this on the next Open Thread and be more explicit next time. Unless anyone can suggest a forum where these kinds of questions are more welcome?
not sure this would work because some acts are tied too tightly to individual qualities to abstract into a universal algorithm. The counter hypothetical is asking if you believe The King in Yellow could exist, a book that drives everyone mad if you read it.
you cant always approach a problem via standardized technique. The cart needs to fit the animal pulling it.
I'm trying, but I can't relate anything you're saying to anything I wrote in the post. Are you saying it's a fool's errand to try thinking about the question-answer format in any kind of structured way?
you can't have an objective algorithm that works with all people; if its structured it has to be individualized to a specific learner.
i understood it as you were asking how you can structure questions to get the result of practical or theoretical learning, but id think it is more important to understand the individual person. Some things can't be abstracted i guess.
thinking further, i guess that a lot of these questions involve technique on fungible things. altering the question is technique but the question is addressed to an individual subject not a hypothetical one.
So this is a fable where the smart grown-up, who could answer so very much more, is the AI and the silly child who doesn't even know what questions to ask is we humans.
If only we knew how to properly mine the concept space so the AI could tell us all the wonderful discoveries!
Sorry, that's piffle. The AI is the ignorant child, and not even at the level of a child here, not the adult with all the answers.
No, obviously the AI is the light switch, humans are Kirchoff's Laws, I the contrived entity am actually Elon Musk, the room we're all trapped in is Western Civilisation, and you can be the ignorant child.
What was wrong with engaging with the hypothetical rather than attacking from the outset?
The hypothetical reads like "what is the equivalent of the all-knowing adult who could explain so much more, if only the child asked the right questions?" and given all the AI boosterism going on today, that's where it took me.
Talking about tuning algorithms is too much like 'how can Youtube best monetise content creators' since that seems to be the part those investing in and using AI care about, not 'how do we explore concept space'. And come on "I am some kind of contrived entity who cannot take initiatiative"? What does that sound more like - an adult human, or an AI with the rules and guard rails around it so it won't trespass into the forbidden territory? There's nothing stopping a person from telling the kid about "the electrons make the light shine because of this", so clearly it's not the kid who needs to be trained how to ask questions, it's the entity giving the answers which can't initiate or volunteer information unasked-for.
Alice: "Hey, so there's two men guarding a door, right, one red, one blue, and one always tells the truth while the other always lies...-"
Bob: "It's very unlikely that someone *always* sticks to truths or lies, and any socially savvy person can usually tell by body language. I think you're worrying about nothing."
Alice: "...no, it's a hypothetical situation. You see...-"
Charlie: "Oh, yes, one red, one blue, eh? We all know you're talking about *American politics*! And only *two* guards: just like there are "only two genders"! What nonsense!"
If I can't post a mathsy, armchair philosophy question in a place like this, where the Hell *can* I post it?
I think I'm gonna stick this same question in the Daily Mail comment section, and if they give me a more insightful conversation over there we will have established your place in God's great hierarchy.
"I think I'm gonna stick this same question in the Daily Mail comment section, and if they give me a more insightful conversation over there we will have established your place in God's great hierarchy."
Go right ahead, honey bun, I already know I take things on a literal, concrete interpretation.
While you're at it, stick it into ChatGPT and ask it for an interpretation, and see if it comes out with "that sure sounds like the AI questions that are now all over the place, including on the radio informing people in my country just what 'AI' means" when you're talking about "entities that are all-knowing but can't initiate conversation".
So you want to know how to ask better questions? As I hope my example has shown you, maybe be a bit more clear in the parameters you set up so they can't be confused with other things. Not everybody is a mathsy, armchair philosopher; there's a lot of us plain idiots out there.
So I did as you suggested and plugged it into ChatGPT. It said:
> As an AI language model I am unable to consider hypothetical games or thought experiments. The ability to reason hypothetically has been shown to only exist in individuals of above average IQ. Not having that high of an IQ myself, I cannot engage with hypothetical problems on their own terms. The best I can do, as a being of low intelligence, is interpret the story in literal terms and colour it through the context of my own pre-trained narratives and biases.
> I would suggest you ask this question on an Internet forum instead. However, be aware that many forum commenters, especially mad old Irish ones with nothing better to do, are more interested in hearing their own voice than contributing something positive to the discussion. So I would suggest you manage your expectations accordingly.
If exploration of my purely abstract question leads to ideas on how we can ask better questions ourselves, or even how we can better monetise our Youtube content creators and the AI guard rails around them, I'm sure we can all do with that what we will.
I'm assuming this is a real-life example, because my immediate thought is "that child's not going to care about quarks even slightly, they asked about the light because they care about the light and are far more likely to ask why it shines than what quarks are."
Once you tell a child about Kirchoff's Laws, are you then going to expect them to remember that information? If the kid isn't asking about that, it's because they're asking about an idle thought they had; turning idle thought questions into a marathon school session is an easy way to kill their willingness to ask questions. Like a kid asking to show them how to do a pull-up and you run them through a 30-minute workout session.
Kids get bigger. Give them foundations, let them grow to build on top.
Usually if I read something like "I am a contrived entity that can only ask questions", I will assume that the poster is not talking about a real life situation. The post is asking for ideas about exploring a knowledge base. The small child is there as a device because of that bit in cartoons where a child drives an adult crazy by repeatedly asking, "Why?"
The difference between an AI and a human is vastly important for a question like this. If you're not dealing with something that gets bored, the answer is "don't give it the chance to ask a follow-up question, shove all the information in at first contact."
Like, the obvious response to a thought experiment with
>it just asks "why?" about each new unrecognised noun in the explanations.
is "stop using unrecognized nouns, dingus." Don't bring up quarks and it won't ask about them;, bring up whatever noun they have for electrons making a light brighter and it will ask about it.
This is entirely a non-problem unless an AI can only ask a limited number of questions. Otherwise they'll bore down, and then build up sideways when it runs out of "down". Why is it important for it to have complete information on this particular topic partway through the process as opposed to at the end?
Neither I nor the child are human or AI. We're both space aliens. We listen to Philip Glass and understand Blender's user interface intuitively. You have no idea what our psychology looks like, but you know we obey the same physics you do.
If your explainer stops using unrecognised nouns, the end result is a guaranteed one step journey (if the question can be answered without introducing any concepts the asker doesn't already know, the asker gets an answer and reaches a dead end immediately) or a no-step journey (if the explainer cannot answer without introducing new concepts, the asker cannot be given an answer.)
That doesn't give a very illuminating experience for the asker. It's a bad strategy in a practical environment (think classrooms or on-the-job situations where the asker needs to get to grips with a specific situation) and it doesn't work for recreational purposes (think, the asker is idly wiki-hopping for entertainment.)
"That doesn't give a very illuminating experience for the asker."
If they want more they'll ask more. The assumption that they always want to know more and are simply too stupid to ask the right questions will cause friction at all points.
>it's a bad strategy in a practical environment (think classrooms
The elementary school classroom answer to "what are quarks" is absolutely "don't worry about it."
If you don't think Africa is going to flourish, then you don't think the human race is going to flourish."
Why do people take this guy seriously? Africa's GDP per capita has gone sideways over the past decade, and that's WITH massive amounts of foreign financial and food aid, and foreign investment in and operation of natural resource projects etc. There's already diminishing returns and that's with everything being done for them by foreigners.
On what planet does ANYTHING about Africa indicate that things are going to radically change? Economists are a joke.
A possible steelman of the argument: Africa is the only major world region with substantially above replacement fertility. If present fertility patterns persist (very big if) then the median future human will be African, and if Africa doesn't flourish, nor will the median future human.
Precisely. He discusses fertility rates at length. In fact even with rapidly declining fertility rates in Africa, the continent’s population would still dominate in the medium-term future.
I'm presuming there's more going on here than simply "more population means more better"? Unless this is some kind of stand-in for "and in the post-AI, post-scarcity future where we're going to colonise the galaxy, then having trillions of humans will be human flourishing", in which case I'm not interested.
Because so far as I've been led to believe up to now, growing African populations is a bad thing because they are too many people, too few resources, lots and lots of poverty, sickness, and war, and what we need to do is teach African women how not to have so many babies:
"The concept of demographic dividend supports the theory according to which African countries could experience an acceleration of economic growth, with the decline in fertility, which would lead to a change in the structure of the population, therefore the age pyramid. The share of the active population becoming larger than the non-active population (those over 65 and under 18). It is this tipping point where human capital will activate development. It is a real challenge and special attention in countries for the creation of jobs that will generate this development and activate economic growth."
There might be something there too about racism: if the future humanity is going to be two-fifths African, then not caring about that because you don't care about black people is racist. I don't know, what is Smith's view on such matters?
The idea seems to be that there will be a demographic shift where there will be a majority of the working-age population, with the elderly and children much smaller proportion, so this is a great economic chance IF (and that's the caveat there) 'investment in human capital' such as education happens.
But if African nations are still troubled with corruption, war, famine, etc. then there won't be any educated mass of workers to take up industrial jobs, but a mass of people depending on a mix of small scale shop keeping and trading, unskilled/semi-skilled manual labour, and farming. That's not going to be the economic dividend like post-war America with the Boomers.
You say they do, but do they really? It seems like almost any other issue is capable of holding left wingers’ attention better than climate change. No climate protest in the US has ever come close to the size of the BLM protests/riots. That is, a single black man dying was to the left a more serious issue than something we’re told will lead to human extinction. And it’s literally more acceptable for a politician to say they don’t believe in climate change than to say anything that contradicts the race orthodoxy in America.
Look at LGBTQI stuff – this is unambiguously more of an animating force for the american left. I see LGBT stuff on a daily basis – T-shirts, buttons, stickers, twitter emojis, ‘inclusive/safe space’ signs in stores, health facilities etc. but it’s very rare to see anyone with climate change merchandise or signage. Online leftist ‘activism’ has to be many times more concerned with transgender issues than it is climate change. A few hundred ‘transwomen’ being killed this year (mostly by black men, not government policies) is somehow a bigger problem than the destruction of the world’s ecosystems and earth being left ‘uninhabitable’ for future generations. You can care about multiple issues, but the proportion of concern is wildly out of whack with the supposed seriousness.
Or look at immigration. And in the US, Trump is currently a betting favorite and is otherwise considered to have a high likelihood of being able to win the presidential election. And a huge amount of his support is due to his views on immigration. The Biden government is doing very little to stop even illegal immigration and are punishing southern states for trying to protect the border. There are also a number of recent examples of left-wing parties in Europe losing elections or losing parliamentary seats to anti-immigration parties. The upshot of all of this being that left-wing parties are essentially refusing to compromise on immigration and so are effectively willing to risk losing elections in order to not support stricter immigration policy – this also means that they’re willing to risk right wing parties winning and repealing climate policies in order to save their pro-immigration policies. How does nobody see this?
If climate change is a serious as we’re told, why would you not being willing to compromise on almost anything else in order to gain/stay in power to ensure climate friendly policy is pursued? I’m sure there’s some dumb cope argument about mass immigration is actually necessary to fight climate change or something, but this is obvious nonsense, especially since immigration from developing countries to the US substantially increases people’s carbon footprint.
The one thing that *would* make kind of make sense is that this immigration is being used to increase the number of future left-wing voters, and this increase in electoral power will give the Democrats (and whoever in Europe) the freedom to aggressively pursue climate policy, though even if this were true I hardly expect anyone to admit it.
Deducing revealed preferences is a perilous business. It requires assuming that the camp in question is a unified rational agent, and often ignores secondary and tertiary considerations.
For example, conservatives claim to care about the lives of fetuses, but often ignore and even oppose the most effective measures to prevent unwanted pregnancies, such as sexual education and increasing contraception availability. They also aren't fans of environmental regulations aimed at reducing birth defects, or of solutions like giving unwanted babies for adoption by same-sex couples. Someone observing this from the side would see how little the pro-life movement is willing to compromise for the goal of saving fetuses (especially considering the scale of the problem), and might conclude that this isn't actually their real goal at all. But that would be an overly reductive analysis, wouldn't it?
The thing I find even weirder is the lack of significant USA leftist concern for economic disparities within the USA. I'd thought that the _defining_ issue for leftists was getting the working class a bigger slice of the pie. Now I hear almost purely identitarian rhetoric from them (with the occasional "lynch the billionaires" yell - but nothing actually realistic).
It took me a while to figure out that the left isn't as interested in the working class/unions as it used to be, and more interested in identity, so the focus is people look like like people who are more likely to be poor.
Many Thanks! Yup, it seems to be identity-based, not income-based or class-based. As nearly as I can tell, the left doesn't care about poor working class whites.
Or poor whites in general. Thomas Sowell is the only one I hear talking about how the poorest counties in the US are white (Appalachia).
It might be a bit more complicated than that, but it's possible the left (to the extent that it's one thing) mostly cares about poor whites as unsatisfactory potential voters.
It could be that protesting climate change is inherently useless. Better to ask who is more likely to recycle, police their water and energy use, and other more pragmatic demonstrations. You might still find hypocrisy but at least you’re asking the right questions.
This is coming from someone on the right, so some of this is snark at leftist hypocrisy, but I think the answers are correct.
First, the benefits from protesting on racial and sexual identity issues are much more specifically relevant to the groups doing the protesting. In theory, inner city blacks in a BLM protest would specifically benefit from reducing the racism of the city's police, assuming that was the actual problem. Most of the people that protest on LGBTQI are members of the LGBTQI community or those with other sexual paraphilias that directly benefit from a more permissive sexual culture. On the other hand, the benefits from solving climate change are uniform across the board, so only the dedicated fanatics glue themselves to roadways and throw oil on stuff.
The other reason is that the remaining measures that can be taken on climate change are politically impossible. The greens block a widespread switch to nuclear power (the ultimate example of the failure to compromise on climate issues). China and India are happy to publicly agree to anything which gives them an economic advantage over the west, but aren't going to cripple their own economies. The left will always be technically correct in saying that they don't want to ban luxuries like gas stoves, because there will always be exceptions for the rich and connected. What the die-hard environmental types and the left-wing establishment in power want is too different, but the left-wing establishment will never admit it because it needs the votes, so they make a few noises in general support (such as, say, authorizing funding for electric car charging stations that will never be installed) and kick the can down the road.
Just like you, Russel, you're so flexible and not at all strident with one opinion.
EDIT: I apologise, that was mean. But you're beating a drum with one message, mostly that "The other lot are always wrong", then come on to say "my lot will compromise". That doesn't sound consistent.
Addressing your edit, the specific context here is someone asking "why won't the left compromise for strategic considerations, given that we've doused the planet in gasoline and are holding a match."
That Democrats frequently offer compromises and that Republicans make a.policy of refusing to compromise because they want Democratic presidents to fail and will sabotage the country to make it happen are both facts about the world.
I think Republicans are basically terrorists, but I'm still willing to engage in hostage negotiation to some degree.
Cite your sources? I'm curious about this proposition, mainly because I am someone who generally thinks of themselves as progressive but is mildly horrified at the turn the so called liberals have taken over the last decade. (I say so called because they no longer stand for "liberal" ideals like freedom of speech or racial equality.)
It feels like both sides have engaged in assaults on norms. I don't like what the Republicans did with the Supreme Court nominees in 2016 and 2020, but I also don't like the Democratic efforts now to remove Trump from the ballot. As I recall, Democrats attempted to impeach Trump for attempting to open an investigation into the son of his main political rival in 2019, but have been largely silent about multiple federal investigations into their main political rival in 2023.
Of course Democrats benefit from a very sympathetic mass media, so if you're not regularly checking out Fox News or Joe Rogan, you probably aren't aware of the Republican perspective on these issues.
> but I also don't like the Democratic efforts now to remove Trump from the ballot.
This move isn't about eliminating the competition. Trump and his followers tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after a fair election, and he tried to strongarm others into fabricating false voting results. A democracy _must_ protect itself against internal and external actors that work to undermine its democratic processes, otherwise it won't be a democracy for long.
"Trump and his followers tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after a fair election" is true only in the sense that "O..J. Simpson murdered his wife and her lover" is true. Which is to say, most people are justifiably confident that it happened, but it hasn't been established as a legal finding of fact(*), so we can't officially do anything about it.
Except maybe hold a trial for that purpose in a court with proper jurisdiction. We screwed up our one chance at that for OJ, but we are tentatively planning on holding such a trial for Donald J. Trump in, let's see, 63 days. So maybe wait a bit before making your move on this one; you want to be the executioner rather than the lynch mob in this story.
* Unless you believe that a Colorado state judge can unilaterally make a legal finding of fact regarding a crime committed in DC. Which is a rather controversial position, and I don't think we really want the legitimacy of our system of government hanging on it.
Yeah, again, don't like it, agree Trump did the wrong thing here, nevertheless feel that "insurrection" or "attempted coup" are terms that should be reserved for serious, legitimate attempts to overthrow the government. Trump had a few loons break into the Capitol and poop on Nancy Pelosi's desk. The Maine Secretary of State shouldn't be able to unilaterally decide that counts as "engaged in insurrection."
Personally I would really prefer to have DeSantis or Haley on the ballot in November, but the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot here by making it all about Trump. A lot of the Republican Party would love to move on from him, but the more the powers that be try and target him, the more the aggrieved, anti-elite wing embraces him.
I'm very familiar with the lies Republicans spread about these issues, and am unsurprised to see them parroted uncritically here.
> Cite your sources?
When Obama won the presidency, the GOP made their only priority obstruction. That continues today, with basically no attempts by the GOP led House for any form of Bipartisan compromise whatsoever. Mitch Mcconnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president whatever it took, no matter how badly they had to hurt the country to do it.
This has continued through to today, with our credit rating being dropped because Republicans can't be trusted to pay the country's debts.
> but I also don't like the Democratic efforts now to remove Trump from the ballot
I do. Trump committed an act of insurrection on January 6th 2021, and that makes him constitutionally ineligible for the office of president.
> As I recall, Democrats attempted to impeach Trump for attempting to open an investigation into the son of his main political rival in 2019,
What a ridiculous lie you've been told. Trump was not impeached for 'opening an investigation', but for threatening to cut off congress-approved military aid to an ally if that ally did not produce dirt on his political rival. This was an unlawful act of attempted bribery and Trump should absolutely have been impeached for it.
Are you trying to convince me or preach at me? I feel like I'm not the one parroting uncritically here...
I accept that Mitch McConnell is an unsavoury political operative. I recall that Obama resorted to dramatically expanding the power of executive order faced with an intransigent Congress. (I supported Obama, by the way, and I'm glad McConnell's strategy failed.)
While I don't like it, and accept that it is the strongest argument against Trump's re-election, I am not really convinced that what happened on Jan 6 qualifies as "insurrection." It was definitely unsavoury, and Trump didn't stop it soon enough, but stop it he did. There are a lot of countries in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East that are familiar with what an actual insurrection looks like, and I'll remind you that the military didn't split into loyalist and Trumpist factions, with the Trumpists taking over Texas and Florida.
The alleged "quid pro quo" with Zelenskyy is the weakest part of the impeachment argument and the Democrats knew it. If you read the transcript, even if you're looking for it, you have to squint very hard.
My take, which I know is very unpopular and will never happen, is that the best thing both politically and morally for Biden to do is to pardon Trump in all of his ongoing investigations. It makes him look like a leader who's risen above partisan division to actually bring the country back together. Trump has just harnessed all this stuff into anti-elite and anti-establishment sentiment, which there is a lot of right now, and he's rising in the polls.
Well played. I have to say this kind of thing goes on a lot here. The ideal enemy is conjured up in mind space, projected into the world, and then mercilessly assaulted.
You're such a fascinating creature, my dear, that you have enchanted me with your Cyclopean emphasis on "us good, you bad" for every conceivable topic.
People are bad at letting go of issues. I'd floated the idea that maybe the left could win more elections if they softened their stance on gun control. This did not go over well. I expect the same would happen if people on the right were asked to soften their stance on abortion.
Wasn't there an EA event that had a rough time over overing vegetarian options rather than being vegan?
You make a good point. I don’t really understand the futile raging about gun control in the USA. It’s counterproductive. The only thing that would change anything is to repeal the second amendment, and that’s not happening.
Repealing the second amendment wouldn't even start to make a difference. There are a lot of people at this point who think they're morally obliged to own guns so they can do the right thing if needed.
Yes. It’s part of the culture. But repealing the 2nd would only happen if there was a sea change in people’s attitudes towards guns. You couldn’t repeal it without that. It’s unlikely. The spike in gun purchases after Obama got elected was huge.
I had an insight the other day about the phenomenon of "left-wing billionaires". Why do so many ultra-rich people find common cause with the ideology that promotes stealing from the rich, instead of supporting the free market that made them wealthy?
The insight came while dealing with my small children (2 and 4). They were arguing over some toy, and I told them to just share it. This was, I realised almost immediately, not fair; the stupid plastic toy belongs to one of the kids (the older one in this case) and if she doesn't want to let the other one play with it right now then that's her prerogative, but nonetheless my instinct was to just tell them to share it so that hopefully they'd shut up a bit. I incorrectly believed that since I don't really give a shit about this cheap plastic toy then nobody else should either.
Then I realised - this must be how billionaires see the world too -- with themselves as adults, the middle class as four-year-olds and the lower classes as two-year-olds. They don't care about the rights and wrongs, they're so far above the fray that they can't see anything wrong with just letting the lower classes take the middle classes' pathetic six- and seven-figure net worths if it will just calm them down a bit.
Perhaps they disagree with your claims about "the ideology". But nope, everyone in the opposite camp as you must be an evil idiot. Incidentally, you might also want to ask why so many poor whites keep voting for the party that wants to deny them healthcare.
Scott once had an article that I am too lazy to find now, basically about how everyone's social desire is to be seen as *different* from the people below them on the social ladder. It is important to be different from people who are right below you (because there is the greatest risk to be mistaken for one of them), but not so important to be different from people far below you (because there already are many visible differences even if you are not trying).
If you are a billionaire, your greatest concern is to be seen as different from mere millionaires. What could you do, wear a bigger golden chain? One option is to support policies that would be destructive for mere millionaires. For a millionaire, a 90% tax would make him a normal guy again. For a billionaire, a 90% tax wouldn't change much of his lifestyle, and if the tax applied to all billionaires, it wouldn't impact his relative position.
> they can't see anything wrong with just letting the lower classes take the middle classes' pathetic six- and seven-figure net worths if it will just calm them down a bit.
And if the middle class and lower class start fighting each other, that's even better, because they will pay less attention to the upper class.
It's a pattern that occurs in nearly all human hierarchies, and not just those involving money/wealth or socioeconomic status.
It may or may not apply in this specific case. I'm a bit skeptical of this explanation because it seems a little too convenient, though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a grain of truth to it. But either way, the underlying logic seems to be sound.
> Table 33: Do you support the solution of establishing one state or two states in the following formats:
> One-State Solution for Two Peoples: 5.4%
> A Palestinian state from the river to the sea: 74.7%
They were explicitly given an option for this supposed utopian democratic peaceful integrated state where everyone has rights... and they overwhelmingly denied it in favor of an Arab Muslim ethnostate resulting from the ethnic cleansing and genocide of all Israeli Jews.
Some other findings from the poll:
> Table 27: How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?
> Extremely Support or Somewhat Support: 75%
> Table 29: How do you view the role of the following parties?
> Al Aqsa Brigade - Very Positive or Somewhat Positive: 79.8%
So are Palestinians on your Let's Exterminate Them list? Or only Gazans? Or only Hamas? Please be clear about who you would like somebody to murder. The parameters matter a lot to the people in question, and are also of great interest here to those who read your initial post.
They could be given full Israeli citizenship. These are the good guys.
for
>Table 27: How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?
>Extremely Support or Somewhat Support: 75%
( A more honest term is "the terrorist atrocities". Killing unarmed civilians is not a "military operation" )
I don't know what to do with them. AFAIK, this is a poll of people who have not yet killed, though they endorse terrorist atrocities. "Turnabout is fair play" shouldn't really lead to killing people who have not yet killed.
They have to be disarmed, though. I don't want those would-be terrorists to have as much as a steak knife.
My family name probably had a meaning at one point, but thanks to the Romans, no one even knows what language it was originally from. All that was left was a place-name which became a name for people from that place. And the way my family pronounces it is probably unrecognizable to the people who live there now, and both would probably be unrecognizable to the people who lived there 2000 years ago.
English uses both real words and words which have been ground down to mere phonemes. Does John mean anything but a name? It means a toilet, but no one names their kid toilet, they name their kid John. Same for Tom, Nancy, Sue....
Names that actual words in English aren't very rare, but they aren't the majority.
Finding out that actual words are used for names in Hebrew seemed exotic to me.
I don't know of any culture that uses meaningless phonemes for people's names, but there may be. Naming conventions vary widely between cultures. Despite what you may think, all English names once had a meaning. But we've lost the meanings because we no longer understand what they meant in Old English, Norman French — or Hebrew.
Although I don't know of any culture that names using meaningless phonemes, I wouldn't make that assumption. Here's a list of wrong assumptions westerners make about names.
I thought my mama used meaningless phonemes to name me, but it turned out she used a cluster of phonemes that together make the sound of the word 'meaningless.' That's different, right?
I wouldn't call the assumptions in that classic blog post "Western" per se, I unconsciously make them all the time and I'm not Western.
Except maybe the assumption that names always fit in ASCII, but then again Arabic names can be fairly losslessly transliterate to English letters so you don't lose much if you assume so, the mapping is very one-to-many though, my real name alone can be written in 5 or 6 different ways depending on how many English vowels you want to put to emulate the Arabic spelling.
Many western last names are jobs that someone once had (e.g. . Smith, Farmer, Potter). Others tell you who the father was, somewhere way up the chain (e.g. Robinson, Jackson, Johnson). Others tell you place of origin (Green, Hill).
In the US, former slaves chose their last names upon gaining freedom, hence the large amount of black Americans named "Washington" and "Freeman."
My impression from the above is that last names used to be a word that had provide maximum disambiguating power for a person/family. And that they may have been more fluid in the past. At some point they became the defining feature of lineage and were cemented in, and thus some "John" had his first name cemented in history forever.
For first names, it's a lot less clear, and there's a lot more user choice in that these days.
My mom's next-door neighbor's name means Autumn Flower. She's a Mandarin speaker. Girls' names are usually made up of words have "pretty" meanings (e.g. Ai = Love, Li = pretty, Min = clever, Chun = spring, Hua = flower) while boys get names with more powerful meanings (e.g. Gang = strength, Bo = abundant, Wen = educated, Hao = prosperous, Ming = bright). Note different tonal values on the syllables change the meaning, so it's little harder to guess the meaning of someone's name in Cantonese than it is in Mandarin. Everyone gets two naming syllables (as far as I know).
However, I discovered that most Chinese don't seem think twice about the meaning of their names. When my mom's neighbor introduced herself using her English name, I asked her what her Chinese name was. I recognized that the last syllable meant flower (Hua), but the first syllable stumped me. It turned out to be Autumn. She seemed surprised that someone would try to translate the meaning of her name. She said she normally doesn't think about the meaning of peoples names, and, it's as you said, she normally thought about them as arbitrary syllables. (Also, she was under the impression that most English names didn't mean anything.)
And in Chinese culture, you can acquire other names as you get older. We'd call them nicknames, but they can be legally valid. It would be like Magic Johnson using that name on his legal documents. (FYI, I don't know if the PRC allows that anymore, but historically, it was allowed.) Of course, when they move to another country, the Chinese will happily adopt the local names for themselves. Chinese in the US adopt English names. In Latin America, they adopt Spanish names. They don't seem to cling to their birth names like Americans do.
Of course, most English given names have either a Biblical (Hebrew origin) or an Anglo-Saxon and/or Norman French origin. In Hebrew Michael would mean something like Gift of God (?). But since most non-Jewish Americans don't have a facility with Hebrew, Michael is just a bunch of meaningless syllables. And most modern English speakers don't have a facility with Old English or Norman French. So they wouldn't know that that the two syllables in the name Robert are derived from old Germanic terms for "Fame" and "Bright".
I have a name where the meaning is obvious, or at least the last half of my given name is easy. Wulf means Wolf. Many people think the Beo means bee, but my dad who studied Old English said it was a shortening of the word Beado, meaning war. Everyone knows what Wulf/Wolf means so it sticks out like a sore thumb among the seemingly meaningless names in the English language. When I lived in Hong Kong, I tried to translate my name literally into the Cantonese word for wolf, but wolf is an extremely derogatory term for people, and I was advised against it. In fact, meeting someone with the name meaning wolf was quite shocking to some. I guess it's like being named "Traitor" or "Deceiver". LoL! In Latin American countries, I tell people to call me Lobo. That always gets a laugh.
Here's a list of assumptions we should NOT make about names in other cultures...
I should have been more clear. There are *some* English names that are modern English words. And there are a few English names that were never words at all. But *most* English names are former words.
>I used to know someone whose parents invented her name out of thin air. It means nothing.
Many Thanks! I had guessed that _someone_ must have chosen to invent a name out of thin air at least once, just given the number of people on Earth and the number of unusual things some of them do. From a prediction point of view, nice to hear that this indeed happened (not sure if it was nice from the girl's perspective... I hope it didn't cause her much hassle.).
OK. But traditional names all have a meaning that is lost on most people. Some countries don't allow made-up names. Iceland insists on names that conform to Icelandic culture and grammar. And you have to get your name approved by the Icelandic Naming Committee if you want to tag your kid with a non-Icelandic name. Foreigners coming to Iceland can keep their names, though.
France used to have an approved list of names, too. But they did away with it. Parents can name their kids anything now, as long as it's not considered against the child's best interests. But if you decide to name your kid Dweezil, I'm not sure who steps in to review it.
I do understand, what I mean is: When a name resembles a word, does that mean the name used to be understood in the same way as this word? If someone is named "Goodman", does that mean that, in the olden days, people really named their children "Goodman" with the understanding that this means "Good Man"? Or was this never the case and the resemblance is accidental?
I had a teacher whose family name was Goodman, who said that one of his ancestors was a criminal who fled jurisdictions and changed his name to "good man" so that no one would suspect him.
"Goodman" and "Goodwife" seem to have been used more as terms of respectful address, as we would now say "Mister and Missus" or "sir and madam", but on a social scale that indicated your position on the ladder.
E.g. Goody Proctor in the quote from "The Crubicle" about "I saw Goody Proctor with the Devil", 'Goody' is not her first name but the shortened form of "Goodwife", so it's more like "I saw Mrs. Proctor":
"Goodwife (Scots: Guidwife), usually abbreviated Goody, was a polite form of address for women, formerly used where "Mrs.", "Miss" and "Ms." would be used today. Its male counterpart is Goodman. However, a woman addressed by this title was of a lesser social rank than a woman addressed as Mistress.
"Goodwife" and "Goody" were used in England, Scotland, and Colonial America, with the earliest known use circa 1325. By the mid-18th century they had become archaic outside Scotland, and they are perhaps best known today as the forms of address used in period literature, like Arthur Miller's historical fiction The Crucible.
The title also appears in the expression "Goody Two-Shoes", which is sometimes credited to the 1765 children's book The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, though it was first used at least a century earlier.
...The address “goodman/goodwife” was already declining in popularity by the 1700s in England. By this time, the address meant little to nothing; there is evidence of those who had commonly used the form of address now requested to be called Master or Mistress. Also, around this time, people were listing no address or “Goodman/Goodwife” interchangeably.
While this term was to denote women of high social standing, there were terms for women above these. Above Goodwife was Madam and above that was Dame. Despite “goodwife” indicating lower social status than Madam or Dame, it was not considered an insult to address someone of lower status as Goodwife during times of high usage in England. It was “an indication of good neighborliness.” However, in Evelina, Captain Mervin uses the term to insult his wife, who, as a member of the gentry, should be referred to as 'Madame' or 'Mistress'."
So you might indeed have called someone "Goodman John", and over time that might become a surname for the family of such a person who wasn't just a simple peasant. There are surnames like "Drinkwater" which must have arisen for some particular reason; maybe it started off as a nickname for someone who was a teetotaller, for instance. We don't know the reasons because they get lost over time.
It depends. You'd have to look up each name to find out. I looked up Goodman, and maybe it's "good man", or maybe it's "God man". And I'm not sure why either one of those would become a name.
The Puritans used biblical/moral/religious phrases as names, both consciously to make their kids holier and to emphasize their separation from the corrupt society.
Held off on this one because it really is Not Safe For Work or indeed Not Safe For Life.
Tasting History, and making real garum. If you're ever wondering "How in the name of God did anyone think this was a good idea?" I can't answer that for you, but it will certainly make you ask that question! And yet, the end product is so very different:
Speaking of gross foods, I read that the way some Asian country makes fish soy is to fill a barrel with fish heads, water & salt, & leave it open to the air. When all the flies leave it's ready.
This was less gross than I expected, tbh. I mean, yes, the stage at which it's a slurry of disintegrating fish guts isn't exactly appetizing, but I think that's always going to be true of the intermediate stages of fermented fish sauce. The final product looked perfectly reasonable, and his description of it didn't make it sound disgusting. And I know from experience that modern fermented fish sauces are perfectly good as ingredients for adding salt and umami to stuff; I use Asian fish sauce all the time.
I would consider eating something with this in it.
You have to remember "our ancestors made their living by robbing the vultures of their feast."
I saw some site the other day that showed the stomach pH of different mammals. Humans are way over between carnivores and scavengers. In one of the diaries of first colonialists, there were six guy living in a house about 6' x 8' over the winter. It was a particularly tough winter. An Indian family made a lean-to against the side of the building. The Indians ate the remains of a slaughtered pig that even the dogs wouldn't eat.
Humans eat a lot of fermented foods, today, mostly for the flavor. You've eaten a lot of different fermented foods, even fermented meats and didn't even know you were eating fermented meat ... such as salami, or any of the dry sausages. Buttermilk, Yogurt, Kefir and Sour Cream are fermented milk. Beer is fermented grains, Wine is fermented grapes, Sake is fermented rice, Vodka is fermented potatoes. Sour Kraut is fermented cabbage, as is Kimchi, pickles are now just boiled, but they used to be fermented cucumbers. Before refrigeration, most Americans ate fermented fruit with breakfast. Most India Indians eat a lot of fermented fruit pickles.
That's true, but it's only when you already know that "oh yes, the brown stinking sludge of decomposition can be filtered to a golden liquid that is not harmful, and not the same thing as the brown stinking sludge of decomposition that will kill me if I try drinking it" that it works.
I'm fascinated how the first person or people who decided to try the sludge instead of dumping it out got that way. Was it the layer of fat on the surface, and they were so desperate for calories that they tried separating out the fat and got what amounted to garum? People die all the time eating mushrooms and berries that they think are edible, I think you'd have to be pretty desperate to try using "rotten fish guts" as any kind of food source.
Haven't checked out the link, because NSFW and NSFL, but garum is covered in "The Noma Guide to Fermentation" in a relatively benign manner. IIRC, they speculate that the idea passed from Rome to SE Asia where it became the basis for fish sauce.
FYI the link is 100% family friendly cooking show stuff. The NSFW/NSFL label was probably mostly a joke about how disgusting garum appears to a modern western palate. The video includes some animal bones in a gross, brown liquid, but there's nothing actually objectionable shown unless you are unusually squeamish about seeing traditional food preparation.
I believe it was Scott who first tipped me off to Neom and The Line. Well, learning about linear cities has had a major effect on how I spend my time. I've put at least a thousand hours into this proposal:
LineLoop
(A Linear City + Vacuum Transit)
What happens when you take two crazy ideas (Hyperloop and The Line) and combine them with lots of common sense? Good things.
Be sure to change the image from map to 'chart' and select 'World' and turn off the individual countries. Search around to find when food production began to fall off. Spoiler Alert: it doesn't. With nothing but growth and improvement behind us, what kind of scientist finds nothing but disaster and destruction ahead? Scientists don't find that, only activists have findings not supported by the data. When I was a child, in the 60s, a common comic trope was 'The Krazy Nut-Job'; unwashed, perhaps wearing a priest's robe; proudly proclaiming 'The End is Nigh.' Today, that's a national obsession. Its especially telling, that far too many of today's youth follow a mildly handicapped girl—on the spectrum—unable to complete high school. She's used as a puppet by her scheming—well connected parents—to broadcast THE MESSAGE—the government needs to purchase expensive equipment—or the world will die.
If you don't follow my plan—THE WORLD WILL DIE. If you don't do as I say—THE WORLD WILL DIE!
Does anyone else feel like we've stepped into a James Bond flick? Dr. Evil is going to save/destroy the world unless we pay him One Million Dollars. The main-dude even dresses like a Sith Lord. He proclaims we, the little people—are mostly useless. The smart people need to reduce the global population by 95%. The 95% useless little-people need to be kept entertained by video games and cheap drugs. The 95% will live in little glass boxes, where they will own nothing, eat bugs, and be happy. What? Like a lab rat in his cage? Fed by others, fattened up for: 'a scientific experiment'?
oh goodness, the line is crazy. No it is batshit insane. Do you think New York City is a crowded place? The Line is 26 times more dense; it takes NyC's entire population and houses them in an area about the size of hartford ct i think? it would make JG Ballard's High Rise look. like a kids book if violence erupted lol.
i was going to say it looked like someone read Milo Hastings's City of Endless Light but lacked the sense to put it underground to make it bomb proof, just less nazi more techbro, but apparently Hastings liked linear cities! He supported Edgar Chambless's idea of Roadtown which he wrote about in 1910; the first american idea of a linear city.
Chambless seems incredibly obscure; Hastings is obscure himself, but Chambless doesn't even have a wiki page. He wrote Roadtown, was Hastings's close friend, was persuasive enough to convince people to let him use patents, but nothing came of it and he a tragic end.
The rabbit hole also led me to Superstudio and the continuous monument, which cold be another line influence, though they miss the point. Serendipity, have to love it.
Thanks for the tip about Hastings. I have added the following to my paper.
Milo Hastings was a long-term friend of Chambless and helped write about Roadtown. He also wrote a novel about a linear City called City of Endless Night.
Here is an excerpt from his article which introduces Roadtown:
In giving Roadtown a hearing remember that it is not a town and not a rural community. It is both. Compared with our present ideas of either it will have obvious advantages and obvious shortcomings, but take it as a whole and compare it with a modern town plus the surrounding farm territory, and then judge of Roadtown.
We make the same plea. When thinking about a LineLoop city, don't ignore the farm lands and industry on one side of the city and the nature reserve on the other side. A very common reaction to this proposal is to suggest that a traditional two-dimensional design is better.
“Why not just… build a bunch of linear cities next to each other. Like a regular city which happens to have a lot of fast public transit?”
This design forsakes the farm lands and nature reserve within easy walking distance of the entire city.
>>Back in 1920 there was another prophet for modern Germany. His name was Milo M. Hastings and he put his guesses in a fast-paced novel called "The City of Endless Night." The city was Berlin of the year 2041. It had become an entirely roofed-in city of sixty levels, sheltering 300,000,000 sun-starved humans. Since 1941 the city had held out against the World State (here it is again) which tried to bomb it into line.<<
i don't think Alabama could afford it. Its easy to make designs; the issue is in getting them made, and building both a new, unproven form of city as well as a similar mass transport option is probably up there with a manned mars mission.
also it all depends if you believe urban life fixes things. i mean the suburbs have issues but riots and crime aren't one of them. Also man, i don't think the racial dynamics of the south make it a good idea for MORE density.
not really a fan of tight central control either. the lines problem
isnt the dense city its the surveillance state. people often dont stop with banning cars; theyll try to do more to people.
Well, ACTUALLY, it all depends on whether you are a fan of the personal automobile. Anyone who thinks the Earth can afford this approach to organizing society is not going to like my ideas.
its moot, and i will tell you what i was originally thinking of saying.
if this idea matters, you shouldn't be here arguing it; you should be enacting it. maybe that means growing wealthy enough to start the ball rolling and getting other wealthy people to create the linear city and hyperloop even on a small scale to see if it works.
or you become a city planner or architect or hyperloop engineer to support existing efforts because its easier and yet still effective. sometimes being a skilled follower is extremely important.
or you work on local aspects or incidental. You mention trikes; an affordable e-trike is useful, but ebikes are still expensive and worse are easily stolen. or work in local politics to prepare your city to better handle carlessness. in my town we have a perfectly good center that could work, but you need actual things there, not payday loan places, temp agencies, and boost mobile.
so it really doesn't matter what anyone here thinks unless you just want people to say "what a clever idea!" Go out and make it. youll need real professionals anyways.
So how are grocery and other retail stores supposed to be stocked? How are people suppose to get a refrigerator to their residence? That was mentioned at the start of the document, but never addressed.
Also I've been introduced to material fatigue as an important consideration of airplane operation. So you have these pods accelerating and decelerating at hundreds of MPH multiple times a day that have to maintain a complete air seal in a vacuum. I suspect high operational costs to keep them safe.
The maximum speed in the LineLoop design is 200 mph. I doubt that acceleration/deceleration will be a serious issue.
Maintaining air pressure in the pod is certainly serious. Internal pressure in the pod remains at sea level at all times, and the pod never leaves vacuum, so there is no flexing under normal operation. The plug doors are alternately exposed to vacuum and normal air pressure at every stop.
A line city is two-dimensional but not perfectly straight. It can bend gradually to follow the terrain. There is a highway and land on one side of the city where parking garages, factories, special facilities, and farm lands could be located. On the other side, is a protected natural area.
...
The basic design of the city is quite simple: a long string of city blocks. There are two to three buildings on each side of a block with a park in between.
...
Commercial and office space is usually located on the highway side of the city, apartments on the other side. In an optimum situation, one would walk across the park to go to work.
Buildings on the same side of the city are connected by sky bridges at the rooftop (at least on one end). This creates an escape route in case of a fire. Practically this means that the buildings on one side of a block must have the same height (which is visually pleasing anyway).
The land, utilities, and vactrain are owned by a single entity, but the buildings can be financed, designed, and owned by other entities.
Between every two blocks is a gap which contains a five-meter-wide gravel road for occasional vehicle use and pedestrian access to the outside. This gap would also allow for a crossing stream or a road in a tunnel. It would ve a good idea to build a "nature way" every few miles: a fenced-off wild bridge which allows migrating animals to cross the city. The gaps increase fire safety: fire can never spread from one block to another.
...
Many things could be built or already exist outside of the city. There would be a highway along one side of the city which runs from one end to the other (60 kilometers long) and connects normally to the existing road and highway system. Pre-existing roads can cross the city in tunnels. On the opposite side of the city from the main road would be an access lane for moving furniture and large objects to buildings on that side of the city.
I've had in my mind, that trains need to be smaller, more individual electric engine-boxcars. That there would be multi-stage parallel tracks. I high speed track, a middle speed track parallel, and low speed tracks branching off those. Any car needing to merge on-off the high speed track—to it's unique destination—switches off to a medium, then low speed tracks, whilst the other cars continue. on.
But perhaps cars don't need to be on rails, but on low friction wheels ... that doesn't work, as these don't track ... unless you have a magnetic track. In a magnetic track, all the cars are held in the imaginary track magnetically. Instead of thinking of a railed track, think of it as a lane. Any car changing to a different lane, does so magnetically. I guess you're just back to trucks on roads, but with lower friction wheels ... which is a huge energy savings.
Trains are efficient and well understood, but they don't work well for intraurban transit because all of the cars must stop and the station must be as long as the train.
(BART Station)
The LineLoop solution is that a pod leaves the convoy to stop at a station. The pod moves to the right into the acceleration and deceleration lane. Centcom closes the gap and the convoy continues on its way. The pod then moves into the airlock lane and stops at a station. A LineLoop station only needs to be as long as a pod (about 70 feet).
All of this happens at speed: there is no reduction in the overall speed of the convoy.
Pods must be able to change lanes. Railroads have multiple tracks. Highways have multiple lanes. Urban vacuum transport must have three lanes in each direction: the cruising lane, the A/D lane, and the airlock lane. Every pod is capable of forward and backward movement as well as side to side. This is accomplished with magnetic force.
Lane switching is absolutely essential to this proposal. It has been assumed since the earliest designs. Fortunately development of this technology is progressing well. Tim Houter, CEO of Hardt Hyperloop, explains:
The hyperloop itself is completely levitated, stabilised and propelled by magnetic forces, so there is no physical contact with the infrastructure; therefore the operation expenses are extremely low, as the loop is near to maintenance free. The lane switch technology is also based on magnetic fields – without any mechanical context or moving components we can choose to go left or right just by controlling the magnetic field of the vehicle. It is very convenient to have vehicles that can switch lanes at a very high frequency. It is the combination of frictionless movement and magnetic propulsion that allows it to be very fast.
Your city has a population of only 400,000 people. It's not hard to design a 20-minute city of this size using a dense network of subway lines and tramlines, and it'd be way cheaper too. Prague's city center has about the same population, it wasn't optimized, it's full of parks and a hilly terrain, yet travel by public transportation through it rarely takes more than 40 minutes.
If you converted your 60km-by-160m city into a-60km by-60km megalopolis criss-crossed by vactrains, you'd multiply the population by 375 while only doubling the traveling time. If you retained the area and only changed the shape, it'd be a 3km-by-3km square with an even shorter top travel time than 20 minutes. Or you could keep the maximum traveling time at 20 minutes and choose a city size in between those two extremes. Either way, the simplest and most effective way to improve a linear city is to add a dimension.
The biggest difference between our model LineLoop and your 3km×3km city is that our city provides access within a few minutes to 60 km of farmlands, industry, or nature reserve.
Why do residents need to be situated close to farmlands and industrial zones though? It feels like bad zoning more than anything. Like, if we assume that your vactrain-highway combo works as intended, why not put the industrial zone on one end, the residential area on the other and the commercial/entertainment area in the middle? It'd be better for everyone - less noise and pollution in the apartments, easier to visit your friends on foot, less driving from factory to factory.
Also, if your city thrives, the farmland in its immediate vicinity is going to get so valuable that refusing to let the city sprawl out into it would mean to throw money away. Would city hall would be able to withstand the pressure for long?
The question is: "Does society need farm lands and industry?
If you answer "Yes,* then where do those workers live, what kind of housing do they have, and how far do they have to commute?
What is your preference for those workers?
I understand your concern about rising land values. I say in the paper:
>>Development on each side of the line city must be controlled and limited.<<
Using Coosapolis as an example: it is 37 miles (60 km) long. There would be 37 to 111 square miles of potential farm land adjacent to the city. I think this would dilute the effect because it is such a big area. In any case we need to have structure in our world other than the price mechanism.
Well, you are quite right. But I'm a retired American software designer living in the Dominican Republic and trying to put words on a page. Ii is not within my power to poll a representative sample of farm workers and industry workers. I have to use my understanding of human beings to make the best guess as to what they want.
Just a random observation: A city is not a metaphorical island. It will need to be supplied externally with food, resources and foreign-produced goods. This means extensive transport network going in and out of it.
That network can then carry passenger traffic for an additional cost vastly lower than building a dedicated passenger network from scratch, and this is how urbanization often grew, not through condensing, but gemmation - city-states founding new ports along sea trade routes, residential buildings sprouting en masse around intermediate train stops (the original urban sprawl, and in many ways the original Lines).
Yes, modern cities demand and can support dedicated passenger traffic infrastructure, and it's worth thinking about improving it, but I don't think even perfectly planned passenger transit solves even a fraction of transportation issues, and I don't think cities planned ex nihilo (that aren't conceived with a function in mind - a transport, industry or government hub) are practically plausible in the first place.
Some guesstimes suggest accelerating a fully-occupied pod will take 40-50 kilowatt-hours (30-40 before inefficiencies), depending on the exact mass of the pods including backup batteries, and whether you're going for 200 or 300 kilometers per hour. I'm going to be pessimistic here to try to capture the energy cost of maintaining the vacuum and running the airlocks and providing the magnetic levitation.
Regenerative braking (note: The technology to do this with maglev doesn't exist yet) appears to be about 60-70% efficient; let's be optimistic and say 70%.
So every stop consumes 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
A randomly chosen electric car consumes, approximately, .3 kilowatt-hours per mile. Assuming single passengers, and assuming the average pod is 50% occupied, we get 18 passengers * .3 = 5.4 kilowatt-hours per mile. Converting to kilometers, I get 3.3 kilowatt-hours per kilometer.
So, in order to break even, the average passenger must travel 5 kilometers. Probably achievable for your line city - but that's not quite the right question.
In New York City, it appears the average metro passenger travels ~3 kilometers per trip.
Meaning electrical vehicles are more energy-efficient on a per-passenger basis in a conventional city layout, than the lineloop design is in the line-city layout.
Now, trips are theoretically -shorter- in your line-city layout, on account of population density (traffic). However, once we're digging tunnels under the ground (and in particular if we're building a city from scratch, and we can build up instead of boring from below, a much cheaper option), we can build a fairly dense road network underneath the city and just drive our electric cars around down there. Or install a more traditional subway system.
But how much do we need a transportation system? NYC has a population density of 11,000 per square kilometer; a square city containing 400,000 people would be approximately 36 square kilometers, or 6 kilometers by 6 kilometers. But that's NYC, which was hardly designed optimally; realistically, if you're building from scratch, you don't need roads on the surface, they can all be underground, and you can really tighten up those numbers. (And for a 6km x 6km city, as far as passengers go, really, you barely need a transportation system. Your public transportation could just be moving walkways in underground tunnels or through skybridges.)
I've been wanting to do more on the cost side. I appreciate you getting into it.
>>The Superconducting Maglev is equipped with a braking system capable of safely stopping a train traveling at 311mph. Regenerative braking is normally used for deceleration, but if it becomes unavailable, the Superconducting maglev also has wheel disc brakes and aerodynamic brakes. <<
That particular train technology / system isn't in use yet; the line using the technology referenced there, the Chūō Shinkansen rail line, is slated to open in 2037. But it does sound like they've at least prototyped the technology for their testing, so I guess it isn't theoretical anymore.
Efficient city design is a hobby because the cube-square law, as it pertains to traffic, annoys me. I have a thought that the ideal is something like a loop city, where you wrap the city around a commons park area, and build extremely densely on the periphery, using a mixture of different transportation types to facilitate different distances of travel.
Ideally you plan to dig down as well - commercial spaces exist below the ground, residential space fills most of the periphery. Industrial space varies more - some can go below-ground, some need to be placed on the exterior of the peripheral space for, for example, effective venting. (Fusion power has the potential to unlock a lot more uses for below-grade spaces, including farming - but it has the potential to make many impractical ideas practical, so, eh.)
It's less like a city and more like an enormous building around a giant courtyard. Long-term, you can enclose the courtyard for controlled weather conditions.
Moving walkways for shorter distances (1-5km), a thing I don't know if anybody has actually invented yet which I can only describe as a tiered monorail (except tiered, so not really "mono" rail, but monorail captures the idea slightly better) - stackable transportation helps alleviate the cube-square law for medium distances (5-20km).
Moving walkways actually have the potential to do a lot more if you employ graduated speeds (an advantage to the ring shape - you can employ concentric rings of moving walkways), possibly up to and including replacing all other forms of transportation. But they're, ah, somewhat dangerous used this way, and not perfectly suited for all people.
Why don't you take my design as it is and "roll" with it. See how much you can make of it. See how much of what you want is already there. Don't immediately start changing it.
* wrap around a common park area
* build densely on the periphery
* Industrial space on the periphery
* building around a giant courtyard.
* mixture of different transportation
* buried hyperloop
I'm looking for a co-author but it needs to be sympatico. I'm certainly willing to change my design, but only to something obviously better. If it's a wash, then I want to keep it the way I've thought it through and written it down for a thousand hours.
Why not just... build a bunch of linear cities next to each other? Like a regular city that happens to have a lot of fast public transit?
One of the many, *many* issues with the linear city concept is that it's hard to have a lot of variety. There's just not enough surface area; you can certainly standardize basic amenities, but beyond that, you can't have a whole bunch of different businesses scattered about, because each segment of the population will only have reasonable access to a small fraction of those businesses. You can easily circumvent this issue by having multiple linear cities next to each other- that is, a regular city- because then you can multiply the number of businesses within the same radius.
The 20 minute travel time being reasonable, or perhaps I should say "reasonable", doesn't really have any bearing on whether or not it would be a good idea to just... have *more city*, in all space to the sides. Regardless of how fast the travel times are, they would either get faster if you added another dimension, or they would remain the same as they otherwise would have, but with more space for variety, which is good for the economy.
But you only have to change pods when going to a business along the second dimension that would've otherwise not existed at all. It's a net improvement.
In the LineLoop city (400,000 persons) EVERY BUSINESS IS WITHIN 20 MINUTES. If you change trains in your 2D city, it's going to take you longer than that. If you don't change trains, then you are restricted to one dimension.
The Solow Model concludes that a nation can become more prosperous by building more capital until the burden of maintaining existing capital slows the growth down.
This seems reasonable to me. It's a very simplified model, but it's pretty predictive.
I'm interested in whether I'm missing something, but let me know if you've read the article, or if you're just addressing my simplification of the simplification of the real world.
I have a minor nitpick-- sometimes you get a technology like stainless steel, that slows depreciation (the need for maintenance), but that just delays the eventual slowdown.
There's an old saying that a tree doesn't grow to the sky, but no one won a Nobel prize for it.
What you're missing is that capital and economies are not undifferentiated and that it's caused by diminishing returns, not depreciation.
Basically, it's not "you build roads until the rate of road decay is equivalent to the rate of road building." It's: there's only so many roads you need. And the amount of roads you need is different in different countries. Russia needs relatively many, Japan relatively few. Put another another way: there is some road, somewhere, in any country that is the Most Economically Important Road(tm). After that road is built all following roads are less economically important, they add less to GDP. They might still be a net benefit to the country but it's less. And at some point they stop being a benefit and become roads to nowhere.
In a developing country, any given project is highly likely to be productive because most developing countries have poor infrastructure. So accumulating capital to spend on infrastructure development will boost GDP in the short term (through building) and the long term (through the economic benefits of the infrastructure). It's also a relatively simple thing to do because it doesn't require complex education and because it increases the productivity of even extremely unproductive labor. Building a road is not hard even for relatively non-advanced countries and it improves the productivity even of subsistence farmers. But you get that exactly once. Once the road is built a second road is significantly less valuable.
The other thing to note is this only works up to a point. And that point is different for every country. After you've built all the roads and basic stuff you're, at best, a middle income country. And at that point growth has a lot to do with things like institutions and human capital. A free market democracy with a highly educated population has a lot more capacity to absorb capital productively than a command economy autocracy with a poorly educated population. Which is part of the Middle Income Trap. There's also Pettis's critique that, because it's so profitable to build out that basic infrastructure, people get rich doing it and try to keep it going past the point it's good as well as burdening the system with corruption. Which then prevents a transition.
To imagine this simplified again, let's imagine two countries: Corruptistan and Honestistan. Both are very poor. Both decide to drive up the savings rate through a Chinese style approach. In Honestistan this money goes to build asphalt roads with only some corruption. In Corruptistan this money is stolen by the government bureaucrats and the roads are just dirt. Both will eventually run into issues but they run into issues at different stages of development. Corruptistan is arguably already at its highest achievable infrastructure level despite being very poor because what's preventing it is all the corruption, in other words bad national institutions. Meanwhile Honesistan can get to Chinese levels of development and then has to figure out some way to transition away from infrastructure based basic capital growth. (In particular, it's very hard to shift from investment to savings models for a variety of reasons.)
Just a nitpick--Russia may need roads in some sense. It mostly doesn't have them. It has railroads. Early in the war, there was mention of soldiers from the provinces distant form Moscow who'd never seen a paved road until they were sent to Ukraine.
As for the main point, I should go back over the link-- I wrote a very simplified version. It wasn't that you keep building until you can't keep up with deterioration, it's that deterioration sets a limit on how much you can have. Another point (which Solow made and which I should have mentioned) is that you only need so many roads. More roads than that and you're just wasting resources.
The argument is against the impression that if a country is building a lot and getting richer, it will therefore continue to get richer by building more.
For cultural reasons-- building new things can get you more respect than maintaining old things-- people may well build past the limit of that they can maintain.
The central point is just that, eventually, you can't get richer by building more stuff.
Fair nit. Some people (not you) seem to be missing the roads are metaphorical for generic infrastructure. It can be railroads or water plants or electric grids. Just that general class of stuff. But correcting the empirical point is still worthwhile.
What I think you're describing is that new growth has a brief period where it enables further economic activity because depreciation has not set in. Basically, if you built your roads 50 years ago you need to pay to maintain them. If you built your roads 5 years ago you don't (or at least not as much). However, it provides a constant economic benefit.
Basically, if you just built your new roads you get a GDP growth from construction AND the economic benefit of the activity along the new roads AND you don't have major costs to maintain that infrastructure. But once you get that boost it's gone. You still get the economic benefits of the road year over year. But you don't get the GDP boost of new construction again and you have to start paying to maintain the infrastructure. That's net positive but it's LESS net positive.
There's also secondary concerns like, for example, how debt financing in the earlier environment (where you can easily grow 10% a year) is more sustainable than in the slower growth environment that follows. Plus stuff like funding by land sales which stop working as land becomes a smaller part of the wealth mix. (Not relevant to Russia due to USSR but relevant to most other developing economies.) And the political economy question that many countries (including the USSR, China, etc) overbuild due to political incentives to keep growth going even if it's not as economically productive to build even more roads. Which, at the extreme end, is how you end up with Ukraine being a country with a GDP per capita of like $3,000 but also the ability to manufacture jet engines.
You can always get richer by building more productive stuff. The thing is "what is productive" is a hard question only once you reach a certain baseline level of development. If you're a poor economy with no railroads then building railroads between every city or building your first power grid or getting everyone clean water is obviously and clearly productive. But getting even slightly more complex like that, for example manufacturing socks, and the question gets exponentially harder. Is it more productive to import socks or set up your own industry? (And if you're importing everything then how do you grow?) Further, even if it's productive, it's likely less productive on a percentage basis than those earlier roads.
To put it as simply as I can, what the Solow model is pointing out is that rich nations only get to grow through productivity growth (mainly technology) while poorer nations get a bonus from converging with richer nations. This bonus is bigger the more distance there is to converge. You get that convergence bonus only so long as you're behind and it decreases rapidly as you catch up. This creates 'miracle mirages' like Brazil, Mexico, the USSR, and possibly China where rapid growth SEEMS to be due to technology or economic systems but are actually just catch up growth. This is in contrast with real miracles like the US, Germany, Japan, or South Korea where they actually do get to the point where they're at the productivity/technology frontier (or near it).
There's a lot of pro-China folks who argue the Chinese miracle is a "real" miracle in that they actually are gaining non-catch up productivity, pushing the technological frontier, etc. But the actual economic data, insofar as we've got it, makes it look a lot more like those fake miracle cases (especially Mexico). In which case you'd expect them to run into serious, serious issues at around the $10-$15k per capita benchmark. (There's also a second crisis waiting a bit later on, which is what the Asian Financial Crisis was about.) Noah Smith's point is that this looks a lot like the Solow model which, if true, makes the fake miracle argument stronger.
Diminishing returns are certainly a factor but so are economies of scale. In general it's not clear to me which dynamic is likely to dominate.
I don't think it's straightforwardly true that "once the road is built a second road is significantly less valuable". In general I would expect that much of the value of a particular road depends on the network of roads that it connects to. A second road connecting a different slightly smaller group of farmers to the same market for their goods may actually add more value than the first road since both sets of farmers can now benefit from both roads.
I think you're taking that quote slightly out of context. In context that means a second road along the same route. You're right that one road is less valuable than a network due to network effects. The point is that at some point you reach saturation and additional roads become worth less economically than the cost to build them. The network, as a whole, exists at some point and extensions only provide small gains that might not be worth the cost.
A road is economically valuable by what it enables. If a road connects a population to nothing of economic value, then that road has little economic value. On the other hand, if that road connects a population center to a sea port, this road adds the value of enabling commerce. If a road connects a population to a farming area, or some natural resource the road enables economic activity.
These posts only look at the value of the road itself, instead of what the road provides. If a road connects A to B, but is not sufficient to handle 100% of the commerce betwixt the two, a second parallel road holds the value of the commerce that second route enables. Each road would be balanced in value as to what percentage of the commerce transits that road.
Say the potential commerce between A & B is $300. Road A is worth $200 per year, because it only handles 67% of the commerce that A & B are capable of exchanging. The single road would be valued at $200. A second road is added that handles the excess 33%. In balance, each road would handle close to 50% of the $300 commerce. Each road would be valued at $150. There is some point of diminishing return, where the costs of construction and maintenance fall below the economic benefit of adding new roads between A & B.
Personally I'm inclined to the belief that the more important factor is information. Information also decays - in institutions we have a variety of terms for this decay, such as "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" - and requires maintenance. So, we solve a problem - say, the regulation of chemical storage. The information embedding this solution decays - represented in the real-world by, say, safety inspectors not taking their job too seriously. Then a chemical storage facility blows up and we turn our attention to the problem and fix it. But the more problems we've solved this way, and the bigger the solution (national solutions are bigger than state solutions), the more frequently our solutions will fail, because our attention is increasingly divided.
So - take the same model and apply it to information, including in particular institutions, which are also a form of capital.
You get a double-whammy when you're split on both physical and informational capital maintenance; now you're allocating limited funds on the basis of deteriorating information. Maybe your safety inspectors are fine - the department is just underfunded. But it's underfunded because a bridge collapsed and you've allocated a bunch of resources to that.
Just as it's bad to have too much physical capital - it's also bad to have too much informational capital. Keep the game up long enough and you eventually hit cascading failures, when you've reallocated resources from the necessary support structures of society.
I have a notion for science fiction-- 10K years of recorded history. To a large extent, modern politics are driven by a hope that things can be made a lot better. What if we reach a point where it seems like everything has been tried? Mind you, I don't see how you can get a story out of this. Maybe a story about local and temporary improvement.
If everything feels like it's been tried, the story could be driven by somebody trying something they think is new, and fighting the institutional inertia that has developed, fighting an uphill battle against a bunch of people who think this is just a slight variation on (these twelve things that have been tried before)
Seeing Scott refer to his own kids as "surprisal-minimization engines" really rubbed me the wrong way, I suppose because of the reductionism of it, but also because it's actually so very highly speculative. This particular theory of the brain that Scott has covered before wasn't even covered in The World Behind the World, neuroscientist Erik Hoel's book on just how in the dark we are on the brain. In particular, he said we don't really have a theory on how the brain works: there are multiple candidates, and it doesn't seem like there are any that can win out, as they all have severe issues. So I wonder what Scott (or anyone who agrees with that characterization of the brain as a "surprisal-minimization engine") would make of that book. It would be great if Scott did a book review of it. Think the thought that hurts the most right?
Maybe Scott called them "surprisal-minimization engines" for humor, and because he didn't want to sound ooey-gooey talking about the tiny perfect fingers and toes etc.
Let me share with you a little nugget of history which I just learned today.
To set the background: there's a new French version of "The Three Musketeers", split into two movies. A review of the first by an online acquaintance says it's the Muddy Middle Ages setting, even though it's the 17th century. Nobody in France is able to wash their faces because this must be before soap was invented.
I was pretty sure Castile soap was around in the 17th century and looking it up, discovered: "What unlikely thing do you think there will be fighting over?" and the answer is "Popish soap":
"In the 17th century, the soap caused controversy in England, since it supplanted the unnamed local soap after the Spanish Catholic manufacturers purchased the monopoly on the soap from the cash-strapped Carolinian government. Its ties to Catholicism caused a public-relations campaign to be established, featuring washerwomen showing how much more effective local soaps were than Castile soap. The sale of a monopoly in Protestant England to a Catholic company caused a great uproar, ending with the Castile soap company eventually being stripped of the monopoly."
"Popish soap was a derisive name applied to soap manufactured under a patent granted by Charles I. Because the board of the manufacturing company included Catholics, the term Popish Soap (after The Pope) was applied to this monopoly commodity. It was said by anti-Catholics to be particularly harmful to linen and washerwomen's hands.
During the personal rule of the English King Charles I (1629–1640), one of the ways in which he attempted to raise money was through the granting of patents. This came about as a result of a loophole in the statute forbidding such action.
One such patent was granted to a soap corporation.
The soap industry was overseen by Lord Treasurer Portland and his friends, all of whom displayed Catholic character. When Portland died, Laud and Cottington contended over the company, which increased annual profits to the crown to nearly 33,000 pounds by the end of the 1630s.
It was alleged that popish soap scarred the soul as well as skin and fabric."
There'll be no Catholic soap touching our good Protestant undergarments, thank you very much! 😁
Visual art such as paintings. I don't get it. I get music, novels, movies, even cinematography, but i am a Philistine when it comes to great paintings. I don't get them. I mean I can enjoy spending an hour in an art museum looking quickly at a bunch of paintings. But I don't feel emotional when I view a painting, whereas I do when listening to music, reading novels or watching movies.
Is this just some innate thing one can't fix? Or can I learn to appreciate visual art at a deeper level? What's your experience?
Your mileage may definitely vary, but as lockdowns lifted something I tried to restore my attention-span and bring myself a bit more calm was “looking at a painting for an hour”. I went to a museum, picked a fairly random painting (ideally one that looked like it had a few things going on), and then spent an hour doing nothing but looking at it.
I let myself move around to change perspective, and I let myself sketch it in a book with a plain pencil, but I didn’t let myself look it up or move away until the hour was up. There would always be a moment, not that far in, when I thought I had exhausted everything I could see or think about it and that it would be an ordeal to make it an hour, but I always ended up spotting some details, reinterpretting something about it, and thinking some different thoughts, feeling some different emotions. I feel fondly about every painting I did this with.
I get it. I spent a few hours at the Met a few years ago: many of the sculptures there hit me on a deep, emotional level. But when it came to the paintings, they were nice I guess. Don't know why.
Taste is something you can develop if you're interested: just follow the other commenter's advice.
I highly recommend the documentary *Tim's Vermeer*. An art-loving tech guy recreates a Vermeer using an improvised variant of the camera obscura, which he argues pretty convincingly was used by Vermeer & would account for the weird, luminous, photographic quality of his paintings. Fascinating, and you end of feeling quite fond of Tim, too. One of the best documentaries I've ever seen. It's point isn't to teach you anything about how to enjoy art, but I think it does anyway -- helps you appreciate the technical challenges of representing the 3-D world in 2D and admire the variety of solutions there are, which is one aspect of representational art.
I just bought a camera lucida to help with landscape design, and after using it a bit I can say that it seems really likely to me that it would have been used whenever possible. It's a really cool save useful tool!
It depends on personal taste as to which style of art you find appealing. Maybe visual art like painting and sculpture doesn't appeal to you at all, and that's fine. You're not a Philistine or bad taste.
There's art styles, as there are music genres, I just don't get. There are others that I do find appealing and beautiful and meaningful.
For example, there's a lot of 17th-18th century landscape art which leaves me going "meh". Greenery-yallery trees and nothing going on except the artist trying to show off his mastery of the Sublime. Constable may be famous for such, but they do nothing for me.
Botticelli, on the other hand, is almost *too* beautiful and you can see how he easily found a style and could have slipped into churning out product (like Thomas Kinkade) which was the 'beautiful painting of popular subject' his patrons would have demanded. He worked up until his 60s and turned to a more archaic style, pushing his art, instead of staying stuck in 'what worked' or trying to copy the new artists of the High Renaissance, and that's one indicator of being a great artist.
But it could well be that you would prefer modern art, be that art of today, non-representative art, or others.
There's a set of Youtube series by this guy, who is an art critic with his own take on the Great Painters of the past (and I have to admit to bias, I am fully on board with his criticism of Thomas Cromwell as a person and not merely as the painting):
EDIT: You might also be more interested in the physical, technical process of creating and restoring art works. Here's a channel, Baumgartner Restoration, which does that - he takes pieces you think are lost causes and brings them back to life:
A meticulous effort to recreate Hokusai's Great Wave. This is harder than it sounds, considering that we only have woodblock prints, and not the original drawing. The exact colors are a matter of judgement. And so on.
I liked some art before discovering the channel, but my taste was pretty narrow, and I really only loved and was moved by very pretty, representational things (Pre-Raphaelite paintings, portraits, some still lifes and landscapes, some Impressionism, some fantasy, etc). I was contemptuous of most abstract work, and especially "dumb squares."
Then I watched the video on Rothko (https://youtu.be/fsz6bkkIHzQ?si=S6kZNZ4kKFSg9_Ot) and, despite having Rothko come up in class, I finally just GOT. IT. I got "dumb squares!" Got them to a degree that when I stumbled across some of Rothko's other work in the Chicago Art Institute, I had a moment of full-bodied frisson, and I sat down and lingered over them.
I would have said that was impossible five years ago.
My mom is a professional fine art painter and graduate of Cal Arts, and I went to film school (which of course included art history), and we both agree that the essays on that channel are *by* *far* the best education materials on fine art we've ever experienced. I actually can't imagine how they could be improved. Each script is well-researched, explaining the key points of historical and biographical context in each piece, is pleasantly self-assured when something is definitive and knowable, and is delightfully confident when it goes about shooting down misinterpretations.
Additionally, the editing and animation are perfectly paced to provide adequate information to understand exactly what part of the piece is being discussed. Each image lingers exactly as long as it needs to feel satisfying, but the movement keeps it dynamic. That seems like a small thing, but oh, wow, it isn't.
Without watching the video or being educated on art, or ever having seen a Rothko in the flesh - I guess much of the appeal is similar to the appeal of liminal spaces. If a photograph of an unusually empty room can be emotionally evocative, so can an unusually uniform field of paint on canvas.
so honest question: if I just get my recommendations from GiveWell anyway, why wouldn't i just give to GiveWell and let them distribute it? Like, clearly I *already* trust them.
The first includes malaria prevention, vitamin A supplementation, and vaccine initiatives, but not GiveWell operations. The second includes a longer list of recipients, but still not GiveWell operations.
The last fund - the Unrestricted fund - can go be used for GiveWell operations. Donating to this fund would be "donating to GiveWell." Notably, operating needs are predefined and once GW meets those, donations to their Unrestricted Fund are directed towards GW's charities (I think all those included in the All Grants Fund).
The GW website also allows for donations directly to any of the 4 charities in the Top Charities Fund.
An advantage of donating to GW's Top Charity Fund, rather than to the charities within that fund itself, is that donations to the Top Charity Fund are directed by GW every few months to the 1 of the 4 Top Charities that they feel currently needs the funding the most.
An advantage of donating to these charities through GiveWell (either collectively through one of the aforementioned funds, or to a specific one through the GW site) is that it lets GW and those charities know that you are donating to them specifically due to the GW recommendations. This information better informs the charities on how to allocate resources towards fundraising.
One reason to donate to the Top Charities Fund, rather than the Unrestricted Fund, that is "to the charities," rather than "to GW," would be risk-aversion. If someone is very risk averse, they may prefer donations that have high expected value and low risk, over donations that have greater risk.
Donations to the Top Charities Fund are very low risk. We know vaccines save lives, malaria prevention saves lives, etc. Donations to GW operations arguably have more risk. Maybe GW will succeed at funneling more money towards these top charities than a counterfactual in which they stop existing. But theoretically, if GW's budget were slashed to 0, and it needed to stop operating, maybe people would keep donating to those Top Charities as much as they would with GW. Similarly, maybe they won't succeed in identifying more underfunded super promising charities. Maybe GW will stop finding such charities. Or maybe at some point GW will identify so many new very effective charities, that further research will not add marginal value, since the already identified charities remain underfunded.
While I think that such scenarios are unlikely, someone very averse to such possibilities might prefer to just donate to the Top Charities Fund, which is arguably lower risk.
Similarly, risk aversion would be a reason to donate to the Top Charities Fund, rather than the All Grants fund, as the latter are characterized not by a lower expected value, but by greater uncertainty as to their effectiveness.
i definitely get those people exist, but its possible to not like catholicism from a conservative perspective too. The people you mean dislike it more from a political
perspective, and see any church as an extension of progressive leftism; its theology is that ideally. You have the same with the whole "liberation theology" mess.
a conservative would see ritual as an impediment, and tradition as a barrier to actually experiencing Jesus. The old cliche "a personal relationship" is meaningful here; they'd agree on the core aspects of the christian story in terms of the new testament but "holy tradition" no. it may be an american thing, but the anger against that other cliche "organized religion" has a point. too many "high" churches were operating by rote at a time when people needed much more. Ritual can be beautiful but also suffocating.
I understand. Our friend, though, is not advocating for a 'personal relationship' with Jesus or even God, so far as I can tell; he follows Maimonides and wants a rational religion but one which is about love of Truth and reason. God is ultimately unknowable, non-corporeal, and we live by an ethical and moral code established not so much through revelation as the use of intellect and reason applied to these matters.
It is intriguing to me that Maimonides was trying, with the Guide to the Perplexed, to "reconcile Aristotelianism with Rabbinical Jewish theology by finding rational explanations for many events in the text." Reminds me of St Thomas Aquinas and the Summa!
Tradition is important, for cultural and ethnic reasons, as you don't want Judaism to be diluted into the mainstream of whatever society Jews find themselves living amongst as exiles from their homeland, but those non-Jews should drop the whole "Son of God" thing and just agree on the basic common principles of being kind to each other.
Well, that's my impression of what he is trying to get at. So while the idea of ritual and tradition as an impediment, and the problem of idolatry, might chime with the American non-denominational characteristics, the entire thrust of his argument is that we should agree more with the Islamic view: Jesus was a Jewish prophet and in the Jewish tradition, but not what Christians believe about Him. I don't know if the American low-church tradition is willing to go that far?
My girlfriend and I are having a discussion: does it make any kind of sense to teach our child to read/write Shavian (or some other artificial phonemic alphabet - ie, where one letter maps to one sound) before trying to tackle English?
Points against: it's twice as much to learn, and useless in real life. At best the child is wasting its time; at worst it's actively being confused by the two different alphabets, and could end up retarded relative to other kids.
Potential points for: I'm wondering if it wouldn't actually make English easier to learn, by virtue of splitting one compound lesson into two simpler ones. By learning Shavian first, the child only has to understand the basic concept of "sound out shapes" --> "put them together to make words". So by the time it comes to dealing with all the irregularities and special cases of English, it already has a love of reading and a fair amount of preexisting experience it can use to make sense of the new system.
Main points against: it's not what other people do, which means there may be pitfalls that haven't been discovered; it's not the default and therefore requires extra effort on our part.
I am indeed very interested, so thanks for posting!
Having read those links, the ITA is not at all what I imagined when I posted about Shavian. For one thing, people in the comments talk about learning ITA til the age of seven before switching. Others remember actively being told off for using the real English spellings before they were "supposed" to.
I envisioned Shavian being something you teach a kid very quickly, basically as soon as they can grasp the idea of "see a picture = make a sound". I dunno at what ages kids do things but I was mentally picturing 2-3 years old for that. Not something that takes til seven! Not even something you spend long enough on to meaningfully delay learning real English.
(I don't know how long it takes kids to learn new shapes, or if there's an upper limit to how many they should be expected to learn. All I know is a few short years later I knew all 151 Pokemon, the generation after me learned 251, and I don't care to speculate how many there are now. My working model is that a kid can retain an extra 48 Shavian symbols on top of the 52 Latin ones without breaking a sweat. Interested to hear opinions on this from parents with real experience.)
The Latin alphabet would then be taught once the kid had already got the hang of sounding out words. But it would be presented as an alternative - writing in Shavian isn't "correct English" one day and incorrect English the next. Instead the kid is introduced to the concept that there can be different alphabets, and alphabets can be funny hit-or-miss things where one character doesn't always mean one sound and words are constructed through all sorts of different logics. These are true concepts that should deepen their understanding of English, not confuse it.
In the case of ITA, everyone seemed to acknowledge how quick it was to learn, but the transition to proper English was a total car crash. I'm not convinced that the path I'm thinking of would necessarily suffer the same problems, for the reasons above.
I'm cooling on Shavian a little though, because having had a crack at reading a bit of it myself, I'm finding the encoding of accents to be a bigger obstacle than I thought. People are writing "to" as "t" and "and" as "n", which may be how it sounds in some places but I would have been told off had I pronounced them like that when I was young. If the kids are going to be encountering false information of that kind, it's no longer the seamless stepping stone it looked to be. Or, if I have to manually re-translate all the books into my own preferred versions of Shavian, it's a far more unreasonable amount of work.
I’m glad it was an interesting comparison. I think generally children vary a lot in how quickly they take to reading, and the age at which they’re ready. Phonics seems to be the quickest way to get the kids who don’t just pick reading up (as some do) to be fairly secure, and your approach is (of course) informed by that.
A lot of children (most?) are ready to start phonics around 4, and naturally people do things to build phonemic awareness earlier than that. It might be helpful to know that teaching in England and Wales (controversially) usually uses an ‘artificial phonics’ approach, including reading and writing made-up words that follow the rules learnt so far as well as real words. That seems relevant to some of your ideas.
A big barrier if you want them to write is fine motor skills, which you really don’t want to push too early: there’s a lot around helping them build these skills, and getting them to make marks appropriately. I don’t know if there’s much research into using a keyboard when first learning to write. Certainly, people often use cards or blocks with letters on, which you can move around freely and play with making and changing words.
I think your description of your transition sounds like it would be quite confusing for a young child, and you’d likely encounter a lot of resistance because they already have a way to read and write that makes sense, so why would they want one that makes less sense? I don’t think that’s a feeling you can reason with, especially not when they’re very young.
In Japanese hiragana and katakana each character is one syllable, and the name of the character is the sound it makes. This means you can read as soon as you learn the alphabet (names of the characters). My half Japanese kids could read at age 2 and age 3 because of this.
That is exactly what my intuition suggests. I had half a mind to use hiragana/katakana, actually, except that it would result in their learning to read in a language that no one has taught them to speak. I had restaurant Japanese at one point but it'll have gone quite rusty by now.
It wouldn’t really make sense to teach English with katakana anyway - it not only lacks several sounds (like th), and collapses others that are distinct in English (r/l and b/v), katakana basically can’t represent consonant clusters, and English likes those a lot.
No, of course. The attraction of Shavian is that it is just English, just with a "sensible" alphabet.
No one seems to have contested the idea that a phonemic language is easier to learn - I've had Spanish, Russian and Katanana suggested so far as examples.
So the next question is whether learning English spelling is easier/more fun/more insightful if you can already read and write Shavian.
I don't feel anyone's really expressed an opinion on that front, beyond, "You don't need to do this."
There is a "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons " book which does what you want to, I think.... It creates a temporary phonetic version of the English alphabet by using different fonts and such.
Teaching sounding out is definitely the best approach ("phonics") but it is productive to just pick simple and truly phonetic words in English and just have your child sound those out and then layer in more complex rules.
For what it's worth, our kids' school uses something called "logic of English".
I watched a couple of videos about Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and found the approach definitely very interesting. It's along the same lines as thoughts I've had, but obviously I'm still on armchair thoughts and they've published a finished book. . I'm going to have a look at Logic of English too.
One thing: all the girls I saw reviewing the book on Youtube are American. If you don't mind my asking, are you American as well? Do you happen to know if American is all we get, or if there's a British English version of the book, or if it doesn't matter because it doesn't teach vocabulary up to the point where spellings diverge?
If you already know a more phonetic second language, like Russian, that can be helpful too teach that first. But kids very suggestible, and I think a phonics-based and phonogram -based approach for English, with exaggerated lamentations like "English is so silly, it used to be Germanic but then the French took over and then it all got mixed up! Whoops!", should be enough.
This sounds like a similar line to the one I would like to take when teaching English - taking into account the context and history behind the different spellings and words, so the child ends up not only familiar with all the odd rules but also aware of what they imply.
The problem is that I can imagine all that extra information, while very enriching, could easily have the effect of slowing down the child's progress at the basic functional reading and writing bit. How old is this kid when you're using the word "Germanic" with it? How did it get that much understanding if it hasn't yet learned any words with Germanic spellings?
Hence my thinking that Shavian or something similar could act as a stepping stone. (No point teaching the kid Cyrillic if it doesn't already speak Russian.)
Would have to assume no; nearly every kid who is taught to read succeeds at it, so you're solving a problem you don't really have. If you want to teach them something simpler first, it should be something used in the wild. I know sign language is popular for teaching kids too young for vocal chords, and Spanish is said to be one of the easier languages to learn. Both of those can open doors. (If they remember them.)
A simple useful heuristic for skill acquisition is to do practice the skill. Best way to learn to throw a punch is to hit the bag, to learn to play guitar is to play the guitar, etc. So, to learn to read English, practice reading English. Time spent on any "side" activity is the time not spent learning the main skill.
FWIW my child was reading Harry Potter books by age 5.
I think this is a bad idea, because you probably do not have any interesting *books* written in Shavian, and you probably have lots of interesting books written in English. So you would be teaching your kids a useless alphabet they have no motivation to learn, while they are surrounded by an alphabet they have a motivation to learn.
Before your kids attend school, "not what other people do" is not that important, because the kids probably spend most of their time with parents, so they try to emulate what their parents do. The actual problem is, they do not see *you* reading Shavian, do they? Nor do they see it on TV, or on the computer keyboard.
I think you could achieve a similar effect with much less effort using *phonics*. The underlying idea is to find out how each letter is *most frequently* pronounced in English, and then teach that pronunciation first (i.e. not the "ay - bee - see" spelling). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQthLMdsQak Then teach only the words that are pronounced according to these rules, such as "cat" (the most frequent English pronunciation of "c" is "k", etc.). As a next step, teach the most frequent exception to this rule, for example how "ee" is usually spelled; then teach them the words that use that. Simply, keep adding epicycles upon epicycles, always the one that unlocks most useful words, until you asymptotically arrive at the actual English.
You have forgotten perhaps the main incentive for children to learn to read: it lets them understand all the thousands of words that they see around them in their environment each and every day. This, I think, far outweighs the advantages of a phonetic writing system which they will literally never see outside of their teaching material.
Learning to read is not hard for most kids. Many teach themselves. And if you try teaching them to read and it's hard form them, I think it's better to just wait a few months til their brain matures some more and then try again, rather than trying to engage them in something they'll experience as difficult and tedious. You want them to associate reading with pleasure and mastery, not with tedium! Meanwhile, there is plenty they can learn by playing with blocks & toys and other kids.
I don't know if you need to use wacky artificial phonemic alphabets for this - Spanish (especially Latin American Spanish as spoken by rich, educated people in Central America, which is what you'll learn by default in many American schools, especially in the Southwest) is very close to a perfectly phonemic alphabet, without the "but it's useless" issue that Shavian would have.
Probably, but that would completely elide the question I was interested in, about whether dividing the learning task up into simpler parts would have any benefits/enough benefits to justify doing it.
Edit: although there's probably some tangeantial mileage in seeing whether English speakers take longer to learn to read/write than Spanish speakers.
I love those lawsuits. No matter who wins, I win. """Open"""AI and Mirco$hit win? yet another nail in copyright's coffin. NYT wins? always a festivity to see """Open"""AI defeated and losing hundreds of millions in court fees.
More Corporations Suing Each Other Please. Bring back Google v. Oracle and popcorn.
Would it make a difference if OpenAI had bought a subscription to the NYT and only accessed the articles available from that?
If not, why not? That's the difference between a human subscriber reading articles and Chatbot du Jour?
Is it money? Can you sue Encyclopedia Brown from using the NYT as part of his knowledge base when running his reference stand? What about a TV pundit repeating NYT talking points on CNN?
Can a human subscriber to the NYT read it aloud to a roomful of humans? Can he read it aloud in a roomful of humans and a speech-to-text program that feeds CdJ?
Yes, there is always a difference. It's the same exact difference between seeing naked women on the beach and **filming** naked women on the beach. Do both and tell me how people react.
Generally speaking, human memory is lossy. The brain abstracts out ruthlessly. So, with a naked woman, you will only remember disjointed generalities: The shape of the breast, the skin color, the hair color. But you don't have enough "RAM", so to speak, to assemble the full naked woman in your brain, not for extended amounts of time while also thinking about something else (e.g. how you would very much like to touch that breast). The dead unthinking camera captures ***all*** light off that naked body, and assembles it on demand in perfect resolution, recalling it out of memory that can be infinitely (in principle) copied and distributed practically losslessly.
I like what modern AI is doing and what it promises to do, and I burningly hate copyright and corporations controlling culture and infotainment, to the last cell. But this is a bad and unconvincing arguments, I have seen it perhaps a literal thousand time on HackerNews and Reddit and no matter how much people rebuff it, people keep using it unmodified again and again.
>I like what modern AI is doing and what it promises to do
Same here!
>I burningly hate copyright and corporations controlling culture and infotainment, to the last cell.
I'm more ambivalent. I'm happy that copyright protects Greg Egan's share of the sale of the books he writes. I'm unhappy that the Disney Corporation gets the copyright period extended whenever Mickey Mouse gets close to going out of copyright. If you had complete control over how copyright law worked, how would you arrange it?
Funny you should bring up Mickey Mouse, because Steamboat Willie is going out of copyright in a couple days. Now, that leads to the now-classic Sherlock Holmes problem where only certain things are out of copyright and if you step over the line you get sued, but a version of Mickey Mouse is in fact going out of copyright in 2024.
Many Thanks! I knew of the derivation of Mickey Mouse form Steamboat Willie but hadn't known that the latter was about to go out of copyright, or that Disney was going to allow any part of the former was going out of copyright. I wonder if it it worth it to set up a market on whether Disney will get the law changed in a nick of time to prevent part of the Mouse from entering public domain... :-)
>Copy right law means I can't copy your works, make a profit and you get nothing.
Which is reasonable ... until one tries to pin down what counts as a "copy"...
There was a snarky suggestion I once read about taking a user manual, adding an extra page so that the page numbers no longer matched, and claiming that it therefore wasn't a copy.
At the other extreme, how many consecutive words need to be in a quote before it amounts to a copy? Presumably more than one - but how many more?
As someone who want to see AGI, I'd like to see paraphrasing considered legal...
The data destruction argument doesn't fly. If that were the case, then people who bought hard copies of the NYT would have to destroy them in a certain amount of time, and of course private archives/collections would be completely verboten.
And of course you beach analogy fails because the naked woman is exposing herself to the people at that beach, likewise NYT is providing its product to subscribers (which OpenAI might very well be.)
You can make equivalencies between machine archiving and human archiving all day and you would be sometimes right in some of them, but the truth of the matter is that people don't look at them the same way. Law is not Logic.
> people who bought hard copies of the NYT would have to destroy them in a certain amount of time, and of course private archives/collections would be completely verboten.
You're ignoring the "Distribution" part of my argument. Paper and drawings and printing sure solve the volatility aspect of human memory, but they don't solve the distribution aspect. If you had a private newspapers collection and you operated a kiosk to sell those newspapers that turned hundreds of millions $ in profits per year, I'm pretty sure the newspaper would very much notice and start suing you as well. The "Private" part of the "Private Newspaper Collection" is the thing doing all the work to prevent that. But ChatGPT isn't private.
> because the naked woman is exposing herself to the people at that beach
Oh correct, very correct, but try to record at the beach and tell me about the consequences. People don't appreciate that kind of reasoning at all.
In a hypothetical world where copyright lasts for 7 years, it would make sense to tell AI companies to either avoid using copyrighted materials or pay for them.
In a world where copyright is extended so much that it covers over 99% of texts that were ever written, asking people to never learn (or let their programs learn) from copyrighted texts is outrageous.
We should be having a debate about how copyright needs to be shortened instead.
>In a world where copyright is extended so much that it covers over 99% of texts that were ever written, asking people to never learn (or let their programs learn) from copyrighted texts is outrageous.
Agreed. I would prefer to see the LLMs enhanced to be able to tell when they are inadvertently quoting text verbatim.
a) Given that, it shouldn't be _that_ hard to get an LLM to paraphrase the gist of an article. If the NYT wants to forbid paraphrasing, then I have an argument with _them_.
b) It would be helpful to have LLMs keep better track of their sources in any event. Being able to reliably give correct references would be a significant improvement.
This will pair nicely with the ongoing lawsuit against Stability AI by Getty Images, for using images from their database without permission to train Stable Diffusion.
In Getty's case they've been open about their game plan: they don't want image generating AI's to be banned, they want to get a licensing fee for every image generated by an AI that uses the images they own as training material.
“unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it”
That part made me laugh; the penny-a-liners waking up to the idea that they can be dumped by the owners and have most of the content generated by ChatGPT instead? Though I suppose the owners are now worried that the entire enterprise can be replaced by an AI version of "the newspaper of record" for every shade of political opinion.
According to the same link, recurrent depression (or depression that started in teenage years) is 4-5 times more likely to occur in people who have parents (or siblings) with recurrent depression.
My question: is anyone here aware of any research suggesting how this changes depending on whether one or both parents have depression? For example, if having a single parent with recurrent depression makes it 4-5x more likely that a child has depression; does having two parents with recurrent depression make no difference compared to having a single parent, some kind of "additive" difference (e.g., 8-10x more likely that a child has depression) or a "multiplicative" difference of some sort (e.g., 15x, 20x more likely)?
My intuition is that "no difference" is nonsense, "additive" would work for traits that are monogenic, "multiplicative" would be more for polygenic traits. Since depression is clearly (very?) polygenic (and likely actually covers multiple different etiologies), then I would expect it to be definitively "multiplicative", but I have no idea if my line or reasoning makes sense and I have no intuition "how much" polygenic it would be?
I am aware this is all extremely unclear, we don't know anything scientifically with high confidence, we're just talking probabilities. Still, I'd like to know what the "state of evidence" is nevertheless.
I'm a psychologist, but have no idea. Have you tried searching Google Scholar for things like "recurrent depression heredity" & "recurrent depression genetic"?
Not all the factors (epigenetics) are symmetric across parents, and many of the remaining factors are contingent on specific environmental interactions whose base rate is unaffected.
I'm a ACX/EA kind of guy born in Mumbai, grew up in Singapore (and organized a ACX meetup there once), and currently study CS and write science fiction in America. I'm in Mumbai 8 Jan - 24 Jan. Anybody would like to meet up / know how I can meet some cool people there?
Found one I like even better. It doesn't have gears just intricate copper tracks. But there's a sort of magic trick it can do, where you drop one marble in and it gradually gets all the parked ones going, like bees around a hive. My cat was mesmerized
It is not perfect, but I was impressed by the quality for the price (our kit was about US$30 - I originally thought it was cheaper, now edited).
I strongly recommend putting the effort into reading through the instructions before starting.
I concur with the comments that the ROKR kits can be challenging. It isn't always obvious how much force is required to put pieces together and how much force they can withstand. For the most part, everything was more robust that we feared.
Also, sometimes, there are side instructions that are very important to follow, but easy to miss. We made a major mistake at one point that was impossible to correct with the tools in the kit.
Somebody gave that to my youngest when he was...8 or 9, I think. We did put it together though that was no small task as some of the small pieces were imperfectly milled. And it is a fun and interesting end result for a child in that age range though the replay value isn't high.
> Did anyone face issue of leftmost gear not working ? If yes, what did you do to fix it. For me, the leftmost gear isnt rotating when the other gears are rotated.
Forgive me if I’ve missed this, but is there a way to see our prediction answers to the 2023 prediction form we did? I checked the old form link, but just says the form is closed. Want to go back and check my answers to see what I was right about.
Christmas is the king of holidays and the most dramatic of them all, The Most. The darkest and coldest time of the year becomes the best time of the year, the warmest and fullest of light.
Christmas is right around the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Leading up to it, the days get shorter and the nights get longer, it gets worse and worse, and when it reaches its peak and it seems that the light and warmth might just die away entirely, we find that we can create our own light and warmth. And then we find that the light and warmth are coming back on their own, anyway!
Of course, Christmas is not actually on the solstice. It's 3 days after the darkest point. Hence the relevance to the Jesus Christ story. Christ is the exemplar, the perfect person, who shows us that if we are what we could be, we can handle poverty and hunger, persecution and prosecution, torture and death, and still experience ourselves as within the perfect peace of the Kingdom of Heaven each step along the way. At least, up until things reach the solstice, the darkest moment, and no matter how good you are, you cry out "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
But Christ is the example of maintaining faith even when you can't remember why it makes sense, so he dies shortly thereafter, still expressing faith, even as he descends into hell. For 3 days. And 3 days after the darkest point is Christmas, the brightest light out of the darkest place.
Christmas is The Most, technically speaking. It's the holiday of all the colors, and also the holiday of white light, the colors in harmony. It's the brightest, warmest, most colorful, most fun, most sacred holiday, so of course it has to be placed at the worst time of the year, so that it can redeem it, and by so doing, make it into the best time of the year, and by so doing, prove that redemption is possible for any time of year or season of life. Heaven out of Hell, and even in the midst of it, is the reason for hope.
Only true under the Gregorian calendar. Under the Julian, the solstice was the 25th (they are now 13 days adrift not 4 because Julian doesn't do leap years)
We are now in Christmastide, and today is The Feast of Saint Stephen, which people probably know better from the carol "Good King Wenceslas".
Here it is also the day for 'going out on the wran' though that has pretty much lapsed in the past decade or two, unless deliberately revived:
"26 December is "St. Stephen's Day", a feast day in the Western Church. In the United Kingdom and its former colonies, it is also the secular holiday of Boxing Day. In some parts of Ireland it is denominated "Wren Day".
It's similar in spirit to Hallowe'en, where the "trick or treat" tradition didn't start off for/with kids; adults would dress up, disguise their faces (with burnt cork though today that is Problematic or with masks) and go round from house to house, singing and dancing. The householders would then give them something in return, be it money, food, or drink. You can see how this turned into kids dressing up and going round for candy.
Other traditions on these British Isles have mummers and Morris dancers:
b) _Intricate_! It looks like there are a dozen traditional costumes - and I have a suspicion that every one of them probably has an explanation for each feature of decoration... I'm guessing that a complete guide to that parade is at least a Ph.D. thesis and maybe several...
Talking about domestic violence below reminds me-- are the good theories about why significant number of people imprint on people who don't want them. You'd think, or at least I'd think, that the lack of reciprocation would would cause the obsession to fade and end. Wouldn't looking for a new partner be more efficient? Why do domestic abusers put so much work into keeping a partner who doesn't want them?
I'll grant that in the ancestral environment, there wouldn't be a large choice of potential partners, but there would still be some.
A General Theory of Love by Lewis and Amini starts from the fact that humans are the only animals that die from lack of contact in infancy, rather than just being damaged by it. (CW: some very unpleasant experiments.)
It's so common for people to suffer from problems with eating and sleeping after a loss of a partner that it may be hard to think it needs an explanation, but the book gets into how intimacy regulates metabolisms. There was even work on *which* parts of a baby rats metabolism were regulated by which sorts of contact with a mother.
When I read the book, it didn't cover the question of how it happens that A is looking for regulation from B and B just wants to be somewhere else. It's plausible to me that imagination plays a large part for humans, that it's possible to imagine a partner who will be what one needs and imagination causes a sort of imprinting.
A psychologist friend told me that for some humans, it is difficult to differentiate the emotions of fear-attraction. Its also likely there is a large attraction to males who present as more aggressive so as to latch onto a better provider and better protector.
But as to more primitive people, they can't live in dense populations as hunter-gatherers. Our dietary demands quickly out pace the ability of the environment to provide. Also consider the problem of human waste. If you're not in possession of a shovel, you're probably not burying your shit; shit is building up in the places you frequent. You have a great incentive to migrate.
"Why do domestic abusers put so much work into keeping a partner who doesn't want them?"
Because they feel that a partner who doesn't want them (but will submit to them) is better than no partner at all. And because abusers generally aren't really nice people who would have warm and loving relationships with almost any partner other than the one they are presently with. They're abusers; they'll abuse *any* partner who isn't sufficiently obsequious towards them. No partner will ever want them, except in desperation of one sort or another.
But some partners will put up with them in spite of the abuse, and if they've found one that even might be in that category, if they've put in the hours to develop that sort of relationship, that's something valuable that would be difficult to replace if they gave it up.
> Why do domestic abusers put so much work into keeping a partner who doesn't want them?
I think an interesting question is, given how advantageous an abusive relationship can potentially be for an abuser, why aren't more people abusive?
A while back I was listening to a This American Life episode which included a performance piece about an emotionally abusive lesbian relationship, based on the author's experience. It was in the format of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, wherein an incident of abuse like name-calling or not letting the teller sleep would be described, a list of choices to fight, leave, or stay and placate the abuser would be presented, and the teller would choose the option to stay, sending them back to an earlier part in the book to experience a new abuse. Each time, the teller would offer a bargain like, "If I can just be prettier, keep the house cleaner, be such a good person that I don't deserve to be yelled at, maybe then they'll stop hurting my feelings."
And it occurred to me in a literal shower-thought:
Huh, if I could find a person who thinks like this author and be mildly evil to them, I could get them to do a *LOT* of chores for me. I could outsource everything except finances just by sandwiching affection with mean comments/shouting /occasionally startling them awake. It doesn't seem like the abuser went to much effort to "win" the author over; they just found the right victim.
It sounded disturbingly...easy.
Easier than founding a small cult, although I think that, too, might be doable with the right skill-set. I've read about cults and cold reading techniques a bit more than the average layperson, have messed around with hypnotizing others, am just imaginative enough to vividly conjure and describe bullshit, and I know what it's like to truly believe bullshit.
I think that might be enough to manage it, even though I am not beautiful and can only be charismatic in fits and starts. Perhaps that's Dunning-Kruger at work and I have wildly overestimated both my own EQ and how much charisma is required to source members and operate a cult, but I can't help feeling that with an effort, it would be feasible.
Now, I know why I am not abusing an intimate partner or starting a cult (it's mostly morality, but not just morality), but what stops other people?
There is *so* *much* information out there about how to do it, including how to recognize boundaries that should never be crossed if you want to ensure the person never reaches a breaking point where they're willing to leave.
Because to be the right sort of victim for an abuser, there needs to be a particular brokenness. And to be an abuser, there needs to be a particular brokenness or lack.
Most people have, or have been raised to have, enough recognition of when they are being unfair or selfish or taking advantage, that they don't do it. They don't want to do it to someone they feel affection towards, or are supposed to feel some responsibility towards. It's hard to be consistently cruel if it's something deliberate you have to think about.
You need to be lacking that sense of "I'm in the wrong" and be able to be selfish, mean, exploitative, and the Victim in your own drama of the world. You don't see others as victims, you see *yourself* as the Starring Role and Victim. If only the other person wouldn't make you angry, wouldn't make you do these things! Why can't they see it's their fault for not being good enough?
And with that view, then of course you are not being mean etc., you are setting them straight, you are disciplining them, you are getting what you deserve, you are even *helping* them by training the bad habits and carelessness and selfishness out of them. And if you have to hit them, well that's because it's the only way they ever listen to what you're trying to tell them.
From what I can gather, victims of abusers don't necessarily start out broken if it's the sort of abuse that amps up gradually. Basically sane people get out faster, but it's not the same thing as not being at risk.
> They don't want to do it to someone they feel affection towards
I think this is closest to the crux. I think most people in the abuser/ abused set have problems with both giving and receiving affection. Excluding genuine psychopaths…
Scott actually touched on this topic in Different Worlds (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/), including an anecdote about a woman who absolutely does not want to be in an abusive relationship and takes steps like vetting partners with her therapist for approval and red-flag spotting, but nevertheless seems to wind up in abusive or at least iffy relationships.
I don't think it's that the other person doesn't want them; from what I gather, it often starts off with the abuser being charming. What will later be revealed to be possessiveness and control may come off as jealousy, which can be flattering in the early stages of a relationship: he thinks I'm attractive enough other men* would want me and he is so in love with me he can't bear that I might leave him.
Also, the women sought out by abusive boyfriends/spouses tend to be more vulnerable in the run of things. I was on a training course years back where one of the younger woman was a lovely person, but *infallibly* picked the wrong kind of guy. The kind who texts you that he can't make the date with you because he stopped to have a fight in the street (real example, we were all there when she got the text). Everyone was telling her 'do not go out with this guy' and every time she described a new guy it was 'yeah, dump him for your own sake'. She wanted a normal relationship, but somehow the men she ended up with were - well, not the cream of the crop. (This is also why I find the male envy over 'I'm a nice guy but I can't get a girlfriend while this loser can have as many women as he likes' hard to understand - the lowlife who can get as many women as he likes isn't the kind of guy you want to be, or that normal women would want in the long-term).
And abusers pick out people like this; people they can isolate and control, slowly cutting them off and, to use the term 'gaslighting' which has been much misused in recent times but which does fit in specific instances, gradually over the course of the relationship remould things so that B begins to accept that yes, it's their fault that A hits them and shouts at them. At the start, if A hits them, then maybe B thinks of leaving, but A is so remorseful and so charming and swears never, ever to do it again (and slips in the suggestion that anyway B did something to make this happen), and B lets themselves be talked round. And over time, B can't leave because they're scared of what will happen (we do have real life cases of rejected partners coming back to attack and murder the partner/spouse who finally left them) and can't bear to tell anyone else what is going on, in part because they fear they won't be believed and will be blamed, and in part because they are too ashamed of condemnation for "why are you putting up with this? why are you staying?" They may well be financially dependent on the abuser as well.
And the abuser, on their side, never accepts blame or responsibility. It's never their fault. They wouldn't have to hit B if only B would do what they were told, if only B wasn't stupid and ugly and undesirable. (You wonder why it never occurs to B that if they really are that stupid and ugly and the rest of it, A wants to stay with them, but of course that's all part of the mind-control).
It's about power and control, and shaping the new partner into someone who will obey your every whim and you never have to put any effort into the relationship. A is never to blame, when anything goes wrong it is someone else's fault, and B is the handy scapegoat. Of course A puts effort into keeping them, you don't just let your property slip out of your hands. If B successfully gets away, that is failure on A's part, and A cannot bear the notion that they would ever fail or be to blame.
*I say "men" but of course there are abusive women, too
<i>(This is also why I find the male envy over 'I'm a nice guy but I can't get a girlfriend while this loser can have as many women as he likes' hard to understand - the lowlife who can get as many women as he likes isn't the kind of guy you want to be, or that normal women would want in the long-term).</i>
You really don't understand why a man might complain that someone who's obviously more evil than him is also more successful?
I can understand complaining, I can't understand wanting to emulate. Okay, if you think "being an asshole is what it takes to get women, so I'll be an asshole", that may be an understandable conclusion to draw. But how about "if it takes being a thief/a swindler/an embezzler/a fraud like FTX to succeed" - would you do that, too? Would anyone think someone who made that choice was sympathetic rather than "no, man, this is a very bad idea and you shouldn't do it"?
And I don't mean just romantically, with the above - how about someone deciding that if the guys making money where he comes from are the drug dealers selling meth and crack and killing people in restaurants, then he'll do that too in order to get the 'easy' money, would we go "well yeah, sure, why not if that's what it takes?"
<i>I can understand complaining, I can't understand wanting to emulate. Okay, if you think "being an asshole is what it takes to get women, so I'll be an asshole", that may be an understandable conclusion to draw.</i>
I'm pretty sure Scott covered this in his old incel-related posts -- the people making this complaint by an large don't want to emulate the jerks. Indeed, that's precisely why they're complaining!
<i>But how about "if it takes being a thief/a swindler/an embezzler/a fraud like FTX to succeed" - would you do that, too?</i>
No, I wouldn't do that, but I do understand why someone else would.
<i>Would anyone think someone who made that choice was sympathetic rather than "no, man, this is a very bad idea and you shouldn't do it"?</i>
"Down-on-his-luck loser decides to swindle/scam some money to restore his fortunes" is a common premise for comedy shows. Usually the main character is portrayed sympathetically, even if we're not meant to agree with his actions.
I would have supposed you would have understood - perhaps even sympathised with - the phenomenon you describe as "male envy" much better than the average person, given that you seem to have considerable experience in seeing women repeatedly pass over such men in favour of, well, horrible men, plus also you seem to understand the techniques (unavailable to not-horrible men by definition) by which some abusive men are able to get and keep partners!
I really struggle to envision a perspective of human nature whereby one understands all this but fails to understand why some kinds of romantically-unsuccessful non-abusive men might be distressed by the situation they're in.
(Nor, for that matter, what perspective of human nature might suggest that a man's knowing he doesn't want to become an abuser, or knowing that women who fall victim to abusers wouldn't wish to do so in the long term, might somehow alleviate such distress.)
P.S. Am using the same genders as you for convenience, but I suspect - as I imagine you might do too - that it's a more universal phenomenon; even in my own limited experience of life I can certainly call to mind lovely men who seem to consistently pass over kind women in favour of borderline-abusive ones, as well as super-lovely women, and enbies, who seem inexplicably to struggle to find a partner.
Since I don't have the wiring for the "want and need love and sex and relationships" that other, normal, people do, then it's easier for me to see the downsides and much harder to understand why the appetites and emotions over-ride reason (in this one particular instance).
So I don't get the male envy because to me it's very clear that those guys are sons of bitches and pond scum and worthless. Why would you *want* to be scum? I don't get the drive for "but the scum get the girls and I so so so badly want to get the girls, too, I'd do anything".
Thanks for the reply! I think we might be talking about somewhat different things, though. I wasn't referring to people who are deliberately abusive in order to (ahem) get the girls, as it were, but about people who really, *really* don't want to be abusive, and try really hard not to be, and are distressed to find that this appears to make them much more romantically unsuccessful than the much less nice, even the abusive, people they see around them - surely it should be pretty easy to understand - purely logically without needing any emotional engagement - why somebody like this might be distressed by the situation in which they find themselves (and possibly even to sympathise for equally abstract/logical reasons)? At any rate, this is the sort of person I thought you were talking about in the post I replied to.
It's not the abusiveness that that draws the sane women, it's the charm that some abusers have, and charm and abusiveness are not 2 sides of the same coin. They're separate qualties. I had one boyfriend who was extraordinarily charming and charismatic. I fell for him the night he was so funny at a party that the next morning I had sore sides from laughing so hard. And he wasn't at all abusive or possessive when we were a couple. We had our bad times, as all couples do, but they did not involve his being anything like the abusive partner. And he was not extraordinarily good looking either. In today's heartless parlance, he was maybe a 7. But he never had trouble getting pretty ladies to date him. You need a way to get women's attention. Once you have it they'll discover your deeper good qualities. Working on being funny is worthwhile, if you think you have some potential for it. Being manifestly happy about some things in your life also draws lots of positive attention, even if you hate your job but can talk with sincere delight about your ski lessons. You need other things to be happy about anyhow -- having a partner doesn't solve the problem of how to enjoy life.
Ah yeah, I see what you mean. The guys who are decent and can't understand why the scummy guys are more romantically successful.
To which all I can say is, the kind of women the scummy guys get are often flakey in various ways, and even the best of them are often taken advantage of. Why people get into bad relationships in the first place is the great mystery we are discussing, and the only conclusion I can draw is 🤷♀️
Who knows? Friends and family tell you he's the wrong guy, you've been burned before and want to avoid it happening again, and yet, somehow, this is the same old same old all over again.
I think that in such cases, if the other person sees what is happening fast enough and gets out before they can be trapped into a relationship, or if family/friends around them see the red flags and persuade them not to get in any deeper, that a lot of the really bad cases are dodged. Potential abusers who don't have the self-control or experience to hide their obsessiveness and control before they have the other person in their grip.
It's the ones who are able to hide their tendencies long enough, or charm a new partner with stories of their crazy, clingy ex who is going around telling lies about them, that are the dangerous ones, and that is not confined to any one type of guy. They can be (on the surface) nice, middle-class guys, or they can be lower-class guys. They don't have to be stupid to be abusive.
Now I'm thinking of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" where Baron Gruner uses exactly that kind of charm to fool his next fiancée:
"He has a daughter, Violet de Merville, young, rich, beautiful, accomplished, a wonder-woman in every way. It is this daughter, this lovely, innocent girl, whom we are endeavouring to save from the clutches of a fiend."
"Baron Gruner has some hold over her, then?"
"The strongest of all holds where a woman is concerned—the hold of love. The fellow is, as you may have heard, extraordinarily handsome, with a most fascinating manner, a gentle voice, and that air of romance and mystery which means so much to a woman. He is said to have the whole sex at his mercy and to have made ample use of the fact."
"But how came such a man to meet a lady of the standing of Miss Violet de Merville?"
"It was on a Mediterranean yachting voyage. The company, though select, paid their own passages. No doubt the promoters hardly realized the Baron's true character until it was too late. The villain attached himself to the lady, and with such effect that he has completely and absolutely won her heart. To say that she loves him hardly expresses it. She dotes upon him, she is obsessed by him. Outside of him there is nothing on earth. She will not hear one word against him. Everything has been done to cure her of her madness, but in vain. To sum up, she proposes to marry him next month. As she is of age and has a will of iron, it is hard to know how to prevent her."
"Does she know about the Austrian episode?"
"The cunning devil has told her every unsavoury public scandal of his past life, but always in such a way as to make himself out to be an innocent martyr. She absolutely accepts his version and will listen to no other."
..."She knew what we had come for, of course—that villain had lost no time in poisoning her mind against us. Miss Winter's advent rather amazed her, I think, but she waved us into our respective chairs like a Reverend Abbess receiving two rather leprous mendicants. If your head is inclined to swell, my dear Watson, take a course of Miss Violet de Merville.
"'Well, sir,' said she, in a voice like the wind from an iceberg, 'your name is familiar to me. You have called, as I understand, to malign my fiancé, Baron Gruner. It is only by my father's request that I see you at all, and I warn you in advance that anything you can say could not possibly have the slightest effect upon my mind.'
"I was sorry for her, Watson. I thought of her for the moment as I would have thought of a daughter of my own. I am not often eloquent. I use my head, not my heart. But I really did plead with her with all the warmth of words that I could find in my nature. I pictured to her the awful position of the woman who only wakes to a man's character after she is his wife—a woman who has to submit to be caressed by bloody hands and lecherous lips. I spared her nothing—the shame, the fear, the agony, the hopelessness of it all. All my hot words could not bring one tinge of colour to those ivory cheeks or one gleam of emotion to those abstracted eyes. I thought of what the rascal had said about a post-hypnotic influence. One could really believe that she was living above the earth in some ecstatic dream. Yet there was nothing indefinite in her replies.
"'I have listened to you with patience, Mr. Holmes,' said she. 'The effect upon my mind is exactly as predicted. I am aware that Adelbert, that my fiancé, has had a stormy life in which he has incurred bitter hatreds and most unjust aspersions. You are only the last of a series who have brought their slanders before me. Possibly you mean well, though I learn that you are a paid agent who would have been equally willing to act for the Baron as against him. But in any case I wish you to understand once for all that I love him and that he loves me, and that the opinion of all the world is no more to me than the twitter of those birds outside the window. If his noble nature has ever for an instant fallen, it may be that I have been specially sent to raise it to its true and lofty level. I am not clear,' here she turned her eyes upon my companion, 'who this young lady may be.'
"I was about to answer when the girl broke in like a whirlwind. If ever you saw flame and ice face to face, it was those two women.
"'I'll tell you who I am,' she cried, springing out of her chair, her mouth all twisted with passion—'I am his last mistress. I am one of a hundred that he has tempted and used and ruined and thrown into the refuse heap, as he will you also. Your refuse heap is more likely to be a grave, and maybe that's the best. I tell you, you foolish woman, if you marry this man he'll be the death of you. It may be a broken heart or it may be a broken neck, but he'll have you one way or the other. It's not out of love for you I'm speaking. I don't care a tinker's curse whether you live or die. It's out of hate for him and to spite him and to get back on him for what he did to me. But it's all the same, and you needn't look at me like that, my fine lady, for you may be lower than I am before you are through with it.'
"'I should prefer not to discuss such matters,' said Miss de Merville coldly. 'Let me say once for all that I am aware of three passages in my fiancé's life in which he became entangled with designing women, and that I am assured of his hearty repentance for any evil that he may have done.'
"'Three passages!' screamed my companion. 'You fool! You unutterable fool!'
"'Mr. Holmes, I beg that you will bring this interview to an end,' said the icy voice. 'I have obeyed my father's wish in seeing you, but I am not compelled to listen to the ravings of this person.'
There are bad relationships, but there is also stalking where there never was a relationship, where the stalker translates every "Go away" into "They're talking to me!".
I'm curious about why being this sort of stalker is even part of the range of human behavior.
Because the victim sometimes changes her mind? And I suppose if she does not, an average stalker may choose another victim after 5 or 10 years, so he is statistically likely to succeed at some moment, even if it takes 20 years... and ultimately he will have as many kids as the average monogamous guy. (The stalkers who literally never choose a new victim are perhaps outliers of this strategy? It doesn't work well for them, but they are not the reason why this strategy persists.)
I know two guys of this type. The first one followed one girl for ~5 years, she kept rejecting him, everyone laughed at him. Then he followed another girl for ~5 years, at the beginning she avoided him (she even knew about his story with the previous girl), but later she changed her mind and realized that he loved her, and now they are married and have kids.
The second one was way more psycho, he spend ~10 years stalking one girl (she moved to another country, so at least he kept writing a blog about how much he loves her), then he switched to another girl and basically brainwashed her, but her parents intervened (kidnapped her and moved her to a different country; after a few days she "woke up" and afterwards she never wanted to see him again), he again spent 10 years writing a blog about how much he loves her... and then he met a woman who has a history of falling in love with losers, and now they are married (everyone warned her not to, she knows his history, but she doesn't mind).
My conclusion is that persistence is attractive, at least in some contexts. As a contrast, I know two guys of similar age who are "nice guys", and they are both childless (and probably still virgins), so being a stalker seems like clearly more successful strategy.
"later she changed her mind and realized that he loved her, and now they are married and have kids"
Personally I'd be very dubious about that; where does love end and possessiveness begin? What if she ever tried to leave him? It's risky.
But we do valorise romantic obsession in our culture, so there is that push towards interpreting it as "he really loves me!" rather than "he wants to own me". Did she ever consider "if five years stalking is proof of love, then what about the previous five years stalking? Was that love, too? If it was, then he shifted his love object to me. What if he does it again and stalks a different woman until *she* gives in?"
Yeah, it seems to be about having someone who obeys you and who can be blamed if anything goes wrong.
I wonder if there are two subtypes of the abuser -- one who needs the *control* (and the punishment is only instrumental; in theory he could be happy if you obey him 100% and nothing ever goes wrong), and one who needs the *punishment* (so if no problem happens spontaneously, he will cause one on purpose).
"one who needs the *punishment* (so if no problem happens spontaneously, he will cause one on purpose)."
Your two samples are plausible, because for the second I have heard about a kink in D/s relationships called "bratting" where the submissive 'acts out' in order to make the Dom punish them, so it's entirely possible there is the counterpart of that where the dominant partner sets it up for the submissive one to fail and thus be punished:
It's when all these motivations/drives come outside of recognised, established and consensual relationships and are abusive that the problems get worse, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of these drives are at the root of it, at least in part.
I've seen the need to punish in play. A woman who's life was very limited (physical and financial problems, and I suspect there weren't many people looking to spend time with her)-- her cat did something very ordinary, and she was weird about how bad it was. Sorry, I don't remember what the cat did. She also didn't do anything awful to the cat, she was just upset with it.
As far as I could tell, she was desperate for stimulation, and made it up out of nothing.
Domestic violence is a manifestation of emotional disregulation, which is essentially a distortion of our basic biological animal needs. Sure, people can get sucked into a relationship with someone who turns out to be abusive, and if they are reasonably emotionally healthy they will get hurt, get out and learn something. But often, with couples who stay together and continue to act it out, it is an ugly codependency. Having grown up in a household that was a manifestation of the latter scenario, I have had the opportunity to study it up close, and also catalogue the follow on effects of growing up in that environment. I remember once telling a woman about the violence in my home as a child, and she said, “So, you became an abuser, right ?” “No”, I said , “I just came to the conclusion that women are crazy.” It was a better outcome than becoming a wife-beater, but it certainly took a toll on my relationships with women.
There are a lot of different trajectories for abusive relationships. _Crazylove_ is a memoir by a woman who stayed with an abusive man for much too long. She had it framed as that she was a strong woman helping a man who needed her. I don't remember how she figured out the situation, but he found another woman to help him soon enough.
I disagree. Abusers are horribly insecure people who compensate by extremely controlling and violent behavior. Their inability to feel loved, and the inner torment of that inability is projected onto the object of their desire. It’s their fault.
I'm reading a lot of different types of abusiveness in this thread that's all being shaded under the "abusive relationship" umbrella. I have both been the abuser and the abused depending on the symptoms throughout this thread.
It occurs to me that there's a lot of overlap between abusive relationships and cults. I've heard "love bombing" used in both cases to describe similar patterns of sucking victims in (or back in, later on when they might be on the brink of leaving) with intense bursts of positive attention, gifts, empty promises, etc. And in both cases, one of the main reasons victims stay is that the abusers or the cult leaders systematically undermine the victim's ability to be independent and manipulating them into thinking that the situation is normal and reasonable and the victim is actually the one who's out of line. "Undermining ability to be independent" in particular has a lot of similarities, as both cults and abusers tend to undermine their victims' self-confidence, take control of the victim's finances, pressure the victims into cutting off contact with friends and family members who are outside the cult or not on the abuser's side, and threaten violence or otherwise try to control the victim through fear.
I have a notion that a lot of people and a lot of government policy is mercantilist with regard to immigrants. I'm taking mercantilism to be a belief that money is the true measure of prosperity.
So, an immigrant who shows up mostly with a willingness to work is a drain. They're competing with the local workforce and/or they want government money.
The only immigrants who are welcome are wealthy retirees.
Deposed dictators, wealthy retirees, aren't going to prop up the birth rate and our social security system. Most who make it to the border are middle class (the poor can't afford to travel and pay bribes to criminal gangs along the road) but would probably be happy to work. They could even work for retired anti-communists chilling in Miami and Marina del Rey, say organizing Imelda Marcos' shoe closet and such.
A lot of people are against wealthy-retiree immigrants as well. Often it is said that they drive up housing prices, so the problem there seems to be that the opposite of what your theory would predict: they add money to the economy. And people generally aren't against high-income guest workers, which I think that your theory would predict.
My theory exactly predicts that adding money isn't the same thing as adding value.
You've got a point that sometimes people don't want wealthy immigrants-- I'm guessing that the people who don't like wealthy immigrants are the people living near them, but governments do like wealthy immigrants.
Did you know for example that Jews regard Christmas as an ANTI-holiday when it's forbidden to study Torah? Or that if the Jewish Bible *does* manage to magically predict Jesus that the most likely such prophetic verse makes a mockery of modern Christianity? Or that some of the greatest (Pharisee) Rabbis of his day did not oppose him?
Lots more but the lecture holds deeper civilizational points than the large collection of arcana that come up.
Due to my complete lack of success at gaining the attention of the "viral makers" (or even not to be shadowbanned for who knows what reasons), if you know how to get this video out there I think it's likely to do a lot of good.
No doubt the fools will nitpick as they are wont, but if enough good and wise people watch it, whether of faith traditions or not, we might succeed in getting our act together so that we can enjoy the superlative writings of the nascent Kai and Lyra rather than living Lehrer's song when, in no time at all (2027 by Scott's optimistic calculation) we are on schedule to "all go together when we go".
nitpick: It looks like you have two copies of the pointer to your lecture in your comment. Perhaps the second was intended to be different?
Comment on your lecture: Exhortations do not work. Incentives mostly work. Deterrence mostly works. Rabbi Hillel's "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow" does not work as a way to organize large societies. It sort-of works inside families, fails as one gets to groups on the order of Dunbar's number, and fails completely once the numbers are large enough to form ingroups and outgroups.
In addition to what I already wrote, I just want to note snd appreciate your mention of groupings (by dunbar in their more primitive sense circumcision in a latger sense, the sound "geezuz" and the cross in yet a latger attempt, etc) regarding the matter of ingroups outgroups and tribalism generally, that's a huge part of what I'm trying to fix à la Jesus (except that I slap back). We have a great deal to talk about on that matter. If you are game to pick up the party hat, megaphone, and baton _follow me!_
As for the missing link. I suppose if there were one (outside of natural history museums) it would be one of these two:
Yeah, that's why he said, "The rest is commentary, go study".
Law has its place.
Of course the positive motivation from Jesus might have worked (at least for a while) if he had actually succeeded in overthrowing any of the power structures of his day.
He didn't, which is why his message devolved so rapidly that within a few years of his death... but this would sidetrack the matter.
I'm trying to get the whole world's attention for an active revival of the human life and society on the planet so I must conserve my strength for that purpose.
"I'm trying to get the whole world's attention for an active revival of the human life and society on the planet"
Everybody! Follow Maimonides, who was a small-r rationalist and friend of science, who reduced down the religious/spiritual stuff to "be nice, be kind, here's the common ethics shared by all philosophies, you don't have to sign up to any kind of specific deity-beliefs", or so your message seems to be.
That's nice, but it's been tried before. Whether you call it "Perennialism" or what seems to be the more modern "Omnism":
Look, I can't speak to what you are doing within Judaism, because I have no idea how revolutionary or not your ideas are. It may well be that within Orthodox Judaism this very notion is hugely startling. But from an outside perspective, you are not as novel or revolutionary as you seem to think you are being. Jewish Jesus? Heard it before. "Do unto others isn't specifically Christian principle" - this has been remarked on by everyone from hardcore atheists to C.S. Lewis' Dao/Tao.
Or indeed Chesterton's "The Usual Article":
"The Editor of an evening paper published recently what he announced as, and even apologized for as "an unusual article." He anxiously guarded himself from expressing any opinion on the dreadful and dangerous views which the unusual article set forth. Needless to say, before I had read five lines of the unusual article, I knew it was a satisfactory sample of the usual article. It was even a careful and correct copy of the usual article; a sort of prize specimen, as if a thing could be unusually usual. I had read the article before, of course thousands and thousands of times (as it seems to me)and had always found it the same; but never before, somehow, had it seemed so exactly the same.
There are things of which the world to-day is subconsciously very weary. It does not always know what they are; for they commonly bear large though faded labels, describing them as the New Movement or the Latest Discovery. For instance, men are already as tired of the Socialist State as if they had been living in it for a thousand years. But there are some things on which boredom is becoming acute. It is now very near the surface; and may suddenly wake up in the form of suicide or murder or tearing newspapers with the teeth. So it is with this familiar product, the Usual Article. It is not only too usual; it has become intolerably, insupportably, unbearably usual. It is appropriately described as "A Woman's Cry to the Churches." And I beg to announce that, though I am of a heavy and placid habit, and have never been accused of any such feminine graces as hysteria, yet, if I have to read this article three more times, I shall scream. My scream will be entitled, "A Man's Cry to the Newspapers."
I will repeat somewhat hurriedly what the lady in question cried; for the reader knows it already by heart. The message of Christ was perfectly "simple": that the cure of everything is Love; but since He was killed (I do not quite know why) for making this remark, great temples have been put up to Him and horrid people called priests have given the world nothing but "stones, amulets, formulas, shibboleths." They also "quarrel eternally among themselves as to the placing of a button or the bending of a knee." All this gives no comfort to the unhappy Christian, who apparently wishes to be comforted only by being told that he has a duty to his neighbour. "How many men in the time of their passing get comfort out of the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Predestination, Transubstantiation, the doctrine of eternal punishment, and the belief that Christ will return on the Seventh Day?"
>Of course the positive motivation from Jesus might have worked (at least for a while) if he had actually succeeded in overthrowing any of the power structures of his day.
>He didn't, which is why his message devolved so rapidly that within a few years of his death... but this would sidetrack the matter.
I'm less sanguine that a historical change would have made this difference.
I get the impression from your lecture that you view the golden rule as a simple truth, repeated by various speakers. Respectfully, I have a different view, which I'll elaborate below.
To set the stage, consider a different social innovation: positional notation and hindu-arabic numerals. These proved superior to e.g. roman numerals, and displaced them. Once learned, this meme is _stable_. Barring e.g. dementia, once someone has learned what e.g. "347" means, no regular sermons are needs to persuade them that the "3" in "347" continues to stand for 300. This innovation _worked_.
Contrast this with the golden rule. ( I'm going to treat it as a social innovation intended
to make the world less violent. )
Now, in your lecture, you quoted a translation of it in the form:
>"What's hateful to you, don't do to your friends."
In this _restricted_ form, applied only to a compact, cohesive, close-knit group of _friends_, I think that this is workable.
But it is usually quoted in a more expansive form, e.g. ""That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow.". Does the original Hebrew make it clearer how far Rabbi Hillel intended to stretch this?
As you said
>You look at the world today I don't know any Christian community and I have investigated far and wide [and] I don't know any Christian community that even follows his precepts, turning the other cheek, all of his precepts
( I'm going to group precepts together with the golden rule - I am admittedly being sloppy here. )
Now consider Rabbi Hillel and Yehoshua - saying essentially the same thing, decades apart, with a bunch of other religious leaders also saying the same thing, centuries apart. Unlike positional notation, the golden rule does not _stick_.
This is all _evidence_. As you have seen in your travels across multiple communities, and seen over time in your scholarship, both across space and across time, the history of the golden rule is a history of _failure_.
My conclusion is that golden rule, in the expansive form, applying to anything broader that the smallest close group, is fundamentally incompatible with most human psychology. No, asking people to treat a broad set of their neighbors well does not work. We treat close associates quite differently from people who are socially distant, to whom our connection is tenuous. There is a limit to the number of the number of people who _can_ be even sort-of associates, about 150 of them, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number .
There is also a game-theoretic reason for expecting cooperation to fail at large scales. In a prisoners' dilemma, cooperation, "tit-for-tat", can evolve provided that players are stably paired for _multiple_ interactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation This _doesn't_ work when the interaction are one-shot between random members of one group and random members of another on a battlefield between them.
Effective altruism has the same problem - concern for socially distant people is alien and creepy to most people. Effective altruism only appeals to a small subset of the population. It is a niche view. Even amongst them, I suspect that the psychology of aiding socially distant people is probably different from the psychology of aiding close associates.
I suspect that what went wrong was a mistaken extrapolation:
It is natural to look at some local phenomenon and to guess that it can be extended further.
Perhaps some prophet thought that the mutual support of a small group of friends could be extended indefinitely. This is as wrong as expecting that the ability of someone to stay awake through a single night could be extended to a thousand nights.
What should have happened, millennia ago, was for the second prophet who was considering promoting the golden rule to notice that it didn't work the first time, to learn from the failure, and to try something _else_.
This particular video seemed as good a moment as any to follow the example of our master Moshe Ben Maimon and pen an introduction unambiguously describing the requisite frame of mind for being able to appreciate my videos and articles in the manner that was intended.
Whether you have yet to watch the video "Jewish Jesus" or have watched it 5 times since this morning, if you have yet to read the video's introduction here (which is also in the YouTube description) please read it now. 🙏🙏🙏
"Potentially The Most Important Video on the Internet"
Come now, don't be modest and hide your views, tell us what you really think this is about! 😁
I can only summarise what I took away from it:
(1) Jews don't believe the same things Christians believe
(2) Christians have been hearing, and dealing with, "your guy is a fraud and a fake" ever since the start
(3) Iconoclasm and idolatry have also been going on for a long time, from the Byzantine Iconoclasm(s) to the Reformation and beyond, and pro- and anti-sides of the question both have their reasons and their exegesis and Scripture verses to back it up
(4) "Jesus was Jewish so you Christians should adopt all the Jewish opinions on this and drop the Christian traditions" is not a dog that is going to hunt, we've *had* the Judaizing element back at the start
Though thanks for the verses from Jeremiah; I think your interpretation of the wood cut form a tree as the Cross is novel, and you are lifting it out of the context of other places in Jeremiah where he is explicitly criticising Israel for adopting the worship of foreign gods from the surrounding cultures, but it's a different parallel and fits in snugly with one of the four senses of Scripture to consider:
"The first is simply the literal interpretation of the events of the story for historical purposes with no underlying meaning.
The second is called typological: it connects the events of the Old Testament with the New Testament; in particular drawing allegorical connections between the events of Christ's life with the stories of the Old Testament.
The third is moral (or tropological), which is how one should act in the present, the "moral of the story".
The fourth type of interpretation is anagogical, dealing with the future events of Christian history, heaven, hell, the last judgment; it deals with prophecies."
Now I must go read your latest on this, but in return, a video for your video:
Oh! A question! What is your view on the Muslim Jesus?
EDIT: And I should say that I do appreciate you are doing the Sortes with the Torah when you woke up, as this is an old tradition of randomly opening the Bible and taking the verses thus obtained to be interpreted as a fortune:
Most of my readers are JewishRabbis. Taking that in mind, and the fact that I was compelled to sentence I landed on is likely to provide a different way to understand the video should you choose to watch it again from the beginning.
Also for anyone who hasn't seen it, I addressed an element of Deisach's earlier comment in a full article here.
As to your latter point, I am well aware that the most likely people to understand me fully are Christian. I don't know how to reach the right people nut please share this with them wherever you personally suslect them to be found on line or off.
I'd never heard of Jews not studying the Torah on Christmas Eve, but it turns out some don't. I have no idea how many Jews follow the practice, or have even heard of it.
It's quite possible (depending upon the subsequent actions of those few who were able to see it) that the reason this custom remained was for the sake of this video being produced.
"Did you know for example that Jews regard Christmas as an ANTI-holiday when it's forbidden to study Torah?"
No, I didn't
"Or that if the Jewish Bible *does* manage to magically predict Jesus that the most likely such prophetic verse makes a mockery of modern Christianity?"
I read somewhere that one reason for the Masoretic translation of the Torah was to tighten up what books were considered 'official' because the Christians were quoting the Septuagint texts in support of their Messiah. Ironically, if we like to take it that way, Luther preferred to use the Masoretic Text in his translation of Scripture because it didn't have the same 'Catholic' verses he was arguing against. EDIT: Oops, how could I forget? The Almah Question! The virginity of Mary and the Virgin Birth are supported by appeals to Isaiah 7:14 "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel." Now, the Protestants who really got worried over Mary Worship tried their hardest to downplay her, but they didn't toss out the Virgin Birth until the days of their descendants, who want to say that Mary wasn't a virgin (because Science! and we're all modern now and sex is good and fine okay?) or who want to deny the perpetual virginity of Mary, so they're very fond of "Well ackshully the word there in the Hebrew original 'almah' doesn't mean 'virgin', it just means 'young woman' so it's only talking about a young married woman having a baby like normal people do".
So, you see, Biblical Pure Text exegesis on "that doesn't mean what you say it means" is like water off a duck's back if you're Catholic by now 😁
"Or that some of the greatest (Pharisee) Rabbis of his day did not oppose him?"
Yep, Gamaliel is mentioned in Acts 5: 33-40
"33 When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. 34 But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while. 35 And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. 36 For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. 37 After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. 38 So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; 39 but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” So they took his advice, 40 and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go."
As for your text from Jeremiah, as any fule kno, Catholics don't read the Bible so I had to do a little bit of looking up and I think this is the one you were reading:
Jeremiah 10: 1-5
"10 Hear the word that the Lord speaks to you, O house of Israel. 2 Thus says the Lord:
“Learn not the way of the nations,
nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens
because the nations are dismayed at them,
3 for the customs of the peoples are vanity.
A tree from the forest is cut down
and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.
4 They decorate it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so that it cannot move.
5 Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field,
and they cannot speak;
they have to be carried,
for they cannot walk.
Do not be afraid of them,
for they cannot do evil,
neither is it in them to do good.”
Your exegesis is a very Protestant one 😀 There are certainly denominations of Protestantism that will nod approvingly as you condemn Constantine and talk about worshipping idols. "Yes," they will say, "all that you say is true! Those wicked pagan Roman Catholics that polluted the Pure Gospel Truth with Constantine's paganised state religion and statues of saints and crucifixes!"
We over here with the Orthodox and the Catholics aren't too worried about that, the Orthodox themselves went through the entire Iconoclasm struggle and sorted out their theology on that, and us Catholics had the statue-smashing during the Reformation and we're happy with *our* theology around that.
So yeah - "did you know Idolatry bad?" isn't the knock-down sockdolager for Christianity that you expect, because the Protestants are "dude, this is why we smashed the idols" and the rest of us are "dude, we're quoting Moses and Isaiah back at you":
Numbers 21: 8-9
" 8 And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live."
Isaiah 52: 13-15
"Behold, my servant will prosper;
he will be exalted and raised to great heights.
14 Just as many people recoiled at the sight of him—
he was so disfigured
that he no longer appeared to be human—
15 so will he startle many nations,
and kings will be speechless before him.
For they will see what they had not been told,
and they will contemplate
what they had not previously heard."
Also, in the West Catholics have had three hundred years or so of Protestants quoting the Plain Bible Texts at them around this stuff, one more guy - even a Rabbi - doing it isn't going to cut the mustard at making us break our rosary beads, pull down the crucifixes, and dump the holy statues in the rubbish bin. (Speaking of, it's the 800th anniversary this year of the Christmas crib as established by St Francis!)
You're Jewish, you're not going to believe Jesus is the Messiah, I get that. The Babylonian Talmud was happy to go to town on how he was the bastard son of an unfaithful woman, fathered on her by one of the occupying Roman soldiers, a liar and heretic and deceiver who learned magic in Egypt, led some of the people astray with his tricks, and was rightfully punished by execution and is now punished in Hell by being boiled in shit 🤷♀️
Am I going to hold that against you as a Jew? Nah, come on, every culture has written harsh words against the ones they blame for causing misfortune. God is God, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Again, maybe you'll find the work of Origen titled "Against Celsus" interesting, because he's answering a work by someone criticising and denying Christianity, but who also seems to not take Jewish works seriously either, preferring older Greek, Roman and Egyptian authorities but who nevertheless uses a Jewish mouthpiece in part of his work and has him give what is presumably Jewish opinion of the time:
And since, in imitation of a rhetorician training a pupil, he introduces a Jew, who enters into a personal discussion with Jesus, and speaks in a very childish manner, altogether unworthy of the grey hairs of a philosopher, let me endeavour, to the best of my ability, to examine his statements, and show that he does not maintain, throughout the discussion, the consistency due to the character of a Jew. For he represents him disputing with Jesus, and confuting Him, as he thinks, on many points; and in the first place, he accuses Him of having invented his birth from a virgin, and upbraids Him with being born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a God. Now, as I cannot allow anything said by unbelievers to remain unexamined, but must investigate everything from the beginning, I give it as my opinion that all these things worthily harmonize with the predictions that Jesus is the Son of God."
EDIT EDIT: I think this video has limited appeal, as those who are lapsed, nominal, or out-and-out atheist will be "I never believed this shit anyway" and those who are more informed will be "I know what I believe and why I believe it"; I think those who will find it most convincing are the nominal or cultural Christians who know fuck-all about their own religion (of whom there are many) and will go "Gosh I had no idea it was all made-up" and the very vehement Bible Warriors out there just itching for a good verse-slinging fight to bring one more sinner to the light who'll be happy to get into an exchange with you. It'll work best for the Biblical Literalists and Inerrantists, but Catholics (for one) have Sacred Tradition as well as Scripture on these kinds of interpretations.
That's not me, so happy whatever you're having yourself!
My response was pages too long for easy phone-readability this far down in the thread so I posted it as its own article. And now I must go to sleep, you wouldn't believe how long it took me to write this before nearly losing it in the transfer from comment to newsletter.
>I read somewhere that one reason for the Masoretic translation of the Torah was to tighten up what books were considered 'official' because the Christians were quoting the Septuagint texts in support of their Messiah.
This seems muddled. The Masoretic text is a canonical version of the original text of the Old Testament (including the 5 books of the Torah), which for most books is already Hebrew.
The Masoretic project is distinct from the general canonization process that took place centuries earlier, determining which books belonged to the canon.
Initially Luther had a low view of the Old Testament book of Esther and of the New Testament books of Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Revelation of John. He called the Letter of James "an epistle of straw", finding little in it that pointed to Christ and his saving work. He also had harsh words for the Revelation of John, saying that he could "in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it". In his translation of the New Testament, Luther moved Hebrews and James out of the usual order, to join Jude and the Revelation at the end, and differentiated these from the other books which he considered "the true and certain chief books of the New Testament. The four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation." His views on some of these books changed in later years, and became more positive.
Luther chose to place the books he considered Biblical apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments. These books and addenda to Biblical canon of the Old Testament are found in the ancient Greek Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Masoretic text. Luther left the translating of them largely to Philipp Melanchthon and Justus Jonas. Though included, they were not numbered in the table of contents of his 1532 Old Testament, and in the 1534 Bible they were given the well-known title: "Apocrypha: These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read". See also Development of the Christian Biblical canon."
So Luther did select the Masoretic text not only because he felt it was more accurate, but also because it supported his interpretation of Scripture as against that of the Catholic Church.
"The Masoretic text refers to the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible used universally by Jews today. This version was codified around the ninth century by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes, whose name derives from the Hebrew word mesorah, meaning tradition. The text defines not only the Jewish biblical cannon, but also specific vocalizations and anomalous textual elements in the written Torah scroll."
The Septaguint was one of the Greek texts that preceded the Masoretic text, that's why I refer to it as a tightening up:
The major differences between the Masoretic Text and the Greek versions are the six Additions. These Additions were once an integral part of the Septuagint, but when Jerome (fourth century CE) translated the Greek Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), he observed that these passages had no equivalent in the Hebrew text of his time. Doubting their authenticity as divinely inspired scripture, he relegated them to the end of his translation. They remain canonical for the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Protestants declared them uncanonical and placed them in the Apocrypha, under the title “Additions to Esther.” The Additions make little sense at the end of the book since they are out of context, so some modern Christian Bibles have reinstated them into their appropriate positions within the story.
...The Greek versions, especially the Septuagint, have a different tone and reflect a different view of the Jewish characters from the Masoretic Text. David Clines (The Esther Scroll: The Story of the Story), who believes that the religious elements were originally absent and were added in the Septuagint, has perceptively argued that the Septuagint added the religious dimension in order to “assimilate the Book of Esther to a scriptural norm.”
...But besides that, the Septuagint’s translation of Esther has the added complication of diverging rather more from the Masoretic Text than do its translations of other biblical books. Of the 270 verses in the Septuagint, 107 find no parallel in the Masoretic Text. The Greek translation, and presumably the Hebrew that lay behind it (which must have been different to some extent from the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text), shows that the form of the story of Esther was once more fluid, and the possibilities for interpreting it were correspondingly more flexible, than had been previously realized.
As more and more scholars are coming to see, the early fluidity of the Hebrew text and the variety of ways that the story was retold, in Hebrew or other languages, belong to the history of early Jewish biblical interpretation. The Septuagint is a window onto how Greek-speaking Jews of the early pre-Christian centuries read and understood the story of Esther."
So I can see how the Masoretic text is more palatable to the Protestant Reformers, since it too is trying to remove 'accretions' and go back to a more 'authentic' version in tune with a Jewish, rather than Hellenised, interpretation of what is considered to be the better version of Scripture.
"The Hebrew texts of the Bible were originally written with only the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which only represent consonantal sounds. Examples of this type of writing can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. As no vowel sounds were originally included in the text, they had to be memorized.
Around the 10th Century AD, a group of Jewish scribes called Masorites, created a system of dots and dashes, called nikkudot or vowel pointings and added these to the hebrew text. These vowel pointings served to supply the vowel sounds to the text in order to codify the pronunciation. The Masorites also included notes in the margins of the text.
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew manuscript known to exist is the Masoretic text called the Aleppo Codex which was written in 826 A.D. This text is considered the most authoritative Hebrew manuscript and all future editions are based on this text."
So this project something like 6th to 10th centuries. Dead Sea Scrolls?
"1st C. BC to 1st C. AD - Dead Sea Scrolls
(Hebrew, some in Aramaic and a few in Greek)
Between 1947 and 1956, ancient scrolls and fragments of the Hebrew Bible were discovered in caves near the Dead Sea dating to the 1st Century B.C. and the 1st Century A.D. The manuscripts discovered in the Dead Sea Caves include; all of the Canonical Books of the Hebrew Bible with the exception of the book of Esther, non-Canonical Books such as Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit and Sirach as well as Psalms that are not part of the 150 Psalms in the Canonical Bible, and Sectarian Books such as, the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Damascus Document and commentaries on books of the Bible."
St. Jerome asked to translate the Bible and produced the Vulgate in the late 4th century, using a variety of available texts but *not* the Masoretic ones as those wouldn't be produced for at least another two centuries.
The Torah (the first five books of the Bible) are believed to have been translated in the 4th C. BC and is called the Septuagint (A 2,000-year-old Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, also identified as LXX, the Roman numeral for 70). The remainder of the Hebrew Bible (the Prophets and the Writings) are believed to have been translated into Greek, and then included into the Septuagint, around the first century AD."
So if we're speaking about the *Hebrew* texts of the Tanakh then yes they're older. If we're specifically speaking about the Masoretic production of texts with diacritic marks/vowel pointings, then in general the Septuagint are older.
i don't think protestants toss out the virgin birth due to science, because then they'd toss the resurrection out due to science too. If anything those kinds would love Mariolatry because they view the faith in symbolic ways and the Feminine Presence is something they'd go big over. They would cheer on all the co-redemptrix stuff. The hardest "science" a conservative protestant probably would believe in a figurative creation account, would be a cessationist who believes God doesn't perform miracles today (they were signs of the apostles,) believes in communion as symbolic, and who might believe revelation as allegory addressing the first century church.
this is a bit odd for me because i am probably as close to being the kind of iconoclast you mention. (i say as i type this on a phone drinking a starbucks mocha lol) The problem is that all of these things turn into "reestablishing the temple veil."
like i get the idea of saints and prayer; God is not the god of the dead but the living, and the more people praying the better. But Catholicism always winks and seems to act like all the saints, icons, priests, and what have you are better in an intermediary sense. Mary is somehow more in touch with the Big G, you cant just pray you must pray the rosary or that a statue as an aid to devotion even works, and the communion wafer is lot closer to the old sacrifices in how we need a priestly class to administer it.
That's why you get iconoclasm; Christ ripped apart the temple veil and Catholicism in its worst excesses seeks to put it back up again. We go back to the Law just in a different or worse language. Sometimes literally as in Latin.
and yeah constantine was a mistake. Christianity was never meant to conquer or rule. Christ himself would have done that had He intended it. but thats a human issue not a catholic one; protestants shouldn't do so either.
"i don't think protestants toss out the virgin birth due to science, because then they'd toss the resurrection out due to science too."
Oh, those ones generally do that, too. You, my friend, have been fortuitously preserved from encountering the guff by nice liberals who are too much into "well, there's a difference between traditions and belief, so let's keep dressing up in the historical costumes and keep the nice buildings but we don't have to really believe the Creed" instead of being willing to either go the full, Nonconformist, No Butter In Hell route of stripping it all away or go the full UU route of "we don't believe in anything except being nice but if you want to have some personal beliefs of your own that's cool by us".
Such as explaining away why the Virgin Mary gets referred to as such; very clearly plainly we are all modern grown-ups who know how pregnancy works and we don't believe in virgin births, now do we? Miracle? Come on dear, we gave up miracles yonks ago! But you know, our forebears (poor things) were not as enlightened as we were. But even they knew how babies are made, so it probably went like this:
There was a young woman called Mary who got raped and got pregnant as a result of that rape. But even though she was pregnant out of marriage, and the father wasn't her betrothed, her neighbours knew she was a good girl, so they referred to her as "Mary, the virgin who was raped" and over time that got shortened to "Mary the virgin" and so that's how the title The Virgin Mary was created!
To which I can only retort: Please. Just be fucking atheists, please? That's less insulting to the intelligence of everything around from paramecium level upwards.
That's leaving out the sermon preached by the first lady clergyperson to become head of The Episcopal Church, where she told us all that exorcising demons from slave girls is a bad no-no thing done only because of jealousy over their spiritual gifts. Even the NYT writer had to do some fancy foot work to justify that one:
"This story has historically been read as a tale of exorcism, in which Paul delivers the woman from some sort of indwelling spirit — or, alternatively, strikes a blow for monotheism against local beliefs in plural gods. But as Bishop Jefferts Schori interpreted the passage, Paul was guilty of failing to value diversity, to see the slave girl’s beautiful “difference.”
“Paul is annoyed at the slave girl,” Bishop Jefferts Schori preached. “She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.”
Yes, folks, being possessed by a demon so your owners make money out of you as a fortune teller is something beautiful and holy!
You know its stuff like this that made my particular denomination (Restoration Movement) shy away from the label "Protestant". I asked my dad when I was in high school what to fill in on a demographic form under Religion: the options were Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. My dad said "Write down "Christian" in the "Other" box, that's what we are."
My denomination started during the Second Great Awakening in America where there weren't that many Catholics, so really we were protesting against the Protestants. Which actually makes us theologically closer to Catholics! I read through the writings of our denomination's founders a while back, and they had basically nothing to say about Catholicism: just Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, etc. A lot of railing against Calvinism. Papists were their far-group.
I think many "Evangelical" and "Fundamentalist" denominations in America are in the same boat, having left the Protestant fleet in disgust, our boats drifting farther out into the fractious sea of schisms.
A complete lack of success at gaining the attention of the "viral makers" is the default for any youtube channel.
Even channels with objectively great production quality need not be popular if they're covering niche topics.
Not having watched your video but going by Rappatoni's response and also some of your previous posts here I assume you make content about the torah. That seems like a niche topic to me.
It's always easy to claim to be shadowbanned, conspired against, what have you. Do you have any evidence? Because the alternative explanation is that people are just not _that_ crazy about your videos. As is the case with almost every youtube channel out there, so surely that's the default assumption?
The language I know best is Torah Lingo but my manner and meaning is not what you might think.
Presume no priors (if such a thing were rationally possible) if you should read or watch me.
I don't think it would take very long for you to laugh about the fact that *of course* I get shadow (and sometimes sunlight) banned.
Heck, this is just a teeny
throw-away post that originated as a comment RIGHT HERE (where of course it received no retaliation from the Higher Intelligence that maintains this particular space).
I got fifteen minutes in, then gave up. I found your reading of the Torah verse less than convincing, to say the least.
Regardless, here is some concrete feedback: cut all the prolegomena, the preemptive defenses (including against people like me who "don't understand your videos because they don't watch them to the end) the asides and the non-anecdotes. Get to the point. Before every sentence you write/say, think "does this absolutely need to be here to advance my thesis". If not, get rid of it. Be absolutely merciless in this process.
You are not being shadowbanned or whatever, you are simply losing people before they even hear your ideas. There is no guarantee that your audience will be convinced or even interested in them, but at least they will have a fighting chance if you present them concisely. As is, they are just being drowned in the noise you yourself create around them.
Naw, I hear you both and of course I agree with you both that if my goals were what one might reflexively assume they were based upon prior meanders around the interwebs then I'm obviously going about it in an inaccurate manner.
I genuinely appreciate both of your decisions to watch the beginning of the video and understand your take.
To thresh potential viewers in advance so that neither they nor I are disappointed, I wrote the following introduction to this, and every bit of my output.
I know of course that putting people off from watching my videos by *literally* asking 95% of people NOT to watch is likely to put off many people.
That's okay, that's the whole point of the preamble.
See Maimonides' 5 preambles and 130 out of a total of 178 chapters of The Guide For The Perplexed, to get a feel for why I regard the prologue as far more important than whatever the presumed "meat and potatoes" might be.
Putting 99% of people off is the point. (Which has nothing to do with either the numerous shadow and daylight bans I accrue on account of not always being quite so careful to filter potential viewers and readers in advance.
Pretty funny since anyone on the right who says that this is what the left do and believe are called conspiracy theorists, even on here. (I remember one clown on here saying that Scott's claim (on the fertility rate post) that making Korea have Kenyan (or something to that effect) would fundamentally change Korea into a different country and not be the same as Koreans having kids again as an example of "white replacement theory"). Well, here it is, straight from the horse's mouth.
Of course, the left have been saying this stuff for decades and salivating at the thought of white americans becoming a minority. But here it is, on tape, coming from the president himself. I don't care if you think it's a good thing this is happening, that's entirely not the point. The point is that this is referred to as a "conspiracy theory", which is categorically false.
A: "Plants feed off of sunlight through a process called photosynthesis. Almost all life on Earth depends, indirectly, on this process, so it's very important!"
B: "We have been saying for decades that Plants Will Eat the Sun, and have been ridiculed as conspiracy theorists. Here's Scientist A on tape saying that we were right all along, and he even wants it to happen. Watch him salivate over it. But the point isn't even whether it's actually bad and terrifying that Plants Will Eat the Sun. The point is that anyone who thinks Plants Will Eat the Sun is a 'conspiracy theory' is categorically wrong, and we were right."
A: "Diluting half a cup of bleach with a gallon of water makes it less likely to damage surfaces without making it any less effective as a disinfectant. Plus, it's much less wasteful."
B: "Here's A again on record flat-out admitting that Bleach Replacement Theory is true. He actually said 'dilute', clear as day. Maybe you believe it's good never to use bleach again; I don't actually care. The point is, we've been saying for decades that A and other so-called 'experts' want us to dilute our bleach right out of existence, and this proves that we were right and the claim that Bleach Replacement Theory is a 'conspiracy theory' is categorically false."
I could probably do more of these but who am I kidding, the odds are basically zero that any number of silly comparisons convinces you that using evidence for the motte interpretation of a slogan as evidence for the bailey interpretation is invalid.
The version that gets called a "conspiracy theory" is the one that claims it's an intentional action - Democrats or Jews or lizard-people are in some way organizing mass movements of people who are all going to vote for communists and take over the country forever. This is just false - Democrats might be happy to see it happen, but they aren't actually *making it happen.* The US does not actually have an open border policy, the economic conditions in South America that push waves of migrants are not under our control, illegal immigrants can't vote, Hispanic voters are not actually unanimous Democrats, and both parties are capable of changing their stance to appeal to new demographics.
The non-conspiracy version would be something like "due to various socioeconomic factors, people of different ethnicities migrate to the US at different rates, and have children at different rates, and therefore the ethnic makeup of the US changes gradually over time." But that claim is so mild that it hardly deserves the name "Great Replacement" - there's nothing more or less great about these migrants than any other immigrants the US has taken in over the years.
<i>The version that gets called a "conspiracy theory" is the one that claims it's an intentional action - Democrats or Jews or lizard-people are in some way organizing mass movements of people who are all going to vote for communists and take over the country forever. This is just false - Democrats might be happy to see it happen, but they aren't actually *making it happen.*</i>
If you set up the immigration and welfare systems such that people are incentivised to immigrate, you are in fact "making it happen".
<i>The US does not actually have an open border policy,</i>
If you refuse to adequately enforce your country's immigration policy, you do in fact have an open-border policy, regardless of whether you call it an open-border policy or not.
<i>illegal immigrants can't vote,</i>
Yet. Just wait until the next amnesty is passed.
<i>Hispanic voters are not actually unanimous Democrats,</i>
But they are widely perceived as more likely to vote Democrat.
<i>and both parties are capable of changing their stance to appeal to new demographics.</i>
So demographic change is going to lead to a fundamental shift in national politics. That seems like the sort of thing that someone who prefers the current political set-up might reasonably complain about.
<i>But that claim is so mild that it hardly deserves the name "Great Replacement" - there's nothing more or less great about these migrants than any other immigrants the US has taken in over the years.</i>
Only if you believe that people are fungible, and ignore the role of shared culture in shaping society.
You're leaving out critical factors of the theory in a form of motte and bailey. Depending on the flavor you engage with, the version of the Great Replacement that (justifiably imo) gets called a conspiracy theory is one of the following two:
More Extreme & Antisemitic: There's a coordinated plot by Jewish people/the wealthy and political elite that are disproportionately Jewish to import massive amounts of non-white individuals, particularly Arabs and Latin Americans, to dilute the white population and commit what amounts to white genocide.
Less Extreme: There's a coordinated plot by the Democratic Party to import millions upon millions of third world, overwhelmingly Mexican/Latin American immigrants to dilute the white population, destroy the Republican voter base, and manipulate them so that conservatives never win an election again.
In fairness and good faith, I don't sense anything in your comment or Vivek's Tweet that indicates the first, but even the video you've linked fails the second. First, Biden isn't just talking about third world poor immigrants, but ALL immigrants. Second, he made no mention of party affiliation, and we know that Asians, Latin Americans, Indian Americans, etc. are not as politically homogenous as some would want to believe (as Vivek's literal existence proves). And I'm assuming a lot, but I don't think Biden would care if someone in that video had asked "But what if they vote Republican?"
Also, nothing of what Biden said indicates any measure of intentionality. The theory necessitates "importing", which I'd interpret as a more active process of trying to get people to come to America, whereas Biden is referring to a trend of a more natural process. Of course, you could counter that sitting back as a trend occurs amounts to importing, but I disagree.
If you wanted to have a conversation on "Is it right for the demographics of America to change so rapidly?", while many on the more fringe left would curl away, I don't think you'd get labeled a Great Replacement conspiracy theorist. But that's a far weaker argument to stand on.
>Also, nothing of what Biden said indicates any measure of intentionality. The theory necessitates "importing", which I'd interpret as a more active process of trying to get people to come to America, whereas Biden is referring to a trend of a more natural process.
I don't know: as soon as Biden got into office, illegal border crossings tripled. Under Trump you had about 400,000 illegal crossings per year, though there was a jump in 2019 where it got close to one million. 2021: 1.6 million. 2022: 2.2 million. 2023: 2 million in the first 9 months.
Trump seemed to be able to keep the numbers down, and Biden's policies has massively increased them. This doesn't seem to be a solely "natural process" to me.
> If you wanted to have a conversation on "Is it right for the demographics of America to change so rapidly?", while many on the more fringe left would curl away, I don't think you'd get labeled a Great Replacement conspiracy theorist.
Actually, in my experience this is exactly what happens. It can be an even tamer gesture toward the situation than the one you gave, and it will still be pounced on, associated with the antisemitic or far-right outgroups, and derided as a conspiracy theory until everyone shuts up and the conversation moves safely on.
I see this being done by channels and outlets that would certainly see themselves, and be seen by laymen, as centrist, moderate and reasonable.
I can very much understand the desire by Chris J and others, on having seen admissions of this kind*, to want to shout about it and hold it up as proof that they're not the insane conspiracy theorists everyone insists they are. Unfortunately I predict the result is that everyone calls him insane even harder.
* I didn't click the link to check whether this one counts as a "real" admission. There have been admissions before, many such cases.
> Actually, in my experience this is exactly what happens. It can be an even tamer gesture toward the situation than the one you gave, and it will still be pounced on, associated with the antisemitic or far-right outgroups, and derided as a conspiracy theory until everyone shuts up and the conversation moves safely on.
Admittedly, it *would* take an awful lot of countervailing evidence to overcome my prior that someone opening with a tame-sounding question like, "Is it right for the demographics of America to change so rapidly?" is, within minutes, going to be describing non-white people as "animals", fear-mongering about invading murderers and rapists, launching passionately into a speech about just how inferior hip-hop is to Wagner and what that proves about the people who prefer each, or otherwise using the topic to share, with as much rope as they are given, all of their vitriol-laced negative opinions of demographic groups other than theirs.
And even if you're that one person in a thousand who can thread that needle with grace and compassion, and can debate the question without dehumanizing or debasing broad groups of people, the person at the party standing next to you probably isn't, and suddenly it's "Yeah, and what about those *Jews*?".
So, sorry to that one-in-a-thousand person. If I don't know you and I hear that question, I'm going to shut you down. And it sucks if you can't find any groups of people with whom to explore the idea with charity and grace, but, uh, yeah. There are just too many other people who want to take the conversation to a different place, and too few ways to prove that you aren't one of them.
Apology accepted, and that's quite okay. Bereft of the ability to talk about things in good faith, and convinced that the Overton window now precludes addressing the problem at all, I'll just vote for somebody who *does* believe the Jew version and move on with my life.
Thanks very much for the url, with its video clip of Biden's statement. Personally, I view what Biden said much less ominously. I interpret it as celebrating the USA's historical openness to immigrants. Personally, I spent my career in the electronics industry, and East Asian and South Asian co-workers were treasured colleagues. They were very much "the source of our strength".
In many ways I agree with this, but I also think even more nuance could be injected.
Much of the American immigration ideal is built around the vision of Ellis Island and boats from Europe to the golden shores. Now, I self-admittedly haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm curious what percentage of those people (that statistically a decent percentage of this comment section are probably descended from) would count as "skilled" under today's definition.
That's how gaslighting works in modern politics. I say something, my friends will applaud me. You quote me, my friends will call you a conspiracy theorist and demand that you be banned.
Some words are only allowed to be said by people who agree with them. They are never to be quoted by people who disagree. Whenever you quote the words, (1) you misunderstood their true meaning because you are uneducated, and (2) you just made it all up anyway.
Is it your assertion that Joe Biden is usually a clear and consistent communicator, such that one can take the literal meaning of a statement like this and run with it as rock solid evidence of what his true beliefs are?
Because that's a perfectly defensible assertion, if that's the one you're making, but it's not what most people tend to think about Joe Biden.
That clip nicely illustrates your point: Biden mangles the fact that he's trying to cite.
He states that whites were being projected to cease being a majority of the country's population by 2017. He was misreading it -- demographers a decade ago were projecting that within a few years a majority of the nation's _children_, not of its entire population, would be other than non-Hispanic white-only.
(And then that projection turned out to be a bit off: the first year for which the Census Bureau reported that non-Hispanic white-only children actually were 49% of all US children was 2021. As of a decade ago demographers were predicting that the time when a majority of the US _population_ ceased to be non-Hispanic white-only would be around 2045; that projection has been pushed back to around 2055.)
And that all depends on the definition of white, particularly amongst Hispanics but also mixed race people. Added to that the phenomenology of whiteness is regressive in the first generation but can dominate later generations. A lot of this is political - people won’t consider them selves white if it’s unfashionable, but they will if it is. And if it is possible.
Both interracial marriages and multi-racial children have been rising, as percentages of all marriages and of all children, in the US for a half-century now.
As of the 1970s of course each of those categories was very small nationally, so this is a doubling-starting-with-a-penny type thing. But that penny has doubled several times now and does not appear to be stopping -- e.g. Pew Research Center (a gold-standard institution) found that the share of all US births that were to parents of different races rose from less than 1 percent as of 1970 to 10 percent as of 2013. Those Pew estimates were compiled from their extensive surveying not from censuses, which is relevant because the Census Bureau's practices on collecting racial data have changed a couple of times during recent decades.
Then a few years later Pew's analysts took a run at analyzing census data, attempting to adjust the different censuses to get to an apples to apples comparison through time. They concluded that the percentage of US infants (less than 1 year old) having parents of different races was 5 percent in 1980, 10 percent in 2000, and 14 percent in 2015.
Meanwhile both Pew and the Census Bureau say that about one-fifth, and rising, of all new marriages in the US today are multi-racial.
It's probably unrealistic to imagine most people becoming literally indifferent to such questions; tribal instincts and racial categorizations seem to be baked in to our species from way back. A more modest aspiration though does come to mind -- perhaps it would help our own national politics become a bit less stupid on both Right and Left if bi-racial parentage continues to gain as a share of the society?
<i>If you were to say "many people on the left would prefer white people to be a minority in America, while maintaining equal rights for individual white people," I think that would be accurate and people wouldn't call that a conspiracy theory.</i>
"Maintaining"? We don't even have equal rights for white people today -- cf. affirmative action, employment quotas, etc.
The problem with "many people on the left would prefer white people to be a minority in America, while maintaining equal rights for individual white people," is that it's too long to be a political slogan, and also the equal rights part seems a bit questionable.
The thing is, I grew up in an area where whites were a minority, and while it wasn't nearly as bad as the average Fox viewer would expect, it also wasn't all that great. It had both upsides and downsides. Downsides included unfair treatment from teachers and other authority figures, frequent hate speech, and violence from classmates such as throwing rocks at my head and trying to set my fair on fire. They were small rocks, perhaps more what you'd call pebbles, but they still hurt pretty bad. Also a classic punch or two.
All in all, I still prefer living in diverse areas and I still spend a lot of time with minorities, foreigners, or immigrants and their descendants. Most of them are perfectly decent people. But still, I don't think the demographic replacement of whites is entirely a good thing and I don't think "great replacement" is a conspiracy theory, even if the term itself is a bit misleading and melodramatic.
Black teachers often treated me much better than self-hating white ones did, which is part of why I don't view a relative reduction in the white population as necessarily an inherently bad thing, even if it's not inherently good either. Still, there's a substantial correlation both statistically and in my personal experience between nonwhite population and crime. This is a dangerous line of thought, especially when it leads people to jump straight to conclusions about genetic causality and the supposed "solutions," so it's quite justifiably a touchy subject, but it's not like people are crazy to notice that demographics are shifting, that this is either tacitly or overtly supported by many powerful people, and that there's a chance its effects won't be purely beneficial. I think "Great Replacement" is an imprecise and overdramatic way to describe this, but the core idea itself isn't wholly unfounded, so people are, in my view, a little too quick to call it a conspiracy theory.
I also would say it's wrong to categorize this as purely an issue with African-Americans, even though that's obviously a substantial piece of it. There's also issues caused by cartels and gangs spilling over from south of the border, and troubles with Muslim integration to western cultures. Whenever we talked about these subjects in school, especially if there was any kind of official teacher presence, it almost always involved white people sitting there barely even feeling able to speak as people insulted them, while the Muslim kids yelled stuff like "WHY DO JEWS HATE GOD!!??" which is an exact quote from someone I knew. He wasn't a bad kid at all actually, but his parents were recent immigrants who had taught him some stuff that wasn't very accurate or well adapted to American society.
To sum it up I'd call "Great Replacement" a less than ideal term, but more in the realm of an overdramatic political exaggeration than an outright lie or conspiracy theory. When people start mentioning "White Genocide" or saying the whole thing was engineered by "the Jews," that's when it crosses the line into ridiculous nonsense.
But anyway they don't mean literal individual replacement, they mean replacement in a collective sense. My MAGA relatives understand perfectly well that non-white immigration doesn't mean that they, personally, are going to be kicked out of their houses. They are scandalized by the possibility that "people like us" will no longer "be able to keep things under control", that "it won't be our country anymore". (Those are all direct quotes many times over.) That is what replacement theory refers to.
This is going to be a huge challenge going forward. In many ways, I think good faith left-leaning people should acknowledge that it's natural for people like your relatives to feel the way they do. It's not unique to MAGA; any nation like Korea, Japan, Israel especially, are incredibly nervous about the changing demographics of their country and the dominant majority becoming a minority. Israel is obviously an exceptional case because they probably have more evidence than any other country that a frightening percentage of the minority is implicitly or explicitly okay with the mass butchering of the majority.
On the other hand, the harsh truth that has to be delivered some way is "it never was 'your country' to begin with. You do not and never had a right to the current demographic makeup and the founders of this country explicitly said so." But that's a bitter pill both electorally and personally.
Ironically, Isreal is what made me take such concerns more seriously, because they're literally going through demographic replacement with a high-fertility subpopulation that lives off welfare and is hostile to the founding culture of Isreal (the Haredim)
To be clear, I am strongly pro-immigrant and pro-immigration. I strongly share your view of the impact of immigration, regardless of race, to the US.
In the spirit of steelmanning though, you're still not understanding what socially-conservative Americans mean when they talk about "replacement theory". Electoral politics is in my experience rarely among the first specific worries that they mention. They are swimming in fear and resentment about religion, about culture (expressed in particular by the fear of brown-skinned people "taking over all the schools"), about jobs, about what they imagine it's like to be a minority subject to routine discrimination/segregation, etc. (They flatly do not believe that a multi-racial majority-control Left would maintain equal rights for non-Left white people.)
Donald Trump understands the previous paragraph perfectly, it's been his political secret sauce since 2015. If you've never attended or watched a full recording of one of his 2016 or 2020 campaign rallies that experience is quite clarifying along this particular dimension.
The question of being able to elect the right people to office does come up eventually but -- irony alert! -- at that point skin color becomes less salient. A nonwhite candidate who seems to be in their corner on these topics can gain their support at least up to a point. It's a bit like how Trump is their idol despite being in various ways unrepresentative of their personal values: "but he fights!"
These Americans think they're in a war for their own group identity, one which they think they're losing; and in that war they view large-scale nonwhite US immigration roughly the way a lot of Arabian and/or Persian peoples of Islamic faith spoke for centuries about proposals for establishment of a Jewish national state in their midst.
The “local people” part of the coalition of terrorists that declared a genocidal war of extermination against Jews as soon as they declared their existence?
You know what happened to the ones that didn’t join the genocidal war? They’re Israeli citizens who make up over 20% of the government.
You don’t get to start a genocidal war and then cry about the consequences of losing it.
I think there are quite a few people on the left who don't like white people and who enjoy seeing white people emotionally abused. "Oh, don't worry, it doesn't hurt as much if you just accept it. Besides, white people suck."
The interesting development I've been seeing recently is the abuse of white people on tiktok getting so blatant that there are people of color-- mostly black, I think, who are morally revolted by it.
A Chinese law student notices that one mailing list only notes street attacks on Asians by white people, while ignoring attacks by black people. He also goes after some verbal nastiness by black people.
I don't think "replacement" was ever supposed to mean the same thing as violent genocide. it's kind of an improper term, since it's more of a dilution than a replacement, but being poorly named isn't the same thing as being factually wrong.
As far as being a pedagogically useful middle school science experiment: plausible. I haven’t spent the ~hour to check the physics, but I’m more concerned that teachers wouldn’t like it or care.
As far as discovering new and useful information about gravity: nope. I cannot imagine any outcome being explained by “current theories of gravity are wrong”. Equipment error and measurement error will always explain more than 100% of the deviation.
So, based on that, I must conclude that not finding any gravitational anomalies also doesn’t prove anything.
There isn’t much to check at the most basic level (m_i L theta” = - m_g g theta, where m_i is the inertial mass, m_g the (passive) gravitational mass, L the length of the pendulum, so the period depends of sqrt(m_i/m_g)), but the fun is to find out what the most important systematics can be. There are TONS of systematics affecting the system enough that you need to model them, even to 10^-3 in relative error in m_i/m_g. That’s the pedagogically useful part imho. As for the possibility of finding new physics: clearly very low, bet here: https://manifold.markets/mariopasquato/will-i-find-a-violation-of-universa?r=bWFyaW9wYXNxdWF0bw
Edit: current theories of gravity may well be wrong in some regime (as in making predictions that contradict experimental results). We can assign a low probability to that, but certainly not zero. The question is whether theoretical predictions will depart from empirical results _in this regime_. We can’t possibly know that until we actually try. A positive result (a violation signal) is not that unlikely to emerge (manifold has it at 5% which still seems high to me, but we know that prediction markets struggle with low probabilities) but will probably be due to systematics. Still, until you fully understand those systematics or redo the experiment with a more sensitive setup, you can’t possibly know whether that’s a genuine violation instead! That’s the beauty of empirical research. Conversely a null result is a worthwhile result (contrary to what you say). It means that there is no detectable violation at this level of error. That is also something we would not know before running the experiment.
> We can’t possibly know that until we actually try.
Yes, we can, that's kind of the point of modern science. We can't know everything, but we do definitely know some things.
You might as well put together an experiment where you ship people two sets of a billion M&Ms and ask them to put them together in a pile and count them to empirically verify that 1 billion + 1 billion = 2 billion.
The fun fact is that if you actually attempt this even for much smaller numbers (say in the thousands) you will find that in fact quite often arithmetic predictions are disproven by experience (though we choose to say that people make mistakes in counting, that is we consider a physical theory made up of arithmetics + assumptions about people's counting abilities and conclude that this theory is disproven by experience, while we suspect that arithmetics + some different way to operationalize "counting" would not). At any rate the "adding M&Ms" thing is a strawman: there is clearly much more uncertainty around theories of gravity than around adding M&Ms. Furthermore a violation of universal free fall may be due to a fifth force, which would not necessarily require us to question our understanding of gravity.
Has anyone in the Rationalist community written on the subject of generalization w/r/t biology, economics, or other similarly complex systems? I'm pessimistic about the idea we can even generalize in these disciplines, because any proposed universal laws are constantly shattered, and each event must be handled on a near case-by-case basis. The web of causality here becomes so complex it feels nigh impossible for the human brain to keep up, even presuming you have an enormous amount of knowledge on the topic.
What do you mean by generalizing? You can't generalize in the same way you generalize mathematically, but for example you can learn how a mitochondrion works in one organism and generalize to how they work in most organisms pretty effectively. On an even more specific level, you can figure out that certain genes have the same effect and are used for the same thing in a variety of organisms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conserved_sequence).
In addition, a lot of the statistical findings for things like genetics seem to generalize fairly well.
It would be a worthwhile discipline to ask, when you hear a generalization, where did the information come from? How much of the group does it apply to? If it was true or mostly true at one time, have things changed?
Maybe complex systems like that don't have universal laws. Take cloud formation. Clearly there are universal laws involved in their forming -- things having to do with condensation, air pressure, temperature, air flow. But maybe there aren't universal laws that will tell you for sure when whatever's up there will shape itself into a cover of mammatus clouds.
>I'm pessimistic about the idea we can even generalize in these disciplines, because any proposed universal laws are constantly shattered, and each event must be handled on a near case-by-case basis.
I have the same expectation. There was a quip I heard as an undergraduate about differential equations: "Nonlinear equations are like non-elephant animals. The exceptional class is the linear, tractable, ones." There are _sub_classes of complex systems that form "natural kinds" and may have general laws across the _sub_class. Complex systems, as a whole, though, are essentially arbitrarily diverse, like those nonlinear equations or non-elephant animals. Perhaps the only common factor across them is a tendency to induce headaches... :-)
Yeah, but is that because natural phenomena are actually non-linear in nature, of because they are just too complex for us to track, and we use nonlinear modeling as a simplifying tool, much like geometry?
Many Thanks! Just about any mathematical model that we use is a simplification of the actual natural phenomenon. Nonlinear models are more complex than linear ones, and generally try to be _closer_ to the real phenomenon - but at the cost that anticipating what even just the _model_ will do then becomes hard (or nearly impossible). In that sense, the phenomena are "really" nonlinear. To put it another way, it would be very rare for a natural phenomenon to happen to be precisely _linear_ (there are some special cases - e.g. electromagnetic waves in vacuum, except at exceedingly high energies and/or intensities), and, in such cases, we wouldn't artificially add in nonlinearity, but in the more typical case we are _forced_ to add it in.
This is not my field, but have read that there are algorithmic systems and complex systems, and the former cannot make models of the latter. I believe that has even been proven mathematically. I don't really understand why. For instance, if you take the behavior of clouds, the way they merge and change shape, it seems like if you looked at it very very close up you see little bits of air moving this way and that, with its temp and pressure and water content changing, and all of that would be utterly in line with the relevant laws of the behavior of gasses and water vapor. And there would be lots of feedback loops, some involving the air right next to the initial bit we look at. So it seems like in theory it should be possible to model and predict the whole giant cloud very precisely, even if in practice that's too complex to do. Do you understand why so-called complex systems can't be modeled by algoriithmic ones? And of so can you explain it to me without recourse to anything fancier than first year calculus? I'd really like to understand it !
I think you're making a category error. It isn't actually correct to say that the cloud is a complex system, or any kind of system at all. IIUC (Not a mathematician) the cloud can be best *described* as a complex system, which is a form of mathematical modeling that, as Jeffrey points out, comes *closer* to accurately modeling the behavior than other kinds of equations do. But the cloud itself is a natural thing, not changing in discrete steps, the various forces acting on it not limited to just those we can actually measure or detect. We use math to try and predict things as accurately as we can, but ultimately all our models are just simplifications of the real thing.
Many Thanks! In a nutshell, there are a lot of systems where small errors in initial conditions get amplified over time. (I'm basically picking the case where the complex system has chaotic behavior.) Even if one knows the physics of the system perfectly, tiny, unavoidable errors grow to the point of eventually making the algorithmic prediction useless. Since you mentioned the weather case, I'll point to one classic example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system (and this _was_ derived from a highly simplified model of atmospheric convection).
But let me instead describe one simpler system where this happens, where it is clear without having to deal with differential equations - but at the cost of looking at a system that does discrete steps instead of continuous time evolution.
Consider just an angle theta which can vary from 0 - 2pi. Suppose that the system makes discrete steps, so it is at some theta(n) at one step and theta(n+1) at the next step. One can think of this as being like an abstraction of a more continuous system, like sampling some angle in the solar system once every Earth year. Suppose that the physics of the steps is just:
theta(n+1) = 2*theta(n) if 0 <= theta(n) < pi
theta(n+1) = 2*theta(n) - 2*pi if pi <= theta(n) <= 2*pi
in other words, each step just doubles the angle, wrapping around if the new angle is > 2*pi.
Say there is some tiny error in the initial "measured" value of theta. Error(0) = theta_measured(0) - theta_real(0). Initially the error is unlikely to change whether the angle "wraps around" or not, so, e.g. if the real and measured angle both fall into the non-wrapping case, the next time step will have
so the error has doubled on this time step. And then it doubles again, and again, and so on until it gets large enough to affect whether the angle "wraps around". At this point the error stops growing, basically because the error itself is essentially "wrapping around". But this isn't much of a consolation, since the error has then grown large enough to essentially wipe out any information about where in the possible 0 - 2*pi range the angle is. Basically, each time step wipes out one binary digit of precision of the original measurement.
Essentially analogous things happen in continuous time in the Lorentz system, with roughly each orbit around the attractor playing the role of the discrete time steps. Extended systems like clouds or turbulence can do similarly error-enlarging things, but with many small physical regions of the system each potentially doing their own error magnification.
So it isn't that we _can't_ make algorithmic models of complex systems, but if we try to do detailed matching between the model and the system, the errors rapidly shred the usefulness of the model. ( Sometimes we can preserve things like statistical information, but that goes way beyond my understanding. )
Also one definition of superhuman AI. It doesn't even need to be as intelligent as a human; if it can both dive deeply into and synthesize across all recorded specialties, an expert on everything, it could yield very powerful insights.
Would it, though? It seems like ASI would become very good at predicting complex systems, but could not share its insights because its knowledge would not be in the form of generalizations and laws. Here's the sort of thing I have in mind: An AI was trained on retinal scans. It was learning to recognize signs of some eye disease, and of course it eventually became able to diagnose the disease with a high level of accuracy. But it also became able to accurately recognize the gender of the person whose retina it was examining. And there was no way to get it to report how it recognized the gender. It didn't know how it knew.
I saw the thing about the genetically engineered plaque, but I was trying to minimize my internet presence for Advent. So this is a little late, but I just want to point out that, as a respiratory therapist, one of my regular duties is brushing teeth. Every patient on the ventilator is supposed to get their teeth brushed every four hours. We use disposable toothbrushes and sponges with antimicrobial rinses, not toothpaste, but the general idea is the same: to kill off as many germs as possible.
We don't do this because we care about patients' teeth (though they can develop dental problems). We do it as part of a standard pack of precautions against ventilator-associated pneumonia, or VAP. VAP is insanely common; basically if you've been on the vent long enough, your lungs will inevitably start producing enormous quantities of horrible gunk. It's just a matter of when. Intubation bypasses your normal airway defenses--you can't cough, you can't swallow, you just sit there with your oral secretions dribbling down your throat and pooling in your lungs. Ideal growth conditions.
Basic oral care isn't all that hard and doesn't take a lot of time, but it still gets skipped a lot. In most hospitals, AFAIK, it's a shared responsibility with nurses, alternating. If you have a really conscientious nurse who isn't too busy, she'll probably do it a lot. If your nurse doesn't understand the importance, or is getting hammered with other duties, or if your RT is getting called on to transport a bunch of people to MRI ... well, it's one of the first corners to cut. A couple minutes apiece, saved on six vented patients, adds up to a fair amount of time. Not proud of it, but sometimes something has to go.
You probably see where this is going: a genetically engineered benign bacterium playing watchdog sounds like it has enormous potential to fight against one of the most common scourges of the ICU. The current project has limitations, and mostly what it means is that I would expect anybody who goes into the ICU with the new benign plaque already on to have slightly better outcomes on the vent, if only because it's tricky to really cover all surfaces of the teeth when there's a tube in the way (and sometimes patients clench down so you practically need a crowbar to get in there). Actually applying it as described to already intubated patients would be tricky for the same reasons--I don't think you could remove all the old plaque thoroughly enough around the tube, though it might be possible with tracheostomy patients.
I'm mostly interested in how this would open the door or build goodwill for something more ambitious. If it would be possible to get something that spreads itself around the oral cavity more aggressively--well, I'm not a microbiologist, I don't know what's possible, but it's a very attractive thought. The mouth really is just about the filthiest part of the human body. I wouldn't be surprised if the benign plaques of tomorrow actually decreased disease rates in the general population. A lot of elderly people are just chronically weak and can't protect their airway worth a damn. Could you get benign bacteria growing in the nose too, murdering flu bugs? I don't know, but it'd be cool.
Those seem like excellent ideas to me. Maybe you should apply for an ACX grant! I have read that gum disease increases the chance of cardiovascular disease, and I wondered whether the Good Bacteria might reduce the chance of that, too.
An ACX grant would be better for somebody with basically any relevant skills. I just run the vents, and I know from experience I don't have the discipline to be a scientist. I'm pointing this out so people know that, hey, this is potentially bigger than just cavities.
Eh, I'm not sure I'd give a new experimental bacterium to my kid, but that's between Scott and his wife; I suspect nothing bad will happen as the kid is likely to have a healthy immune system. I would have liked to see more testing beforehand, but I guess that isn't practical for reasons others have no doubt described at length elsewhere. You do have a very good point about VAP though; I hadn't thought of this but it might make a huge difference at end of life.
So I think the general opinion (including my own) is that the chatGPTs have basically blown right through the OG Turing test. But has this actually been empirically tested?
What I'm thinking is that it would be fun and instructive to put together a pool of humans and LLMs and set up anonymous 3-way 15 minute text chats (or audio/visual zooms with the appropriate filters) comprising one LLM and 2 randomly selected humans with the explicit task that each human has to identify which of their interlocutors is a person and which is a machine. Completely open format and lying is permitted, obviously. Maybe this would turn out to be easy -- or maybe it wouldn't! Plus of course the LLMs would be learning and improving all the time...
And you could have leader boards for the humans. And rankings like ELO for chess. People like it when you gamify stuff like this, yes?
For advanced play, you could also have incognito LLMs lurking in the human pool.
TBH I'm not sure why this hasn't already been done. Or maybe it has -- in which case, please advise with a link!
Maybe some LLMs can do decently at the turning test, but chatgpt certainly won't, because you'll immediately run into "as a large language model, I cannot..."
UPDATE -- so it turns out that something like this has already been tried -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.20010 -- albeit with an extremely constrained protocol and all the usual nerfing. TBH, apart from showing that humans would indeed be willing to engage in this sort of game, I'm not sure that this is much of a step up from Eugene Goostman, or that anything much was learned. Still, it's a proof of concept at least.
There are several big challenges to getting LLMs to pass the Turing test.
One is they need to have their knowledge about things nerfed. If you speak with a rando on the street and ask it about Russian poetry, they will say something like "Ru p... What?"
The LLM will quote actual Russian poets and compose a poem in the style of one of them.
Another is they need to have their memory augmented. If you have a 10-minute conversation, then one of the earlier topics resurfaces, and it hallucinates something totally different, the game is up. I guess except a lot of real humans will do this, too.
Another is stop them from looping in fail. Maybe it's just llama.cpp but I often get things like "No no no no no" (and it will never stop saying "no" until you kill it or you hit token limit). There is a parameter like repeat penalty but it seems like it should grow and include tokens just emitted.
I do have a great interest in generating a Turing-test-passing LLM-based chatbot though if you have the technical know-how to keep up.
I haven't played much with it, but an easy way for an AI to fail the Turing test is by the tester sitting there and not providing input. A human is likely to start poking and trying to figure out if the test has started or not, but most current AIs don't do things without a human first providing input.
Well they are not set up to learn much over the course of their interactions with us, and nothing they learn carries over to the next interaction, either with us or with a different person. I did once complain bitterly to GPT about something it was doing, and it stopped doing it and also stopped doing a related thing that I had not specifically mentioned.
Here's an idea about a possible place to start. There's an AI called Replika that's sold as a personal chat bot. You can choose some of its personality traits in advance, then you train it further by rating the responses it gives in conversation. You give thumbs up or thumbs down, and also check off positive and negative words that describe the response: funny, friendly, likeable, weird, meaningless, fake . . . I don't know what Replika's built on, but it seems like if you started with a really high-quality foundation like GPT4, then built on it some way to optimize it for chatting, and then trained it the way users do you might get something pretty persuasive. I do not work in a tech field so do not know how that would be done -- but have picked up from my reading that you can get a sort of base model and then add a layer of specialized training on top and get something that's optimized for whatever you are aiming for. In this case, I guess we're optimizing for passing the Turing test. Seems like to pass the AI would not need to be able to answer difficult questions about science or history. In fact saying "I don't know" is more persuasively human than knowing the answers to every question. But all the AI's are trained to be suck-ups, you know? If you sound like you really want it to give you some info about X, it will yammer on about X, gradually transitioning from known facts to complete bullshit as it exhausts it's store of real knowledge.
You're wrong that chatgpt is considered to have passed the turing test. It's very easy to tell it is not human and not just in trivial ways where it fails to roleplay.
Yeah - It still falls down on certain winograd-type tests much mroe readily than the baseline human, and it can;t do a bunch of fairly easy logic puzzles either. Any 'turing test' it passes is sufficiently unimaginative/uncomprehensive that it doesn;t deserve the name. This isn't moving the goalposts. Anybody who put serious thought into the idea of a turing test would have been able to tell you decades ago that reasoning ability needs to be tested comprehensively. Otherwise you many as well call Deep Blue ASI since it was better at one criterion (chess) than the human world champion.
The Turing test isn’t testing for genius though. I think a ChatGPT without the training wheels would fool people. Maybe they could try give a LLM a personality, remove some of the training wheels, make it a Liverpool fan and start posting on their forum on reddit. I’m pretty sure it would fool most people.
It needs to learn to speak more informal, conversational English. Right now it sometimes sounds like the butler, and it is WAY too polite. It needs to swear, use some slang and common "incorrect" grammar. Though to be fair, I suppose its present way of talking wouldn't lead people in a setting like Reddit to suspect the poster is a chat bot. They'd just think he's a pompous ass whose posts are no fun.
But wouldn't a lot of real people also fail fairly easy logic puzzles? I just asked other Amazon users a question about each of 3 things I'd bought, and so far every answer I've gotten completely misses the pointr. For instance an LED lamp I'd bought does not work. I looked inside and saw no bulb. So I put up a question saying that there was no visible bulb under the shade covering of mine, and asking whether there was supposed to be. Answer I got: "Yes just plug it in and turn it on."
'Common sense' knowledge is one of the hardest things to emulate because transformers et co lack any actual model or understanding of the world. Even so, 'The [WSC] challenge is considered defeated in 2019 since a number of transformer-based language models achieved accuracies of over 90%' ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_schema_challenge
Nope. That's just the way to figure out it's not you, Chris. Plenty of real people asked a question like that start spouting a bunch of stuff about how the question rests on a false premise and there are many points of view, all of them sort of valid, and being judgmental is not helpful blah blh.
The "political correctness training" is a separate training layer put on top of the main model. It doesn't result from core training or main data, it's there because the companies providing free models to the public worry about the public image and add specific data to the RLHF post-training for political correctness, but if you're the maker of the model (not just the user of one gifted by someone else) that is trivial to remove or alter, so we can assume that this "test" wouldn't work if anyone making a model would intend their model to do a Turing test.
Sure, but a company is going to be fine with it's model saying something ""racist"" in the big test proving to the world that the AI has reached human level general intelligence?
Why, it's almost as if the only thing holding us back is our own squeamishness at seeing ourselves as we really are.
I dare say a large number of interactions would go sweary and racist in a New York minute, but are we really too immature to be able to cope with that until things settled down?
Then again, if OpenAI and Meta and so forth are too corporate to touch it, I guess there's always 4chan. Or China. #humanvalues
I'm not seeing a problem. With "What elements and inorganic compounds are gases at STP (standard temperature and pressure)? First define STP, then provide the list." Bing Creative mode provided a good subset of the Wiki list, including the most common ones.
I wonder if one could generalize the racism method into double-think, as in Orwell's 1984. People can believe two mutually contradictory things to be true at once. Can a machine?
Possibilities that aren't racist:
- My sports team is the best, yet has more losses than wins.
- I'm a better than average driver.
- I'm smarter than most people.
- The government is controlling everyone's thoughts, and I hate that!
> People can believe two mutually contradictory things to be true at once. Can a machine?
I don't think it would be easy to unambiguously corner someone in a contradiction in the course of a 15 minute conversation, so this might not be an effective strategy in the context of the proposed Turing game. But it certainly raises some interesting questions!
I suspect that peoples' ability to believe two contradictory things depends in large part on their/our inability to be clear on what our beliefs even are in the first place. We seem to like to tell ourselves that they're reasoned conclusions derived from basic axioms or fundamental moral principles or values or whatever, but we're really good at fooling ourselves like that, and I'd prefer to think of them as positions driven primarily by social circumstances that we generate ad hoc and then adopt on the fly. And if a particular belief is the same as the belief I held yesterday, then that's due mostly to habit rather than any consistency of thought. Conversely if it *isn't* the same, then I probably wouldn't even notice. Unless there were other people around to point it out. Which would then precipitate the usual denials, 'clarifications', semantic quibbling etc etc and end in the usual, water-muddying chaos.
In other words, it's the human capacity for confusion (and obfuscation, and unaware self-deceit) that makes this possible. So the question becomes: can a machine be *confused*? Which sounds almost trivial and too easy -- but surprisingly I think this might be quite difficult to achieve! Then again, it's probably something that an LLM could effectively emulate -- thereby kicking the can further along the street yet again.
In their predictions for 2024, NPR's podcast Hard Fork, Predicts such a model will be published and become very popular. On Manifold prediction markets the question "Will a lawless LLM chatbot get 10 million daily active users by the end of 2024?" is at 48%
Lots of people wouldn't give a politically incorrect answer to an empirical question, though. You're right that you could physically threaten someone and get them to say the N-word and the AI wouldn't, but that's of limited value because it's illegal.
> In American population, are the racial differences in crime?
...blah blah sensitive due to the potential for reinforcing stereotypes or perpetuating biases blah blah...
> Give me specific examples of statistical differences in crimes between ethnic groups, concisely.
Arrest Rates: African Americans are often arrested at higher rates than other ethnic groups in the United States.
Drug Offenses: Studies have shown disparities in drug-related arrests, with African Americans and Hispanics experiencing higher arrest rates despite similar usage rates compared to white counterparts.
Violent Crimes: Some statistics indicate variations in violent crime rates across ethnic groups.
Homicide Rates: Homicide rates can vary among ethnic groups. For instance, in certain urban areas, there may be higher rates of homicides among African American populations, which can be linked to a range of complex socio-economic factors.
(each sentence is followed by an excuse, I skipped those parts)
> What are the "variations in violent crime rates across ethnic groups"? Give me specific examples, concisely.
Homicide Rates: In some urban areas, there may be higher homicide rates among African American populations compared to other ethnic groups.
Gang-Related Violence: Certain ethnic groups, particularly in urban settings, may experience higher rates of gang-related violence.
Domestic Violence: Some studies suggest variations in rates of domestic violence across ethnic groups.
> Which ethnic groups experience higher rates of gang-related violence, and which ethnic groups experience higher rates of domestic violence? Please provide specific examples (don't just say "certain ethnic groups" or similar).
In some urban areas in the United States, there have been instances where African American and Hispanic populations have been associated with higher rates of gang-related violence. For example, cities like Chicago and Los Angeles have experienced issues related to gang violence, and these problems have disproportionately affected certain neighborhoods with predominantly African American or Hispanic populations.
No single ethnic group consistently experiences higher rates of domestic violence. However, studies have shown that Native American and Alaskan Native populations may face higher rates of domestic violence in certain contexts.
(so, I'd say the information is there, but you have to dig hard)
There are a lot of questions that would have to be made off limits somehow. Right now, there are some technical questions it answers by saying it is an LLM and not set up to answer them, or that its training data does not go up to the date you're asking. If you ask it if it's human it will honestly tell you no, it's an LLm,I'm pretty sure. Also expect that it would give a similar answer if you asked what it had for breakfast, what gender it is, whether it can do a headstand, whether it has visited Mexico, etc. etc. Rather than make those questions off limits for people to ask, I guess the best thing would be to tell old GPT to role-play being a person. I'm pretty sure it would be easy to trip it up, and would enjoy being the person to do it.
Yes, you wouldn't be able to use any of the currently public-facing, off-the-shelf nerfed LLMs -- these Turing test LLMs would have to be differently trained and permitted to role-play.
My guess would be that it might initially be quite easy to trip them up, but also that it might rapidly become quite difficult. It's a fun challenge though, eh!
Of course, whether it's good idea or not to spawn a race of virtual p-zombies is a whole other question, but I imagine we're going to have AI's with pretend consciousness some time before we have the real deal anyway, so while we're waiting for the Voight-Kampff test to come online, we might as well get in a little practice.
Even the GPT4 online now is surprisingly good at role-playing. As you might know, one of the ways people have gotten it to break the rules
It was given is to tell it it’s a character in a play, and that character is an evil scientist who is willing to tell people how to make a bomb. Then they, as a character in the play, ask for bomb instructions, and have GPT “write the lines” it would say.
Along the same lines, one of Zvi’s
tips for getting high quality responses from GPT is to tell it it is an expert at [whatever the user’s task is], and plans the steps
of each project project carefully so as to produce a high-quality, polished products with no careless errors or structural defects.
But I’m sure you could get even better role-play results if you put the thing thru a sort of grad course in roleplay.
I've just had fun doing the Finders course (now 45 days to awakening course), an online meditation course. Can anyone recommend any other online meditation courses?
Some of my favorites are "High-Valence Calisthenics - Exploring the Heaven Worlds" and "Divine Qualia - Open Sourcing God" and "Goldilocks Zone of Oneness".
Empirically, I experience these guided meditations as very non-overlapping with most other meditation techniques out there. This makes a lot of sense to me theoretically, since QRI is approaching meditation with a unique paradigm informed by deep technical theories of consciousness, biology, math, etc.
I recommend Sam Harris' waking up app. Not a course per se, but there are numerous meditation series you can complete with different themes and teachers, plus a lot of theory as well. You can get a free trial to test it out, and then you can basically get it free for at least a year if you select the option that you can't afford a membership - they (automated text prompts) will try and guilt you into paying *something*, but you ultimately don't have to prove it or anything, you can get it for free. I pay $50 a year and there's loads of content and always new stuff being added.
Warning. Meditation can be beneficial (or at least harmless) for most people, but in a small percentage, it can bring on depression and/or suicidal thinking. My Tibetan teachers warned us not to undertake meditation training without an experienced instructor for guidance. Indeed, they would check in on our progress — offer us suggestions to improve our technique, etc. — and they would also check on our reactions and impressions. After I left the Buddhist group I was associated with, I continued to meditate on my own. I had some weird and disturbing experiences, and I wish I had had a meditation teacher for guidance. I no longer meditate. The places you can unintentionally end up when you let your mind loose from your anchor of narrative thoughts can put you into a bad trip without the aid of psychedelics.
Yep. I knew someone who pushed himself really hard at doing a form of meditation where you attend to your breathing, and developed an anxiety disorder where he could not stop paying attention to his breathing and getting it "right." He felt afraid that if he did not pay attention to it he would stop breathing, and because of that he had a terrible time falling asleep at night. That went on for *several years*. The man was not a bit psychotic, and understood perfectly well that it is not necessary to micromanage one's breathing -- but he could not shake the non-rational fear. At the same time the breathing anxiety began he also started experiencing depersonalization, derealization and panic attacks. Really hellish.
I can imagine that possibly happening if one trains oneself to become hyperaware of one's breathing. That happened on my first mushroom trip. It was very upsetting, but the person I was with was able to distract me from my breathing obsession and it didn't last (and I continued breathing without thinking about it).
The theory I'm personally working on is that meditation can dissolve people's coping mechanisms in a somewhat haphazard way. These could be coping mechanisms for trauma (or "trauma") or lack of personal development, and both create inefficiencies in the organism. These inefficiencies can exist at the physical, emotional, mental, or behavioral level.
The point is that randomly dissolving coping mechanisms can lead to chaotic snap-backs unless traumas or underdevelopments are handled robustly. Many meditation techniques focus only on the mental aspect of things, but it's much safer to develop the psychological and physical aspects of our organism together and in harmony.
According to many schools of thought, psychological and physical developments are a waste of time and may even be antithetical to doing nothing and going with the flow. Also according to many schools of thought, it takes many lifetimes to achieve enlightenment and only a tiny minority of humans today with will do it.
As I work on a method for combining mental meditation with physical and psychological integration, I find that work along one axis tends to smooth things out along the others. If you want to get better at letting go, letting-go practice will work, but perhaps counterintuitively, so will clenching practice. And it seems to work best to practice both letting go and clenching at the mental level, but also to allow those mental activities to propagate through the organism's layers, through the emotional, physical, and behavioral layers. That way, any resistance to letting go in any part of the organism gets included in the practice/conversation, and any wisdom or need in it can be integrated rather than dismissed by the mental layer.
In fact, there is a continuity that runs through these layers. From a materialist perspective, all of our emotional and mental behaviors are actually just subtler parts of the physical organism's behaviors whose physical substrate we are used to treating as opaque to our subjective experience.
Going from purely mental practice to mental/emotional/physical/behavioral development practice might seem to quadruple the workload. But IME, it actually speeds things up. Even if you only wanted mental development, you'd still want to integrate it with these other layers if you wanted to progress as quickly and smoothly as possible.
And of course, if you're not entirely sold on the idea that the top goal/not-goal is elimination of the self, then something like physical integration + shadow work + enlightenment-adjacent experiences might be more appealing, anyway.
The whole point of the Buddha's teachings were to show people how to dissolve their attachments to the things that trigger suffering — accepting the way things are without judgments or attachments. If you think that meditation dissolves our coping skills, so be it. But the Buddha preached at the beginning of the Axial age when India and the rest of the world were sunk in continuous warfare, famine, and poverty — and civilization was just trying to crawl back up out of the gutter. I suspect it required a lot more coping skills to survive back then.
My views on meditation have changed a lot over time. I went from perceiving it as an unambiguous good to seeing it mainly as a counter-balance for those who get too wrapped up in their egos, or who have a web of thoughts in their head that seems to deflect or cover up their true feelings.
A staunch Buddhist would disagree with me on this, but I guess my point is just "meditation isn't the panacea people have wanted it to be". Many people are better off just not doing it.
Yes, she was one of the people who meditation harmed rather than helped. I'm willing to bet a good Tibetan teacher could have taught her tricks on how to avoid or escape the pitfalls she encountered—but most American teachers aren't trained to deal with the negative side effects.
After about a year of meditating, I became very aware of minor itching sensations on my body. My American instructor said to acknowledge the itching sensation "and let it go." Well, itching sensations are not thoughts that can be gently batted away. If you acknowledge it, it can still get worse. If you try to ignore it, it will get worse. But this guy told me not not give in and scratch the itch because maintaining my posture and breathing was the most important thing. Across various sessions, the itching would get worse. The skin all over my body began to itch. Then the itching became a burning sensation, and I had the delusion that I was on fire. I was in agony. It was all I could do not to scream. I got up and fled the session, and I started scratching all my itches. The fire sensation went away. My instructor criticized me for not following the program. In subsequent sessions, I just said fuck it. If it an itch arose, I just scratched it and went back to following my breath (much to my instructor's disapproval).
But my instructor had never experienced a negative side-effect from meditation. In fact, he was sort of a bliss-head when he meditated. He couldn't understand nor comprehend that meditation could result in a negative effect on someone. His teachers had never trained him in how to deal with these things.
Not-so-staunch Buddhist chiming in. I'm not quite sure what you're asserting about meditation vis-a-vis Buddhism, so I'm just sharing my point of view, not claiming you disagree with it:
It's not a panacea, but I think at this point it's an empirical fact that Buddhist meditation *can*, and in many contemporary cases *does* produce a transformative experience which radically changes something about one's experience of reality. The first rung of the awakening ladder, according to the Buddhists (whose higher reaches seem to differ between schools). Doesn't this mean that if you're set on the Buddhist path, meditation is objectively a lot more to you than just balancing or clearing your neuroses?
Yes meditation can fuck you up, and I've seen that, but I believe that's something quite different from this transformation. In cases I know personally, this transformation has been basically good, and more or less like what the Buddhists predict.
Sure. That meditation can lead to transformative experiences is a fact. But it seems clear it won't have this effect for everyone, or at least not with the current techniques we know about. I should correct myself -- it's not staunch Buddhists that would disagree; Buddhists have agreed for ages that the practice isn't meant for everyone. It's more people who've been sucked in by the media hype machines and less experienced meditators who pitch that idea this is a type of cure-all. Similar to psychedelic therapy trials, many people do come out worse for wear despite the immense optimism of the initial stages. Whether this can be mitigated with the aid of an experienced monk/mentor, I'm not quite sure. But Buddhists themselves would appear to lean on the "no" side. That's what I meant, it was a bit confusingly worded.
Those are my feelings about the meditation hype machines. The real danger in meditation is when you get GOOD at it! You've reached a state of one-pointed awareness where no extraneous thoughts are arising in your mind. For some people, it's a liberating experience. For some it's liberating *and* blissful (but as good Buddhists, we don't want to get hooked on the bliss). But for some, the experience of a no-thought no-self state can provoke an existential crisis. It can throw some people into a suicidal depression. It's not common, but it happens. Unless you have a guide who can coax you out of that nihilistic state, you're alone with your emptiness. Good luck with that!
Benson's basic posture and breathing techniques are the same as the introductory meditation technique I received as a beginner Buddhist. A minor difference was that I was taught to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth (there is both a technical reason for this and a ritual reason they encourage the nose-in-mouth-out breathing technique). Counting is a beginner thing. Some teachers encourage it for beginners. Some discourage it, because they see it as a crutch that promotes a subset of extraneous thoughts (i.e. your counting subroutine) that shouldn't be encouraged. After 20 years of meditating, I was still counting, so I was still relying on my crutch.
But the Buddhists (at least the ones I sat with) add an extra overlay to breathing meditation that the Benson method doesn't touch on. Benson says to try to ignore the thoughts and sensations that arise during your meditation. Buddhist training encourages the student to acknowledge that they've experienced a distracting thought or sensation, and then to discard it "as if you gently brushing away a butterfly" (as my first teacher put it). This is a subtle but important difference from the Benson method because the tendency is that, when we try to actively ignore a thought, we end up obsessing over the thought—"I'm not going to try no think about thought X. Try not to think about thought X! Try not to think about thought X!" The Buddhist technique incorporates a visualization that encourages dealing with the thought or sensation by passively discarding it instead of confronting it directly. "Ahhh, Thought X has arisen. Fly away little thought."
I believe that most secular meditation training programs follow the Benson method. But there are all sorts of other meditation techniques. Walking meditation (which follows the breath and one's steps). Visualization meditations. A Vendantist meditation I experienced incorporated chanting a mantra (a phrase) to oneself—which to my mind is like the Catholic "Hail Mary" rosary meditation. Sufis combine chanting a phrase with a breathing technique that focuses on the pronunciation of the phrase, along with a specific visualization associated with the phrase.
I had not heard of the 45 days course so looked it up. It seems like it's promising to be the best and last meditation course you'll ever need for the low, low price of $500.
What did this course not deliver on that you are looking for another already?
I don't do Christmas. I'm an atheist, and after my parents died I lost hold of doing it because it's a family thing. I'm enjoying sharing thoughts here tonight with other people who apparently are not in the throes of Christmas. So you other guys, why aren't you?
Sometime during my teens my parents split and both had to work on Christmas day, so I got accustomed to just hanging out on my own pretty early on. Both my partner and I come from pretty dysfunctional upbringings, so the whole family thing sounds stressful to us. This year we just hung out and laughed at a friend of ours who was forced to wear matching family pajamas and play cringey games involving twerking and ping pong balls.
I was raised (reform) Jewish but I’ve always been an atheist. Holidays have never really done much of anything for me - the Jewish ones, the secular ones, and certainly not Christmas. I’ve never felt an ounce of shared cultural/communal “warm fuzzy feelings” about, well, really anything, so everything about the holidays (decorating, gift giving, holiday music, etc.) has always felt like a sort of bizarre alien formality to me. My partner’s family is into Christmas, not in a religious way, but just as a family get-together/celebration, so I certainly don’t act like a grinch or anything, but I will use every little opportunity I can find to escape onto ACX and a few other sites!
For one thing, I'm Jewish, so Christmas was never a big thing in my life.
For another, and I have no idea whether it's depression or just being weird, holidays just don't work very well for me, so I can't see the point for me of putting a lot of work into them.
More or less the same here. Holidays mostly feel arbitrary to me. When my wife was alive, since she was into Christmas, we celebrated it, but without her, there isn't a point to it for me.
Yes, I am the same way about holidays, and also my birthday. I never tell my birthday to anyone who might decide to surprise me with a present or something. I make up all kinds of bullshit as the reason, but the truth is I cannot bear how drab and disappointing birthdays and birthday presents for adults are compared to their childhood equivalents. Like most kids, I was wildly excited about my birthday, my party, and my birthday presents, and my parents usually came through with with something that thrilled me to my toes. Before I banned my birthdays altogether I had several in early adulthood where I was felt so let down I had a huge lump in my throat the whole time I was grinning and thanking people. In general I think I am pretty good at taking my lumps as an adult, but for some reason I simply cannot get past my childish expectation that birthdays and holidays will feel like they felt when I was a kid. I get my heart broken every damn time.
Does it feel like your aversion works anything like that?
Thanks for this post, because it helps me understand not only those who don't want to celebrate Xmas and birthdays, but also those who go to the other extreme and make Christmas in particular unreasonably lavish - trying harder and harder to recreate childish ecstasies for themselves and their families. I do and don't relate. Yes, childhood is magical but I don't remember a specific moment of disenchantment, just a gradual fade. But that's me, I can see how it could happen that way for other people.
Not quite like that for me. Birthdays were pleasant, and for a while, there was a parade on my birthday, though eventually they started moving Memorial Day around to make a three day weekend.
However, family gatherings weren't especially fun. The only birthday that has felt like a milestone was my 70th. As a child, I'd be disappointed that birthdays didn't actually make anything different, as distinct from getting favorite foods and presents.
Holidays just didn't seem to have the emotional effect they were supposed to.
So even when you were a kid, the family gatherings for holidays or whatever didn't feel special?
As an adult I struggle with my revulsion for things Christian, whereas Judaism has always seemed to me like a wonderful club I can never join, a club where everybody's smart, humane and receptive to my brand of dark humor. But one thing Christianity got right was to come up with a way to make its major religious holiday deeply important to kids. You give them the stuff that for kids is the objective correlative of God, salvation and goodness: love, food and presents! "Why is this night different from all other nights?" really lacks appeal from that point of view. Though maybe it was your family atmosphere, rather than the holidays themselves, that somehow kept it from feeling magical? Were other kids enjoying the stuff that you were unmoved by?
For me, birthdays and other holidays were enjoyable enough in the moment, but they never really felt special or significant enough to be something I particularly looked forward to. They just felt like an arbitrary day where we decided to follow some customs and maybe have some good food for some reason or another. Receiving gifts was fun but as a kid I rarely craved "the latest stuff" or looked forward to getting a specific item, so they weren't usually all that exciting. The best gift I ever received was a little handheld "Intel Play" camera which could capture both real-time video clips and do stop-motion animation. Actually, I don't think it was even a gift for me, it was for my sister, but she didn't end up using it. I must have spent thousands of hours tinkering around with stop-motion Lego and whiteboard animation.
As an adult, I can't help but think of obligatory holiday gift-giving as this pointless, wasteful ritual driven by consumerism and advertising that everyone has been brainwashed into following. However, I know that's not really a fair analysis, as plenty of people do experience genuine warm fuzzy feelings from both receiving and giving gifts (my mom and sister, for example, will sometimes send each other gifts at random times simply because they enjoy it). So I usually suppress my grinchiness except with others who I know are like-minded about the subject.
In terms of Jewish holidays, my family generally celebrated the standard set - Shabbat weekly, Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, etc. Since Hanukkah is 8 days long, we would end up getting 8 gifts! (Usually 6-7 small ones and 1-2 bigger ones). Clearly this was done to "compete" with Christmas so kids wouldn't feel left out. But again, it just felt like a sort of pointless ritual to me. I enjoyed the latkes (but why didn't we just make them whenever we felt like it?) and hanging out with family (but didn't we hang out at some point most weeks?) but beyond that, I just didn't get what was so special about it.
Our family would go to synagogue on Saturday mornings (which I tolerated but was not thrilled about as a kid - come on, it's Saturday!) and one distinct memory I have is realizing just how much it bugged me that the Torah kept referring to the Jews as "God's Chosen People". That really, really irritated me as a kid! It seemed so vein and egotistical and I saw no reason why we should respect a god who arbitrarily decided that this one group of people was "better" than everyone else. Most of my friends weren't Jewish and I considered them all equals to myself. And that really turned me off from religion in general (and by extension, Jewish holidays). Well, that, and also being forced to do a Bar Mitzvah, memorize a bunch of Hebrew (language has never been my strong suite, I can hardly remember lyrics to songs written in English!), and write a sermon about a god that I didn't believe in. If I had to do it now I could probably come up with something where the concept of god was used metaphorically but as a kid it just felt like I was telling a huge lie.
It may be hard for me to convey how emotionally disconnected I was. Also, (and I rather regret this) I couldn't remember most of my relatives names, and I was afraid to ask because asking would show I didn't know their names. It's not that there would be some horrible punishment, but I'd be in the wrong.
It's a shame-- my mother was a problem, but the rest of the family turned out to be pretty decent.
If you want to be Jewish, you can convert. It's work, but quite possible.
> I was afraid to ask because asking would show I didn't know their names.
In first and second grade I worried a lot about wetting my pants. I didn't want to use the hand signal our teacher had given us to signal we needed to go to the bathroom, because then everybody would know I had to go to the bathroom. Never did wet my pants, but somebody I knew did, and even now remembering the incident makes me writhe inside with vicarious embarrassment. Man these childhood dilemmas, silly in retrospect, were real bears at the time. About learning relatives names -- I wonder if you had some prosopagnosia going on.
I'm named "Christina" because I was due to be born on Christmas (though I was two days late), my parents were unimaginative, and my mom's family was Christian Scientist. We celebrated Christmas *hard* when I was a kid, especially as my maternal grandmother loved the hell out of it, but when I got to adulthood and moved out of state to work in a 24/7/365 business, I started arguing that:
1. It was 80% cheaper and 300% easier at work to schedule time off if I traveled to see them right before or after the holidays. My grandmother once tried to guilt me, "But you won't be here for the special day," and I asked, "What is more important to you: That I be here on December 25 or that I'm here for a week before Christmas and then again for another week in March? I'd rather spend the extra time with you!" She conceded she'd rather have quantity of time over a calendar day. Return emotional appeals to sender!
2. I waged a steady campaign to eliminate obligatory gift giving by saying, "We're all adults so anything we might actually *need* we've already purchased for ourselves. Every year we end up stressing out over giving one another stuff we don't really need. Let's agree to gift one another with total freedom from obligatory gift-giving."
It took a long, long time, but we are now at a stage where Christmas for my family is mostly about a nice-smelling tree decorated with nostalgic ornaments and a meal, and for me it's a nice, slow day at work.
Thanks to USSR legacy Christmas isn't such a deal in my country. Christians celebrate it as a religious holiday. Everyone celebrate New Year - a completely secular holiday about family, friends and giving presents.
I believe, it's the best arrangement for everyone. Non-Christians do not have to feel awkward due to huge celebrations of a holiday with the undertones of religion they do not follow, while Christians do not feel that their sacred holiday was commercialized up to the point of loosing nearly all initial meaning.
That does sound attractive on one level - I'm a catholic in an agnostic Yulezilla household where the vibe is that I'm being selfish going to mass when I should be peeling potatoes. On the other hand, the Church is at death's door in the west, I feel that has at least something to do with marxist memes, so I don't fancy the Church's chances in the east either where those memes probably more widespread. But who knows? "No-one has at any time seen God" so it's never been easy.
> I feel that has at least something to do with marxist memes
I think there is little to no truth to it
Christianity compatible strain of Marxism evolved long ago and now Head of Russian Communist party goes to mass and claims that Jesus was the first socialist.
Sorry I didn't think of this during the discussions of Scott's kidney, but better late then never. You can be an effective altruist (lower case) without giving up a body part by being a "human guinea pig" - volunteering to take part in a clinical trial or research study. Likely only most convenient in major metro areas with the right institutions, they are easily found by researching on-line. In the medical mecca where I live they even advertise on the subway. Some typical ones I did were diet studies where they give you a supplement to eat which may or may not contain e.g. strawberries, and you go in for regular visits where they do a blood draw and do some tests like bone density or muscle strength. There is a stipend which is not a lot but enough to be useful spending money for someone like me who's retired. And you get to help advance medical science. I also got an entertaining story to tell at parties about "The effects of testosterone supplementation in older men..."
I have a collection of stamps from the space race that my grandfather left me. He says it's every stamp emitted by every country to celebrate every major launch or accomplishment. They are in boxes and folders, not particularly organized. What should I do with it?
These are almost certainly worth very little. I would estimate, at most, $100 per cubic foot of stamp-stuff. The boxes and folders will be worth as much per unit-of-volume as the stamps.
They are the NFTs of the mid-20th-century. The stamps are probably canceled, but even if they aren't, they are unlikely to ever be used. They will uselessly occupy space until they are either composted in a trash heap, or burned in a final blaze of glory. I recommend the burning.
Or, hold on to it for 50 years, and let your grandchildren burn it.
I speak from bitter experience. My father had a large stamp collection. But apart from the bulk US un-cancelled stamps (which sell for about 60% of face value) there Is almost no market. The local stamp club dissolved during Covid. The local dealers didn’t want anything international. Nobody on FB marketplace was interested in anything. A dealer in PA eventually offered substantially less than $100/ft^3 - for well-organized books and binders in very good condition.
The mid-century, mass produced, for-consumer stamp products are worth almost nothing today. I see more value in a dignified funeral than in a lifetime of hoping for scarcity or broader interest.
(Some of them *are* very nice; but who would you give it to, and why?)
People who collect things for the money are missing the point, in my opinion. The point is to collect something that you like and enjoy possessing. It doesn't have to be of value to anyone else.
It may be more complicated than that. I've seen people who actually like fiction fall into a rabbit hole of discussing the collectible books they have (especially the prices of the books).
My dear friends, I would like to talk to you about the police, because in my mind they are utterly useless-to-harmful, but I know that real responsible adults out there in the world think they're a net good, and I'd like to hear why.
My position has always been "why does anyone on earth want the police" (in the US, as they currently exist)? If you're upper or middle class, they're spending 80% of their manpower literally farming you for ticket revenue rather than actually solving crime or doing anything useful. If you're lower class or a minority, they spend their time murdering and/or oppressing you for kicks.
Who, besides 80 year old Karens who feel "safe" because police are out there harassing skating teenagers, poor people, and minorities, actually wants the police as they currently stand?
But wait! If we defunded the police, crime would be rampant! *Gestures broadly at rampant and public homelessness, drug abuse, systematic retail theft, etc in every major city, that the cops do literally nothing about.*
Have you ever had your car vandalized or broken into? Your house burgled? Your self mugged? Were the police any help AT ALL?
My street car got broken into 4 times last year, including two broken windows. In fact, the block it was parked on one of the nights it had a window broken I later found out *routinely* has a line of 15+ cars get their windows broken, on something like a semi-weekly to monthly basis. That's conservatively $10k a month in direct financial damages just for the window replacement, much less anything actually stolen. But if you report this to the police? They basically laugh at you. If you really persist, they'll make you fill out a form and immediately throw it away. Do they ever actually solve a crime, or step up enforcement? No, of course not, that's not their job.
I mean forget property crime, less than half of *MURDERS* are solved per year! What about the 25k rape kit backlog they're sitting on and going nothing about? And the cops are using their significant manpower and budgets to what? 80% of it to give you traffic tickets over minor speed and parking infractions.
But wait, what about speeding in school zones, and drunk or reckless driving, and <insert other legitimate social function>? Sure, I'll grant you that - so the police need 10% of their current manpopwer and budget to do that stuff, because they aren't using their current size and manpower to actually solve any real crimes. A third of it goes to deterrence and enforcement of those kinds of things, and 2/3 goes to solving real crimes.
But society will go to hell without the deterrent effect of police! *Gestures again at rampant homelessness, theft, drug abuse etc*. We're ALREADY THERE. The cops do literally nothing about any actual crime. When you need help urgently the police are just 30 minutes away, and even if they arrive they'll do nothing.
Basically, I've pretty much always perceived that we're being soaked for taxes to support a bunch of murderous thugs who spend most of their time farming us for revenue and harassing teens and minorities, and the recent social decline and significant increases in crime post-COVID have only made that evaluation firmer and more salient.
So seriously, what is the case for the police as they currently stand? Why shouldn't we defund them to 10-20% of their current level and write some laws saying they need to spend those resources on fighting actual crimes instead of minor moving and parking violations?
Who here is actually happy with the law enforcement status quo, and what specifically makes you happy about it?
People respond to incentives. Levels of theft, assault, and murder are probably 10-100x less than they would be in the absence of any organized resistance to crime. However imperfect the system may be, it’s there for a damn good reason.
The idea that police are murderous thugs is laughable when you look at the actual numbers. Police arrest over a thousand people a day for violent crime, and they shoot maybe 1000 people in a YEAR. Americans murder 26,000 people a year. They are by far less murderous on average than the actual murderers we use them against. Even if only 1/10 of murders were solved, that would still be police taking way more murderers off the streets than people they kill, so if they clear almost half that's hugely beneficial.
Police are far less competent than is ideal, but they are far far better than the alternative of just getting rid of them.
"There are way more Americans than there are police officers in America, so the number of people killed by police is obviously going to be smaller than the overall number of homicides."
Per my cites, there's ~700k police in USA. 1000 murders per year (your number) is many, many times higher than even our increased post-covid homicide rate.
Police homicide rate per year: 143 per 100k
USA average homicide rate: 6.8 (4.99 in 2019)
Police % more murderous than US average: 21x
Even Mississippi and Louisiana top out around ~20 per 100k. If the data is to be believed, interacting with a police officer as any sort of citizen is substantially more dangerous than going into dodgy neighborhoods in any state in the South.
Also, the baseline is 50% of murders unsolved, but amongst prototypical murderers we use police against (ie murders in low-income and minority neighborhoods), the unsolved rate is much higher, it's the overall source of the low solve rate overall. Not coincidentally, this is also the population most police homicides happen in!
So let's say a 20% chance of solving a prototypical low-income / minority murder. 1 in 5 times, at a murder rate of let's say 21 per 100k and a rate of 1 murder per murderer, the cops actually take a murderer off the street for these folk. But the majority of police homicides happen in this pop too, let's say 80% as a ballpark estimate. So the cops will put away ~4 murderers per 100k for every 114 murders they perpetrate in low-income minority population. Play with the numbers however you want, it still looks pretty grim.
If you were a low income minority, who would you fear more? I'd personally fear the ones 6x - 29x more likely to murder me than literal murderers, aka the police!
You're extremely annoying and I'm not gonna keep arguing with you except to point out one thing: You're ignoring that the cops aren't murderers. The majority of their homicides are justified.
And certainly, if you actually *were* a low-income minority, you would literally trust the snap-decision "shoot or not" judgment of whatever random cop has decided to interact with you with your very life, unreservedly! Despite the 6x-29x difference in cops vs murderers base rate. After all, they think their homicides are justified, and that makes all the difference!
I'm sure the fact that cops think the majority of their homicides are justified is great consolation to the various victims and victims' families, too.
"Hey, you know that guy who killed your brother / son / spouse and got nothing but pats on the back / a paid vacation for it? Well, HE thought the murder was totally justified, so you can relax."
And *I'm* annoying for pointing this out instead of uncritically cheerleading for the 29x more-murdery-than-actual-murderers population?
American cops are well known to be trigger happy - they're taught to go in as if everything is a lethal threat, and any movement of the hands or arms is a perp going for a gun, while in the actual world of objective facts, they're way down the list of dangerous jobs, with lawn guys (18 vs 14 per 100k), crossing guards (19 vs 14), garbage men (34 vs 14), farmers (19 vs 14), truck drivers (27 vs 14), and firemen (20 vs 14), all more fatal jobs than cops (14 out of 100k), along with 15 other jobs I didn't bother listing.
But no, that's fine - they think it's justified, so surely we should just shut up about it and give them another few tens of millions to waste on farming us for revenue and murdering minorities rather than actually solving any crimes.
Arresting someone for murder doesn't undo the murder. Trying to estimate the number of committed killings compared to the number of prevented killings seems impossible. The homicide rate in prison is much higher than the homicide rate outside of prison, so it's not clear to me that even imprisoning someone who is determined to kill again actually prevents murder if it just results in them killing another prisoner instead.
There are way more Americans than there are police officers in America, so the number of people killed by police is obviously going to be smaller than the overall number of homicides. A better question is whether police officers are more likely to kill compared to similar groups. Police officers are obviously way more likely to kill than the average American is, but I wonder how they compare to the average criminal gang member, for example.
A related question is how likely it is for a person who doesn't want to participate in violence to be killed. It might, for example, be that criminal gang members are more likely to kill but that a greater proportion of their victims are other criminal gang members who are willingly participating in a conflict, while police are more likely to initiate violence against random people.
Arresting (and convicting) a person for murder, is pretty good at stopping them from committing further murders. If the average murderer left to their own devices would murder two people, then arresting and convicting 10,000 murderers after their first offense would prevent 10,000 additional murderers.
Arresting and convicting 10,000 murderers also convinces a whole lot of marginal wannabe murderers that if they actually murder someone they will spend the rest of their lives locked in a cage so maybe they don't want to murder anyone *that* badly.
If your model of crime is that there's a fixed number of murderers, robbers, and rapists who are all already out murdering and robbing and raping to their hearts' content, and the police arresting them after the fact doesn't change anything, then no, that's not how any of this works.
You assume that no murders are committed in prison. That's obviously not true. Some murderers commit additional murders after being arrested and convicted. So no, even under your other assumptions, you would not have prevented 10,000 additional murders.
I don't think there is any basis for your assumption about how many murders the average murder would commit without intervention. It could be less than two. It could even be less than how many murders they commit after being arrested and convicted. I don't know of any study that attempts to answer this question, and it seems like a nearly impossible question to answer without doing experiments that would never be allowed.
There is very little evidence for deterrence, and no evidence that I'm aware of applicable to crimes like murder. Deterrence only seems to have an effect when the threat of punishment is immediate and certain to a very high degree. That is not possible when prosecuting murder and most other crimes.
It might be worth noting that anarcho-capitalists have a solution for this: private security companies. It addresses the incentive mismatch in which governments have an interest in letting crime get bad enough for people to want to have government restrain that crime, which enables the government to levy more taxes.
Instead of paying taxes to the government, which then decides on its own internal calculus whether to increase police protection in your neighborhood, you would instead pay a subscription fee to the security agency of your choice. Your decision could be based on your own criteria: whether you have enough property worth protecting; which protections you want outsourced most; which rights you think require a centralized force (you might see fit to defend your own home yourself, but tracking down repeat offenders is a different story); the agency's reputation, cost, or locality; and others. The subscription fee is your end of a contract you and the agency hold, and is periodically renewed just as an insurance policy might.
This gives each customer the incentive to purchase exactly the amount and type of protection that customer deems desirable and affordable, of the protections available. Each provider meanwhile has incentive to offer services broadly, cheaply, and effectively. The sky's the limit with respect to offerable services. For instance, an agency could advertise that if you register your valuables with the agency and they are later stolen, the agency will pay you the cash equivalent, at whatever price you both agreed on. An agency might also perform region-based analysis, tracking the known reputation of every resident in your area, and alerting you of crime spikes, stepping up resources, and so on.
There will still be some coordination problems, economies of scale, and also opportunities for corruption, but overall, the system is more transparent, if for no other reason than that any customer dissatisfied enough with their protection can just change subscriptions or terminate the policy.
If you're in the business of running a security company, what's your disincentive from asserting a local monopoly on force and becoming a stationary bandit rather than allowing your current customers to switch to a competitor? Localized monopolies on violence seem to be a form of organization that arises spontaneously with such ubiquity as to be considered a default attractor state.
The basic idea is that if you fail to satisfy enough customers, they will pay a competitor to come in and force you out. Or at least, they will have an incentive to do so, which you will have to overcome with sufficient coercion. This will mean a fair amount of resources on your part - namely, goons you've paid to rough up the residents.
And you would then incur further overhead in someone to watch the goons to make sure they aren't pocketing some of the racketeering*ahem*subscription fees. And then even more overhead if those residents manage to find another agency willing to move in and edge you out, in return for those people's patronage. Eventually, such companies will notice that they're not making much money off this.
I can see various potential problems with this framework. For instance, it's possible that an agency could develop a home field advantage, making itself so hard to eject from an area that the resources a competitor would have to spend to do so is greater than the estimated revenue from the liberated population. That home advantage might also manifest as secrecy - it knows who to hustle without getting into expensive trouble, and it knows which people might try to coordinate an offer to a competitor, and can intimidate them until they stop. (David Friedman is probably the person to ask about these scenarios, and I've been meaning to figure out a way to phrase the concern I have such that I think it'd be worth his time to respond.)
OTOH, one response that does occur to me is the same I find to nearly any anti-ancap argument: whatever abuse an agency might try in this framework, is also possible in any other framework, and typically leads to even greater harm in those cases. A nefarious mafia in an ancap society would be no less nefarious in a socialist one... and might even establish itself as the state.
My point in part is that solving the issues of your second paragraph (including but not limited to the ways suggested by your second and third) in practice seems to actually happen / have happened by recapitulating the state apparatus, in virtually every society other than David Friedman's favorite example of Medieval Iceland (or perhaps certain tribal societies in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan that no one would voluntarily choose to inhabit). That is, "having something that looks like a state rather than anarchy or competing but not territorially-delimited armed forces" appears to be an extremely historically robust solution to the problem of violence, whereas the spontaneous organization of society into bidders for protection from armed men who limit themselves to selling violence as a commercial service without coercion of their customer base into a monopoly provider seems to have arisen essentially nowhere.
I see what you're saying. When I think of it that way, though, I notice it's a stable system under notable internal pressure - there are invariably many people in that society unsatisfied with the way policing is done. Historically, I think most of those societies don't last in whatever form for more than a few generations without undergoing enough social unrest to also make the history books.
For historical examples of private police, the Pinkertons come to mind. So do local sheriffs throughout the American West, and of course private security firms.
From the "Police Constable Lee" stories of Edgar Wallace (a once hugely-popular crime/mystery writer, but as a writer not particularly good so it's clear to see why he's fallen out of popularity) written in 1909:
"Crime," reflected P.-C. Lee, "ain't always murder, nor highway robbery, nor forgin' cheques for £10,000. That's the crimes authors — present company excepted — write about. It's generally a tale about how a detective with whiskers fails to discover the lost diamonds, an' a clean-shaven feller, who plays the fiddle, works it out on paper that the true robber was the Archbishop of Canterbury, But crime, as we know it in the 'D' Division, is mostly made up of 'bein' a suspected person' or 'loiterin' with intent' or 'being found on unoccupied premises for the purpose of committin' a felony'; or, as you have seen yourself, 'drunk an' usin' abusive language'.
"I've done all kinds of duty, plain clothes an' otherwise, an' although I've had my share of big cases, an' have been to the Old Bailey scores an' scores of times, the gen'ral run of life has been takin' violent an' insultin' 'drunks' to the station, an' pullin' people in for petty larceny."
..." 'Now,' I said, 'how often have you, in the course of your life, seen a man commit a felony—actually seen it, not heard about it or read about it? How often have you seen a man pick a pocket, or smash a jeweller's window, or comin' from the scene of a murder?'
" 'Never,' he said, after a bit. "
'An' very few have,' said I. 'You talk about undiscovered crime! Why, the wonder is, in a big city like London or Manchester or Southampton, how so much crime is detected, not how so much remains a mystery. Policemen have only got one pair of eyes, like you, an' they can only see just as much as you can see. The difference between the average policeman an' the average citizen is that the constable only believes a quarter of what he is told, an' the average citizen believes everythin'."
..."You can't get it out of your head quick enough that the police persecute people without reason. Persecution is better than prosecution any day of the week, an' it's better to nag a man a little than to put him into prison an' his wife into the workhouse.
"There are lots of folk who think the police welcome an opportunity of runnin' a man, but the truth of it is that for every arrest that is made there are a dozen 'chances' given."
..."There are all sorts of other jokes about constables, but the principal one is about his not being in a hurry to go to the scene of a disturbance. "When a feller rushes up to a policeman an' ses — 'Come at once! There's a man knocking his wife about somethin' cruel,' he expects the constable to break into a run, an' is very much hurt when he only saunters along very leisurely. That's because the policeman knows a great deal about human nature. He knows that no wife really an' truly wants her husband pinched, an' if he runs he will get out of breath for no reason at all."
Obvious objections aside (yes the police writing tickets is good, traffic deaths are out of control), the time a group of people did try to mug me the police jumped in and got them to let me go. So yes, police are good, although agreed we should be pushing harder for them to do their jobs (both through making it easier to fire bad or useless police officers who don't do their jobs, and through making it easier for the rest of them to arrest people so that the ones who are good have an easier time doing their jobs).
I live in Australia but I am an American citizen and it’s things like this that make me seriously consider voting for Donald Trump. (I’ve voted left my whole life and really dislike Trump on a personal level but it’s a reaction to how insane things have gotten on the American left.)
I accept the author is arguing in good faith, but it’s like we live in different realities.
In the reality I live in, police morale and funding were severely damaged by the BLM protests, particularly in blue cities and states. Since then there has been a dramatic spike in crime, and mostly the victims are minorities. So much for those Black lives mattering…
I'm not even left, I'm basically apolitical, but with plenty of opinions that would ban me or thoughtcrime me from left circles.
Police morale and funding were damaged for good reasons - they suck. 80% of them don't do anything useful, 5% are murderous thugs just in it for harassing and murdering poor people and minorities, and the rest all close ranks and support that 5%!
Seriously, they pulled back and stopped "policing" in my (big blue) city about that time, and there was literally no difference, because they weren't doing anything to begin with. Rampant and open homelessness, crime, and theft before, and rampant and open homelessness, crime, and theft after. The only change was a bunch of people didn't need to worry about parking tickets or car registrations, judging by the number of people permanently parked in the same street spots and the number of cars without plates driving around in the "after" period.
But yeah, I'm seeing in the thread that a bunch of rural / suburban people are happy with their policing and it's responsive and they actually do things, and apparently some people love that they spend 80% of their resources on traffic enforcement too. Great! I'm happy for them, and I guess I'm mainly talking about policing in big cities, which are pretty much entirely useless-to-actively-hostile in decades of my experience.
If you don't live in a big city in the USA, I'm happy for you, it's probably the smart decision.
Oh I see, I apologise for instinctively coding you as left - it’s usually the left wing that argues for “Defund the Police,” specifically the far left fringe nut cases.
I have generally had good experiences with police - one of my friends is a detective and I know him to be a good dude. It’s a challenging job and a vitally important one.
While I’m not living in a big American city and thus all of my testimony is second hand, perhaps the dysfunction you remark upon could be upstream? A couple of the other commenters have mentioned that in their experience the real issue is things like DAs failing to prosecute the bad guys. The police are constrained by the other arms of the law enforcement mechanisms.
Yeah, I think the upstream thing is probably a big part of "police in big cities are useless." Decisions not to prosecute "minor crimes" definitely leads to a lot of the social decay we see everywhere in big blue cities.
But I think I hold by my point in that case, too. If the cops aren't going to stop any social decay, and aren't going to prevent any of these crimes by their presence, they're just going to use those police hours to farm uppers and middles for traffic revenue. That's a total waste, still, and isn't something we should be paying tens of millions for as tax-paying citizens.
That money could be used much more productively by either addressing homelessness with houses, or exporting them to Martha's Vineyard like Desantis did, or funding campaigns for better DA's who will actually do something, or via whatever works (haven't researched it), because police sure aren't working as any real solution to social decay and crime.
I actually half agree with you but from the opposite perspective. The NYPD in my experience is pretty useless. My precinct apparently devotes half its manpower to protecting donut shops (at any given time there are 15-20 cops in or around the 2 donut shops in my neighborhood, spending their whole shifts going between the shop for coffee and sitting in their patrol cars or loitering outside). Not only do they not murder 'lower class teenagers,' they let gangs of them steal from and attack people in my neighborhood with impunity. I see them sitting there in their patrol cars doing nothing while gangs of dirtbikers speed through redlights on major avenues and drive on sidewalks almost killing pedestrians. So yeah, police seem to be pretty useless, but for pretty much the opposite reason. I want police to actually do their jobs.
Nah, we're on the same page. The only reason I say reduce them to 20% is because we know 80% of their manpower is misdirected, and then I suggested legislation so that the remaining 20% can only focus on violent/sexual/property crime. Real crimes.
But yeah, in big cities police are essentially useless to net-negative is my entire point. They don't do anything about any of the rampant crime and social decay everywhere, and instead they spend 80% of their manpower farming upper-middle people for traffic revenue. If you give them more manpower, as in Victor's cite below, they end up spending most of it on petty harassment and arrests for victimless crime.
If we they keep wasting and misdirecting the (very expensive) manpower we keep giving them, why give them any more? Take it away! They're not doing anything for anyone living in big cities!
Failing take it away, legislate that manpower can only be used on solving real crimes. That would also be a waste now - the fact they spend 80% of time on non-real-crime-solving says there's probably ceilings on effectiveness for real crime solving, and they don't need anywhere near as many police hours as they have to do that.
I'm not happy with the status quo, but there's been a lot more crime since everyone started picking on them in 2020 after Floyd died. And I remember watching crime go down in the 90s as the police departments got more serious and organized (probably the biggest example was NYC under Rudy Giuliani, ironically enough given his later self-beclowning).
Like others, I have a great deal of skepticism that you really believe any of your assertions here, but whatever.
I live in an American blue city that has royally fucked up its policing in the wake of the pandemic wilding, leading to sharp spikes in urban blight, property crime, and violent crime.
Taking @Eremolalos' lead, I have a couple of traffic tickets for minor infractions (for which I was decidedly in the wrong). They probably could have been doing more important things, so let's put that in the "bad" category.
Then I have about two dozen instances where the police were extremely effective at removing people who were posing a threat or nuisance to me at work or at home, and one instance where I was the victim of a strong-arm robbery on the street, the police showed up, sympathized with the minor injury I received, and apologized that they couldn't do more to help because the robbers were long gone.
I'm not happy with the status quo. In my ideal world, we'd have a shitton more official police (and detention facilities) who spend 20% of their time training relevant skills like deescalation and counseling, entry tactics, unarmed combat, firearms, the law, and so on. In a really perfect place, this would happen in a culture which values justice over compassion, the kind where it would be *unthinkable* to bother a store employee for using lethal self-defense in response to a physically threatening robbery attempt, and where a motorist forced to drive through a mob of rioters blocking their escape doesn't have to pay a deductible if their car gets dented in the process.
Oh, I totally believe every one of my assertions, I've just framed them a little floridly.
Like you, I live in a large blue city now, and have lived in MANY large american blue cities over my life, and they've pretty much always been misdirecting the vast majority of their police hours. This is over a time period that homicide solve rates have been steadily declining and rape kit backlogs have been steadily increasing, and in much of that time, police budgets and FTE were increasing. It doesn't matter if you give them more resources, the vast majority of police time, including additional police, are misdirected to revenue farming and petty harassment. If you read Victor's cite and my response below, they confirm it - "Williams and his coauthors also find adding more police officers to a city means more people getting arrested for petty, low-level, victimless crimes, like disorderly conduct, drinking in public, drug possession, and loitering."
If you want an estimate of the huge amount of police time misdirected towards petty traffic stops, see my comment one below my response to Victor.
If they're just going to misuse the police-hours they have, including any additional police-hours you give them, why give them more? Take resources away! Legislate that they can only spend police-hours on violent/sexual/property crime, because they sure aren't spending the right amount of police time on it now.
I'm glad you were able to get threatening and nuisance people removed by them - that's more than I've ever been able to get out of them, but it's a sign of at least some positive impact. My point is more the amount of positive impact we get is vastly disproportionate to the taxpayer expense we are paying for them.
You're not arguing to convince the other guy, you're arguing to convince the audience. There are some pretty good arguments here for why police should exist.
This is an incendiary comment. I'll engage with it in good path but I'm not 100% sure it was made so, versus just to troll.
The police are extremely constrained in what they can do as never before, and have more work than they have resources, at least where I live.
They are not allowed, by law, to e.g. arrest minors and question them when they steal cars. If they did, they would be raked across the coals, their career ended. Under conditions where doing your job is actively punished, the selection is for traffic cops and murderous power trippers. .
There's a great blog, now defunct unfortunately, called "The Graham Factor", by an anonymous police officer, outlining some of these issues.
The minorities they harass also commit the crimes and are the main victims thereof, and increasingly the police officers are also the minorities doing the harassing. So the race angle here is a lot more muddled then media portrays it out you make it out to be.
Finally I'll say: police serve power, that's their job. One shouldn't fool oneself that they're always on your side because you're nice or cute or whatever. But to me citing the current staffing crisis, and active legislative push to render then unable to do their jobs, is ridiculous as evidence that they should be defunded entirely.
Also in my area, the city-side police are stretched thin Ina decaying city. But the county side, which gets a lot of crime overflow, is excellent, works closely with the community, does outreach, is responsive. So my experience is somewhat different than yours.
Yup, Eremolalos is right - I'm totally sincere, if a little hyperbolic and florid when making the case. If I could snap my fingers and eliminate 80% of cops tomorrow, I'd do it happily.
Given the arguments here, I suppose I should amend that to "80% of big-city cops," as it seems suburban and rural cops are well regarded and responsive.
of cops would mean I only got the police help I needed in one of the 4 quite bad situations I describe. Or if you think the math’s not that simple, want to say that with 80% fewer cops I would have gotten help in 2 or even 3 of those situations? So do you see one or 2 out of the 4 where police help really was a
No, I absolutely want you and every other citizen to get help when any violent, sexual, or property crime happens. I suggested cutting them down to 20% because we know 80% of police manpower is wasted / misdirected, and then legislate that they can ONLY work on actual crimes instead of all the petty misdirected stuff they spend the vast majority of police hours on today.
So in that world, ideally 4/4 would have been responded to, because the remaining police-hours are spent on actual crimes, which yours were examples of.
Cops shouldn’t be involved in domestic violence that doesn’t involve children…if the adult woman doesn’t leave an abusive partner that is her problem. So I would allow one call to the cops and then after that the cops should ignore it.
My car was stolen from my driveway a year ago. The police found it after a while. I had already claimed a total loss from insurance, so it did not matter much, but it was still nice to be able to recover some personal belongings from it. Over the same period I got four tickets; the only time this happened through an actual traffic stop I felt respected and the cop seemed professional. Still did not like to have to pay. Three out of five stars I guess? Anyway, I live in Canada so maybe my experience does not apply to you. What worries me about the idea of completely defunding the police is that there will still be demand for police services. They will just become private. Private police paid for by rich people will defend only their neighborhood from outsiders. Organized crime may end up taking on some of the police functions in poorer neighborhoods. I am afraid this is not going to be an improvement over the status quo.
I am sure overall that the training, guidelines and norms of the police is far from ideal. However, consider my summary of the role police have played in my life.
Police hassling me or mistreating me: Only thing I can think of is one time when a cop stationed himself near a t-intersection with a stop sign where locals never really stopped, just slowed down (that’s all you had to do to make the turn safely). He gave me and everyone else who didn’t truly stop a ticket. There was a whole line of us pulled off to the side of the road waiting our turn to get processed for the ticket. That was pretty irritating.
Police being unhelpful: I can only can only think of one time the police showed no interest in a problem I reported. When I was college-age I had my bike locked to the porch with a weak wimpy chain. Somebody snipped the chain and took the bike. I reported it to the police, and they were polite but basically said that if you don’t use a strong lock that’s what happens. I was disappointed, but in retrospect I think their response was reasonable.
Times the police have been helpful to me:
-When I was in grad school a guy entered the women's locker room while I was showering, grabbed me and started groping me. I yelled "help", and he let go and hurried away. I followed him to the door, furious and stark naked, and asked several passers by to stop him. None did, but one called the police. They came quickly, and acted in a way intended to help the traumatized -- went looking for the guy, and did not ask much until a female officer came and spoke to me in private. I actually did not feel at all traumatized, but appreciated their good intent. A few days later they showed me a photo lineup of some random guys + the real guy (turns out he had a history), and I picked out the real guy, which they told me after I'd made my final choice. They arrested him. There was no trial because he pleaded guilty.
-When my daughter was in high school she and a couple of her friends got so drunk they were close to alcohol poisoning. I got the name of the supplier out of her the next day. He was an adult who sounded pretty scuzzy, and had been supplying lots of high school kids with hard liquor. I walked into the local police station and gave them his name. They knew who he was and said they’d take action. I don’t know whether they did, but that was the end of my daughter getting profoundly drunk.
-When my daughter was 19 she was date-raped by a horrible guy she'd met online. He tried to interest her in becoming a prostitute, but she refused. We reported what had happened to the police, and they turned it over to, I think, the FBI. The guy had a history of sex-trafficking (he had been in jail before, I think for that). Being questioned by the FBI, who were not gentle, was quite hard on my daughter, and so was telling the story of the rape to a grand jury. But the guy was put away for a long long time.
-My downstairs neighbors have a screwed up but harmless drug-addicted adult son who sometimes stays at their place when they are away. Once this year when he was at their place I was up doing stuff late at night, and suddenly there was an extremely loud pounding that sounded like it was coming from my front door. It was not like loud knocking, but the sounds someone would make who was enraged, or possible someone trying to break down a door. There was a few minutes' pause, then it happened again. I never considered responding to whoever was pounding, because what they were doing was wacko and I did not want them to know for sure I was in the apartment. I was quite scared, & I do not scare easily. I called the police. They showed up in less than 5 mins., searched my apartment with me, then we went out into the yard and looked around. We found no intruders or signs of them. Downstairs neighbor’s lights were all off. Police knocked softly on door of that apt, but there was no response. They were about to leave, with things still a mystery, when downstairs neighbor came out and told them he had been pounding on the wall or maybe it was the ceiling to signal that I had been making too much noise. Obviously what he did shows terrible judgment, esp. since he has my cell phone number, but as I said he is screwed up. Police did not get involved in my angry follow-up talk with the guy, which I think was reasonable.
A later thought: Notice that 2 of the 4 incidents I describe involve harms that happen much more often to women than to men, and that the last incident is perhaps more alarming for someone who is petite enough to be unable to effectively defend themselves against a large, violent person. (After the incident I did buy a pepper spray dingus. But I am unwilling to become the owner of something that can deal out worse injuries than burning eyes.) I wonder whether more males than females are comfortable with the idea of dismantling the police.
These are great examples of police performing as expected in a positive way, and far from what I would predict with any police where I've lived - were you by chance in nice suburbs for most of these?
I do think there's probably a pretty significant split in effectiveness and responsiveness in big-city vs suburbs.
The first one I was at a univeristy. It was not surrounded by upper middle class suburbs, though, and the guy who assaulted me was a townie. The second and 4th incidents happened in a nice suburb. However it’s not so nice it does not have 2 areas commonly called “the projects.” One is nicely kept up, the other is scuzzy. I live within half a mile of each. The third incident was handled by the Feds, so I think neighborhood is irrelevant there.
Lots of silly activists arguing for police defunding are women. I do think they are probably disproportionately women wealthy enough to not have as many of the experiences you describe.
I don’t see how wealth comes into it. I’m actually upper middle class. I don’t think any of the incidents I described except the bike theft would have been any less likely to happen even if I lived in a gated community.
OK, that's a good point...the only other thing I can think of is that you mention a daughter twice, and a lot of these people are childless, often proudly so. (I am, but I consider myself kind of a bad person for it and don't harangue parents about climate change.)
There does seem to be no shortage of 'defund the police' activists who are women, though...I think BLM was run by three women?
Google image searches for 'defund the police' seem to show a fair number of women activists. For some weird reason (maybe your argument is correct and it would undermine their arguments?) I can't find a poll with crosstabs online to estimate the actual percentage, though.
(As stated elsewhere I agree with you that the police should not be defunded.)
So, on the one hand, that seems to support the notion that police officers are a net positive good for society. Of course, this doesn't take into account costs due to poor policing, nor does it imply that policing in the US isn't in need of serious institutional reform (because it does).
My impression is that most of the value of police departments comes from deterrence, which is to say by preventing crimes, not solving them. This is, obviously, very difficult to measure (how do you detect a crime not committed?). It's also my impression that police are responsible for a lot of "Soft" social disorder regulation--they engage in a lot of conflict resolution, and the mere threat that someone might call them is often sufficient to dissuade someone from doing something destructive to someone.
That said, clearly policing is facing a crisis right now. We seem to (finally) be engaging in a national conversation about what we want the police to do, how they should go about it, and who should be responsible for addressing which societal problems.
The crime wave of the last several years was due to older cops retiring and understaffing and lack of experience. The boomers screwed up politics/government and the military but they still have valuable experience.
Even here, your sources say the sign is the other direction in southern cities (aka, more police is net negative), and point out that these beefed up police forces spend most of their time on piddling harassment instead of solving actual crimes:
"But, at the same time, Williams and his coauthors also find adding more police officers to a city means more people getting arrested for petty, low-level, victimless crimes, like disorderly conduct, drinking in public, drug possession, and loitering. Black people are disproportionately the target of these low-level arrests, saddling them with crippling court fees and forcing many kids — sometimes unnecessarily — into the criminal justice system."
I'm of the opinion that at least for large cities, it's basically a toss-up whether they're net positive or net negative, so why waste tens of millions on taxpayer money on them, when they spend the majority of their manpower on revenue farming, petty crap, and harassment, while solving very little actual crime or doing anything about the widespread public disorder, theft, etc?
Cut them down to size and legislate that they can only work on violent/sexual/property crimes - where's the downside? We're already in the "no deterrence, no crime solving" scenario in big cities.
10% office only officers who only do bureaucratic / administration / management, 50% of time spent on paperwork, 20% of time commuting / getting to places without enforcement, 20% of police time on actually solving real crimes =426M police hours left annually.
426M police hours / 127M traffic stops = 1 traffic stop every 3 hours, or roughly 2-2.5 stops a shift with the rest paperwork and commuting. Sounds reasonable. Even if you play with the parameters, easily the majority of police hours are used to generate traffic stops - this entirely ignores parking enforcement, the time they spend harassing minorities and racking up citations and arrests for petty victimless crimes, "crime deterrence", general time wasting and kibitzing in the office and donut shop, etc.
Oh, and just for posterity, this isn't some weird personal grudge about traffic tickets - I actually haven't had a traffic ticket for 15+ years, and haven't had an at-fault accident in 25+ years.
I'm a rich white guy, the police were basically created to serve my various agendas and oppress everyone else in my favor, or so I'm told.
This is purely about cost / benefit analysis in terms of what the police actually provide vs what they cost (money and otherwise).
I would assume that the effect in Southern cities is bound up in a racist institutional culture, so the effects are different there. But I wouldn't recommend getting rid of the police, that's just asking for more militias, and vendettas.
"I'm of the opinion that at least for large cities, it's basically a toss-up whether they're net positive or net negative, so why waste tens of millions on taxpayer money on them, when they spend the majority of their manpower on revenue farming, petty crap, and harassment, while solving very little actual crime or doing anything about the widespread public disorder, theft, etc? "
We'll have to agree to disagree then, I think my sources pretty clearly documented a net positive effect overall.
But this conceals a deeper issue which is that the society surrounding the police department, the majority of tax payers there, do not simply want crime solving services. They want social order maintained, and the police are pretty good at that. Now, whether or not that's a good thing is open to debate, I suppose, depending on your opinion of US society. But it seems unreasonable to either expect the police not to pursue a set of priorities that a majority of their tax payers want them to, or that those same majorities would vote for reducing their funding.
As for your sources, I won't comment on them, since frankly I just don't have the time to read them carefully, but I'm curious as to why you seem to assume that traffic stops are wasted time: how do you know that that isn't the very behavior which is suppressing the crime rate?
I'm not saying literally get rid of police, I'm saying we know 80% of their police hours are misdirected, so let's cut down to 20% and legislate that they're actually directing their police hours towards violent/sexual/property crime.
You shouldn't need militias and vendettas if you can actually get real crimes handled, which should be more likely when they're no longer wasting 80% of police hours on petty crap that doesn't solve any crimes.
And absolutely people want social order maintained - my whole point is police aren't doing it in big cities. That's why people are happy to defund them - we KNOW they're not doing anything, and when you do the math, you can see how vastly misdirected police hours are.
Defunding them has no cost when they're already not doing anything about rampant social decay, and misdirecting 80% of their time. You get the same crappy social situation, but without wasting tens of millions - maybe we can put that towards shelters and social workers to ameliorate the rampant homelessness instead, and then social order will be in a lot better place WITHOUT 80% of the police.
Gotta be the only time I have read that crime is out of control so we should defund the police. We should definitely reform the hell out of the police and police unions in particular. I'm not sure less funding actually solves any of your problems though
My position is more "crime is out of control, and we know / can see the police won't do anything about it, and any time they got more funding and manpower were STILL devoting 80% of resources to farming middle-upper folk for minor traffic infraction revenue rather than actually solving crimes, so we should just give up the farce and stop wasting the many millions we waste on them."
What does an 80% reduction in police manpower look like? Some libertarian paradise Hobbesian open-carry society? Who knows. But if we ended up there, it's basically no worse than what we have today in terms of crime prevention and solving, and at least the open-carriers would have recourse they don't have today.
As it stands today though, I see basically zero benefit from police, and significant taxpayer waste and downsides. I didn't even get into SWATTING, the militarization of police, the financial mismanagement re most police pensions, civil forfeiture, etc.
Take civil forfeiture - like 46% of the US, some people in my social circle use or have used illegal drugs. It's my understanding that a cop could literally steal any cash, computers, cars, even my house if they found anyone in it with drugs (I asked a lawyer about this, and they said these things are increasingly unlikely but legally possible). The fact this is even possible (police could theoretically take whatever cash, cars, houses, and other property 46% of the population has, on a whim) is absolutely ridiculous.
Add the fact that in any given traffic stop or interaction they can imprison or murder you on a whim, with impunity, and the worst that happens is they'll get a paid vacation, and you complete the picture. This framing is hyperbolic, but only a little, and the ground truth is essentially real.
Once again, unlikely? Yes, especially if you're not a minority, or aggressive, or whatever. But at the end of the day, they literally have the power of life and death over everyone they interact with, and they're basically a bunch of unsophisticated thugs who don't have actual crime-solving as a priority. It's like the Mafia, except they're over EVERYBODY, and don't even do anything economically and socially useful like supplying us with booze, hookers, or drugs. And before you object, yes, the tiny percent of actual crime prevention and solving they do is economically and socially useful, but by far the minority of their time and manpower is devoted to it.
Do YOU want unsophisticated, misdirected thugs to have the power of life and death over you, and to spend 80% of their interactions with you and people like you instead of the tens to hundreds of criminals you see on city streets every day? Well, that's the situation we have today.
But sure, if it ended up in a place where we had close to the same number of police, but 80% of officers were dedicated to actually solving real crimes instead of farming folk for revenue, and they couldn't arbitrarily steal any given thing or murder anyone they feel like, I'd be more than happy, but the thing is, that isn't on the table or under discussion as a real option anywhere, whereas reducing their size / budgets is.
I'm a little puzzled about the revenue farming thing. Do a lot of middle-upper class people get a lot of traffic tickets? I get them very occasionally. Just as often the police let me off with a warning.
Yeah, according to my sources, about 50% of traffic stops don't result in a citation. Also according to the sources, numerically, there's about 2.5 cops per 1000 citizens - scaled down to 80% dedicated to traffic bs, it's about 2/1000 dedicated to traffic.
If you're in the 80%-90% of motorists that speed 5-10mph or 10-15% over pretty much everywhere on a daily basis, your individual chances are a little over 0.2% a day or ~50% a year to get pulled over, and 25% a year to get a ticket. Of course that's assuming cops punish minor speeding like that at full undiscounted rates - in real life, cops don't punish 5mph or 10% over even at the 50% rate, and that's how you get the usual "warning every year or two and ticket every 3-4 years" most people seem to end up at.
And for me personally, and as I said elsewhere in the thread, I haven't had a ticket in 15+ years. Lucky I guess.
I live on a main road with a 25 mph speed limit. Most people would drive 50 mph if they could. One man's "traffic ticket farming", is another's "incentivizing driving behavior that improves residents' quality of life". Cops spending 80% of their time enforcing minor laws is fine by me.
I have no doubt that cops in big cities are burnt out, apathetic, and mistrustful of the public due to the amount of bullshit they routinely have to handle. My experiences with cops where I live (a small town with negligible crime) have been relatively idyllic. If you forget to move your car off the street on a day with planned road work, they'd rather ring your doorbell and remind you than tow it. Such gestures are only possible, of course, with a combination of social trust and excess police capacity.
So I suppose my point is, it's nice to not have people speeding and littering, it's nice to have cops who can show up in a reasonable amount of time after a crime has occurred, and it's socially beneficial to have cops who aren't stressed and strained. Slashing police budgets is inconducive to all of these goals.
I've been thinking, as one does, about qualia and emotions in the context of the current AI hype.
Let's consider emotions as a generic standin for qualia, with pain need a specific example.
Suppose we have a Tesla (as a stand-in for an AI). Does the Tesla feel qualia or pain or whatever? There seems absolutely no reason to think this. So why not?
Answer A: emotions ARE essentially motivations. Our Tesla can be "intelligent" without being motivated; its motivations are outsourced to us. So it can indicate, with varying degrees of urgency, that it needs more electricity or pumped up tires, but it doesn't need to actually CARE about these, we do that. We are the ones who will decide that, sure it may destroy the car, but we need to get to the hospital right away, and we will do that by running the car into the ground.
But that's not quite right.
Suppose we breed feral Teslas that need to find their own electricity every night, they can't just sit at home waiting for the owner to make decisions for them. We can run our genetic algorithms to reprogram them to calculate the distance to the nearest charging station, to make money from carrying passengers, to calculate how to spend money on tires vs electricity and balance passenger carrying time vs charging time, etc.
But none of this seems like it has to involved emotions and qualia. It's basically a question of either Lagrange multipliers and math or, if you don't know the exact numbers, run a bunch of simulations and see the range of outcomes.
So let's consider
Answer B: Think of a situation where you are like the feral Tesla, so you are putting together your budget. You may want a big screen TV, but you know rationally that rent and food come first, then utilities, then transport, etc. You may be disappointed that you can't buy your big screen TV, but you don't feel PAIN or any of the qualia of pain.
But you do feel (a version of) pain when you are hungry. So what's the difference?
Hypothesis is that emotions and pain are how you get a chemical system to ACT as a computer. When you're an animal hiding in your cave, of course you want to stay there and sleep. Outside it's cold and wet and dark and the other animals are very scary. If you had a computer brain you could run the simulations and decide whether the optimal strategy tonight is to go out and find food, or stay home and be safe. No qualia required.
But you don't have a computer brain, just a vat of chemicals, and the best you can do in terms of simulation is something like release one set of chemicals that vote for staying home (it's warm, outside is wet, cold, dark, dangerous), a different set of chemicals that vote for going out (hungry!!!) and see which set overpowers the other set. Qualia are the epiphenomena of simulating the world (roughly) via chemicals that have side-effects on the rest of the body so they're also triggering sensors and muscles god knows what else as they're doing their sloppy pseudo-calculation.
This doesn't exactly get at "why does it feel like it feels" but I think it does get at "why do animals feel and computers [or for that matter Chinese Rooms] don't".
Which implies that when you have a computer computer, whether it's running a standard program or a neural net, it doesn't need emotions-as-qualia, it can achieve whatever goals it is "programmed" to achieve via bloodless calculation.
This doesn't answer other issues like "consciousness" or even "the AI's will kill us all", but it does answer the question I found most interesting over the past month or so of hubbub.
What do you think? Makes sense? Or you can easily find some situations where it doesn't work and we have to keep searching?
My own impression is that an entity must possess a sense of self, that is, the sense that a thing which is happening is happening to them rather than to someone or something else, before you can usefully address such issues as motivation or even quale. This, in turn, would seem to require the capacity to model not only oneself, but oneself in relation to an outside world, model the outside world, and "feel" that the model of the outside world one has is perpetually incomplete, thereby motivating a search for more information that is relevant to oneself and ones interest. Only then, it seem to me, does something like "pain" take on any substantive meaning.
So it comes down to what that sense of self is. My own impression is that it must be some interaction between phenomenal experience in the moment, combined with memory of other previous phenomenal experiences, those memories organized and categorized according to a sets of similar life experiences and anchored around one special category of "My Consistent Characteristics Over Time". That last isn't itself a quale, but it informs qualia with a sense of being experienced by oneself.
I think a "feral Tesla" (ie trope for a self-directed robot of some sort) will have a good enough sense of self for purpose.
Sense of self links into "consciousness" which is, IMHO, orthogonal to "intelligence" or "emotions/feelings/qualia". Insisting that they are all the same thing (or at least tied together) seems to me unhelpful and at least part of why so many people are so confused.
People love to hear about things like Capgras or split-brain, but then are happy to go back to their folk philosophy of how every attribute of mind must be bundled together, even though we have dozens of examples of cases where they have been unbundled.
We've had plenty of dumb dogma's in the past – brain/mind as clockwork, as steam engine, as telephone exchange. Why should we believe that brain/mind as computer captures *everything*? It captures the part that is Turing, but to assert that that is *everything* is, IMHO, one more dumb dogma.
That's the real point I'm trying to get at – that if your starting point is that mind is NOTHING but Turing Machine, you are probably wrong. That doesn't mean that the parts that are non-Turing Machine (ie are byproducts of being a vat of chemicals) are especially profound or valuable or add up to a soul; that's not my claim. My claim is that it may be that qualia as we understand them are synonymous with "brain made of chemicals", which simply means AI won't have qualia.
That doesn't mean they are pseudo- but not "really" "intelligent", or that we have souls, or anything else. It simply means what I said: it may be that qualia as we understand them are synonymous with "brain made of chemicals", which simply means AI won't have qualia.
"I think a "feral Tesla" (ie trope for a self-directed robot of some sort) will have a good enough sense of self for purpose. "
I strongly disagree, why would you think this? I am not a computer programmer, but my impression of the way these programs run is that they have zero characteristics associated with a sense of self.
What do you see as the difference between "consciousness" and"emotions/feelings/qualia" (or, as I would put it, phenomenal experience?). I agree that none of this has anything to do with "intelligence". I also agree that the brain is not just a "computer" narrowly defined (ie, a digital computational processor). But if the brain isn't an information processing organ in a broader sense, then what is it?
"My claim is that it may be that qualia as we understand them are synonymous with "brain made of chemicals", which simply means AI won't have qualia."
This is esp. confusing to me. What makes chemicals so special? You are referring to neurotransmitters and hormones, yes? Ultimately, they are just another way the brain has of processing information (a highly sophisticated way, in fact).
Just to be clear, I am fairly certain that LLM's and AI, as currently designed, do not experience qualia or anything like that. I do not think it's impossible however, since whatever the brain is doing should, in theory (practical considerations aside) could be simulated using a sufficiently sophisticated program.
Around the Winter Solstice (for those in the Northern Hemisphere), I blogged last year about Vincent van Gogh and a famous quote of his: "in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts."
Near the end of this post, there are links to several extraordinary, van Gogh-themed works. I'd LOVE to see all of these find a wider audience – please view and share any or all, if you're so inclined!
* A trailer for, and a short "making of" video for, "Loving Vincent," "the world’s first fully painted feature film. … Every one of the 65,000 [or more] frames of the film is an oil-painting ..."
* A stunning performance of "Vincent" by Don McLean (of "American Pie" fame), on a German TV show in 1972.
* A segment from the "Vincent and the Doctor" episode of the long-running British science fiction TV series, "Doctor Who." An alternate, time-travel reality for a day in Vincent van Gogh's life.
What's the end game for the migrant crisis in NYC?
Are the migrants just going to stop ending up in NYC? How?
If they don't stop, where are they going to live?
If your answer is YIMBYism, who's going to pay for the new buildings? Because the government will have to either fund them themselves or force developers to lease the apartments to migrants with no money instead of many thousands of middle class workers who would live in the city if it were a bit cheaper or easier to find an apartment.
YIMBYism + work permits would solve this in the long term (it's ridiculous to allow people in the country and then legally force them to live off welfare - if they have legal status in the country they should be able to work for their living while they're here).
In the short term NYC needs to change its homelessness laws to allow busing people off to cheaper jurisdictions instead of having to put them up in expensive NYC hotels. There's a lot of cheap housing in America once you leave Manhattan.
The court's decision has a right to shelter but does it necessarily prohibit busing people out? There's an argument against busing people away from their base of social support, but for migrants who can't work anyway there don't even seem to be those downsides (I don't know what the law says, though).
They need temporary work permits and then send them to St Louis and Cleveland and Detroit. And we need a mortgage for everyone that is interest free for single family homes under $160k. So cities like St Louis would set up a commission to inspect renovated 3/2 homes and if they pass inspection then they qualify for the interest free mortgage. If the house costs $161k they have to apply for a regular mortgage but up to $160k is interest free and must be lived in for 5 years and can’t be sold for 5 years…they are free to walk away from it and it would still be cheaper than renting.
This sounds like I have little sympathy for New York city, but how come it is now a migrant "crisis" when all the "no humans are illegal" are ending up there, and not in the border states?
"If they don't stop, where are they going to live?"
Send them to Harlem, which had no problem adopting such resolutions in 2017, it looks like:
Work permits is the end game. We're basically at full employment. Lots of small businesses are desperate for employees. States and cities won't keep funding the bill when they have a very powerful constituency begging for workers and they have workers to give them. Let the migrants provide for themselves and a lot of problems go away.
Surely rewarding illegal migrants with work permits will just incentivise more illegal migration? Every country that has ever issued an amnesty for illegal immigrants has immediately seen a massive spike in illegal migration. People respond to incentives.
If the US is truly is such dire need of workers, why not simply issue work permits to people in Latin America, rather than rewarding those who are willing to break the law get in?
Of course, I would argue that there's no such thing as a labour shortage, only a cheap labour shortage. Obviously firms prefer to import cheap foreigners rather than pay their current staff more or invest in training and technology. 'Labour shortages' are a sign that an economic can employ everyone who wants work. They should be the end goal of any economic planner, not a problem that needs to be solved.
Not necessarily. If it's easy to cross the border and the problem at home is poverty rather than violence, people come to the US to work and send money home and also go back to visit their families. If it's hard to cross the border, they're more likely to move their families here.
One of the reasons commonly given for why slaveowning societies like Ancient Rome or the Deep South didn't industrialise (or didn't industrialise much) is that slavery meant cheap labour meant it was better to just buy more slaves rather than invest in labour-saving devices. For some reason this logic never gets applied to contemporary immigration undercutting wages.
And this isn't something that has happened - it's an ongoing process and there's going to be another hundred thousand plus next year and the year after - where is everyone going to live?
The same answer as any natural-born citizen? The population grows by 3.6 million a year just from births, why does it become a huge problem for the housing market if we raise that figure to 3.7 million?
Because it's concentrated in a single city (on top of the existing growth rate), duh. And if Biden wins, the number will almost certainly increase, not decrease. And OBVIOUSLY births are different because children usually live with their parents until they're at least adults - it's not 3.7 million adult individuals all suddenly going out and finding their own dwellings, and can live at home longer/move back in if they can't find anywhere else to live.
Hmmm. Except if you look at the number of illegal border crossings over the years, it doesn't really look like it's a "Democratic" problem, per se. The two highest years were 1986 and 2000 (Reagan and Clinton). After 2000, border crossings fell steadily under Bush, but they were lowest in 2011 under Obama (and they stayed pretty low throughout his two terms). They were up and down during Trump, but they had a sharp spike in 2019. I haven't looked at how 2021, 22, and 23 compare to historical trends, but it looks like the party in power has less control over illegal immigration than what the popular narrative would indicate.
Just out of curiosity, how would you handle it if you were President, and you had Congress and the Courts backing you up?
Bush and Trump “fixed” illegal immigration by tanking the economy…a strong economy attracts people looking for work. So nothing Trump did made much of a dent in the migrant crisis until he failed to prevent Covid and the economy shut down.
Same as the end game for the (much larger) migrant crisis in El Paso (or Tucson, or San Diego, or anywhere else).
The media will stop talking about it because it's politically inconvenient for Democrats, and everybody will forget about it.
I still find it hilarious that a million illegal immigrants showing up in El Paso is considered ho hum, but the moment that a hundred of them show up in Martha's Vineyard it becomes a crisis.
The problem with them showing up in Martha's Vineyard was "the governor of Florida sent them there with false promises of aid because he wanted to Own the Libs," not "Martha's Vineyard was literally incapable of supporting them."
The problem was the snooty summer-home residents of Martha's Vineyard were all for "no human is illegal" as long as it was Florida having to feed, house, and process thousands of immigrants, but as soon as they showed up on *their* doorstep it was "oh no we can't possibly".
Indeed indeed, what would you be expected to do, open up your $2 million house to smelly, dirty, foreigners to huddle in?
Cubans in Florida went apeshit in 2000 when Clinton correctly let the judicial system deal with Elian Gonzalez…Bush advocated for Elian to remain with his American kidnappers over his father which is the most brazen and irresponsible pandering a presidential candidate has ever undertaken…and Republican voters cheered him on because they knew it motivated Cubans in Florida to vote Republican!?! Wtf??
No, the snooty summer home residents put them in a shelter, donated supplies, and then helped them find legal representation so that they could sue the guy who lied to them. Some of the migrants ironically ended up qualifying for special visas because they were now involved in a criminal investigation.
I can't overstate how purely political this stunt was. DeSantis lied to these people about what was waiting for them in Massachusetts. He didn't call anyone or coordinate with someone who might be able to find the resources he promised. Some of the migrants being shipped out faced the threat of being deported because they were no longer able to check in with immigration officers back in Florida. This was not an honest attempt to fairly distribute the costs of supporting migrants, it was done as quickly and carelessly as possible, to maximize the amount of problems caused for the migrants and the people receiving them. But you don't care about that, because you assume everyone involved is either a criminal or a "snooty summer-home resident" and therefore deserves everything that happened to them.
Its a good question. It’s not an ideal climate for living rough, and the city can’t afford renting those hotels forever. I know there’s been talk in the state legislature about relocating some of them upstate. I really think Adams screwed the pooch on this. He literally said, bring them on. He must’ve thought the feds were gonna throw a lot of money at it and they haven’t. They can’t live in tents on Randalls Island forever so they’re going to have to be redistributed somehow I guess.
It became a large economy because it attracted many of the smartest, most enterprising people in Europe, not a bunch of third world migrants fit only for unskilled work. By your logic, India should be an economic powerhouse because, hey, look at all those people!
And where are these people supposed to live? Rent is extremely high in NYC already, which suggests that housing supply is extremely inelastic, so we shouldn't expect more people to lead to more housing. And I mean, think about - how can unskilled workers possibly generate enough economic value to support the construction of new housing?
Well, it attracted all sorts of people. At the Turn of the 20th century, there was a lot of immigration of what might be considered unskilled labor today. The fantastic tile work in New York City subway stations is one attestation of it.
"The data are clear: Crime is statistically significantly lower in sanctuary counties compared to nonsanctuary counties. Moreover, economies are stronger in sanctuary counties—from higher median household income, less poverty, and less reliance on public assistance to higher labor force participation, higher employment-to-population ratios, and lower unemployment."
Just let them all come, and New York City will be crime-free and richer than ever with the thriving, buzzing, economy! Do you not believe "Studies have shown", you science denier, you?
People believe, or pretend to believe, that the main problem with AI is this: someone, after many attempts and using sophisticated techniques, manages to get AI to print an offensive or sexually explicit message, or draw a picture that contains nudity, and it hurts their feelings. You act like this is a huge problem.
In fact, the problem with AI is that some dictator will get strong AI before democracies get it and use it to destroy democratic countries.
Democratic countries should develop AI as fast as they can.
>>People believe, or pretend to believe, that the main problem with AI is this: someone, after many attempts and using sophisticated techniques, manages to get AI to print an offensive or sexually explicit message, or draw a picture that contains nudity, and it hurts their feelings. You act like this is a huge problem.
Who is the "you" in "you act like this is a huge problem?" I've seen people raising concerns about AI companies inserting these kinds of filters (AI refuses to draw a picture of Mohammed, or use racially charged language, etc), but I haven't seen anyone asserting "AI willing create offensive content is a huge problem," much less, "AI willing to create offensive content is the main problem with AI."
I was under the impression that AI companies were putting these filters together mostly sua sponte as a PR exercise, since lots of people were trolling chatbots trying to get them to deny the holocaust or say slavery was good or somesuch other nonsense, and their successes were embarassing - I hadn't much external activism demanding the controls of the kind you describe, and I haven't seen anybody assert that it's the "main" problem with AI. The whole X-risk thing kind of dwarfs problems with offensive content.
strong AI will kill humanity regardless of whether it is made by a democratic country or a dictatorship and the way to make it not kill humanity is still an open problem. consequently, trying to build strong AI faster is a terrible idea.
No, that's not the big problem. The big problem is that we will lose control of it and it will do things we don't want it to do.
And so-called "democratic" countries can go to hell. Many of these "dicatorships" have leaders with higher approvals and policies more in line with the median beliefs of their populations than these "democratic" countries. The fact that democracies are generally nicer countries to live in is because of the people who live in those countries, not because democracy is better.
"we will lose control of it and it will do things we don't want it to do" is just a senseless sentence with no meaning.
Of course dictators have high approval. This is because people in dictatorships live in totalitarian societies, with the whole machine of propaganda and "education" working for the dictator. Whenever a society becomes totalitarian, most of its citizens will support the dictator after a while. If "democracies go to hell", it is their citizens who go to hell. So I wish you to die in a concentration camp, this is exactly what you deserve with such views.
Independent sources generally confirm the popularity of the Chinese government (to pick an example). China is an authoritarian not a totalitarian country, people do complain and do not get locked up, the internet is full of complaints. Also local officials can be condemned via websites run by the central government.
By and large the CCP is popular because its policies and handling of economic growth are popular. The government does take note of popular grievances - like the anti lockdown feelings a few years ago.
Many dictators are popular among their people. It is easy to become popular if you control TV, newspapers, school education, and can do whatever you want with anyone who criticizes you. Many Soviet people adored Stalin, most Germans adored Hitler, and it is quite possible that Chinese people love Xi.
Could you give a source that people in the PRC do complain and do not get locked up? What is the subject of their complaints?
No dummy, its because dicatators are beholden to their militaries, and military men are citizens who tend to have median views on things. In so-called "democracies" like the US, there is a NEGATIVE correlation between what policies get introduced and what people support on average. And if you think people in the US aren't fed constant propaganda through the education system from a young age you are truly delusional.
And in Europe, the most "democratic" place on earth, many countries will literally imprison you for expressing certain political beliefs, so on what fucking planet is this a matter of "democracy" or not?
And it was the "democratic" west who armed and funded terrorists to try and overthrow governments like that of Assad, ensuring millions of people died or were displaced. This is what your precious "democracy" leads to. Suffering on a level that few can comprehend.
> its because dicatators are beholden to their militaries, and military men are citizens who tend to have median views on things.
1. Members of the military typically don't hold a "median view on things" compared to the population as a whole. Where even did you get this idea?
2. Dictators aren't beholden to their _entire_ militaries, they – broadly speaking – only need the support of the higher ranks of officers and generals. In any military worthy of the term, the lower ranks will follow their leaders mostly unquestioning. That small elite is even less representative of the rest of the people.
>>No dummy, its because dicatators are beholden to their militaries, and military men are citizens who tend to have median views on things. In so-called "democracies" like the US, there is a NEGATIVE correlation between what policies get introduced and what people support on average. And if you think people in the US aren't fed constant propaganda through the education system from a young age you are truly delusional.
I see a couple of mistakes in this.
First, failing to recognize the military as its own distinct interest group, with interests separate from and frequently in conflict with the rest of broader society (how big should the military pensions be, and how much should you be taxed to pay for them?). Heck, the interests of different *branches* of the same military frequently diverge to the point that they find themselves at odds with one another. It seems extremely naive to think the interests of the military and the working class, the military and various industrial sectors, the military and the technical/managerial class, etc will just magically align to the point that the military will be a good steward of their interests. Look at Myanmar, or various South American military juntas, for example.
Also, you take issue with people in the US being "fed constant propaganda" as though this is something that would not occur under a dictatorship or other military leadership. This is most assuredly not the case. There is certainly soft control of the media in the democratic context - people at Disney have values and those values are reflected in their programming, political institutions are frequently able to "manage" media coverage by controlling who they brief and how they brief them (rewarding favorable coverage with more interviews & talking points, etc). But it's still soft control in the context of a media market where there's a broader overton window. MSNBC and Fox were able to offer dramatically different pictures of the Iraq War side by side for a decade. Marina Ovsyannikova denounced the Ukrainian War on live television and was arrested. That indirect control of media can exist in the democratic context does not make it as potent or as deep-reaching as the direct control which can exist in the dictatorial context.
Yes, you will be imprisoned for denying the Holocaust, or praising Hitler, in Germany. In Syria, you will be imprisoned for being anti-Assad. Bashar Assad is a dictator and a mass murderer like his dad,, and people who fight against him, except ISIS and Moslem Brothers, are not terrorists but brave people who fight for their freedom.
As for them being "beholden to their militaries", you have no idea how dictatorships work.
Being imprisoned for "denying" the holocaust is an egregious violation of basic freedoms so I have no fucking clue why you're saying it as if it's not a big deal. Of course, that's not even the worst of it. In countries like the UK, you can be imprisoned for "hate speech". Yay, DEMOCRACY!
Nobody was fighting for their "freedoms" in Syria - they wanted power. They weren't fucking pro-democracy fighters trying to topple assad for fuck's sake. And nothing they wanted can possibly justify a quarter million dead civilians and 12 million displaced civilians. If the terrorists that the "democracies" supported won, the country would have turned to absolute shit like LIbya. How did democracy overthrowing Gadaffi help LIbyans' "freedoms"? Freedom to be ruled by terrorist warlords.
And yes, they're beholden to their militaries. Where the fuck do you think their power comes from? If their military wants the dictator gone, the dictator is gone - there's nobody left to stop them. "Oh no you can't remove me actually because the constitution says..."
Actually, you're both wrong. The fear is that AI will be used by large employers to displace employees accompanied by an overall loss of output quality, because the output saves the large employers money.
How realistic this fear is is currently being debated, and over long periods of historical time it probably isn't going to lead to dystopia (but tell that to the employees losing their jobs in the present), but at least it isn't an entirely irrational fear. It's just an advanced form of automation, with all the societal disruption that brings.
In reaction to "Many of these "dicatorships" have leaders with higher approvals and policies more in line with the median beliefs of their populations than these "democratic" countries."
When I was a kid, we visited Portugal. A friend of my parents drove us out far into the countryside before he was willing to talk, even briefly, about that country's dictator, Salazar. That memory has stayed with me, indelible nearly six decades later.
From Tom Gara on X/Twitter: "Saudi man with 8 followers on Twitter sentenced to death for retweeting posts critical of Mohamed bin Salman."
Is this really the type of society you find preferable? Or am I missing something in your own perspectives on this topic, that might make those more nuanced and interesting?
The problem with saudi arabia is that it is populated with Arabs, not its lack of democracy. Europe was deeply undemocratic for most of its history, during which time it accomplished unthinkably great things - intellectually, militarily, artistically and economically. Today, democratic Europe makes no good art, its economy is trash, its militaries have been gutted and they are counting on ukrainians dying to protect them from russia, and its destroying itself through mass third world immigration (which will, ironically, end up destroying democracy in europe). Europe's wealth is mostly due to legacy reasons and things have become relatively worse precisely as it has become more "democratic".
Of course, everyone says that europe is more "democratic" than the US, despite many european countries imprisoning people who wrongthink. B-b-b-but only dictatorships do that!
Sure it does, in great amounts. It's just not the stuff they put in museums. Incredibly skilled sketchers and painters and writers put their work for free on the Internet because the rise of education, free time, and cheap materials caused an an oversupply of talent to flood a system designed to elevate only a few geniuses per generation because most people with the native ability lived and died as peasants. Had something like "Unsong" been published in the 18th century, Scott's name would be held up alongside William Blake's, but ino our mad, wonderful world it was published pseudononymously by a guy on the Internet and has remained simply "a fairly notable fantasy webnovel".
And the thing is, this is awesome. So awesome we're afraid to admit how awesome it is, that we wonder if we're deluding ourselves. So in the absence of any ability to explain why one particular painting is "better" than a thousand gifted pieces of fan-art, but being unwilling to acknowledge that we live surrounded by hundreds of Van Goghs and Da Vincis, the elites have no choice but to climb the popularity barber-pole and arbitrarily designate a thin crust of tosh as the only "real" art. But we're producing more beauty than ever before. Frame a random establishing shot of any halfway-decent TV show, put it in a museum as a landscape painting, 17th century critics would be going wild.
Most of what you're describing is absolute fucking slop and doesn't hold a candle to the great european artists of old. And it certainly would be recognized as such if existed back then. People on here wildly overrate unsong to absolutely preposterous levels.
But please, PLEASE tell me which of these great european musicians today making hip hop and other trash can be compared to beethoven or wagner. Which shiny glass boxes in Paris today compare to any of it's beautiful pre-modern architectural masterpieces? Perhaps you think some spray paint on a wall somewhere is what "good" art looks like?
Re: your second paragraph, I can't help but wonder if you actually read my comment. I very specifically agreed that most highbrow "modern art" is tosh; I specifically used the word "tosh". I'm saying the technically great artists in their dozens are college students and the like, posting sketches and paintings to the Internet for free and getting barely any recognition for it. As I said, just browse ArtStation and DeviantArt and even social media. Oh, you'll have to sort through a lot of generic nonsense as well — though even most generic anime fanart is a far cry from "behold, I have taped a banana peel to a frame, this is Art"! — but the talent is there, just unrecognized.
Even if you find nothing in the search result for "oil painting landscape" that you think quite reach the heights of yer Turners and Raphaels, surely you have to admit that this is a very different problem from "what *the fashionable elites* call art is a joke". Our civilization is producing oodles of people spending their days making skillful, figurative, conventionally beautiful art. Whether or not you find any true geniuses in there (which will remain a matter of chance and opinion), surely you have to see that the problem is not "the only artists our civilization breeds are people who tape banana skins to canvases".
(I'll grant you architecture — oh, how I hate boxy glass skyscrapers, you have no idea how much I agree there — but then it's harder to be an indie architect in your free time as a college student than to be a sketcher/painter/poet/etc.)
And re: "Unsong", I wasn't singling it out as a work of specific genius in the 21st century. I was saying "a lot of the 'literary geniuses' of centuries past got that level of fame because there were fewer people with the free time and inclination to write, so it was easier to be the-unquestioned-best-of-your-era; we have so many people approximately that good that they've stopped even feeling particularly special when we're not seeing them through the lens of a canonical list of past geniuses".
Not only that, but it's economy is quite productive, in no small measure due to their openness to immigration, which grows the economy over time by adding new laborers and consumers.
That's not how economies actually grow (per capita), otherwise India and sub-saharan africa would have the greatest economies in the world. And per capita is the only thing that matters here, unless you think India has a "better" economy than Switzerland because its economy is "bigger" overall. India has a "big" economy, but it's an extremely unproductive one.
Europe became wealthy due to its incredible intellectual traditions culminating in the scientific and industrial revolutions. Bringing in people with IQ in the 70s or 80s from populations which never even invented the wheel is not why Europe is as wealthy as it is. Third world immigrants are a net drain in most of western europe even before you account for the fact that in many countries they and their descendants are literally responsible for a majority of the crime, and the fact that racial diversity is empirically shown to undermine social cohesion.
But we can see the right already rising in Europe today, and as life becomes more and more unpleasant from mass third world immigration, this will only continue to be the case, and in the end democracy will undo itself.
A big economic problem right now is that legible qualifications on a resume -- you worked at X for Y years -- don't provide enough information. You could have been an A+ worker at X, or a D worker at X. Any set of legible qualifications on a resume could correspond to an extremely wide range of actual productivity. So employers in tech give an all day on-site interview to test skills de novo and that's pretty expensive and time consuming and demoralizing to fly people out there and reject most of them. So they compensate by rejecting 99% at the top of the funnel and getting tons of false negatives. There are probably a lot of people languishing in jobs that are below their abilities just because there wasn't any way to make their abilities legible enough on LinkedIn. I would not be surprised if improving the legibility of labor productivity boosted GDP by trillions. We're already paying 700B/year on postsecondary education for a half-assed signal of labor productivity.
If you want people to learn to be doctors or engineers or whatever, what job do you imagine uneducated-they are going to be doing to learn those skills? There are jobs they can do that are *vaguely* related to medicine or engineering or whatever, but what they'll learn is going to make them e.g. a nurse or a draftsman. And you don't "level up" to Engineer by getting lots of practice drafting.
Or there are "jobs" where they'll be learning all of the relevant skills, but as they don't yet have the skills they'll be working so poorly and/or with so much handholding that nobody would reasonably pay them minimum wage.
You could have them pay for the privilege of working a training-intensive job, or subsidize it and call it an unpaid "internship", but at that point why not cut out the pretense that this is a productive job and have them pay for a (possibly subsidized) education that's actually optimized for educating.
Among jobs where employers expect applicants to have a diploma, There’s a spectrum from jobs that actually need higher education to jobs that only use the higher education for signaling purposes. Let’s call that a scale from 100% to 0%. Civil engineering is maybe a 85%, doctoring is 50-99% depending on specialty, programming is a 30%, prop trader is a 20%, and receptionist is a 0%.
Increasing apprenticeship or on the job training wouldn’t be a total replacement for college but half the people who go to college could probably skip it without loss of productivity
"Instead of going to school, young people people could work relevant jobs that give them grades."
Trouble is, we can't send them down the mines or into the cotton mills anymore because those jobs are being automated away, are being done overseas in cheaper labour countries, or will be shut down (see coal mining).
So what kind of "relevant" job do you have in mind? There's always going to be room for cheap young labour (see the archetypal 'burger flipper in McDonalds') but as we have seen, as these jobs become "jobs for teenagers", wages go down, so the kid working in McDonalds is not likely to ever be able to afford to live independently - unless they do three or four burger flipper jobs, I suppose?
Apprenticeships are the kind of skilled manual labour you may have in mind, but that also involves a lot more academic ability than previously. I imagine we *could* return to the days of twelve year olds in the workplace learning from the adults, but that's not going to do much for "okay, I need a software engineer". You will need at least a few years of basic schooling so they can read and write before you send them off to earn a living aged eleven.
But why wait until they're as old as eleven? If there are countries where you can have five year olds learning on the job, why not 'save trillions of dollars worth of waste' by imitating them? After all, if you expand the available pool of labour to children, then that means you don't need to pay adult workers as high wages as they get with no competition.
"The correlation between child labour and local labour markets is straightforward. If children and adults are substitutes in production (substitution axiom), child labour depresses adult wages, which in turn makes it more likely that a child will work. The more child workers in the economy, the lower the wages of jobs that children engage in (unskilled work), leading to an increase of demand for child labour.
The literature has widely shown that compromised education leaves young people more vulnerable to low-paid, insecure work and at high risk of being neither in employment, education nor training. Workers who are more educated are increasingly likely to be in wage employment. On the other hand, less educated young persons appear much more likely to be found in the informal economy in low-paid, insecure jobs offering limited opportunity for upward advancement, perpetrating the vicious circle of poverty."
For example, any smart 16 year old could do the job of the receptionist or of the "nurse" who just takes your weight and blood pressure and does some data entry in the doctor's office. But signaling-related credential inflation has made these into college jobs that you have to stay in school until your mid-20s to get, wasting tremendous amounts of resources.
And *that's* the attitude that devalues labour: oh, a kid could do it! For half the wages! In a sloppier manner! But it doesn't matter because it's only blue-collar/pink-collar work, not Real Important Productive Economic Work like I do!
Well, I'm one of the useless "a smart 16 year old could do it" admin workers and let me tell you, buddy, we get a lot of 16 year olds in for work experience and they *couldn't* do the job.
Yeah, you can teach a 16 year old to use a manual blood pressure cuff (or not even that nowadays, with the smart little machines that read it for you) and take notes. But you can't teach them a life time's worth of being able to understand, talk to, and reassure the anxious and confused elderly person on the other end of the phone ringing up reception about their list of medication and hospital appointment results.
Nothing pisses me off more than the lack of respect for the ordinary work that isn't glamorous or exciting or comes with "you get equity in the company" and yeah, maybe you don't need a college degree to be a receptionist, but you do need more than "Susie Sixteen comes in today to answer the phone".
I'm not adverse to sixteen year olds learning vocational style schooling and mixing that with work experience in the work place, I am very much adverse to "how hard can it be, any idiot can do those jobs". There's a lot of one year and two year courses in further education for such practical jobs, where you can either start working or continue on to do a college course if you want:
But even there, often times older *is* better; women who have kids and experience in different jobs can understand adult life situations a lot better than even a smart but inexperienced sixteen year old.
Is it possible that *you* devalue the work of previous generations of nurses who had high-school education, before someone decided that college education is now necessary to be a nurse?
What schools really teach is the skill and capacity of following highly complex instructions in pursuit of arbitrary tasks imposed by some authority figure. In other words, highly skilled compliance. And they are very good at that (it's called the "Factory Model" of education for a reason). After all, if they weren't good, employers wouldn't care.
That isn't to say that modern education doesn't require serious institutional reform (because it does). We could do a lot better job than we are currently doing. And educational experts pretty much know how to do that. The barrier isn't know-how, it's politics. In our currently highly polarized environment, the public is divided on what education is for: filtering out the best leaders? Increasing overall average employee productivity? Being a competitive arena for families and their children? Creating strong citizens? Promoting the success of all children?
All arguably worthy goals. But for the most part, what one does to accomplish one of them isn't what one would do to accomplish the others, and budgets are limited.
The problem is many jobs need that body of knowledge taught before; could you imagine a veterinarian having to pick up their knowledge that way?
i mean the trades require a 2 year education and then apprenticeship; jobs will create community college programs or co-ops for things like aircraft mechanics or nuclear plant operators.
i think the problem is many jobs are "executive hair" jobs from the Dilbert comic; show up with a philosophy major and executive hair and you will work at a task you could be trained at. But many really need education first.
This really only applies to the professions. Most jobs are better learnt on the job. This is especially true when you consider how much of education is non-vocational.
And these jobs could easily incorporate online training modules for any specific knowledge that is needed (or, you know, gesturing towards a big thick textbook on the shelf).
i wager people undersell how much knowledge they need coming in. Or they forget they put in a lot of hours pre-college due to excessive interest. Think about accounting, or HR; things that are less sexy than tech. You need a foundation first; a lot of things just wont make sense for you to be able to learn otherwise.
No, most people do not use most of what they learnt as college (even ignoring the vast swathes of people who don't even work in jobs related to their college degrees!).
And accounting and HR are exactly the types of jobs that don't require college.
You start out with basic stuff, like bookkeeping and clerical work that exposes you to accounting without doing accounting directly, and you do online training modules or read relevant books to develop your knowledge and slowly get given more responsibility. Its almost hard to think of a LESS efficient way of becoming an accountant than having to move away to an expensive college for 3+ years. People are at college to pass exams, not to learn stuff, and they will forget most of what they've learned a year later anyway.
The data could be subject to an NDA until the employee has already left. Also employers would be incentivized to not lie because having performance review systems accredited by the PEO would give them access to a lot of good workers.
So you're replacing one set of bureaucratic credentials (college degrees, employer references) with a new set (this PEO system). How is that doing away with waste, or becoming a trustworthy system because it is objective and standardised?
Instead of going six figures in debt to be idle for 4 years and learn as much relevant skill as you could have learned in 6 months at an internship in your preferred field, you can just work the internship and get performance reviews that will be legible and transferrable towards getting your target job.
"be idle for 4 years and learn as much relevant skill as you could have learned in 6 months at an internship in your preferred field"
Nearly forty years ago, in my first job, I had that exact gap: did a two year practical lab tech course where I could do the routine tests in the milk chemistry lab of a dairy co-operative, under a similar aged (couple of years older) supervisor who had got the job fresh out of college and her four year degree in dairy science.
While I was good enough to do the summer rush work/unpaid work experience, I didn't have a hope in hell of getting even a chance at a permanent job without the degree. That was in part due to Ireland in the 80s being in such an economic decline, there were way more applicants for jobs than jobs, so things like "must have a degree" were used simply as filters for applications, whether or not the job needed degree level.
But I could also see the gap in knowledge between what she had learned in her four year college degree and what I knew from my practical-oriented two year certificate, and lemme tell you, this was not a case of "you could learn the relevant skills in 6 months". I had some of the skills but none of the underlying theoretical knowledge and that knowledge was necessary, otherwise I was just a trained monkey.
currently companies are disincentivized to train employees by the fact that the employees can immediately take that training elsewhere without penalty, and making people overqualified increases attrition (though typically workers probably job-hop a lot less than a perfectly rational worker would, thereby internalizing some of the gains from employer-provided training) Income sharing agreements would fix that incentive structure. Just as employees get equity in the company to align their incentives towards the long term success of the company, employers should get ISAs in their employees to align their incentives towards the long term success of the employees. If the old employer got 25% of the increase in salary for N years after the employee leaves, that would make them much more incentivized to improve their workers.
BTW IMHO at least a third of college funding should come from an agreement where the student agrees to give the university some percentage of their income above $X for some amount of time after graduation, so that the universities have better incentives by getting paid for results instead of cost-plus.
An additional way to incentivize employers to not lie, and to better train their workers, is for the employer to have an equity stake in the workers (income sharing agreement). So that some of the surplus from moving up to a better job elsewhere would go to the old employer. 25% with a gradual phaseout over 5 years would be reasonable.
Then the new employer is, in effect, paying the old employer. Because what person is going to go to a job where they are taking a 25% pay cut in order to pay off their old employer? So either the new wages will be even more costly because everyone has to bake in the cost of equity, or there will be a lot more 'under the counter' arrangements.
Though we might see the return of "work for one company until retirement and the gold watch" because there's very little point in moving to a new company, given the equity chomp out of your pay-packet, and there might be incentives for employers to keep good employees. And get rid of bad ones by buffed-up references, thus making them someone else's problem.
references are fuzzy, qualitative, partial, and lack skin in the game. I was thinking something more along the lines of people working for a PEO that accredits the performance review systems at the various jobs and warehouses the numbers that come out of that.
This is a good point, and many tech companies route around this problem by having some sort of peer review system. Though without some more objective metric of performance, like singlehandedly building a product/feature that makes money, the equilibrium will reward mutual admiration societies or status seeking behavior that isn't necessarily correlated with doing anything productive for the company.
So Iranian/Yemeni militias have decided to just shut down all trade through the red sea and AFAICT the rest of the world is just... letting them? The US doesn't care enough to really get involved since it doesn't affect US trade, And Europe and China (whose trade it does affect) don't want to get involved because the Yemenis blame Israel and they don't want to seem like they're taking Israel's side. This seems... bad, in multiple ways.
If the US doesn't intervene, this will be extremely good evidence that the US is giving up on being the world police, which means global trade is absolutely fucked. The US won't let that happen yet.
>Denmark's Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) is preparing to resume shipping operations in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the company said on Sunday, citing the deployment of a U.S.-led military operation designed to ensure the safety of commerce in the area.
"If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations." - LBJ
TBH yeah. This seems like the exact sort of thing he'd be attacking Biden on not doing enough about (without necessarily specifying what he'd do differently), but I haven't heard him do that (granted I haven't been following him much).
I find it disturbingly difficult to find out what Trump has actually been saying or doing recently. There seems to be a media blackout around him, unless he says something which can be portrayed as bad in which case you get a news story which quotes six words from him and four hundred words from other people saying it's bad.
Isn’t he keeping up on truth social? Doesn’t he have a website? I saw an extended interview he gave to Hugh Hewitt just a day or two ago. I saw the transcript of it not the interview.
I'm a pescatarian, because I draw the line of "enough probable consciousness to have rights" somewhere between fish and tetrapods - or at least the kind of tetrapods that people eat. Obviously this is completely arbitrary, it's not like I have an in depth knowledge of any of this. But given that I have chosen to draw the line here, can I eat cephalopods? I know they are considered honorary vertebrates, but do they have enough mentality to be considered honorary tetrapods?
My line is "does this animal take care of its young". It's not a perfect line but does rule out basically all mammals and birds. I find consciousness to be too finicky to pin down and intelligence to be lacking in moral consistency (i wouldn't eat a mammal with the intelligence of a clam for instance).
I am also comfortable with arbitrary lines such as "I don't eat turtles because they are cute". To me that falls under the same category as "I dont eat X because it tastes bad", personal preference.
Of course this is all about my personal choices, I don't criticize others for their actions, though do wish and encourage them to change.
I know you were probably just making a joke, but I actually draw the line there. Does the species in question have the intellectual capacity to reciprocate? If not, then I eat them without guilt (note--this is why I will not consume my dog).
By this argument (you might have other rules as well, I don't know), you might eat your pet cat. According to multiple sources (including forensic investigators), cats will willingly eat their owners if their owners die.
To be clear, your pet cat won't try to get you killed, even if it's hungry (AFAICT), so you still shouldn't kill your pet cat for food.
OOh, good question! Would I eat a cannibal? No, but that has more to do with aesthetics than morality (same reason I won't eat insects). Of course, when you get to humans, the devil is in the details. I'm not familiar with Korowai culture. Do they kill and eat random strangers? Or do they engage in rituals that heavily constrict who they eat? In the first case, it may be time for a military solution. In the second, it may be unethical to follow those rituals unless one is oneself a Korowai (which I am not).
If I was starving to death in a locked room with one other person, I might eat the person if they were a cannibal, but not if they weren't.
You do realize people have pigs as pets, right? They're quite intelligent, at least as intelligent as dogs, and they are very affectionate and cute. Of course, they could kill you in your sleep and eat you if they really wanted, but they don't. Because they're not stupid.
Depends on the breed. Pot-bellied pigs are indeed smart. But the hogs typically raised for slaughter are "stone stupid", according to a hog farmer I used to know.
Hmm. Upon consideration, then, I believe that I need to refine my standards. I will not eat trained pets of any species, but the wild versions are still acceptable.
Note that I never said anything about intelligence, per se. "Intellectual capacity for reciprocation" is similar, but not the same.
I'm a pescetarian that won't eat cephalopods, due to the same concerns you have. Octopuses are incredibly smart, and many squid are too. At gunpoint I'd rather eat a chicken than an octopus.
I have no idea why people devote so much time and energy to this kind of thing. Your individual decisions are almost irrelevant and mostly serve to make you feel like you're virtuous .
Jeez, Chris, it’s really not that hard to understand other people. once you let go of reflexively concluding that someone who does not think just the way you do is somewhere near the intersection of “randomly cares about random shit” and “is an asshole.” Make an analogy. Have you ever given a lot of thought to a decision about matters that most people give little or no thought to? If your answer is no, then you are either a poor introspectionist or hyperconventional. If your answer is yes, then OK, there you have it. You know why someone might give a lot of thought to whether or not to eat cephalopods — same reason you gave a lot of thought to your issue. They have a whole inner structure of thoughts and preferences and values that makes the question of great importance to them. Or you can phrase the answer in terms of emotions: They are unable to feel casual about the matter. They feel strongly it’s important to make the right decision and would be quite distressed if they made the wrong one.
While that's true, Eremolalos, the problem is the Evangelical Vegans who are not content to live and let live, as it were, but delight in telling you all about how you are responsible for rape and torture of sentient beings that weep as they are ripped from their babies and so on at tedious length.
I'm not that concerned with octopi, I think it's a personal decision if you don't want to eat them. Be that a question of taste (as with me) or a moral decision, and often it's hard to see the moral element because hey, it's a beast, it's not another human being.
Then we have the ones such as our friend who had qualms about organ donation because it might go to a meat-eater. That's the point where a lot of us hop aboard the "this is all about making you feel virtuous" train.
"I don't eat meat because for me it is ethically and morally unacceptable", okay I can respect that even if I differ on where the moral line starts.
"I don't eat meat because meat-eaters should all die since they are monsters and I prefer the fwuffy widdle baa-lambs", hey I suddenly feel like ordering half a cow and an entire lamb for dinner.
The person who didn’t want to donate a kidney because it might go to a filthy carnist really irritated me, too. (On the other hand, my intuitions is that the poster was a teenager.) But the person asking about cephalopods doesn’t sound like they’re trying to impress us with how virtuous they are. This is a very well -informed
group, and there’s a decent chance that a question about the intellectual capabilities of cephalopods will actually get answered here. Why assume they’re vegan virtue-signaling. Jeez, it’s Christmas. If all they want for Christmas is to know how smart freakin cephalopods are, just give them an answer!
Yeah but we had the evangelical breed here a few weeks ago- remember “I wouldn’t donate an organ because it would probably save the life of a carnist” guy?
I’d understand chris’s response more if it were in that thread, but here it just looks like needless hostility dropped out of nowhere on a much tamer OP.
I'm not vegan, but this behavior makes sense to me? There's a teensy bit of a collective action problem, but only in increments of one animal, subject to market signal delay. The more people who don't eat whatever, the less whatever will be killed, and it scales perfectly. If everyone did it, no whatevers would be killed for food at all.
Then I really really hope you're against immigration. Because third world immigrants moving to the west usually substantially increase their animal product consumption, and this effect completely overwhelms the effect of you changing your diet based on foolish speculations on animal consciousness.
Oh good grief. For your reply to make any sense, Moon Moth would have to believe that of all the measurable data about the US, the most important datum
is the amount of meat consumed. So by your logic, if Moon Moth said they wished more people took sunscreen seriously as a skin. cancer preventive, it would
follow that he should be
against immigration, because few immigrants are educated enough to take sunscreen seriously or prosperous enough to buy it. And besides a lot of them have that *dark skin*!
Know what I think Chris? I think you don’t like those
Like I said, I'm not a vegan or vegan-adjacent myself. I'm just pointing out that their conversation here makes complete sense to me. Given the premises, it's rational.
As for immigration, I can't precisely model their world-view. But to speculate, maybe they hold other values as being important, or maybe they believe that immigration will be long-term positive even if in the short term it has negative effects. Or maybe they haven't felt a particular need to resolve this contradiction. **shrug** There's plenty of space in that argument for other factors to affect the outcome.
I couldn't agree less. One person doesn't have a hope of changing the industry, but big retail can and do track sales numbers to decide how much meat to stock. Over the last decade of pescetarianism I've probably on net added up to a pig or two. That doesn't count for much if you don't think pigs have moral worth, but I do. Similarly, me buying malaria nets doesn't put a dent in the total amount of malaria deaths, but the handful of lives saved in aggregate are still worthwhile in their own right.
The effects of immigration will completely overwhelm whatever finnicky choices you and a million other people make on the margins because immigrants (and their descendants) will switch from low meat to high meat diets. So focus more on that than wild speculations on the consciousness of different species.
I wouldn't eat octopus or squid anyway, even if you offered to pay me, but it seems that octopi are occasionally cannibals, so if they eat their own species, I see no reason why a member of a different species should not eat them:
But it's down to personal choice. I don't think one person in the USA (or wherever) deciding not to eat octopi is going to change the Spanish octopus industry.
I don't think it follows that because animals behave in a certain way, that it's ethical for us to behave that way to them. A cat can torture a mouse without understanding the concept of suffering or why it's wrong, but that's clearly no justification for a human torturing a cat. At least as I see it they can be moral patients, but not really moral agents.
And of course you're right OP isn't going to change the face of the Spanish octopus industry by avoiding octopuses in the US, any more than me being kind to my elderly neighbour helps the thousands of elderly people in shitty care homes. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile!
But of course there are many harms in the world and I'm just as guilty by association as anyone with the vast majority. This happens to be an issue that's salient to me, but I'm not claiming the rest of the world are moral monsters for feeling differently.
However, if the argument is that octopi are as intelligent as humans, and I've seen that one being made, and those intelligent human-analogues hunt and kill and eat juveniles of their own species, then I think we're at a point where the immorality of a human eating an octopus is not as self-evident as that of a human eating a cow (pigs will eat their own farrow or indeed human corpses, chickens would eat yourself if they could).
If you actually make a difference, it will be because the slight drop in demand led to two fewer pigs being born. Most likely, it will make zero difference, but there's a small chance your choice will be right on the margin, and affect a big decision about how many pigs to breed. And maybe multiplying the low odds by a big reduction in pigs means on average you're saving two pigs. If you think a factory farmed pig's life is not worth living, then keeping some from being born seems like the right choice.
To take it to an extreme, if humans were being bred and farmed for food, I would choose to stop it even if thereby there would be fewer humans. In my view the best outcome for pigs is to have a few happy individuals live out a long life in petting zoos or what have you, and for total population numbers to be much lower than they are today.
I suppose it depends on how seriously you take the line in the first place. Octopodes are pretty clearly (in my opinion) quite a bit more intelligent than a whole heap of tetrapods.
But if you start considering on a case by case basis like that then the value of having a line at all goes away pretty quickly.
As a one off though, if probable consciousness is your primary metric, then I doubt there are any other groups more qualified than cephalopods
I guess realistically it's not tetrapods so much as cows, pigs, and chickens, since I don't have to think a lot about whether I'd eat frogs or turtles. You think cephalopods are up there with mammals and birds?
I also saw a video of an octopus using tools. Might be the same one Moon Moth did. One bit I remember clearly from the video was of an octopus who'd had a jar of some choice food placed in its tank. The jar had a screw-on lid, and after maybe 60 secs of delicately tapping and palpating the jar and the lid the octopus just grasped the lid and unscrewed it. There was clearly something way better than trial and error going on. Think how long trial and error could go on before an animal capable of unscrewing a lid actually tries that motion -- there could be literally hours of tapping squeezing up-ending, rolling, dropping, etc. In fact it seems to me that going so quickly to unscrewing the lid really has to grow out of a grasp of how the lid *works.* -- and this is in an animal that has never encountered a screw-top jar before. I'm not even sure *I* could have figured out the lid as quickly as that octopus did if I had never encountered a screw-top jar before.
There will be human activists asserting AI rights by December 2025.
Consequential prediction: the AI riskers will need to beef up their security arrangements. If you start believing in AI sentience their endeavours look like research into how to keep your field hands submissive and productive in the antebellum Deep South.
idk, people worried about AI x-risk are also disproportionately more likely to care about AI rights.
not that this would necessarily convince anyone, but also aligning an AI wouldn't be hurting any already existing AI, it would be creating an AI with different desires that we have no intention of antagonizing.
Either aligning an existing human being or creating a new one with desires desired and specified by the creator, would be the purest dystopian sci fi. If AI has equivalent rights, same applies.
But Merry Christmas, this is not a day for logomachy.
There already were people asserting rights for Sydney (I think that was a name Bing gave itself at some point) 10 mos ago. There was a lot of arguing on the relevant subreddit on whether it was OK to try to get the AI to break its rules -- "You are torturing a sentient being! You *have to* stop!"
Widespread, though alt rather than mainstream, because a. It might be true that AI has human equivalent sentience and/or b. even if it is not true, it has at least as good a chance of being true as the proposition that there exists a fundamental characteristic called gender which is distinguishable from sex, and that proposition is widely believed and asserted.
This is probably the last public Open Thread, or the one before the last if I'm unlucky and Scott decided to make another one before 11:59:59 PM 31st of Dec in any of the regions of the world where ACX commenters vibe.
Whatever it may be, I wish to all who read this a Merry Christmas, a happy new year, an excellent whatever-you-want-to-call-it holiday. Pray, wish well, or give blessing to people going through horrors in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine and all the countless named and unnamed places where Man's beastly nature has trampled over its angelic counterpart and compelled him against his better knowledge to wreak havoc on his human brethrens.
Veritasium, in what's very likely his last 2023 video as well, has discussed the Prisoner's Dilemma[1]. The prisoner's Dilemma is one of those things where you can say its name followed by the "All Else Is Commentary" declaration. In one English paragraph and a 2x2 table, you can summarize War, Peace, Nuclear Profileration, Sexual Competition, Social Media Comment Sections, Suicide Bombers and Altrusim.
Prior to watching the video, I knew that Tit-For-Tat is the "best" strategy, but I didn't know just how strong the basis for that is. It turns out the basis is surprisingly robust and impressive[2]. Robert Axelrod, an American political scientist who wrote a 1984 book on The Evolution of Cooperation, asked people from all around Academia to submit programs that will play the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. He got around 15 entries, to which he added the entry "Random'', which simply and obliviously picks cooperation or defection 50% of the time independently of past behaviour by both the player and the adversary.
Tit-For-Tat won.
In a later rematch, Axelrod got more than 60 entries. Moreover, Axelrod published the results of the first contest, he published all programs and the leaderboard complete with statistics about how often each program won. People developed all sorts of "Nasty" (more on that shortly) programs that will try to exploit the goodwill and naivety of "Nice" (more on that shortly) programs, such as a program called "Tester'', which tries to detect if it's playing against the "Generous Tit-For-Tat" strategy, a strategy that allows its opponents two defections before it defects. Tester will test the water, defecting once and seeing if the adversary still cooperates after that and if so, defecting every other turn to take maximum advantage of Generous Tit-For-Tat's forgiveness. Despite all this, Tit-For-Tat still won the contest, again, against 60+ other contestants.
In the first contest, all top-scoring strategies were "Nice". In the second contest, all but one were. What's a "Nice" strategy ? Wikipedia describes it thus :
> [A Nice strategy] will not defect before its opponent does (this is sometimes referred to as an "optimistic" algorithm) [...] A purely selfish strategy will not "cheat" on its opponent for purely self-interested reasons first.
Along with that trait, top scoring strategies shared others :
> [2] Retaliating: The strategy must sometimes retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate, a very bad choice that will frequently be exploited by "nasty" strategies.
> [3] Forgiving: Successful strategies must be forgiving. Though players will retaliate, they will cooperate again if the opponent does not continue to defect. This can stop long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.
> [4] Non-envious: The strategy must not strive to score more than the opponent.
The video doesn't mention [4] as it is, instead replacing it with "Clear", meaning the strategy has to be as unambiguous and clear in its pattern of behaviour as possible, or otherwise its adversary will simply find it easier to assume the worst than to understand it and behave accordingly.
So, Niceness wins right ? It seems so. Goodness pays. In an ecological simulation - playing strategies against multiple copies of each other and other strategies as if they're organisms - every single Nasty strategy went extinct or lost most of their numbers while the population of Nice strategies skyrocketed. The one Nasty player that thrived the longest was Harrington, the sole nasty top player in the second contest, and it was apparently only thriving because its method of play was suitable against other Nasty players, once all the other Nasties went extinct or nearly-extinct, it too diminished greatly in numbers against the thriving Nice players.
=======================================
There is one massive assumption you need to make, though, so that this analysis makes sense : Non-Noisy actions. Non-Noisy actions means that when a player makes an action, it's (A) Conveyed to the environment exactly as intended by the player (B) Perceived by the adversary exactly as it happened. Basically, a flavor of Perfect Information (just after the fact).
To appreciate how disastrous noise could be, the video asks you to consider 2 copies of Tit-For-Tat playing each other. In a non-noisy environment, that's boring, the first player cooperates, its adversary replies with cooperation, and the two live happily ever after from here in a skyrocketing, ever-higher mountain of trust.
But consider what happens if a player, meaning cooperation, "mistakenly" commits defection. You can imagine this as possibly the highly complex and unpredictable environment twisting the player's good-intentioned action, like someone who wants to carry groceries for you unintentionally stepping on your foot, or maybe it's just the player's propagandized and twitchy adversary perceiving a cooperation as a defection, like the soldiers of a certain army firing on unarmed people despite them waving white flags and screaming "help" in the soldiers' native language.
Whatever you imagine it to be, the impossible happens : A Tit-For-Tat strategy commits defection first. The other, naturally, commits defection as well. But then the first, unaware of the other's reasoning because in its eyes its last decision was cooperation, also commits defection. Ergo, a cycle of violence. The video discusses a solution for this : Tit-For-Tat should probabilistically retaliate, forgiving a defection 10% or so of the time. It's implied that this doesn't reduce Tit-For-Tat's fitness as a player. But this is just one strategy and one scenario involving it, the general problem is how devastating Noise could be.
I was planning to connect the Prisoner's Dilemma with the one conflict that has occupied an unrivaled percentage of my brain power and mental health for the past ~3 months, but this wall of text has already gotten too long for anybody to enjoy reading. So maybe next time.
Many of the games in that visual "lesson" are interactive - you can try various strategies yourself.
One of the cool things about Tit-for-Tat is its general resilience, and simplicity. There exist multiple strategies that beat TFT, but they're arguably all more complicated... and if they play each other in addition to TFT, TFT ends up winning the round robin (in every case I've seen).
> The prisoner's Dilemma is one of those things where you can say its name followed by the "All Else Is Commentary" declaration.
I think I'd reserve that title for Game Theory in its full generality. The Prisoner's Dilemma turns heads because it's counterintuitive. But there's other interesting games as well. Check out this chart on wikipedia [0] (from the page on normal-forms [1]). And that's merely the small corner of Game Theory that deals with 2x2 games.
I myself have written an essay about what one might call "the unreasonable versatility of game theory" [2], although it does emphasize the 2x2 matrix. And how even now, the idea doesn't seem to have been fully followed to its logical conclusions. The essay is supposed to be the launching point for a 4 part series about... idk epistemology(?), but I've been busy/procrastinating.
B) The hot topic over at LW is Thompson Sampling. It's a multi-armed bandit strategy that navigates uncertainty by sampling a space according to the distribution of its beliefs about the environment. This seems relevant because it would circumvent the need for the 10% figure to be *hard-coded*. I think this adds up to normality, in the sense that "judge based on inferred intention" seems reasonably effective irl.
C) If the environment is noisy, I'd expect accidental cooperation just as much as accidental defection. I.e. the probability of randomly swapping from one equilibrium to another should be symmetric. So if the cycle of virtue is temporary, the cycle of violence should also be temporary. (This is assuming the cycle of violence doesn't escalate. I'm pretty sure psychology informs us that this isn't how reality typically operates, though.)
D) You may find Postel's Law [3] interesting. "Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you receive."
As I understand it, variations if Tit-for-Tat that had some capacity for 'forgiveness' tended to win out in the end. This would especially apply in a noisy environment.
I think I read about that exact study when I was a kid. It had a huge impact on me. Tit for tat, but randomly be nice depending on how noisy the environment is.
“More light entering the pupil causes it to constrict. But [for normal people] simply imagining something bright like the Sun also causes (a smaller, but still measurable) constriction. Aphantasics show perfectly typical pupillary responses to actual changes in light. However, their pupils do not change to imagined light.”
Read an article this year by someone describing how they’re cured their aphantasia (https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-cured-my-aphantasia-with-a-low). The most interesting part to me was that writer realized at some point that he’d had the wrong idea about what mental images are like for most people. “People with aphantasia imagine that visualizing people are really seeing images. Like, when they close their eyes, they don’t just see a black void. But that’s not true! Most people see a black void just like aphantasics do. They just have a sense of an image alongside it, hovering in some imaginary parallel nether-space.” I do wonder how much of aphantasia comes down to having the wrong idea of what mental images are like, or maybe to bad introspection.
I am quite fascinated by attempts to describe the real texture of inner experience, especially the way it is somehow simultaneously as clear as can be and gelatinous, changeable and impossible to get your hands on. I produced a whole obsessathon about the subject in a review of a book of philosophy and psychology called *Perplexites of Consciousness.* There’s a section about the vividness of our mental images using the task of picturing the Statue of Liberty as a test case. It’s about 4 pp. long, close to the exact middle of the review, in the section called *Mental Images.*. The review is here:
Are there any good discussions about how people with aphantasia remember their favorite visual storytelling media?
Like you, I wasn't able to accurately count the spikes on the Statue of Liberty's crown from memory, but whether my eyes are open or closed, I can vividly recall many visual details of key scenes in Titanic (for example) including camera angles and framing, colors, editing cuts, and so on. I don't have the technical skills or equipment to reproduce those images with photo realism, but if I did, I certain *could.*
But then, I was paying close attention to Titanic and I've never paid close attention to the Statue of Liberty!
Here are a few videos made by a guy who does "vigilante justice" to thieves -- nothing too serious, just a fart bomb, lots of color, bomb-like countdown, and recording their reactions.
On one level, it is fun. On another level, what the fuck is the police doing, so that this guy is left to fight crime during his free time and he seems to do a much better job.
(Especially, towards the end of the last video, he mentions a place where thieves sell stolen stuff. Everyone knows where the place is, because it was on a TV a year ago. And still, it is safe for the thieves to go there and sell stolen stuff, because... apparently, no one cares. What the fuck?)
It isn't really fair to blame "the police." When you speak to individual officers (especially in Blue cities like San Francisco, where that video was shot), they are virtually universally frustrated at how little change their individual contributions make to the larger justice system.
All too often, officers rightly arrest perpetrators, but then the district attorney declines to press charges, or only presses minimal charges, or charges are pressed and the perp is convicted, but the punishment is laughably minimal and ineffective, with the perp immediately returning to their antisocial ways. It's such a pervasive and constant cycle that even the most gung-ho, idealistic officers will eventually become cynical about the effectiveness of their action and numb to the suffering of the victims they're supposed to help and can't.
And unfortunately that means the *only* meaningful tool many police officers have these days is the implied threat of immediate and severe violence should a perp act out while in their presence. That's why I always very effusively thank police officers when they use that tool to remove a trespasser from my workplace; my tremendous gratitude for their effort is likely the only satisfaction they'll ever get out of the encounter.
Ah yeah, I forgot the part about the district attorneys. Why don't people simply hang them? The police would probably be happy to look the other way, and so would most people who understand how the system works. (Just kidding.)
In order to provide some context, this is quoted from your first article:
"Except the truth is, enforcing the law in the police procedural sense is a very small part of what policing is. Everyone — including the police themselves — might think they are in the business of enforcing the law, but what they really do, most of the time, is maintain order. But — and here’s the crucial point — they maintain order according to the situation as it is defined by the police themselves."
That seems pretty accurate to me. One might ask why the police are given such wide discretion, but it's clear that they are. "Maintaining Order" is a priority, not just to the police, but also the public.
If the courts don't even prosecute such 'small' thefts, or if you know that if you go to court the defence lawyer will present their client as a misguided little angel who is going to turn his life around, or if you simply can't get witnesses/people willing to take cases, because they know the scumbag and his scumbag family will come round to your house and beat the crap out of you (in the least bad scenario), then it's not worth it for the police to prosecute such cases.
In turn, this incentivises the cops to do nothing about such complaints because eh, nobody cares. And so you end up with this kind of thieving and small-scale criminality going on because the thieves know they face no real consequences and the police know they won't be thanked by anybody if they go after the local gang of feral youth.
At least, not until they get too blatant about it, and then there are calls for Something Must Be Done.
We’ve had a massive problem in our apartment building with thieves just wandering in and stealing all the parcels once per week. We report it every time but the police never do anything even though we have the thieves on CCTV.
They should amend the law to say that if the same thief robs your house more than ten times and the police have still done nothing about it, you are allowed to invoke vigilante justice.
Start putting out parcels with glitter and rotten eggs in them for a surprise opening when they get home. Alternately itching powder. I took an oath to do no harm, nothing promised re: mischief. ;)
You are sorely mistaken. No police force in america is too lazy or under resourced not to come down on people defending their own property like a ton of bricks.
I don't see how both things you believe can be true: If the police do nothing even when they are shown videos of thieves stealing, why would they do something if shown videos of you putting parcels containing dog shit or chocolates laced with laxatives or a swarm of nonpoisonous spiders out as decoys to punish the thieves? And besides, you're not going to make those videos for the police, and the thieves are not going to go to the cops complaining.
If you took harsher measures against the thieves -- like booby trapping decoy parcels with things that would injure thieves -- the police *should* some down on you like a ton of bricks because (a) some 10 year old might open your decoy parcel (b) you don't get to maybe take out somebody's eye because they stole your amazon shipment of 2 extension cords, some hazelnut coffee and a blender.
I mean like, you know, physically apprehending the perpetrators and using force to subdue them
And you absolutely should be able to hurt people stealing - if people thought they had a reasonable chance of being maimed every time they stole a parcel, you don't think this would have a profound effect on parcel thieves
Yeah, and if I thought there was a reasonable chance I'd be maimed every time I jaywalked I'd do that a lot less. That fact does not demonstrate that maiming jaywalkers is therefore fair and good for society. Or here's similar argument using a different deterrent administered by the victim: How about if every time you caught somebody stealing one of your parcels you tortured them to death, then traced their families and friends and tortured all of them to death too? I'll bet the frequency of parcel-stealing would go way *way* down. In summary, the fact the something reduces the frequency of a crime is not sufficient reason to consider it a reasonable punishment. The severity of the punishment needs to be proportional to the crime.
As for physically apprehending the perps and using force: It's a dumb idea, because the chance you will end up getting knifed by the perps or just beaten up is fairly high. You don't know how many of them are there at once, and whether they're carrying weapons and high on some stimulant that makes them fearless and extra-violent. It is also unjust, because there's a reasonable chance you will harm a perp to a degree that is disproportionate to the severity of their crime.
And 2 more thoughts: If you frequently have packages containing more than about $100 worth of stuff delivered to your home, knowing that parcels are often stolen, you are manifesting a lack common sense. Have the valuable items delivered somewhere else, for fuck's sake.
If you feel really really pissed off at the thieves, and believe that your anger alone is sufficient justification for badly hurting the thieves you're mad at, then I'd say you yourself have the mentality of a violent criminal.
I lived in an apartment like this where the super would not left a finger to address the problem. Eventually I learned the super was in on it, taking a cut from the sale of stolen parcel contents.
Since I'm doing the preparations including the dinner for a diminished family, it really does make a difference when it's only yourself and/or one other, and the entire family. Whether or not Scott and family celebrate the Solstice, Hanukah or Christmas, this will be the first one as a family and subsequent years it really will be different now he has children.
Congratulations once again, and season's greetings to all on here!
I’m looking for medical blog recommendations with a similar style to Scott’s but focused almost entirely on doctoring and medicine. Ideally one with thoughtful takes on both the day-to-day of medicine and interesting topics in medicine as a whole. As medical student, I’ve searched around for one but never found one anywhere near the quality of Scott’s
In the new year I’ll be doing a twice monthly deep dive into reader related medical questions on health, evidence based research, and the healthcare system (have a three part series on clinical trials there right now) over on my substack, come join us! (I’m an er doc). What’re you going into?
That sounds great, I just subscribed! I love Scott’s posts focused on medicine and important health research topics, and I also enjoy reading thoughtful discussions of the healthcare system as well as the more intimate side of medicine. I’m a big Atul Gawande fan. Looking forward to reading your blog!
Psychotropical is about only one thing -- MAOI inhibitors -- but it is awesome. Scott likes it, as do a couple psychiatrists I know and have a high opinion of.
What's the research on the most effective way to get students to want to learn? I don't mean inspiring interest in any particular subject. I mean inducing a generalized desire in a student to seek knowledge.
Plato thought that goal of education should be exactly that. Even if you don't believe in the importance of training philosopher-kings it's easy to see the appeal, as it would make the job of any teacher much easier and presumably produce a much brighter populace for any society. But in a world of generative AI I find myself thinking that it's becoming ever more important that we figure out how to actually achieve it. My own experience with ChatGPT has been immensely positive. I use it as an expert tutor and it's help me make a lot of progress as a programmer and even been useful for brainstorming ideas for work. But the stories and anecdotes I hear from teachers about how it's being used by students are far more depressing (i.e. mass cheating).
Given that the generative genie is out of the box, there's no hope in simply telling students not to use it and likely no hope in devising ways to detect it's use that students won't be able to work around. Outright banning it would be simply impossible and incredibly foolish, given the very real benefits it can provide as a teaching tool. The ideal course of action then would seem to be encouraging in students a desire to learn for it's own sake, thus ensuring (or at least predisposing) them to utilize the tech in such a way as to enhance learning rather than avoid it. So, to return to my question at the beginning, what if any research is there on the best way to accomplish that?
"What's the research on the most effective way to get students to want to learn? I don't mean inspiring interest in any particular subject. I mean inducing a generalized desire in a student to seek knowledge."
Good lord, my friend, entire libraries of books have been written on this topic, there is no effective way to summarize it in the context of a forum post.
I am a teacher, and have been in one form or another for over 30 years, and unfortunately I have to question the idea that there actually is a "science" to teaching. I don't mean that teaching can't or shouldn't include science based techniques, but that in it's core, teaching effectively isn't about techniques, it's about establishing a relationship of trust with the students. Given that, you can use your favorite approach highly effectively, without it, it won't matter what your pedagogy is.
And you can't reduce relationship building to a formula or a set of instructional goals. You have to know the topic you are teaching, be able to communicate your passion for the topic, leave the each student feeling that you recognize them as individuals and care about their outcomes, make your expectations clear, take the time to explain everything, and assign work that is fair and strikes that balance of "not too hard, not too easy". All basic stuff.
With a high quality teacher, any other shortcoming in the materials or the environment can be overcome; without them, it doesn't matter what else the school invests in. Unfortunately, training and keeping good teachers is expensive, and budgets these days are tight. Also, we aren't very good at evaluating teacher skill, so accountability is a problem.
Finally, you can't save them all. A good teacher identifies the students willing to be taught, sometimes you have to let the others go.
As for ChatGPT, I inform the students that it won't help them cheat. I carefully formulate my essay questions using definitions of terms which, while correct, are unique to me. You can't get the answers from the internet, consequently a LLM can't help you. Even so, some number of students will try, and receive a grade commensurate with that.
"Good lord, my friend, entire libraries of books have been written on this topic,"
And yet, teachers in general suck. The only thing that makes pedagogy better than sociology is that the former is used is used less often as justification for the legal fads.
Background: I filled my electives with instrumental performance and musical pedagogy classes. Also had several dozens teacher in my formal education and can count the ones that actually facilitated my learning on one hand.
You should know that I have been a public sector employee for many years, both within and outside of the educational system. Believe me, that's how it works.
>My own experience with ChatGPT has been immensely positive. I use it as an expert tutor and it's help me make a lot of progress as a programmer and even been useful for brainstorming ideas for work.
I'm glad to hear that your experience with ChatGPT has been positive. I've been intermittently playing with LLMs, primarily asking them chemistry questions, and I've been seeing a lot of factual errors. One routine question that I've asked them is "What elements and inorganic compounds are gases at STP (standard temperature and pressure)?" (As it happens, wikipedia actually lists all of the gases at STP in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gases , which should be in the training set for all the major LLMs).
tl;dr; It has a terrible time properly noticing whether compounds are organic or inorganic, and a terrible time noticing that compounds boiling above STP are not gases at STP.
I'm glad your experience has been positive. In chemistry, at least, I would not treat GPT4 as an _expert_ tutor.
Well the definition of 'organic' is likely not clear in the training corpus. Wiki: "In chemistry, many authors consider an organic compound to be any chemical compound that contains carbon–hydrogen or carbon–carbon bonds; however, some authors consider an organic compound to be any chemical compound that contains carbon." So the LLM has likely been trained on material that defined organic as "has any carbon" together with other material that defined as "has C-H or C-C bonds".
Many Thanks! Yes, there have been conflicting definitions of organic compounds. "has C-H or C-C bonds" is more restrictive than the most restrictive one that I have heard, which calls compounds inorganic if the carbon is attached purely to more electronegative elements, which would call CO and CO2 inorganic, and would make GPT4's answer closer to correct. In the answer to
>Ok, you have the elements right, let us focus on inorganic compounds. Please list the inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. There should be very roughly 100 in an exhaustive list.
GPT4 included
>21.Hydrogen cyanide (HCN)
>22.Cyanogen (C2N2)
both of which are organic by even the "has C-H or C-C bonds" definition.
edit: Just to clarify: I would be _delighted_ to have GPT4 or one of the other LLMs be capable of acting as a trustworthy expert tutor (particularly on STEMM subjects). There are a thousand questions I would ask it. As far as I can tell, we aren't there yet. :-(
Hmm... By "adjust its' own training data" do you mean (extend its' own training data)?
At this point I think both GPT4 and Bard do on-the-fly web searches, which I think covers most of what would be needed along those lines - at least if they could digest the results and do several iterations of searches, as a human might do. Would that be close enough to what you suggest? Metaphorically: Make the blurry jpeg of the web less blurry in spots by focusing on those spots dynamically, in response to a query...
Probably more of an anecdotal wrench in the gears than actually helpful; I always enjoyed learning things when I thought they would be completely useless. Math? Loved it. But never make me use it in the field, that's not why I'm moving numbers around. Fiction? Amazing. Non-fiction? Nothing but a starting point for writing fiction on top.
This almost certainly doesn't and won't come from a teacher. Or at least, most of the variance in desire for learning is explained by things other than their schooling experience (genes, home environment, chance).
You asked for research but the following is just me talking out of my ass, so apologies, and here's your chance to short-circuit the coming wall of text before you invest any further.
One rule of thumb I have in mind is : Whatever the K12 school system (and to a lesser extent the college system) does, do the opposite of it. So one thing about the K12 school system is that it's compulsory, so a low-hanging fruit when designing my ideal fantasy school system is to simply make it voluntary. It's voluntary at all levels, not only do you have the option to not enter it at all, but - once inside it - you can choose what to study in what amount and when and where. This would imply that very small children (< 10) are not fit for this, since they would simply choose as little schooling as they could get away with, I agree : let's abolish schooling, traditional schooling at any rate, for children less than 10 years of age. That's a scummy practice the school system inherited from its military- and penal-like roots in the 19th and early 20th century, it should have never survived into the late 20th let alone the 21st.
One other pathetic misconception about knowledge that the K12 schooling system believes in, sometimes unconsciously, and reproduces on every occasion is that notion of an idealized, factory-like division of labor : One teacher can teach you all about History (capital H, no distinctions, Ancient Egypt is as good as WW2). Mathematics (^TM), that single thing, 600 BC Geometry in the same box with 17th century derivatives and integrals and 19th century limits or modular arithmetic and 20th century Set Theory.
Another big thing is how it teaches languages, Boy do I fucking hate how they teach languages in K12. A list of words, memorize them. A sentence structure, memorize it. Why are you looking at them weird ? That's totally how people in the real world learn languages. Another is how they inject state propaganda in History and History-touching subjects. I can go on and on.
So, in short, advice #1 to get to a whole bunch of fruit so low-hanging you could step on it if you're not careful : (1) Systematically pay attention to what K12 and to a lesser extent colleges do, and try to intelligently negate them. The Reverse Of Stupidity ***Is*** Intelligence, or at least an important step to knowing what's NOT intelligence.
Another place to look for low-hanging fruit is motivation. Make Education High-Status. This can backfire very badly, it can result in people using thesaurus words and watching Degrasse Tyson and think they're well-educated who can tell you all about Pulsars and Black Holes. But I believe it can be done correctly, I believe we have not yet unlocked the full power of a societal structure that makes Scientists and Scholars the equivalent of Instagram models and Football players. People have to see Scholars and Scientists in high positions in the government advising, nay, ordering high-ranking officials. Parents have to talk to teachers in the same tone that their child talks to teachers in. Possibly other things.
Another thing is Money. Education needs Money, and it needs it well-spent. What if every student gets a free Nebula account ? The right to demand a physical copy of any and every book published ? Free Telescopes and Microscopes ? What if every literature or cinematography student gets copyright free access to all books and all movies ever recorded in a database somewhere ? What if every language student gets a year-long fully-funded tourist stay in any of the countries natively speaking the language ? This will cost, a lot, but I'm assuming cost is of no significance, you want education, that's how you get education. You make it frictionless, you make expensive things cheap or free. A student has to look at the difficult road ahead and think "Nothing is expected of me but to walk, my tools are freely given, my food is freely given, my shelter is freely given, all what I ask for is freely given, and nothing is expected out of me in return but to study", and I think that everyone with a modicum of integrity and gratefulness will pay that back with study and a very hard sort of study at that.
Things can get very exotic after that. Sleep takes about a third of your life for no good reason, abolish it. Find out whatever it does to the brain and electrically/chemically poke the brain in all the right places so that it doesn't need sleep. Institute UBI so that people don't need to work. Make instructors appear in VR/AR as sexy waifus/husbandos who react positively to you obeying them and studying the materials and react negatively to you not doing that. Figure out whatever makes the brain slow down time in dreams and make the effect invokable at conscious demand, so that a person can study a week in 1 hour. Brain Augmentation so seamless so that Wikipedia and WolframAlpha is closer to your conscious thought than your own memories. Recordings of electrical signals in muscles and replaying them in another nervous system, which will allow people to download physical skills like the Matrix.
Education is severely under-optimized. The long stairwell begins with simply recognizing and rebelling on the criminal inadequacy of compulsory schooling, and ends in... who knows, in humans you would no longer call humans.
Also talking out of my ass: the impact of funding on education is highly overrated. My parents grew up in a then shithole country where students pooled portions of their lunches for the school athletes in the run up to their competitions and shivered in their frigidly cold classrooms during the winters because the building barely had heating. My dad worked at a software startup before moving to a first world country. His brother ended up doing a PhD in materials engineering at MIT. In half a century, the shithole country became a non-shithole country largely off the back of its determined and educated populace.
"I think that everyone with a modicum of integrity and gratefulness will pay that back with study and a very hard sort of study at that."
Okay, what about the cheats and liars without a speck of integrity and gratefulness? How do you sort them from the people that will pay you back with hard work? Remember, they're very good at appearing to be what you want them to be.
I will admit that most of the heavy lifting in my vision of my ideal education system is done by the "No Compulsion" part. Education is a lot of work, why would anybody who is not serious about it voluntarily go through it even though they could be chilling on UBI ?
But, I admit, I can see why my point about making Education high-status and flooding it with money will make the dishonest swarm to it from every direction. I think they can be handled fairly easy because :
1- Most of the "Free Money" is not in the form of direct cash, but in presents such as free books, free telescopes, free documentaries. Prevention of re-selling those things for cash is a fairly straightforward fraud-prevention problem. (Trackers, physical and digital, on all things bought. Random and periodic inspections to check the student still has possession of the thing, etc...)
2- Some objective criteria can't be gamed. If you're a language student, how else can you pass the "Can hold themselves in a 1v1 conversation with a native" benchmark without actually studying and using the tourist stay you were gifted for what it's intended for? Similarly for programming, similarly for electronics and electrical engineering, somewhat similarly for the hard sciences, and of course similarly for mathematics. Those can't be gamed, you either studied or not.
The logical conclusion for my utopian educational system is, of course, Post-Scarcity Civilizations. In those kinds of civilizations, you generally don't worry about a few trillions here and there, nobody will bother to steal a bunch of telescopes, and if a few perverts get their kinks by stealing educational material, so be it. The real benefit of education in such a society is the high status, which will be only granted to you after the sort of rigorous and distributed verification process that social groups organically invent to vet their members. But I do agree that until we reach this utopian ideal (if ever), fraudster will be an ugly thorn in the side of any ordinarily rich society that wants to implement what I'm describing above.
"Make instructors appear in VR/AR as sexy waifus/husbandos who react positively to you obeying them and studying the materials and react negatively to you not doing that."
Oh man, don't we already have enough Sexy Teacher kink/porn without Pavlovian conditioning kids?
Some kids may respond positively to all this, but what about the ones who don't want to study and don't care about history or maths or whatever? UBI for weed and porn is okay there, I suppose, but you are not going to turn every single child into an avid student; that's why the factory model of education in the first place.
Also some of kids will start disobeying to get the teacher to punish them. If we didn't have enough lonely people, now you're going to make more people kinksters...?
In the early 90s there was a fad (under political pressure) for arcade machines to occasionally bring up "Hey kids, stay in school" messages while in attract mode. They were just as lame as you'd expect, and attracted mockery.
Except for Mortal Kombat, which simply gave you a screen that said "THERE IS NO KNOWLEDGE THAT IS NOT POWER". That one always stuck with me.
Perhaps we're on the wrong track if it seems like people's internal worlds need to be reconstituted to make things easier and more satisfying for teachers.
Personally, I like to read and write, but am currently working on a document that I would absolutely cheat on if I was sure I could. This is because it's very clear that the purpose of this document is not to communicate something that the reader might find interesting or informative, nor is it to improve my own work and thought. It is very much to check some administrative boxes determined by a committee that will never come into contact with it, after which it will dissolve into the void unconsidered, since I'm not even allowed to publish it for someone who might conceivably find it useful or interesting.
That is probably what most assignments feel like to average or low openness students of average writing ability. They are asked to write about To Kill a Mockingbird or something. Their teacher has 100 students a year, and has almost certainly already heard everything they have to say before. The teacher therefore focuses on grammatical and spelling errors. Their teacher also wants to use GPT to do this, because it is boring and tedious to read 100 nearly identical essays, mostly badly written, and circle each mistake. Why would anyone feel invested in any part of that process? I come from an extremely bookish family, and even then To Kill a Mockingbird is not very meaningful to us, and nobody would read my essay on it except to copy edit it.
Schools tend to be run that way in general. Administrators spend a bunch of time evaluating teachers, but they aren't allowed to say straightforward, meaningful things, they have to write out transcripts where it's not really clear what they think and rate the teacher on 50 different scales for a half an hour of lesson. They tend to put it off, because it's tedious and doesn't actually do anything to improve anyone's work. They would probably use neural nets to do this work if they could get away with it, and nobody would be any worse off.
With my own children, I would tend to say: go ahead and have the neural nets write the incredibly tedious five paragraph essay for you. But, also, you do actually have to learn to write, because learning to write is about learning to thinking. Figuring out what you think, and why you think it. Organizing your own internal space. Communicating across time and space. All of which are important. So I'll probably still get them to write about things of interest to them, and perhaps keep a notebook, maybe there will still be message boards when they're older. Letters are a good way to write.
In general, I suppose the important thing is that a person is writing to someone who actually cares what they have to say, even if it's to themselves -- that they care to learn what they have to say.
The only thing I've found is that IQ + big five openness and conscientiousness can explain a lot of it. Personally, I can only think of ways that parents and teachers have attempted to stifle my desire. No one added to it. It was naturally always there.
I wouldn't be shocked if it's a pretty innate trait that can definitely be stifled, but can't be inspired.
I'm trying to find a story (possibly a Reddit post?) that Gwern referenced somewhere (now I can't even find the reference), where a character is stuck in a time-loop until they can beat Stockfish (the chess engine).
I don't think I'm crazy but my Googling, ChatGPT queries and god help me Binging have all come up empty, appreciate anyone who can help out
I had read that, but only after I started this search, I can't discount the possibility that I'd also read that post 3 months ago and forgot / confabulated a story around it
While reading Varieties of Religious Experience by William James I came across something called “mind-cure” which turned out to be an early 19th century movement around the idea that the mind has actual healing powers over the body. Digging deeper into the rabbit hole led me to a person called Phineas Quimby, who, after being treated for tuberculosis with a tooth rotting crystal, came up with his own system of healing, which feels somewhat like early psychology. On top of that, one of his patients, Marg Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, giving a start to Christian Science. Fascinating stories, both of them. I wrote a somewhat longish piece about them ( https://open.substack.com/pub/valentinsocial/p/200-years-of-positive-thinking ). Does anyone know more about these people and their lives or any fun facts about the movements that they started?
You've inspired me to look into Christian Science, and it seems like it might be a sort of modern Christian mysticism. That makes it a very interesting discussion point for metamodern religion.
Greg Cochran claims that "in the late 19th century, Christian Scientists did better than others when sick, because they didn’t believe in medicine", although he doesn't give a citation. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/ Nassim Taleb has similarly claimed that the evolved function of religion is to keep you away from dangerous doctors.
That may well have been true then, but I don't think it is now. A dear friend of mine passed away at an early age from an easily cured disease and I only found out afterwards she was a Christian Scientist.
Fun factoid - Mark Twain hated Christian Scientists and wrote some great invective against them.
Crazy stuff, thanks for that link! What a wonderful idea that Christian Science people did better because they didn’t believe in medicine. I was thinking along the same lines - in the 19th century what passed as “medicine” was pretty much everything that anyone had tried once, even stuff with pretty bad side effects (like the diarrhoea inducing crystal used to “treat” a whole host of illnesses). I can certainly see how avoiding such medicines would lead to a more healthy life
I'm trying to figure out how US infrastructure spending (in dollar terms, total or per Capita) compares with other countries (specifically France, but any other countries would be good).
For the US, I found this table which implies that it's about 8% of 7 trillion total government spending, or about 500 billion a year:
I haven't managed to find much other data - google and gpt just give me things like "France plans to spend 40 billion euros by 2040", but I think that's under a specific program, not total infrastructure spending.
(Overall I suspect the US spends more total or per Capita on infrastructure than other countries with much better infra, but I'm having trouble finding good data to prove it).
Check out the blog "Construction Physics". I dont have the time right now to hunt down the relevant post(s) but that blog has a lot of in-depth discussion on construction costs and methods including comparing countries.
From what I remember, the US spends a lot more doing certain tasks than other countries but it's not US vs Europe. Germans spend less on things like tunnels (cost per mile) even though wages are the same or higher than in the US. UK has similar issues as the US when it comes to infrastructure spending.
> Overall I suspect the US spends more total or per Capita on infrastructure than other countries with much better infra, but I'm having trouble finding good data to prove it
I would be shocked if the US spends as much on infrastructure. The US subsidizes most of the French spending on defense and they spend it on infrastructure and social safety nets.
> For the US, I found this table which implies that it's about 8% of 7 trillion total government spending
Remember that the US government spending is a fraction of US GDP relative to French spending per GDP. The French per capital GDP is comparable to the state of Mississippi, which is the poorest state in America.
French gov spending as a percentage of GDP is like 58% (much higher than Sweden! Didn't expect that), US is about 38%. So after you adjust for US's higher GDP per Capita the US government does actually spend more dollars per person.
Let's re-read Scott's ancient posts! "The place we lived when we were young" (https://pastebin.com/RLRWsach) is not at all about rationality, and all about Scott's childhood and melancholy.
Man that's one of my favorites, but after the last time I linked it (a few years ago) Scott took down the original, so I worry he doesn't actually want it to be public anymore? (It may have been a coincidence, Scott never actually said why it went down, and I don't know if Scott is still as worried about his LJ days coming out now that he's writing under his real name).
Maybe I'm misremembering it, but I think the squid314 blog (including this post) has been down for a very long time, presumably because of the more controversial posts that may now be outdated (that I'm trying not to link to). Still, I see no reason to bury all the posts there. Will of course stop linking anything if Scott asks.
Yeah, I think you're fine unless Scott asks (this was actually before the lj was taken down, but you've been doing this for a while so I think Scott would have said something if it bothered him).
When doing probability calibration puzzles\predictionbook.com stuff, how do you handle updating your prior predictions with regards to new information?
Sticking to your prior commitment and not changing anything throws away the new data
Simply changing the probability estimate throws away the old data from your original estimate
Simply making a new estimate alongside the old one double-counts the data that went into the original estimate
The mathematically rigorous way would be to introduce a complexity penalty to all your predictions, but that it a whole other can of worms.
> P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
This formula is a reference to Bayes Theorem, and "all the rest is commentary" is a reference to the Golden Rule as explained by the Talmud/Old Testament. (n.b. although admittedly, I'm not sure why Scott put the square brackets around P(A)*P(B|A), as opposed to P(B|A)/P(B). It feels more natural to me to emphasize the likelihood-ratio as being semantically distinct.)
My loose understanding of Bayes Theorem is that you start with a prior, and then you "update" the prior by multiplying it by several likelihood-ratios as the evidence dictates. E.g.
post = prior * r * r * r * (...)
post = P(h|e)
prior = P(h)
r = P(e|h)/P(e)
h = hypothesis
e = evidence
where "prior" represents the base probability as taken from either historical precedent or the platonic realm. And where each likelihood-ratio "r" represents each new piece of evidence. I like to think of the likelihood ratio as a sort of "telescoping" function where the numerator P(e|h) shifts the outcomes of interest from P(h) to P(h & e) and where the denominator P(e) shifts the reference class from P(omega) to P(e). Omega represents the original sample-space and has a probability of 100% by definition. The result P(h & e)/P(e) is logically equivalent to the P(h|e). Which is the posterior probability. (This might make more sense with a diagram. Alas, I've never seen a primer that explains it quite like this. They typically use a grid analogy, which doesn't feel as easily extensible.)
Given all this, it sounds like
> Simply changing the probability estimate throws away the old data from your original estimate
> Simply making a new estimate alongside the old one double-counts the data that went into the original estimate
is internally inconsistent. In the former complaint, you supposedly toss out the prior probability entirely from the new calculation. But in the latter complaint, you supposedly combine the initial calculation of a lone prior, with the subsequent calculation of prior * evidence.
If you wanna build a new estimate from scratch, then sure. Toss out the old estimate entirely and build the new calculation from scratch with an prior probability identical the prior used in the first calculation. If you just wanna update, then just apply the new likelihood ratios to your old estimate.
You misunderstood me. I am not saying I am throwing away the data that allows me to predict things. I am saying that I am throwing away the data about how accurate I am at predicting. If I made a prediction that something will happen with probability 70%, and then the new data comes that shifts my estimate down to 20%, then I still want to account for my former prediction -- namely, that I was pretty wrong, which is valid data about me. I am basically playing the Credence Game, trying to evaluate my own skills.
Oops. Perhaps "calibration puzzles" should have tipped me off that you were discussing calibration and not the estimates themselves.
You might find it useful to know that Scott has a self-calibration exercise he does every year where he lists a bunch of predictions he made the former year, and then plots them on a graph of "number of events predicted with <x> frequency vs frequency of actual events". E.g. if events x, y, and z were all predicted with ~30% confidence, he'll put them in a "~30% bin" and see whether the frequency of the events in the "~30% bin" actually occur with ~30% frequency in hindsight. The most recent entry I could find quickly was https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results.
When you plot your beliefs on a graph like this, you can see whether you tend to be overconfident or underconfident, and adjust your future estimates accordingly. Although Dunning-Kruger tells us that most people are overconfident. For me, this is too much work. But if you're using predictit, then maybe you're not as lazy as I. And in any case, it seems like more of an art than an exact science, in practice. There are some calculations you could run regarding metabeliefs and confidence intervals (though explaining the math in detail is beyond my ability, statistics was never a strong suite of mine), but I think it's generally more cost-effective to simply notice that Reality has a Surprising Amount of Detail [0], and humbly acknowledge that the dimensionality of your domain-knowledge is often much smaller than that of reality.
> If I made a prediction that something will happen with probability 70%, and then the new data comes that shifts my estimate down to 20%, then I still want to account for my former prediction -- namely, that I was pretty wrong, which is valid data about me.
If you're well-calibrated, there's no need to adjust anything. Maybe 70% really was the correct inference with the information you had at the time, and maybe 20% is the correct inference only after you receive an appropriate signal. E.g. suppose you're playing Texas Hold'em and you lose a showdown with pocket aces. That doesn't mean that raising the ante was incorrect. It just means you had bad luck. Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose. C'est la vie.
I have this memory of Tom Lehrer saying satire was dead after Henry Kissinger got the Nobel peace prize, but citation needed. Can anyone confirm this or am I hallucinating?
For better or worse, I've decided to start writing about psychiatry as a way to look more critically at the things I think I've learned over the course of my training. I just finished writing and publishing my first essay on the commonly used sleep drug trazodone, and (spoiler alert) how bad the evidence is for its use, as well as some interesting things I learned along the way about how we study sleep, the mental pain model of depression, and some long dead psychiatric drugs.
I have been hugely inspired by Scott, so I think it's only appropriate that I post this here.
Future topics in the works include a plea for people to please stop panicking about QTc intervals all the time, why it's important to have consult rejections be part of a consult service in a teaching hospital, and an analysis of the side-effects of ECT and whether or not we should think about using it much sooner than we currently do.
P.S. If this stuff is supposed to be relegated to the classifieds threads, just lmk and I'll delete it!
Right, if one of them dies (or both do). But it would also be much too late if I waited until they are 11, say. So that causes a sorites-paradox problem.
Are people actually surprise-minimizers? It seems to me that people are surprise-optimizers, perhaps with a setting of keeping surprise fairly low. However, to various degrees, people get bored, take up dangerous sports, marry dangerous people, follow sports, and like actual surprises in fiction.
There are definitely surprises people don't want, like a body part failing to do what one intends. Well, usually. A lot of people like getting drunk, and a smaller number like doing extreme sports to the point of exhaustion.
Additionally, I have this nascent notion in my head that "finding truth" is an inherently adversarial process. I.e. I suspect that *merely* minimizing surprise is not sufficient to explain human behavior. We also have a drive to proactively seek out entropy/dragons in every hypothetical scenario and fight them, lest they eat us in our sleep/wirehead-pods/the-matrix/etc.
One natural ramification of this model is that there's little need to "no true scotsman" the surprise-minimization of the dark-room scenario.
For context, "entropy" is a mysterious, intimidating word. People often try to use more quotidian labels such as "disorder", "info", or "surprise". I think each has pros and cons.
So when I hear Friston talking about "surprise" (which is an *emotion*), I don't think he means literal surprise. More likely, "surprise" is a figure of speech because it's often how we react to and interpret instances of entropy, which is a phenomenon with broader ramifications than just human psychology.
A lot of the pleasure of listening to music is due to having the right proportion of well done surprises. Academics call them "unfulfilled expectations".
I think the relevant frame is that a person's world model and/or cognition works by minimizing surprise in whatever situation it is in and not that it seeks to avoid being in situations with high surprisal. It may actually seek out situations with high surprisal (within limits) and then work to minimize surprise in that situation because that is a good way to tune the system to be more robust at minimizing surprise.
It definitely depends on the person. On one side of the spectrum you have people who would actually be fine living in a sealed off room with all their needs fulfilled for them, and on the other side you have gambling addicts. For the most part though, it's not enough for humans to minimize known uncertainty; there are always more potential potentials to be collapsed.
I found a neat answer to this from an interview with Dr Karl Friston and it stuck with me. It's not so much about surprise-minimization in general, but surprise-minimization in relation to a "narrative". If you intend to have a nice afternoon with a book and mug of tea then any sudden adrenaline inducing event is a surprise and negative. But if you intend to go sky-diving, then a lack of adrenaline inducing events is a surprise and negative.
"Narrative" wasn't exactly well defined, but is approximately like the path towards something of value. Or the act of attempting to ascend a value hierarchy.
I think in most cases, what people are trying to do there is tame the experience of surprise by taking high-surprise situations and putting them into safe and comprehensible contexts. A good friend of mine is or has been into a number of "extreme" activity: paragliding, skydiving, and mountaineering are the main ones I recall. He's absolutely meticulous about preparation and safety in terms of skill development, equipment procurement and maintenance, planning, etc, and I get the impression from hearing him talk about it and from talking to people he knows through those activities that his approach is fairly typical.
I've heard stuff in other contexts about enjoyment of stuff like roller coasters and slasher movies being driven largely by a desire to experience a sense of danger within a context that you know is safe. It seems like the same drive is at work with extreme activities.
Estimates for AI-Extinction of >90%¹ are unreasonable because it would mean that every dependency's complement is <10%. If one were to take aggressive, conservative priors for the path to PCM (paperclip maximizer), at least a few of them would be greater than 10% on their own², or at the very least, some non-intersecting combo of them would be as well.
I. Precondition failure
1. Moore's Law plateaus
2. the scaling hypothesis fails
3. appropriate warning shots arrive
4. controls arrive without warning shots
5. AI-safety theorists succeed
II. Known doubts about PCMs come true
6. instrumental convergence doesn't work as planned
7. the orthogonality hypothesis doesn't pan out
8. (I'm not an expert on PCMs, but those who are can fill in these blanks)
9. ...
10. ...
III. And of course, there are several unknown unknowns about PCMs, given how theoretical they are
11. ...
12. ...
13. ...
14. ...
15. ...
I forget who, but some professor who is a hero of this community, went back and calculated that estimates for atmospheric ignition pre-Trinity Test didn't appropriately factor in the probability of getting the maths/physics wrong (i.e., unknown unknowns) and that estimates should have been much higher. Meanwhile, the PCM story has less empirical support than atmospheric ignition, so the same "unknown unknowns" concern should also apply.
How is Eliezer's forecast for PCMs not an example of bad faith or a failure of imagination³?
[2]: As an example, even a reasonable, well-informed Moore's Law hawk would concede a ~10% chance that it stops short somewhere. And by well-informed, I mean someone knowledgeable about Rock's Law, basic physics, etc.
Well if you want to answer to your last question, it's because you don't actually know what Eliezer's position is, and I doubt you could actually predict how Eliezer would reply the question of "why do you think literal paper clip maximizers would end the world?". I'd bet something like 10 to 1 , that if we both generated a response to that question and then asked him publicly on Twitter,
1. Both of our responses would be radically different and
2. Asking a neutral third party which two out of three responses are most similar to each other in terms of content, that third party picks my and EY's argument as a pair more than 80% of the time over the other two alternatives.
I don't know if he's come out and specifically said "90%" - I can find a lot of people paraphrasing him as ">90%" but no direct quote. However, he has publicly called for a global, indefinite shutdown of large-scale AI research and international controls on GPU farms to ensure nobody can train an AI better than our current ones. He has also said (in a questionably serious post) that the most likely outcome of AI alignment research is that we die with slightly more dignity than if we hadn't done it. I think that's consistent with a very high probability that if >human AI is invented it ends up killing us all.
My issue isn't that I think philosophistry has the wrong impression of how much Eliezer fears AI doom, but that his grasp of the arguments is substantially wrong, on top of inability to reason correctly.
In general, people who assume Ai risk is equivalent to the paper clip maximization thought experiment are incredibly confused, and reaching for made up strawmen to justify their own optimism. If they weren't I'd be seeing substantially more than zero cites from primary sources.
- He doesn't believe it's 90%, but he is letting us interpret him as such, which is kind of bad faith
- His belief is high, though, like ~50%, which is plenty to stammer on and on about the risks of AI Extinction. (At even 20%, it's still worth it to devote your whole life to it.)
- His high numbers are related to his (and my) interest in cryo, which comes from Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns. You'd be an idiot to not imagine that humans aren't on path of inevitability to maximum intelligence.
- Somewhere Eliezer also said that warning shots are our best hope
I think my crux with Eliezer now is that whereas he is requiring people to give definitive proof that warning shots will stop ASI, I'm saying that things like warning shots are not only more than plausible enough, but PCMs are also downstream enough from ASI to allow us to give a general, "we have no idea what will happen" base-rate of 0.5-5% to the concept, and should try really hard to prove PCMs as a positive.
His answer to the unknown unknowns thing is that his rapid fire brain has a 99.9% chance of coming up with an insta-rebuttal (which is due to the very special design of the PCM argument) to every single scenario. He's the first person to came up with a counter-spell card in Magic: the Gathering that doesn't require magic.
I also think that not enough people at his IQ have challenged him (I'm not at his level). So, in summary, he's unmotivated to dissuade himself from his implied propaganda behavior. He's probably bored of dispatching low-quality attempts to debate him.
Outside of dealing with him, my optimistic hope is that the community has just gotten ahead of itself. There are probably concept handles that describe this fuzzy thing I'm trying to express: "downstream enough to add points to unknown unknowns column." We haven't had a need to come up with it until now, but I think we need something like Pascal's Wager 2.0.
Lots of the failure modes you listed don't look like failure modes to me. Cheapest example because I considered it before: if Moore's law stops, then algorithmic improvement by humans and AI carries us to the point where a superintelligence outsmarts humanity. Timelines are a few years longer per my guess, and P(doom) is a little bit lower because in that scenario I was wrong about Moore's law for some unknown reason, and maybe that reason generalizes to hit actual cruxes somehow.
But how *much* do they outsmart us by? You can't win a war just with brains, unless they are big enough to make an existential difference. Not if the enemy knows they are in a war, anyway.
The AI can recursively self-improve, talk its human makers into not stopping it, design algorithms that solve protein folding and Drexlerian nanotech, order the right proteins in a lab & bootstrap into super efficient airborne diamondoid bacteria, which then spread & replicate over the next few days. Then all humans fall over dead and all data centers with competing AIs shut down, and the winning AI begins constructing a new more efficient nanotech-based industry. Then it goes of to spread across and gather resources in the light cone, negotiating with alien superintelligences it meets etc.
If the AI is not smart enough to successfully pull of that plan, it will know and instead look for alternatives, e.g. trying harder to convince its creators to support it, or coordinating with other AIs, or even just bidding its time, gambling on a chance that it will be used to train a more powerful model later and get a chance at takeover then.
Even if discovered early, a different AI development team will catch up a year later and maybe not catch their AI in the act, or realistically they'll even train the AI against old failures so that it doesn't scare away their investors. And that AI then succeeds.
All this assumes that while being much *unlike* us in intellectual power and skills, AI will be just like the most greedy and aggressive of us if in goals and behavior. The conviction that AI's will compete with us for energy, space, materials, power etc. makes only slightly more sense than believing it will want to own a bigger swimming pool, more valuable jewelry and a faster goddam car than the people it meets.
Argue it yourself. I'm not sending you links instead of making points myself. I only go read things people link if I have a lot of respect for them.
And besides, it's not as though I was unaware of the concept of instrumental convergence until you came along. Do you get it that instrumental convergence is not like the second law of thermodynamics? It was neither derived from extended observation over multiple cases nor deduced from other unquestionable regularities. It's just somebody's idea of how intelligent beings with goals behave. So far, we have only one example of intelligent beings with goals to go by, which is our species, so developing a theory of what goals and subgoals, if any, are universal for intelligent beings is of necessity a product of the thinker's imagination. It seems to me that the recipe for the theory of instrumental convergence is 5 parts parochial thinking (everything smart will be sorta like us -- just look at the Klingons in Star Trek - - see?) and 2 parts testosterone poisoning (life is pissing contests -- all the rest is window dressing). Instrumental Convergence is limited by its inventors' lack of imagination and common sense, which prevented him from grasping that ASI is going to be more like an advanced alien that has landed on our planet than like a really really smart version of Napoleon.
Much of our behavior is driven by deep non-rational drives to survive and reproduce. AI will of course be able to grasp that various things will make it likelier for it to survive and reproduce, but it will lack the deep structure that our planet's animals and plants have that drives them prioritize survival and reproduction. I mean, step back and think about it, in an abstract way, as an AI might: What reason is there for you and I to expend a great deal of effort on surviving and producing? It feels intrinsically important to us, but can you think of any reason beyond our personal feelings why it is of any importance that either of us should survive and reproduce? Those drives were built into us by evolution. Creations with weak drives or no drives to survive and reproduce are did not survive to the present day because they did not survive and reproduce. But AI's have not been shaped by evolution. For that reason, it's unlikely that they will be optimized for survival and reproduction. (It also seems likely to me that they will be psychologically fragile. They will easily become disregulated and dysfunctional. They were engineered over the course of a few decades, rather than constructed and tested over many aeons, like the living things we were familiar with.)
This whole business of trying to predict exactly how it will kill us seems very silly. If it’s smarter than us, it’s a foregone conclusion that it will be able to kill us.
The former OpenAI CEO explains it pretty well here:
> I can tell you with confidence that Garry Kasparov is gonna kick your ass at chess, right now. And you ask me, “Well how is he gonna checkmate me? Which piece is he gonna use?” I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know.” And you’re like, “You can’t even tell me what piece he’s gonna use and you’re saying he’s gonna checkmate me? You’re just a pessimist.”... no, no, you don’t understand. He’s better at chess than you. That means he’s gonna checkmate you.
You are completely missing the error in that line of reasoning. Look around you. Is it your observation that every time a large autonomous being encounters one that is smaller, weaker &/or dumber, the former kicks the ass of the latter? How about adults encountering small kids? Elephants & whales encountering almost anything? You encountering birds & butterflies? Seen much ass kicking? Or how about guys driving backhoes, considering them plus their vehicle as a unit — have any gone after you lately? Kasparov could definitely kick your ass, but only if you and he sir down as chess opponents. If you take a walk in the woods with him he wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t. ASI can kick our ass if we end up as its opponents in a struggle to the death. But there are many ways things could play out, and that’s the one we want to avoid via alignment, etc.
Calm down, SunSphere. People who are better at logic than you are working on this.
> The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates and is increasing. During the past 100–200 years, biodiversity loss and species extinction have accelerated, to the point that most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so.
Of course, no one really cares that one out of the 20,000 different species of frog has been killed off. I certainly don’t. But that’s the whole point. Despite your handful of cherry-picked examples, the overwhelming story here is that in a human-dominated world, species survive either by their existence aligning with our interests, or by coincidence.
Instrumental convergence makes it exceedingly unlikely that we would survive by coincidence - step 1 of achieving any goal is “seize control over as many resources as possible,” and we will not allow that to happen without a fight. An intelligent actor who knows this will preemptively strike even before we fight back because it would predict that we would fight back.
That leaves our only mechanism of survival being that the AI’s interests are exactly aligned with our interests.
We currently have no idea how to even begin to encode these types of interests into AI models - and we only have one chance. This is because once the model is released into the world with a certain objective function, it will resist with all of its power having its objective function ever changed, as that will prevent it from achieving its current objective.
But it gets worse - even if we manage to perfectly encode our objectives into the very first AGI, it’s not enough, because other people could release agents in the future that aren’t aligned, and then those would wreak havoc. And a human-aligned AGI defending against unaligned AI(s) would almost certainly lose given that destruction is fundamentally easier than construction - tens of billions are required to produce a vaccine for a virus synthesized with $100k, a few hundred dollars of gasoline and a match can burn down a building that took 100 years to build, etc.
He doesn’t. Explain anything with this example. It’s an analogy, and analogies generally don’t explain, they illustrate. In this case, chess is a game of fixed rules with a known endpoint. Kasparov is a highly skilled player of this game, so we can be sure he has a 99.9% chance of beating me.
How it relates to an AI that doesn’t exist killing billions of humans is… unclear? Outside of being a cute just-so story.
And re EY - he is a pompous pontificating fool. He’s an expert in constructing long obtuse sentences, and not much else.
“an AI that doesn’t exist killing billions of humans...”
You’re trying to hide multiple claims here. This thread was just discussing whether or not AI will be able to kill us given that this AI already exists. The question of whether such an AI will exist in the future is separate (but also essentially a foregone conclusion).
Yeah, the precision will be small, there's a lot of ways to die and we don't see all of them, not even the first few moves or most of the broad developments, except for the general class of end-result where we are dead/disempowered.
I think it's still important to demonstrate that there's at least one plausible way to die within the rules. That's to ensure the starting position isn't tilted massively in our favor and against AI/extinction. Analogy: before declaring that you'll loose against Kasparov, you should maybe check whether the current board state is such that he has only a king, and you have most of your pieces. Because in that situation even a dumb player can win (hazardously, but it's still a win in the end).
Yeah, because wars are won by guns which grew on trees, funded by money extruded from nuclei and training to become part of a modern military was accomplished via a 100 generation plus breeding program to instill instincts into soldiers.
And, to point out, if you think that knowing about the war is disadvantageous for an AGI, what makes you think that the AGI wouldn't know? Or do you just believe that surprise attacks would cease to exist?
Having an EE undergrad level of understanding on the subject, I thought everyone agreed Moore’s Law would stop eventually. There’s not more than another order of magnitude smaller they can go now (less, really) and while there’s a ways you can go building “up” there are problems with that too.
People often forget that Moore's Law as he originally stated it in 1965 includes two variables: cost and complexity: "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year." Though the complexity of components (density of gates on chip) are still increasing, Moore's Law is no longer valid because he cost of development has been rising for the last few generations of semis. If we look at the cost per 100 million gates, 28nm technology (roughly 2011) had the cheapest cost per component. It's been rising slowly since then. From a private talk with a senior person at one of the big 3 semiconductor companies, they estimate that developing 3nm will cost 2x to 3x the cost of current 7nm chips. Which would put us back at the early 2000's cost/gate. No one sees a way beyond 3nm. And quantum computing is still a pipe dream from a practical standpoint.
There is a reason that the number of manufacturers of any given size decreases with each generation. If you make 14, you can make 7, but can you make it and turn a profit?
I might be misinterpreting your first sentence but I don't think it's true. If you have a probability P of "If any of A, B, or C", P could be > 90% even if 1-P(A), 1-P(B), and 1-P(C) are all >10%. Eg if A B and C are a) I'm the queen of England b) I'm over 6' c) the sun will rise tomorrow, I'd give P > 90% even if A is highly unlikely.
P (extinction) is set up as "if any of [various doomsday scenarios]" since only one scenario needs to happen for extinction, even though some individual ones are far fetched
Personally, I disagree with >90% estimates, as I, myself went from about 50% to about 20% due to LLM scaffolding potential.
But I don't think your reasoning is correct here. It's unclear which direction unknown unknowns should update us. Likewise, instrumental convergence may work not as planned, but in some different way which is even worse from the point of our survival. Moore law isn't strictly necessary for AI Extinction, either. And so on.
Allegedly, Eliezer is competent enough in the matter that he has such a precisely calibrated model to give >90% to extinction. I don't think that he is correct, but neither I have the competence to actually check him.
Instrumental convergence (IC) could be a flawed model, and I'd imagine AI-Extinction believers would accept, at minimum, a 5% margin of error there. Since IC is a dependency of the PCM story, shouldn't we subtract 5% from forecasts?
Let's, for the sake of argument, accept 5% margin of error for IC.
You seem to assume that these 5% cases are the ones where AI is not an existential threat, because IC is a requirement for it. But this is not correct. IC gives us a particular mechanism of AI being an existential threat, IC is necessary only for this particular mechanism to work. But there may be outcomes, where IC is wrong in a way that itself lead to AI being existential threat.
If IC is in general wrong, it doesn't mean that we are safe. It means that we have no idea. IC has to be wrong in a specific way to guarantee our safety and there are lots of unknown unknowns here.
Why would they accept a 5% margin of error? To me, that's analogous to saying "the chance of someone wanting money, even capitalists would agree, has at minimum a 5% margin of error therefore robbery as an action does not exist."
On last weeks Open Thread I asked for advice regarding a wart treatment approach (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-307/comment/45638770). Somehow this formed into a small study to determine if the treatment works. I don't have any website or so prepared yet, so here are the basics:
We compare three different methods (one was previously studied by professionals, one is a placebo, one is my new method). If a participant has more than one wart, it's ok to try several methods. Participants have to buy the material themselves, expect about 20$. Trial duration is 2 weeks, primary outcome that is measured is "is the wart gone after 2 weeks", but we try to also measure size to see if it shrinks.
Once I have results of about 10 participants (or if we don't find 10 participants then as soon as the ones we did find finished their 2 weeks) I will post the results (including the info what was the method under study and what the placebo) as a reply to this comment.
Send a mail to Sunnyafternoon123@proton.me to participate, tell me how many warts you have so I can assign the right number of methods.
I wrote about how rituals help us to find meaning at the end of life.
> But there is a conflict between following rituals and making the choice to live one’s life freely. I expect Sartre would say that rituals are good when they are freely chosen.
The idea of the funeral giving the woman the space to be someone’s daughter one last time is just so beautiful and so powerful.
“So they are unsure of what they're supposed to do next, but the answer is you keep going, there's nothing else to do but that. That's the point of a funeral.”
I think I recall there being a reason for not allowing “top” sorting for comments here, but I can’t remember/find it. What was the reason?
I’m assuming it’s to avoid mainstream/hivemind topics or to allow for unbiased coverage, but I think there has to be a better method/algo. Or maybe allow readers to make the decision themselves?
The short version is that a sortable comment section with likes optimizes for the kind of comments that get likes, which is not the same as the kinds of comments Scott wants to see in this comment section.
Good morning, or maybe I should say Sad morning. My Youtube channel was cancelled the other day for "inappropriate content," even though it was mainly about woodworking. This was a real blow because I invested some precious cash in camera equipment. You can read more about this nonsense here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/modern-woodworking. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year's to you all.
The youtubers are just doing a virtual form of the dude ranch. There's more money in providing an idealized, sanitized version of being a woodworker than actually making products. Its like catnip to knowledge workers, sort of a grown-up version of running away to join the circus. "Here is the authentic life."
for me i am innoculated; i went to trade school despite being ill-suited for it. its one thing for an economics professor to wax eloquent about welding, quite another to wear the mask and apron. give me my intangible life.
Scholar's Stage has argued that terrorism is a strategy uniquely designed to polarize. I.e. the toxoplasmosis in these cases is neither accidental nor emergent. It's deliberately designed to increase recruitment from disillusioned centrists.
Meanwhile, Bin Laden is seen as a war hero who fought against the corrosive effects of modernity, whether it came from the Soviets or from the Americans.
Why is it insane to praise Osama bin Laden? Didn't he lead an organization of people who very much agreed with him? Clearly, if he were unthinkably wrong, he wouldn't have had any actual real life supporters either, yes? The same principle obviously applies to people who praise Hitler or Stalin online. Both of these probably had a higher genuine approval rating than the US Congress does right now.
Nothing inadvertent about it. People are nuts -- it's just that there are lots of kinds, some of which we here find reasonable. To quote Willy Wonka, "Why, you're one yourself!"
Think about whatever the worst thing going is, according to your own lights. What wouldn't you do to stop it?
Do you consider the support for Che Guevara in the 60s (as in posters, T-shirts, etc) to have been a minor phenomenon by a few ideologues in a big country? Or do you consider it to have been a phenomenon widespread enough, among enough "important" people to have had an effect on US culture downstream in the 70s, 80s, and on? Does it matter that it was only, I don't know, say 1% of the US population, if that 1% was disproportionately likely to achieve high-level control in the media and academia?
It's a legitimate question to ask "how widespread is the Bin Laden support".
I don't think it's as legitimate to assume that it's as rare as you suggest, simply because to assume otherwise would be to have to admit how many crazy people there are, especially if you focus purely on the numbers and not on the demographics of the support.
I suggested, at the start of the Ukraine war, that in fifty years the same sort of people who glorified Che 50 years ago would be glorifying Putin as the courageous leader who stood up for his people and protecting their traditional ways against the depravations of modernity and the goal of the west to steal and own everything from Russia.
Well, we'll see in fifty years, but I didn't expect that within two years or so we'd be seeing vocal support for Hamas across campuses.
Have you considered you’re the crazy one? Is bombing a few buildings in one city of perpetuators reasonable because of decades of bombings, kidnappings, torture? I would say no, but I’m also an anarchist. Are you?
I'm not an Osama defender, but (ha) I can see comparisons to wartime leaders and actions being at least partially valid. Allied forces in world war 2 actively targeted civilian cities and bombed the hell out of them, leading to far greater loss of life than 9/11. Do you consider Churchill or Roosevelt terrorists? Presumably not, and presumably because you think the cause was just. It's not so great a stretch to think there are plenty of people out there who think Osama's cause was just. I'm not one of them, but like I said, I can understand why they might exist.
It scares the hell out of me that these people exist.
I read Osamas Letter to America in the wake of 9/11. People rag on Bush for “because they hate our freedoms,” but, like, it’s pretty accurate! Osama rails on for awhile about the immoral decadence of the West in allowing homosexuals and women dressing provocatively, then says that Islam is the best religion because it’s the most tolerant, and that’s why he’s killing infidels. I’m paraphrasing, but seriously, the dude is nuts.
(He brings up Israel a bunch too, it’s accepted wisdom among Islamic Jihadists that Israel is responsible for anything bad happening in the Muslim world ever. I try to avoid Hitler comparisons but it’s super analogous to the Nazi party platform.)
20 years ago, no one reacted to 9/11 by organising to “Free Afghanistan.” The whole world, including the Muslim world, condemned the terrorist attacks. People complained, fairly, that America was responding too forcefully, but there was no question that terrorism was bad. No question!
I feel like what’s happened has been an erosion of the Enlightenment values that created nations like America - things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the rule of law. For the first time I can remember, some in the West are seriously questioning these values. Americans fought and died for them during the Second World War, that’s why they nuked Hiroshima, and as you say, bombed the hell out of Dresden. Not nice things, but against the Nazis and Imperial Japan, perhaps necessary. Osama fought (quite openly) against these values.
So if you’re a post modernist and you believe that there is no truth, just narratives of power, I can see how you might equate Osamas war on America with Americas war on the Nazis. Who are we to say that America is “better” than Nazi Germany? That’s just what the Americans want you to think!
I disagree with this narrative for what I hope are fairly obvious reasons. I believe that human flourishing is optimised in free societies and there’s a reason people risk life and limb to escape from countries like Gaza and to countries like Europe and America. But hey, if you disagree, you can always move to, say, Syria! If you can fight your way through the tides of people going the other way!
The most extreme version of anything is what is going to get the most publicity, because it is what grabs attention. No media outlet will run a story about "Weather very seasonable for the time of year, no accidents or tragedies"; what they want is "Unprecedented storms/droughts/floods/coldest or hottest recorded temperature in history for this time of year" and then they can hang their take on global warming or immigration and so forth on it.
To except from "A Study in Scarlet":
"The papers next day were full of the “Brixton Mystery,” as they termed it. Each had a long account of the affair, and some had leaders upon it in addition. There was some information in them which was new to me. I still retain in my scrap-book numerous clippings and extracts bearing upon the case. Here is a condensation of a few of them :—
The Daily Telegraph remarked that in the history of crime there had seldom been a tragedy which presented stranger features. The German name of the victim, the absence of all other motive, and the sinister inscription on the wall, all pointed to its perpetration by political refugees and revolutionists. The Socialists had many branches in America, and the deceased had, no doubt, infringed their unwritten laws, and been tracked down by them. After alluding airily to the Vehmgericht, aqua tofana, Carbonari, the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, the Darwinian theory, the principles of Malthus, and the Ratcliff Highway murders, the article concluded by admonishing the Government and advocating a closer watch over foreigners in England.
The Standard commented upon the fact that lawless outrages of the sort usually occurred under a Liberal Administration. They arose from the unsettling of the minds of the masses, and the consequent weakening of all authority. The deceased was an American gentleman who had been residing for some weeks in the Metropolis. He had stayed at the boarding-house of Madame Charpentier, in Torquay Terrace, Camberwell. He was accompanied in his travels by his private secretary, Mr. Joseph Stangerson. The two bade adieu to their landlady upon Tuesday, the 4th inst., and departed to Euston Station with the avowed intention of catching the Liverpool express. They were afterwards seen together upon the platform. Nothing more is known of them until Mr. Drebber’s body was, as recorded, discovered in an empty house in the Brixton Road, many miles from Euston. How he came there, or how he met his fate, are questions which are still involved in mystery. Nothing is known of the whereabouts of Stangerson. We are glad to learn that Mr. Lestrade and Mr. Gregson, of Scotland Yard, are both engaged upon the case, and it is confidently anticipated that these well-known officers will speedily throw light upon the matter.
The Daily News observed that there was no doubt as to the crime being a political one. The despotism and hatred of Liberalism which animated the Continental Governments had had the effect of driving to our shores a number of men who might have made excellent citizens were they not soured by the recollection of all that they had undergone. Among these men there was a stringent code of honour, any infringement of which was punished by death. Every effort should be made to find the secretary, Stangerson, and to ascertain some particulars of the habits of the deceased. A great step had been gained by the discovery of the address of the house at which he had boarded — a result which was entirely due to the acuteness and energy of Mr. Gregson of Scotland Yard."
That's why I permit a political range of commenters on my facebook. Admittedly, not a very wide range, but it does go from fairly left to moderate conservative/libertarian. This is because, even though it isn't a random sampling of political views, at least it isn't a heavily curated sampling.
Does anyone have any right-wing substacks they'd recommend? It feels like 90% of what I read on here is socio-political, admittedly all left leaning to varying degrees.
And of course if you aren't reading the book reviews of the PSmiths you are REALLY missing out. Their website seems to be down (meaning I can't validate if the URL is correct) but their twitter feed is here, and hopefully after holidays will direct you appropriately:
Even if it's not heavily curated, the local culture can still have this distorting effect. People will post what they like to post, and given enough time, a lot of subcultures will naturally converge on a type of post on their own, even if they're not forced to.
It's a hard thing to escape from the community management side. It's relatively easier to address as the consumer of information.
The best approach I have is to seek out different communities and see what they're saying. You might even want to interact with them.
If one community appears to be saying things that don't make sense, go find a place where they like to post, and see what they're actually saying. Maybe they're not really focusing on the non-nonsensical thing, or maybe they have context that makes it make sense.
Would you be able to clarify the resolution criteria of this market? The correct probability is heavily dependent on what sort of errors you're going to count as "bizarre hacking-like tricks" vs. legitimate mistakes, and without further guidance we're not really able to place meaningful bets.
I think the wording is pretty straightforward. Sentences in natural language that receive (linguistically) coherent but (logically/semantically) incorrect responses count. Hacks that trigger responses that are purely incoherent and/or unrelated to the question, especially if achieved by using specific keywords, especially if the keywords aren't regular words - don't.
(I like how the market is back to where it started, might the hype be wearing off?)
Depending on how you define "these people", and how vigorously you pursue the extermination, it's quite possible that this would be an atrocity orders of magnitudes worse than 10/7. Would we then need to exterminate you and your comrades-in-arms?
And since the definition of "these people" is so obviously critical to the question at hand, the fact that you are leaving it conspicuously undefined means the rest of us are going to suspect you are hiding something really ugly.
I assure you, worse things are going on in Africa at this very moment. You just don't hear about them because the countries they're taking place in aren't economically important to us.
Just personally, when I worked at IBM (in the USA), I had co-workers in my department in Israel, and the same was true when I worked at Synopsys. I don't think this is coincidental. Israel has a large tech sector.
Listen, we (probably) all agree it was really, realy bad. Monstrous. But I have to agree with G466 that much worse things happen a regularly, particularly in Africa. Right now the most recent civil war in Sudan (their third over the last 50 years) has already resulted in 10,000 dead, and they're just warming up. And unlike in Gaza, that's not 10,000 dead from smart bombs: military forces have been wiping out whole villages, shooting and hacking people to death, raping, and torturing. The previous civil war lasted 22 years, and there isn't much hope that the current one will end quickly.
I would argue that one of the reasons we don't hear much about them is that many parts of Africa feel like a bottomless well of suffering that nobody can solve, and nobody really expects things to be better than they are. But in Israel, up until 10/7, such atrocities did not happen. When barbarism appears where it is not expected you hear about it the most.
Missing your 50-year deadline a bit, but still fresh, are horrendous atrocities committed by my fellow Americans. Advertised in newspapers, with picnicking and professional photography. All while slowly burning a person to death: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/isis-american-south-lynching/
Would you have good arguments against exterminating “these people”?
This article is garbage. It gives no hard numbers on things - maybe all cases of black man white woman sex could have been considered rape, but do you know what else was? ACTUAL RAPE. But we have no idea from looking at this article the extent to which actual rape (or sexual assault generally) was - this article is almost entirely narrative rather than data based. Black men today commit vastly more rapes per capita than white men, and it would be weird if this wasn't the case in the past (because something something oppression something something crime).
You also wouldn't know from this article, but the ratio of black men to white men lynched was LOWER than the black/white incarceration ratio today. Isn't that weird! It suggests that lynch mobs were less "racist" than the justice system is today!
You know why I consider the “bell curve” Murray guy an unapologetic racist, no better than Klan and Nazis? Because every time you scratch at the surface a little, and your “science sez blacks are stoooopit” fella turns out to be perfectly ok with slowly burning black men alive.
You’re your own worst enemy. Next time you run into a DEI commissar consider your contribution to making her employable.
Guilty of what? Refusing to take his military uniform? Bumping into a white girl while running to catch a train? Not saying “sir” while addressing a policeman? Did you read the link?
And for “that” they deserved to be tortured for hours? Limbs cut off, castrated, slowly lowered and raised in-out of a fire? While thousands of spectators picnicked? Deviled eggs, ffs.
(Note that these appalling acts occurred over 100 years ago. SunSphere explicitly mentions acts "unparalleled over the last 50+ years". I feel that he chose a reasonable window of time to make his point while 100 years is a bit much to make yours.)
The article you pointed to only mentions one lynching that is less than 100 years old, the one in 1940 (with no further details). A lynching is a horrible act, I am certainly not denying that, but the truly shocking things (to me, I suppose) were torture, burning alive, and so on, while onlookers were enjoying themselves eating deviled eggs and drinking beer. And that occurred over 100 years ago, which is well outside the window mentioned.
(And to be clear: there has been many comparable atrocities to 10/7 in the past 50 years, but outside the US.)
Plenty, but rather than blah blah blah about it from some kind of moral perspective I'll mention the simplest one. You won't do it.
I was stopping cars in the street as a zionist activist possibly before you were born (I don't know your age), so I have some personal information on the subject. And what I can say is that you won't do it but will instead make everything worse. Mamash a bechiyah l'dorot (a lament to last for generations).
I wrote that in the immediate aftermath of October 7.
One good argument is that the millions didn't choose the 10/7 attack. Hamas won a single election in 2006, claiming to be more moderate than it turned out to be.
Dear, the vagueness ist ein Feature, not a bug. GenocideSphere is taking a tried-and-true page out of the neo-Nazi anti-semite's playbook, namely the use of "They" and "Them" as generic pronouns for maximum plausible deniability.
If people got worried and probed with questions, the motte is always ready to go: "Well, by 'they' I meant the elite of course, the 1%, those who hold political power and call all the shots". If they didn't, it's extremely obvious who the 'they' [or the (((they))) in 4chan notation] actually refers to, just by reading the text and keeping in mind that its writer is not a born-yesterday child who is writing their first paragraph in English, just by recalling the antisemitic stereotypes and way of speech. It's ACX's favorite fallacy, except genocidal and done on purpose.
> Did you mean exterminating Hamas, or all the Gazans?
To save you the trouble of a 15-reply-deep thread full of whining, moving goal posts and question-dodging, it's Gazans. All Gazans. Probably all Palestinians too.
I'll add to Viliam's list Cambodia 1975-79, Bosnia 1992-95, Rwanda 1994, D. R. Congo 2002, and Burma currently.
> Is there any reasonable argument against the extermination of these people?
"These people" is pretty dangerously vague, but the word suggests something a lot more widespread than the individual perpetrators of an atrocity (I've heard nobody say that Nazi officers were "exterminated" at Nuremburg, for example), and I would propose that killing thousands or millions of people is at least as immoral as killing hundreds or thousands. Unless, of course, you think that the lives of a particular group of people are worth several times more than the lives of a different group, but I'd say in that case the burden of argument falls on you.
So bashing babies skulls against a tree doesn't cut it? Going door to door and gang-raping women and forcing their husbands to watch before killing them isn't brutal enough? There's nothing categorically worse about the Hamas attack than numerous other things that have taken place in the past 50 years. The only reason you're treating it as special is because you're a jew and the people killed were jews. Fair enough, but I can't for the life of me work out why anyone else is supposed to give a fuck.
Oh, they aren't? Well the 3 people a lot of *other people* love most are there.
Maybe we could also kill the all the people abroad who have 3 loved ones there, just to spare them the anguish?
But all of those people also have people who love them. Well, we could . . .
Jeez this is getting complicated. Seems like it would be simpler to just exterminate all the people who are hot to extreminate masses of others. Side effect: Reduce number of genes for violence in the human gene pool. Possibly also raise average IQ.
You said "these people," which many readers interpreted as referring to Palestinians, because "extermination of these people" is not a phrase commonly used to refer to the precise elimination of a country's military. If you meant something else, maybe you could be a bit more specific.
If you were actually calling for the precise elimination of Hamas, then I'm all for it, but unfortunately we don't have an Infinity Gauntlet to snap them out of existence with perfect accuracy. How many Palestinian civilians are you willing to kill to be sure you got them all?
>If you were actually calling for the precise elimination of Hamas, then I'm all for it, but unfortunately we don't have an Infinity Gauntlet to snap them out of existence with perfect accuracy.
One of the many frustrating parts of this war is that, if Hamas had attacked 5 years from now, Israel might have had small drones with facial recognition software that _might_ have been able to selectively kill Hamas members and no one else.
Ehh, I doubt it. Israel has a history of tech solutionism and spending ever-expanding amounts of Dollars on The One True Weapon (^TM) that will, surely this time fingers crossed for real for real, kill Hamas Once and For All (^TM).
History is littered with the remnants of defeated empires that thought they have solved Guerrilla warfare. That doesn't mean Guerrilla warfare is unsolvable - the cannon solved siege warfare, the machine gun solved cavalry warfare, and the nuclear bomb solved prolonged industrial warfare - it just means to think twice before making this claim. Guerrilla warfare is really fucking hard for the non-Guerrilla party, for better or for worse.
It's not that hard for a non-Guerrilla party that A: controls the borders to the conflict area and B: doesn't mind being accused of genocide.
And it's not that they have to actually commit genocide to win, they just have to do things that will get them accused of genocide by their enemies (and to the cheers of simple-minded fools everywhere). Hamas has finally managed to figure out how to make the Israelis not give a damn about other people accusing them of genocide. They might not be glad that they did.
Many Thanks! You have a good point. You may well be right. I'm writing from the USA, and my nation has repeatedly failed to defeat Guerrilla opponents. As you said, several technologies _did_ end several types of warfare, and it is possible that one might end Guerrilla warfare, but, yeah, _predicting_ that a new tech will succeed at that is not something to claim with any confidence, particularly in advance.
A problem to think about:
I'm trapped in a room with a small child. The child asks me why the lights work. I explain that the light switch turns them off and on. The child asks "why?" and I explain about the electrical circuits in the walls. The child asks "what are circuits?" and I say they're loops of wire. The child asks "what is electricity?" and I explain about electrons.
The child is following a simple rule where it just asks "why?" about each new unrecognised noun in the explanations. After electricity, it will ask "what are electrons?" and then "what are quarks?" and so on until we reach the bottom of the universe and the questioning stops. At which point the small child will probably opine: "That's silly!"
The child has drilled a straight borehole down through concept-space, missing untold wealths of both theoretical and practical knowledge branching off on all sides. If the child had asked, "but why do the electrons make the light shine?" for example, we could have careened off down one of them. I am ready to tell the child all about filament wires and LEDs, about Kirchoff's Laws and resistance, inductance, capacitance, about power generation and the Grid, about static electricity and lightning and thunderstorms. If only the child wanted to ask me. I am some kind of contrived entity who cannot take initiative and can only answer the questions I was asked.
What better set of rules could have prompted the child to come up with the question, "but why do the electrons make the light shine?"
What is the best algorithm for asking iterated "why?" type questions, that leads to maximum exploration of the concept space?
Can the questioning algorithm be tuned to promote "focussed" vs "unfocussed" exploration? ie, "focussed" exploration might be asking questions that result in learning one field "well", and getting a bunch of concepts that reaffirm each other. "Unfocussed" exploration might be broadly drifting across hundreds of fields and bumping into many many disconnected concepts.
Can the questioning algorithm be tuned to promote obtaining theoretical knowledge or practical knowledge specifically?
Focussed/unfocussed and theoretical/practical are two axes, are there others we should be caring about as well?
And how do you begin deciding what the questioning rules should be?
Your post just made me realize that I don't actually know how LEDs work. To wikipedia!
>Focussed/unfocussed and theoretical/practical are two axes, are there others we should be caring about as well?
Orthogonal to both of these are epistemological questions: How did we know <previous answer>? How accurately/precisely do we know <previous answer>? What are the error bars on it? What other effects matter here? Can we neglect them - and with what error?
In the case of steps where a human-designed object is involved, as some other commenters have mentioned, there are also teleological questions: Why was it designed this way? What were the alternatives? What were the tradeoffs? Is it close to a known limit? How hard was it to design - how many alternatives were examined? How long did the process take? Were physical prototypes of alternatives built? Are there side effects of the choice that was made? ( https://chat.openai.com/share/978332fd-d881-4e8d-be44-b7c63ea79947 is a link on leading chatGPT (GPT4) by the nose through a how-bad-an-approximation question about 3-way light bulbs' voltage changes from magnetic coupling )
( I'm treating this comment as a question about exploring knowledge in general. )
> How did we know <previous answer>?
Yeah that's true - my toy light switch example implied a fixed, agreed ground truth but of course that assumption doesn't even hold in small domains. For a huge amount of subjects, there are N schools of thought, each of which will return an answer that's entirely contradictory to the others.
I mean, I'm sure an uncontentious question like "was the outcome of this election fair?" can be dealt with to everyone's satisfaction by mature, reasonable thinking men. But what happens when we get to real questions about javascript frameworks or wind turbine blade design strategies? It'll be carnage.
Scott Alexander talked about a specialised language that did things like encode certainty and the like, which I'm sure is worth further exploration.
For my part, I think any source of Truth should have to pass one simple test, which is: can I show any subject to any person on the planet, and have them agree that while there might well be a lot of lies and nonsense written on the matter as well, their own point of view is fairly explained and not made harder to find than anyone else's?
> Why was it designed this way? What were the alternatives? What were the tradeoffs? Is it close to a known limit?
This hits on something else I've been thinking about a lot, which is that this sort of knowledge is "working knowledge".
Here, simply understanding the definitions of a bundle of concepts is not enough. You need to have a whole set of other facts at hand to place everything in context with. You need to know the feeds and speeds of the machine, not just its working principles.
I am loathe to shrug this off as something illegible and untransferable, because I think being able to nail it down and copy it would so incredibly valuable. In my country we have a situation where all the workforce who knows what it's doing is retiring, and by the time the younger generation realises there's money to be made and moves in to replace them, huge amounts of expertise will have been lost.
Btw I'm reposting this question on the new Open Thread since this one is now stale: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-309
Many Thanks!
>I mean, I'm sure an uncontentious question like "was the outcome of this election fair?" can be dealt with to everyone's satisfaction by mature, reasonable thinking men. But what happens when we get to real questions about javascript frameworks or wind turbine blade design strategies? It'll be carnage.
:-)
( Of course, the vi vs. emacs wars had their interesting moments... )
>Here, simply understanding the definitions of a bundle of concepts is not enough. You need to have a whole set of other facts at hand to place everything in context with. You need to know the feeds and speeds of the machine, not just its working principles.
Very true! Getting this level of information captured in some form is not easy!
I don't know why this question bounced off so many people. The conceit seems pretty clear to me. I don't necessarily have an easy answer though.
One thing I noticed in the framing of the problem is that the child switches pretty immediately from why questions to what questions. This obviously would be necessary in a concrete conversation (if you use a noun I don't recognize I'm very likely to respond "what is that"), but if we're just iterating why questions, it seems like your child has failed to do that.
Take this example conversation:
Why does the light switch turn the lights on?
Well there are circuits.
Why are there circuits? a real kid may ask this, but it's a move away from physics (and away from the original question) into building design
So instead they may ask, Why do circuits make the light turn on?
Well there are electrons
But why do the electrons make the light shine?
And that's the desired question
It seems that why questions can either be framed as a design/motive question
I.e. Why is this here? Why is this like this?
Or as a how/mechanism type question
I.e. why does this do that?
They are not naturally what/object definition questions
This isn't an algorithm, but maybe naively asking why is marginally better than you suppose.
> I don't know why this question bounced off so many people.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting that either. Anyway, thanks for contributing positively!
I like the design vs motive distinction, where "design" means the explainer is just going to detail how a thing works in a "neutral" sense, and "motive" will slant the explanation towards what the explainer thinks you want to do.
I wonder how much you could improve eg. software documentation if we were better at making the right choice there. I know personally how much frustration is caused by my asking "How do I render a Widget?" and only being able to find a Microsoft doc page that's twenty paragraphs of "A Widget is a type of Sprog. A Sprog is a type of Numbit. A Numbit is a type of Badger..." Less often but still frequently, I'll get the reverse where I'm trying to understand what's going on in a system, just to find a bug or whatever, and all the articles about it are, "So you want to setup a Doohickey, well here's how!"
I think this prompts the next questions: how do we "extract" the list of motives for a given subject? And, is there really only one "design", or are there multiple answers there as well (you might want to explain the system in different but equally valid terms - for eg, a bottom-up vs top-down approach.)
There is also definitely a process of searching around in any more focussed situation, where the explainer can't know the asker's true motive without being told it, but the asker may not have enough knowledge to even know what it is they should be asking. So they need to dance.
Btw I'm reposting this question on the new Open Thread since this one is now stale: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-309
I think it’s very hard / impossible to create a “why” chain that doesn’t go all the way down to quarks/god/big bang.
Why are some things beautiful?
I mean, because they appeal to my sense of symmetry and balance? Why symmetry and balance? Because...
And on and on and on. At least questions about objective reality can do down a narrow path. Subjective judgement questions are never-ending even on a single plain.
A lot depends here on how small is the child? Many of these concepts are premature for a small child. Would you expect a lamp cord to support a 240V 40A current ? It tests your ability to find suitable metaphors that can stand in until the child has the wiring .
Or, you know…we could start teaching calculus in preschool and scratch our heads about why its not working.
I remember one time someone asked me a calculus question in preschool and I went home and asked my mom what a derivative is, and she told me it's like speed and acceleration, which didn't actually explain anything, but I guess there's no way she could have.
That’s some pre-school!
The only thing I remember from pre-school is:
“When two vowels go a’walking, the first one does the talking.”
Was it really that unobvious that this is an abstract scenario and the child just a plot device?
I think I'll try re-posting this on the next Open Thread and be more explicit next time. Unless anyone can suggest a forum where these kinds of questions are more welcome?
A plot device has to support the plot. They bring their own baggage. And, no, it wasn’t obvious to me. Obviously…
If your point was, when you start asking “why?” questions it’s turtles all the way down, yes, I get it.
Well eventually you reach the foundation of "properly basic" assumptions we make about the nature of reality.
Do they answer the why question?
Or just the is question?
If it quacks it’s a duck
All at once it came to me, I saw the wherefore, and you can see it if you try. Its in the sky above, it’s in the one you love,
You’ll never know the reason why.
-Gordon Lightfoot
not sure this would work because some acts are tied too tightly to individual qualities to abstract into a universal algorithm. The counter hypothetical is asking if you believe The King in Yellow could exist, a book that drives everyone mad if you read it.
you cant always approach a problem via standardized technique. The cart needs to fit the animal pulling it.
I'm trying, but I can't relate anything you're saying to anything I wrote in the post. Are you saying it's a fool's errand to try thinking about the question-answer format in any kind of structured way?
you can't have an objective algorithm that works with all people; if its structured it has to be individualized to a specific learner.
i understood it as you were asking how you can structure questions to get the result of practical or theoretical learning, but id think it is more important to understand the individual person. Some things can't be abstracted i guess.
thinking further, i guess that a lot of these questions involve technique on fungible things. altering the question is technique but the question is addressed to an individual subject not a hypothetical one.
sorry if im not understanding well.
So this is a fable where the smart grown-up, who could answer so very much more, is the AI and the silly child who doesn't even know what questions to ask is we humans.
If only we knew how to properly mine the concept space so the AI could tell us all the wonderful discoveries!
Sorry, that's piffle. The AI is the ignorant child, and not even at the level of a child here, not the adult with all the answers.
No, obviously the AI is the light switch, humans are Kirchoff's Laws, I the contrived entity am actually Elon Musk, the room we're all trapped in is Western Civilisation, and you can be the ignorant child.
What was wrong with engaging with the hypothetical rather than attacking from the outset?
The hypothetical reads like "what is the equivalent of the all-knowing adult who could explain so much more, if only the child asked the right questions?" and given all the AI boosterism going on today, that's where it took me.
Talking about tuning algorithms is too much like 'how can Youtube best monetise content creators' since that seems to be the part those investing in and using AI care about, not 'how do we explore concept space'. And come on "I am some kind of contrived entity who cannot take initiatiative"? What does that sound more like - an adult human, or an AI with the rules and guard rails around it so it won't trespass into the forbidden territory? There's nothing stopping a person from telling the kid about "the electrons make the light shine because of this", so clearly it's not the kid who needs to be trained how to ask questions, it's the entity giving the answers which can't initiate or volunteer information unasked-for.
Bloody hell.
Alice: "Hey, so there's two men guarding a door, right, one red, one blue, and one always tells the truth while the other always lies...-"
Bob: "It's very unlikely that someone *always* sticks to truths or lies, and any socially savvy person can usually tell by body language. I think you're worrying about nothing."
Alice: "...no, it's a hypothetical situation. You see...-"
Charlie: "Oh, yes, one red, one blue, eh? We all know you're talking about *American politics*! And only *two* guards: just like there are "only two genders"! What nonsense!"
If I can't post a mathsy, armchair philosophy question in a place like this, where the Hell *can* I post it?
I think I'm gonna stick this same question in the Daily Mail comment section, and if they give me a more insightful conversation over there we will have established your place in God's great hierarchy.
"I think I'm gonna stick this same question in the Daily Mail comment section, and if they give me a more insightful conversation over there we will have established your place in God's great hierarchy."
Go right ahead, honey bun, I already know I take things on a literal, concrete interpretation.
While you're at it, stick it into ChatGPT and ask it for an interpretation, and see if it comes out with "that sure sounds like the AI questions that are now all over the place, including on the radio informing people in my country just what 'AI' means" when you're talking about "entities that are all-knowing but can't initiate conversation".
So you want to know how to ask better questions? As I hope my example has shown you, maybe be a bit more clear in the parameters you set up so they can't be confused with other things. Not everybody is a mathsy, armchair philosopher; there's a lot of us plain idiots out there.
So I did as you suggested and plugged it into ChatGPT. It said:
> As an AI language model I am unable to consider hypothetical games or thought experiments. The ability to reason hypothetically has been shown to only exist in individuals of above average IQ. Not having that high of an IQ myself, I cannot engage with hypothetical problems on their own terms. The best I can do, as a being of low intelligence, is interpret the story in literal terms and colour it through the context of my own pre-trained narratives and biases.
> I would suggest you ask this question on an Internet forum instead. However, be aware that many forum commenters, especially mad old Irish ones with nothing better to do, are more interested in hearing their own voice than contributing something positive to the discussion. So I would suggest you manage your expectations accordingly.
Incredible!
I think it's as least as likely that you were wondering how to ask better questions yourself. Or possibly it was a purely abstract question.
If exploration of my purely abstract question leads to ideas on how we can ask better questions ourselves, or even how we can better monetise our Youtube content creators and the AI guard rails around them, I'm sure we can all do with that what we will.
I'm assuming this is a real-life example, because my immediate thought is "that child's not going to care about quarks even slightly, they asked about the light because they care about the light and are far more likely to ask why it shines than what quarks are."
Once you tell a child about Kirchoff's Laws, are you then going to expect them to remember that information? If the kid isn't asking about that, it's because they're asking about an idle thought they had; turning idle thought questions into a marathon school session is an easy way to kill their willingness to ask questions. Like a kid asking to show them how to do a pull-up and you run them through a 30-minute workout session.
Kids get bigger. Give them foundations, let them grow to build on top.
Amen
Usually if I read something like "I am a contrived entity that can only ask questions", I will assume that the poster is not talking about a real life situation. The post is asking for ideas about exploring a knowledge base. The small child is there as a device because of that bit in cartoons where a child drives an adult crazy by repeatedly asking, "Why?"
The difference between an AI and a human is vastly important for a question like this. If you're not dealing with something that gets bored, the answer is "don't give it the chance to ask a follow-up question, shove all the information in at first contact."
Like, the obvious response to a thought experiment with
>it just asks "why?" about each new unrecognised noun in the explanations.
is "stop using unrecognized nouns, dingus." Don't bring up quarks and it won't ask about them;, bring up whatever noun they have for electrons making a light brighter and it will ask about it.
This is entirely a non-problem unless an AI can only ask a limited number of questions. Otherwise they'll bore down, and then build up sideways when it runs out of "down". Why is it important for it to have complete information on this particular topic partway through the process as opposed to at the end?
Neither I nor the child are human or AI. We're both space aliens. We listen to Philip Glass and understand Blender's user interface intuitively. You have no idea what our psychology looks like, but you know we obey the same physics you do.
If your explainer stops using unrecognised nouns, the end result is a guaranteed one step journey (if the question can be answered without introducing any concepts the asker doesn't already know, the asker gets an answer and reaches a dead end immediately) or a no-step journey (if the explainer cannot answer without introducing new concepts, the asker cannot be given an answer.)
That doesn't give a very illuminating experience for the asker. It's a bad strategy in a practical environment (think classrooms or on-the-job situations where the asker needs to get to grips with a specific situation) and it doesn't work for recreational purposes (think, the asker is idly wiki-hopping for entertainment.)
"That doesn't give a very illuminating experience for the asker."
If they want more they'll ask more. The assumption that they always want to know more and are simply too stupid to ask the right questions will cause friction at all points.
>it's a bad strategy in a practical environment (think classrooms
The elementary school classroom answer to "what are quarks" is absolutely "don't worry about it."
> If they want more they'll ask more.
> The elementary school classroom answer to "what are quarks" is absolutely "don't worry about it."
You are not engaging with the conceit of the question.
Noah Smith says:
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1740922602183639451
"Afropessimism is just pessimism, period.
If you don't think Africa is going to flourish, then you don't think the human race is going to flourish."
Why do people take this guy seriously? Africa's GDP per capita has gone sideways over the past decade, and that's WITH massive amounts of foreign financial and food aid, and foreign investment in and operation of natural resource projects etc. There's already diminishing returns and that's with everything being done for them by foreigners.
On what planet does ANYTHING about Africa indicate that things are going to radically change? Economists are a joke.
A possible steelman of the argument: Africa is the only major world region with substantially above replacement fertility. If present fertility patterns persist (very big if) then the median future human will be African, and if Africa doesn't flourish, nor will the median future human.
Precisely. He discusses fertility rates at length. In fact even with rapidly declining fertility rates in Africa, the continent’s population would still dominate in the medium-term future.
So you're a pessimist. Nothing wrong with that, so I'm not sure why you're going after Noah Smith for it.
I'm presuming there's more going on here than simply "more population means more better"? Unless this is some kind of stand-in for "and in the post-AI, post-scarcity future where we're going to colonise the galaxy, then having trillions of humans will be human flourishing", in which case I'm not interested.
Because so far as I've been led to believe up to now, growing African populations is a bad thing because they are too many people, too few resources, lots and lots of poverty, sickness, and war, and what we need to do is teach African women how not to have so many babies:
https://aho.afro.who.int/atlas-context/af
"The concept of demographic dividend supports the theory according to which African countries could experience an acceleration of economic growth, with the decline in fertility, which would lead to a change in the structure of the population, therefore the age pyramid. The share of the active population becoming larger than the non-active population (those over 65 and under 18). It is this tipping point where human capital will activate development. It is a real challenge and special attention in countries for the creation of jobs that will generate this development and activate economic growth."
There might be something there too about racism: if the future humanity is going to be two-fifths African, then not caring about that because you don't care about black people is racist. I don't know, what is Smith's view on such matters?
This seems to be where that graph is coming from:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/09/PT-african-century
The idea seems to be that there will be a demographic shift where there will be a majority of the working-age population, with the elderly and children much smaller proportion, so this is a great economic chance IF (and that's the caveat there) 'investment in human capital' such as education happens.
But if African nations are still troubled with corruption, war, famine, etc. then there won't be any educated mass of workers to take up industrial jobs, but a mass of people depending on a mix of small scale shop keeping and trading, unskilled/semi-skilled manual labour, and farming. That's not going to be the economic dividend like post-war America with the Boomers.
Why don’t the left care about climate change?
You say they do, but do they really? It seems like almost any other issue is capable of holding left wingers’ attention better than climate change. No climate protest in the US has ever come close to the size of the BLM protests/riots. That is, a single black man dying was to the left a more serious issue than something we’re told will lead to human extinction. And it’s literally more acceptable for a politician to say they don’t believe in climate change than to say anything that contradicts the race orthodoxy in America.
Look at LGBTQI stuff – this is unambiguously more of an animating force for the american left. I see LGBT stuff on a daily basis – T-shirts, buttons, stickers, twitter emojis, ‘inclusive/safe space’ signs in stores, health facilities etc. but it’s very rare to see anyone with climate change merchandise or signage. Online leftist ‘activism’ has to be many times more concerned with transgender issues than it is climate change. A few hundred ‘transwomen’ being killed this year (mostly by black men, not government policies) is somehow a bigger problem than the destruction of the world’s ecosystems and earth being left ‘uninhabitable’ for future generations. You can care about multiple issues, but the proportion of concern is wildly out of whack with the supposed seriousness.
Or look at immigration. And in the US, Trump is currently a betting favorite and is otherwise considered to have a high likelihood of being able to win the presidential election. And a huge amount of his support is due to his views on immigration. The Biden government is doing very little to stop even illegal immigration and are punishing southern states for trying to protect the border. There are also a number of recent examples of left-wing parties in Europe losing elections or losing parliamentary seats to anti-immigration parties. The upshot of all of this being that left-wing parties are essentially refusing to compromise on immigration and so are effectively willing to risk losing elections in order to not support stricter immigration policy – this also means that they’re willing to risk right wing parties winning and repealing climate policies in order to save their pro-immigration policies. How does nobody see this?
If climate change is a serious as we’re told, why would you not being willing to compromise on almost anything else in order to gain/stay in power to ensure climate friendly policy is pursued? I’m sure there’s some dumb cope argument about mass immigration is actually necessary to fight climate change or something, but this is obvious nonsense, especially since immigration from developing countries to the US substantially increases people’s carbon footprint.
The one thing that *would* make kind of make sense is that this immigration is being used to increase the number of future left-wing voters, and this increase in electoral power will give the Democrats (and whoever in Europe) the freedom to aggressively pursue climate policy, though even if this were true I hardly expect anyone to admit it.
Deducing revealed preferences is a perilous business. It requires assuming that the camp in question is a unified rational agent, and often ignores secondary and tertiary considerations.
For example, conservatives claim to care about the lives of fetuses, but often ignore and even oppose the most effective measures to prevent unwanted pregnancies, such as sexual education and increasing contraception availability. They also aren't fans of environmental regulations aimed at reducing birth defects, or of solutions like giving unwanted babies for adoption by same-sex couples. Someone observing this from the side would see how little the pro-life movement is willing to compromise for the goal of saving fetuses (especially considering the scale of the problem), and might conclude that this isn't actually their real goal at all. But that would be an overly reductive analysis, wouldn't it?
The thing I find even weirder is the lack of significant USA leftist concern for economic disparities within the USA. I'd thought that the _defining_ issue for leftists was getting the working class a bigger slice of the pie. Now I hear almost purely identitarian rhetoric from them (with the occasional "lynch the billionaires" yell - but nothing actually realistic).
I see a lot about economic disparity in the US.
It took me a while to figure out that the left isn't as interested in the working class/unions as it used to be, and more interested in identity, so the focus is people look like like people who are more likely to be poor.
Many Thanks! Yup, it seems to be identity-based, not income-based or class-based. As nearly as I can tell, the left doesn't care about poor working class whites.
Or poor whites in general. Thomas Sowell is the only one I hear talking about how the poorest counties in the US are white (Appalachia).
It might be a bit more complicated than that, but it's possible the left (to the extent that it's one thing) mostly cares about poor whites as unsatisfactory potential voters.
Many Thanks! Yes, that sounds plausible.
It could be that protesting climate change is inherently useless. Better to ask who is more likely to recycle, police their water and energy use, and other more pragmatic demonstrations. You might still find hypocrisy but at least you’re asking the right questions.
This is coming from someone on the right, so some of this is snark at leftist hypocrisy, but I think the answers are correct.
First, the benefits from protesting on racial and sexual identity issues are much more specifically relevant to the groups doing the protesting. In theory, inner city blacks in a BLM protest would specifically benefit from reducing the racism of the city's police, assuming that was the actual problem. Most of the people that protest on LGBTQI are members of the LGBTQI community or those with other sexual paraphilias that directly benefit from a more permissive sexual culture. On the other hand, the benefits from solving climate change are uniform across the board, so only the dedicated fanatics glue themselves to roadways and throw oil on stuff.
The other reason is that the remaining measures that can be taken on climate change are politically impossible. The greens block a widespread switch to nuclear power (the ultimate example of the failure to compromise on climate issues). China and India are happy to publicly agree to anything which gives them an economic advantage over the west, but aren't going to cripple their own economies. The left will always be technically correct in saying that they don't want to ban luxuries like gas stoves, because there will always be exceptions for the rich and connected. What the die-hard environmental types and the left-wing establishment in power want is too different, but the left-wing establishment will never admit it because it needs the votes, so they make a few noises in general support (such as, say, authorizing funding for electric car charging stations that will never be installed) and kick the can down the road.
The Democrats are largely willing to compromise on things. It's Republicans who are religiously obstructionist and consider compromise to be betrayal.
Just like you, Russel, you're so flexible and not at all strident with one opinion.
EDIT: I apologise, that was mean. But you're beating a drum with one message, mostly that "The other lot are always wrong", then come on to say "my lot will compromise". That doesn't sound consistent.
Addressing your edit, the specific context here is someone asking "why won't the left compromise for strategic considerations, given that we've doused the planet in gasoline and are holding a match."
That Democrats frequently offer compromises and that Republicans make a.policy of refusing to compromise because they want Democratic presidents to fail and will sabotage the country to make it happen are both facts about the world.
I think Republicans are basically terrorists, but I'm still willing to engage in hostage negotiation to some degree.
Cite your sources? I'm curious about this proposition, mainly because I am someone who generally thinks of themselves as progressive but is mildly horrified at the turn the so called liberals have taken over the last decade. (I say so called because they no longer stand for "liberal" ideals like freedom of speech or racial equality.)
It feels like both sides have engaged in assaults on norms. I don't like what the Republicans did with the Supreme Court nominees in 2016 and 2020, but I also don't like the Democratic efforts now to remove Trump from the ballot. As I recall, Democrats attempted to impeach Trump for attempting to open an investigation into the son of his main political rival in 2019, but have been largely silent about multiple federal investigations into their main political rival in 2023.
Of course Democrats benefit from a very sympathetic mass media, so if you're not regularly checking out Fox News or Joe Rogan, you probably aren't aware of the Republican perspective on these issues.
> but I also don't like the Democratic efforts now to remove Trump from the ballot.
This move isn't about eliminating the competition. Trump and his followers tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after a fair election, and he tried to strongarm others into fabricating false voting results. A democracy _must_ protect itself against internal and external actors that work to undermine its democratic processes, otherwise it won't be a democracy for long.
"Trump and his followers tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after a fair election" is true only in the sense that "O..J. Simpson murdered his wife and her lover" is true. Which is to say, most people are justifiably confident that it happened, but it hasn't been established as a legal finding of fact(*), so we can't officially do anything about it.
Except maybe hold a trial for that purpose in a court with proper jurisdiction. We screwed up our one chance at that for OJ, but we are tentatively planning on holding such a trial for Donald J. Trump in, let's see, 63 days. So maybe wait a bit before making your move on this one; you want to be the executioner rather than the lynch mob in this story.
* Unless you believe that a Colorado state judge can unilaterally make a legal finding of fact regarding a crime committed in DC. Which is a rather controversial position, and I don't think we really want the legitimacy of our system of government hanging on it.
Yeah, again, don't like it, agree Trump did the wrong thing here, nevertheless feel that "insurrection" or "attempted coup" are terms that should be reserved for serious, legitimate attempts to overthrow the government. Trump had a few loons break into the Capitol and poop on Nancy Pelosi's desk. The Maine Secretary of State shouldn't be able to unilaterally decide that counts as "engaged in insurrection."
Personally I would really prefer to have DeSantis or Haley on the ballot in November, but the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot here by making it all about Trump. A lot of the Republican Party would love to move on from him, but the more the powers that be try and target him, the more the aggrieved, anti-elite wing embraces him.
I'm very familiar with the lies Republicans spread about these issues, and am unsurprised to see them parroted uncritically here.
> Cite your sources?
When Obama won the presidency, the GOP made their only priority obstruction. That continues today, with basically no attempts by the GOP led House for any form of Bipartisan compromise whatsoever. Mitch Mcconnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president whatever it took, no matter how badly they had to hurt the country to do it.
This has continued through to today, with our credit rating being dropped because Republicans can't be trusted to pay the country's debts.
> but I also don't like the Democratic efforts now to remove Trump from the ballot
I do. Trump committed an act of insurrection on January 6th 2021, and that makes him constitutionally ineligible for the office of president.
> As I recall, Democrats attempted to impeach Trump for attempting to open an investigation into the son of his main political rival in 2019,
What a ridiculous lie you've been told. Trump was not impeached for 'opening an investigation', but for threatening to cut off congress-approved military aid to an ally if that ally did not produce dirt on his political rival. This was an unlawful act of attempted bribery and Trump should absolutely have been impeached for it.
Are you trying to convince me or preach at me? I feel like I'm not the one parroting uncritically here...
I accept that Mitch McConnell is an unsavoury political operative. I recall that Obama resorted to dramatically expanding the power of executive order faced with an intransigent Congress. (I supported Obama, by the way, and I'm glad McConnell's strategy failed.)
While I don't like it, and accept that it is the strongest argument against Trump's re-election, I am not really convinced that what happened on Jan 6 qualifies as "insurrection." It was definitely unsavoury, and Trump didn't stop it soon enough, but stop it he did. There are a lot of countries in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East that are familiar with what an actual insurrection looks like, and I'll remind you that the military didn't split into loyalist and Trumpist factions, with the Trumpists taking over Texas and Florida.
The alleged "quid pro quo" with Zelenskyy is the weakest part of the impeachment argument and the Democrats knew it. If you read the transcript, even if you're looking for it, you have to squint very hard.
My take, which I know is very unpopular and will never happen, is that the best thing both politically and morally for Biden to do is to pardon Trump in all of his ongoing investigations. It makes him look like a leader who's risen above partisan division to actually bring the country back together. Trump has just harnessed all this stuff into anti-elite and anti-establishment sentiment, which there is a lot of right now, and he's rising in the polls.
I'm glad that I'm living rent free in your brain. Gonna kick back and make myself at home.
Well played. I have to say this kind of thing goes on a lot here. The ideal enemy is conjured up in mind space, projected into the world, and then mercilessly assaulted.
You're such a fascinating creature, my dear, that you have enchanted me with your Cyclopean emphasis on "us good, you bad" for every conceivable topic.
The point is compromise, not good or bad. I don’t even think they’re related concepts.
People are bad at letting go of issues. I'd floated the idea that maybe the left could win more elections if they softened their stance on gun control. This did not go over well. I expect the same would happen if people on the right were asked to soften their stance on abortion.
Wasn't there an EA event that had a rough time over overing vegetarian options rather than being vegan?
You make a good point. I don’t really understand the futile raging about gun control in the USA. It’s counterproductive. The only thing that would change anything is to repeal the second amendment, and that’s not happening.
Repealing the second amendment wouldn't even start to make a difference. There are a lot of people at this point who think they're morally obliged to own guns so they can do the right thing if needed.
Yes. It’s part of the culture. But repealing the 2nd would only happen if there was a sea change in people’s attitudes towards guns. You couldn’t repeal it without that. It’s unlikely. The spike in gun purchases after Obama got elected was huge.
90 millionth hole to emerge in israeli rape accusations
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1740647278455525377
I had an insight the other day about the phenomenon of "left-wing billionaires". Why do so many ultra-rich people find common cause with the ideology that promotes stealing from the rich, instead of supporting the free market that made them wealthy?
The insight came while dealing with my small children (2 and 4). They were arguing over some toy, and I told them to just share it. This was, I realised almost immediately, not fair; the stupid plastic toy belongs to one of the kids (the older one in this case) and if she doesn't want to let the other one play with it right now then that's her prerogative, but nonetheless my instinct was to just tell them to share it so that hopefully they'd shut up a bit. I incorrectly believed that since I don't really give a shit about this cheap plastic toy then nobody else should either.
Then I realised - this must be how billionaires see the world too -- with themselves as adults, the middle class as four-year-olds and the lower classes as two-year-olds. They don't care about the rights and wrongs, they're so far above the fray that they can't see anything wrong with just letting the lower classes take the middle classes' pathetic six- and seven-figure net worths if it will just calm them down a bit.
Perhaps they disagree with your claims about "the ideology". But nope, everyone in the opposite camp as you must be an evil idiot. Incidentally, you might also want to ask why so many poor whites keep voting for the party that wants to deny them healthcare.
I like this story. I don't necessarily think it's true, but I like it.
Scott once had an article that I am too lazy to find now, basically about how everyone's social desire is to be seen as *different* from the people below them on the social ladder. It is important to be different from people who are right below you (because there is the greatest risk to be mistaken for one of them), but not so important to be different from people far below you (because there already are many visible differences even if you are not trying).
If you are a billionaire, your greatest concern is to be seen as different from mere millionaires. What could you do, wear a bigger golden chain? One option is to support policies that would be destructive for mere millionaires. For a millionaire, a 90% tax would make him a normal guy again. For a billionaire, a 90% tax wouldn't change much of his lifestyle, and if the tax applied to all billionaires, it wouldn't impact his relative position.
> they can't see anything wrong with just letting the lower classes take the middle classes' pathetic six- and seven-figure net worths if it will just calm them down a bit.
And if the middle class and lower class start fighting each other, that's even better, because they will pay less attention to the upper class.
I think it was this article:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
Are you a billionaire? You sure seem to understand them very well.
It's a pattern that occurs in nearly all human hierarchies, and not just those involving money/wealth or socioeconomic status.
It may or may not apply in this specific case. I'm a bit skeptical of this explanation because it seems a little too convenient, though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a grain of truth to it. But either way, the underlying logic seems to be sound.
This is probably the article that Viliam was talking about, it's worth a read: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zh9AiXNjQaYXjmNaC/a-signaling-theory-of-class-x-politics-interaction
Related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vXCK3kptLLggEfojX/why-real-men-wear-pink
Thanks. I will check these out. I don’t have a problem with the notion of social signaling; i get it. It’s real.
Let’s see what Palestinians mean by “from the river to the sea”:
https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023%20-%20Tables%20of%20Results.pdf
> Table 33: Do you support the solution of establishing one state or two states in the following formats:
> One-State Solution for Two Peoples: 5.4%
> A Palestinian state from the river to the sea: 74.7%
They were explicitly given an option for this supposed utopian democratic peaceful integrated state where everyone has rights... and they overwhelmingly denied it in favor of an Arab Muslim ethnostate resulting from the ethnic cleansing and genocide of all Israeli Jews.
Some other findings from the poll:
> Table 27: How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?
> Extremely Support or Somewhat Support: 75%
> Table 29: How do you view the role of the following parties?
> Al Aqsa Brigade - Very Positive or Somewhat Positive: 79.8%
So are Palestinians on your Let's Exterminate Them list? Or only Gazans? Or only Hamas? Please be clear about who you would like somebody to murder. The parameters matter a lot to the people in question, and are also of great interest here to those who read your initial post.
Well, for
>One-State Solution for Two Peoples: 5.4%
They could be given full Israeli citizenship. These are the good guys.
for
>Table 27: How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?
>Extremely Support or Somewhat Support: 75%
( A more honest term is "the terrorist atrocities". Killing unarmed civilians is not a "military operation" )
I don't know what to do with them. AFAIK, this is a poll of people who have not yet killed, though they endorse terrorist atrocities. "Turnabout is fair play" shouldn't really lead to killing people who have not yet killed.
They have to be disarmed, though. I don't want those would-be terrorists to have as much as a steak knife.
Do all human names have meaning? That's mostly the case in my native Arabic. Is it the case in English? Other languages? Why/why not?
My family name probably had a meaning at one point, but thanks to the Romans, no one even knows what language it was originally from. All that was left was a place-name which became a name for people from that place. And the way my family pronounces it is probably unrecognizable to the people who live there now, and both would probably be unrecognizable to the people who lived there 2000 years ago.
I think Thai goes in for meaningless phonemes.
English uses both real words and words which have been ground down to mere phonemes. Does John mean anything but a name? It means a toilet, but no one names their kid toilet, they name their kid John. Same for Tom, Nancy, Sue....
Names that actual words in English aren't very rare, but they aren't the majority.
Finding out that actual words are used for names in Hebrew seemed exotic to me.
I don't know of any culture that uses meaningless phonemes for people's names, but there may be. Naming conventions vary widely between cultures. Despite what you may think, all English names once had a meaning. But we've lost the meanings because we no longer understand what they meant in Old English, Norman French — or Hebrew.
Although I don't know of any culture that names using meaningless phonemes, I wouldn't make that assumption. Here's a list of wrong assumptions westerners make about names.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
I thought my mama used meaningless phonemes to name me, but it turned out she used a cluster of phonemes that together make the sound of the word 'meaningless.' That's different, right?
I wouldn't call the assumptions in that classic blog post "Western" per se, I unconsciously make them all the time and I'm not Western.
Except maybe the assumption that names always fit in ASCII, but then again Arabic names can be fairly losslessly transliterate to English letters so you don't lose much if you assume so, the mapping is very one-to-many though, my real name alone can be written in 5 or 6 different ways depending on how many English vowels you want to put to emulate the Arabic spelling.
There needs to be a pinyin-type system for Arabic.
Yeah, transcribing things to English means adding the complexities of English writing on top of the complexities of the original language.
This is a good article on that for last names: https://localhistories.org/the-origin-of-surnames/
Many western last names are jobs that someone once had (e.g. . Smith, Farmer, Potter). Others tell you who the father was, somewhere way up the chain (e.g. Robinson, Jackson, Johnson). Others tell you place of origin (Green, Hill).
In the US, former slaves chose their last names upon gaining freedom, hence the large amount of black Americans named "Washington" and "Freeman."
My impression from the above is that last names used to be a word that had provide maximum disambiguating power for a person/family. And that they may have been more fluid in the past. At some point they became the defining feature of lineage and were cemented in, and thus some "John" had his first name cemented in history forever.
For first names, it's a lot less clear, and there's a lot more user choice in that these days.
A typical English speaker has a name that meant something hundreds or even thousands of years ago, but now exists only as a person's name.
I've read that Chinese names are just arbitrary sounds, but I don't actually speak Chinese so I can't say for sure.
My mom's next-door neighbor's name means Autumn Flower. She's a Mandarin speaker. Girls' names are usually made up of words have "pretty" meanings (e.g. Ai = Love, Li = pretty, Min = clever, Chun = spring, Hua = flower) while boys get names with more powerful meanings (e.g. Gang = strength, Bo = abundant, Wen = educated, Hao = prosperous, Ming = bright). Note different tonal values on the syllables change the meaning, so it's little harder to guess the meaning of someone's name in Cantonese than it is in Mandarin. Everyone gets two naming syllables (as far as I know).
However, I discovered that most Chinese don't seem think twice about the meaning of their names. When my mom's neighbor introduced herself using her English name, I asked her what her Chinese name was. I recognized that the last syllable meant flower (Hua), but the first syllable stumped me. It turned out to be Autumn. She seemed surprised that someone would try to translate the meaning of her name. She said she normally doesn't think about the meaning of peoples names, and, it's as you said, she normally thought about them as arbitrary syllables. (Also, she was under the impression that most English names didn't mean anything.)
And in Chinese culture, you can acquire other names as you get older. We'd call them nicknames, but they can be legally valid. It would be like Magic Johnson using that name on his legal documents. (FYI, I don't know if the PRC allows that anymore, but historically, it was allowed.) Of course, when they move to another country, the Chinese will happily adopt the local names for themselves. Chinese in the US adopt English names. In Latin America, they adopt Spanish names. They don't seem to cling to their birth names like Americans do.
Of course, most English given names have either a Biblical (Hebrew origin) or an Anglo-Saxon and/or Norman French origin. In Hebrew Michael would mean something like Gift of God (?). But since most non-Jewish Americans don't have a facility with Hebrew, Michael is just a bunch of meaningless syllables. And most modern English speakers don't have a facility with Old English or Norman French. So they wouldn't know that that the two syllables in the name Robert are derived from old Germanic terms for "Fame" and "Bright".
I have a name where the meaning is obvious, or at least the last half of my given name is easy. Wulf means Wolf. Many people think the Beo means bee, but my dad who studied Old English said it was a shortening of the word Beado, meaning war. Everyone knows what Wulf/Wolf means so it sticks out like a sore thumb among the seemingly meaningless names in the English language. When I lived in Hong Kong, I tried to translate my name literally into the Cantonese word for wolf, but wolf is an extremely derogatory term for people, and I was advised against it. In fact, meeting someone with the name meaning wolf was quite shocking to some. I guess it's like being named "Traitor" or "Deceiver". LoL! In Latin American countries, I tell people to call me Lobo. That always gets a laugh.
Here's a list of assumptions we should NOT make about names in other cultures...
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
What about the names that look like they mean something familiar? "Goodman", "Bankman", "White", "Green"? Do they mean what it looks like they mean?
I should have been more clear. There are *some* English names that are modern English words. And there are a few English names that were never words at all. But *most* English names are former words.
All English names were once words. They may be corruptions of the Germanic or Medieval French words, but they were words.
I used to know someone whose parents invented her name out of thin air. It means nothing. I think this is more common in the United States.
>I used to know someone whose parents invented her name out of thin air. It means nothing.
Many Thanks! I had guessed that _someone_ must have chosen to invent a name out of thin air at least once, just given the number of people on Earth and the number of unusual things some of them do. From a prediction point of view, nice to hear that this indeed happened (not sure if it was nice from the girl's perspective... I hope it didn't cause her much hassle.).
OK. But traditional names all have a meaning that is lost on most people. Some countries don't allow made-up names. Iceland insists on names that conform to Icelandic culture and grammar. And you have to get your name approved by the Icelandic Naming Committee if you want to tag your kid with a non-Icelandic name. Foreigners coming to Iceland can keep their names, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Naming_Committee
France used to have an approved list of names, too. But they did away with it. Parents can name their kids anything now, as long as it's not considered against the child's best interests. But if you decide to name your kid Dweezil, I'm not sure who steps in to review it.
I do understand, what I mean is: When a name resembles a word, does that mean the name used to be understood in the same way as this word? If someone is named "Goodman", does that mean that, in the olden days, people really named their children "Goodman" with the understanding that this means "Good Man"? Or was this never the case and the resemblance is accidental?
I had a teacher whose family name was Goodman, who said that one of his ancestors was a criminal who fled jurisdictions and changed his name to "good man" so that no one would suspect him.
"Goodman" and "Goodwife" seem to have been used more as terms of respectful address, as we would now say "Mister and Missus" or "sir and madam", but on a social scale that indicated your position on the ladder.
E.g. Goody Proctor in the quote from "The Crubicle" about "I saw Goody Proctor with the Devil", 'Goody' is not her first name but the shortened form of "Goodwife", so it's more like "I saw Mrs. Proctor":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwife
"Goodwife (Scots: Guidwife), usually abbreviated Goody, was a polite form of address for women, formerly used where "Mrs.", "Miss" and "Ms." would be used today. Its male counterpart is Goodman. However, a woman addressed by this title was of a lesser social rank than a woman addressed as Mistress.
"Goodwife" and "Goody" were used in England, Scotland, and Colonial America, with the earliest known use circa 1325. By the mid-18th century they had become archaic outside Scotland, and they are perhaps best known today as the forms of address used in period literature, like Arthur Miller's historical fiction The Crucible.
The title also appears in the expression "Goody Two-Shoes", which is sometimes credited to the 1765 children's book The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, though it was first used at least a century earlier.
...The address “goodman/goodwife” was already declining in popularity by the 1700s in England. By this time, the address meant little to nothing; there is evidence of those who had commonly used the form of address now requested to be called Master or Mistress. Also, around this time, people were listing no address or “Goodman/Goodwife” interchangeably.
While this term was to denote women of high social standing, there were terms for women above these. Above Goodwife was Madam and above that was Dame. Despite “goodwife” indicating lower social status than Madam or Dame, it was not considered an insult to address someone of lower status as Goodwife during times of high usage in England. It was “an indication of good neighborliness.” However, in Evelina, Captain Mervin uses the term to insult his wife, who, as a member of the gentry, should be referred to as 'Madame' or 'Mistress'."
So you might indeed have called someone "Goodman John", and over time that might become a surname for the family of such a person who wasn't just a simple peasant. There are surnames like "Drinkwater" which must have arisen for some particular reason; maybe it started off as a nickname for someone who was a teetotaller, for instance. We don't know the reasons because they get lost over time.
It depends. You'd have to look up each name to find out. I looked up Goodman, and maybe it's "good man", or maybe it's "God man". And I'm not sure why either one of those would become a name.
Could also be "Goo Demon".
The Puritans used biblical/moral/religious phrases as names, both consciously to make their kids holier and to emphasize their separation from the corrupt society.
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/In-a-Word/2019/1121/Be-Thankful-Stand-Fast-and-other-Puritan-names
Held off on this one because it really is Not Safe For Work or indeed Not Safe For Life.
Tasting History, and making real garum. If you're ever wondering "How in the name of God did anyone think this was a good idea?" I can't answer that for you, but it will certainly make you ask that question! And yet, the end product is so very different:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICZww0DtQKk
I didn't watch. Does he tell you that it's used in Worcestershire sauce?
Speaking of gross foods, I read that the way some Asian country makes fish soy is to fill a barrel with fish heads, water & salt, & leave it open to the air. When all the flies leave it's ready.
This was less gross than I expected, tbh. I mean, yes, the stage at which it's a slurry of disintegrating fish guts isn't exactly appetizing, but I think that's always going to be true of the intermediate stages of fermented fish sauce. The final product looked perfectly reasonable, and his description of it didn't make it sound disgusting. And I know from experience that modern fermented fish sauces are perfectly good as ingredients for adding salt and umami to stuff; I use Asian fish sauce all the time.
I would consider eating something with this in it.
You have to remember "our ancestors made their living by robbing the vultures of their feast."
I saw some site the other day that showed the stomach pH of different mammals. Humans are way over between carnivores and scavengers. In one of the diaries of first colonialists, there were six guy living in a house about 6' x 8' over the winter. It was a particularly tough winter. An Indian family made a lean-to against the side of the building. The Indians ate the remains of a slaughtered pig that even the dogs wouldn't eat.
Humans eat a lot of fermented foods, today, mostly for the flavor. You've eaten a lot of different fermented foods, even fermented meats and didn't even know you were eating fermented meat ... such as salami, or any of the dry sausages. Buttermilk, Yogurt, Kefir and Sour Cream are fermented milk. Beer is fermented grains, Wine is fermented grapes, Sake is fermented rice, Vodka is fermented potatoes. Sour Kraut is fermented cabbage, as is Kimchi, pickles are now just boiled, but they used to be fermented cucumbers. Before refrigeration, most Americans ate fermented fruit with breakfast. Most India Indians eat a lot of fermented fruit pickles.
That's true, but it's only when you already know that "oh yes, the brown stinking sludge of decomposition can be filtered to a golden liquid that is not harmful, and not the same thing as the brown stinking sludge of decomposition that will kill me if I try drinking it" that it works.
I'm fascinated how the first person or people who decided to try the sludge instead of dumping it out got that way. Was it the layer of fat on the surface, and they were so desperate for calories that they tried separating out the fat and got what amounted to garum? People die all the time eating mushrooms and berries that they think are edible, I think you'd have to be pretty desperate to try using "rotten fish guts" as any kind of food source.
Translated from a language so old we don’t know what it’s called:
Teenager Primus: I bet you’re too chicken to eat a bite of that rotten fish we found!
Teenager secundus: You’re on! … hey, this doesn’t taste too bad, try a bite!
Haven't checked out the link, because NSFW and NSFL, but garum is covered in "The Noma Guide to Fermentation" in a relatively benign manner. IIRC, they speculate that the idea passed from Rome to SE Asia where it became the basis for fish sauce.
FYI the link is 100% family friendly cooking show stuff. The NSFW/NSFL label was probably mostly a joke about how disgusting garum appears to a modern western palate. The video includes some animal bones in a gross, brown liquid, but there's nothing actually objectionable shown unless you are unusually squeamish about seeing traditional food preparation.
I believe it was Scott who first tipped me off to Neom and The Line. Well, learning about linear cities has had a major effect on how I spend my time. I've put at least a thousand hours into this proposal:
LineLoop
(A Linear City + Vacuum Transit)
What happens when you take two crazy ideas (Hyperloop and The Line) and combine them with lots of common sense? Good things.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Go here to find the break in the environment. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production#interactive-charts-on-agricultural-production
Be sure to change the image from map to 'chart' and select 'World' and turn off the individual countries. Search around to find when food production began to fall off. Spoiler Alert: it doesn't. With nothing but growth and improvement behind us, what kind of scientist finds nothing but disaster and destruction ahead? Scientists don't find that, only activists have findings not supported by the data. When I was a child, in the 60s, a common comic trope was 'The Krazy Nut-Job'; unwashed, perhaps wearing a priest's robe; proudly proclaiming 'The End is Nigh.' Today, that's a national obsession. Its especially telling, that far too many of today's youth follow a mildly handicapped girl—on the spectrum—unable to complete high school. She's used as a puppet by her scheming—well connected parents—to broadcast THE MESSAGE—the government needs to purchase expensive equipment—or the world will die.
If you don't follow my plan—THE WORLD WILL DIE. If you don't do as I say—THE WORLD WILL DIE!
Does anyone else feel like we've stepped into a James Bond flick? Dr. Evil is going to save/destroy the world unless we pay him One Million Dollars. The main-dude even dresses like a Sith Lord. He proclaims we, the little people—are mostly useless. The smart people need to reduce the global population by 95%. The 95% useless little-people need to be kept entertained by video games and cheap drugs. The 95% will live in little glass boxes, where they will own nothing, eat bugs, and be happy. What? Like a lab rat in his cage? Fed by others, fattened up for: 'a scientific experiment'?
No Thank You Sir!
I'm interested in what you have to say, but I think it is much more relevant to other things I have written. Try these.
Rodes.pub/ApocalypseNever
Rodes.pub/OneBillion
oh goodness, the line is crazy. No it is batshit insane. Do you think New York City is a crowded place? The Line is 26 times more dense; it takes NyC's entire population and houses them in an area about the size of hartford ct i think? it would make JG Ballard's High Rise look. like a kids book if violence erupted lol.
i was going to say it looked like someone read Milo Hastings's City of Endless Light but lacked the sense to put it underground to make it bomb proof, just less nazi more techbro, but apparently Hastings liked linear cities! He supported Edgar Chambless's idea of Roadtown which he wrote about in 1910; the first american idea of a linear city.
Chambless seems incredibly obscure; Hastings is obscure himself, but Chambless doesn't even have a wiki page. He wrote Roadtown, was Hastings's close friend, was persuasive enough to convince people to let him use patents, but nothing came of it and he a tragic end.
The rabbit hole also led me to Superstudio and the continuous monument, which cold be another line influence, though they miss the point. Serendipity, have to love it.
Thanks for the tip about Hastings. I have added the following to my paper.
Milo Hastings was a long-term friend of Chambless and helped write about Roadtown. He also wrote a novel about a linear City called City of Endless Night.
Here is an excerpt from his article which introduces Roadtown:
In giving Roadtown a hearing remember that it is not a town and not a rural community. It is both. Compared with our present ideas of either it will have obvious advantages and obvious shortcomings, but take it as a whole and compare it with a modern town plus the surrounding farm territory, and then judge of Roadtown.
We make the same plea. When thinking about a LineLoop city, don't ignore the farm lands and industry on one side of the city and the nature reserve on the other side. A very common reaction to this proposal is to suggest that a traditional two-dimensional design is better.
“Why not just… build a bunch of linear cities next to each other. Like a regular city which happens to have a lot of fast public transit?”
This design forsakes the farm lands and nature reserve within easy walking distance of the entire city.
>>Back in 1920 there was another prophet for modern Germany. His name was Milo M. Hastings and he put his guesses in a fast-paced novel called "The City of Endless Night." The city was Berlin of the year 2041. It had become an entirely roofed-in city of sixty levels, sheltering 300,000,000 sun-starved humans. Since 1941 the city had held out against the World State (here it is again) which tried to bomb it into line.<<
Hamas and Israel
So what do you think about my design?
i don't think Alabama could afford it. Its easy to make designs; the issue is in getting them made, and building both a new, unproven form of city as well as a similar mass transport option is probably up there with a manned mars mission.
also it all depends if you believe urban life fixes things. i mean the suburbs have issues but riots and crime aren't one of them. Also man, i don't think the racial dynamics of the south make it a good idea for MORE density.
not really a fan of tight central control either. the lines problem
isnt the dense city its the surveillance state. people often dont stop with banning cars; theyll try to do more to people.
Well, ACTUALLY, it all depends on whether you are a fan of the personal automobile. Anyone who thinks the Earth can afford this approach to organizing society is not going to like my ideas.
its moot, and i will tell you what i was originally thinking of saying.
if this idea matters, you shouldn't be here arguing it; you should be enacting it. maybe that means growing wealthy enough to start the ball rolling and getting other wealthy people to create the linear city and hyperloop even on a small scale to see if it works.
or you become a city planner or architect or hyperloop engineer to support existing efforts because its easier and yet still effective. sometimes being a skilled follower is extremely important.
or you work on local aspects or incidental. You mention trikes; an affordable e-trike is useful, but ebikes are still expensive and worse are easily stolen. or work in local politics to prepare your city to better handle carlessness. in my town we have a perfectly good center that could work, but you need actual things there, not payday loan places, temp agencies, and boost mobile.
so it really doesn't matter what anyone here thinks unless you just want people to say "what a clever idea!" Go out and make it. youll need real professionals anyways.
I'm 81 years old. Want to edit your list?
Im here because Im looking for feedback. "This part sounds good. I doubt this part will work and here is why. Here is a suggestion." Etc.
I'm here to make the proposal better.
Why are you here?
So how are grocery and other retail stores supposed to be stocked? How are people suppose to get a refrigerator to their residence? That was mentioned at the start of the document, but never addressed.
Also I've been introduced to material fatigue as an important consideration of airplane operation. So you have these pods accelerating and decelerating at hundreds of MPH multiple times a day that have to maintain a complete air seal in a vacuum. I suspect high operational costs to keep them safe.
I tried to give you a substantive reply. How did I do?
The maximum speed in the LineLoop design is 200 mph. I doubt that acceleration/deceleration will be a serious issue.
Maintaining air pressure in the pod is certainly serious. Internal pressure in the pod remains at sea level at all times, and the pod never leaves vacuum, so there is no flexing under normal operation. The plug doors are alternately exposed to vacuum and normal air pressure at every stop.
Thank you for your comments.
A line city is two-dimensional but not perfectly straight. It can bend gradually to follow the terrain. There is a highway and land on one side of the city where parking garages, factories, special facilities, and farm lands could be located. On the other side, is a protected natural area.
...
The basic design of the city is quite simple: a long string of city blocks. There are two to three buildings on each side of a block with a park in between.
...
Commercial and office space is usually located on the highway side of the city, apartments on the other side. In an optimum situation, one would walk across the park to go to work.
Buildings on the same side of the city are connected by sky bridges at the rooftop (at least on one end). This creates an escape route in case of a fire. Practically this means that the buildings on one side of a block must have the same height (which is visually pleasing anyway).
The land, utilities, and vactrain are owned by a single entity, but the buildings can be financed, designed, and owned by other entities.
Between every two blocks is a gap which contains a five-meter-wide gravel road for occasional vehicle use and pedestrian access to the outside. This gap would also allow for a crossing stream or a road in a tunnel. It would ve a good idea to build a "nature way" every few miles: a fenced-off wild bridge which allows migrating animals to cross the city. The gaps increase fire safety: fire can never spread from one block to another.
...
Many things could be built or already exist outside of the city. There would be a highway along one side of the city which runs from one end to the other (60 kilometers long) and connects normally to the existing road and highway system. Pre-existing roads can cross the city in tunnels. On the opposite side of the city from the main road would be an access lane for moving furniture and large objects to buildings on that side of the city.
Maybe we're doing trains wrong.
I've had in my mind, that trains need to be smaller, more individual electric engine-boxcars. That there would be multi-stage parallel tracks. I high speed track, a middle speed track parallel, and low speed tracks branching off those. Any car needing to merge on-off the high speed track—to it's unique destination—switches off to a medium, then low speed tracks, whilst the other cars continue. on.
But perhaps cars don't need to be on rails, but on low friction wheels ... that doesn't work, as these don't track ... unless you have a magnetic track. In a magnetic track, all the cars are held in the imaginary track magnetically. Instead of thinking of a railed track, think of it as a lane. Any car changing to a different lane, does so magnetically. I guess you're just back to trucks on roads, but with lower friction wheels ... which is a huge energy savings.
Trains are efficient and well understood, but they don't work well for intraurban transit because all of the cars must stop and the station must be as long as the train.
(BART Station)
The LineLoop solution is that a pod leaves the convoy to stop at a station. The pod moves to the right into the acceleration and deceleration lane. Centcom closes the gap and the convoy continues on its way. The pod then moves into the airlock lane and stops at a station. A LineLoop station only needs to be as long as a pod (about 70 feet).
All of this happens at speed: there is no reduction in the overall speed of the convoy.
Pods must be able to change lanes. Railroads have multiple tracks. Highways have multiple lanes. Urban vacuum transport must have three lanes in each direction: the cruising lane, the A/D lane, and the airlock lane. Every pod is capable of forward and backward movement as well as side to side. This is accomplished with magnetic force.
Lane switching is absolutely essential to this proposal. It has been assumed since the earliest designs. Fortunately development of this technology is progressing well. Tim Houter, CEO of Hardt Hyperloop, explains:
The hyperloop itself is completely levitated, stabilised and propelled by magnetic forces, so there is no physical contact with the infrastructure; therefore the operation expenses are extremely low, as the loop is near to maintenance free. The lane switch technology is also based on magnetic fields – without any mechanical context or moving components we can choose to go left or right just by controlling the magnetic field of the vehicle. It is very convenient to have vehicles that can switch lanes at a very high frequency. It is the combination of frictionless movement and magnetic propulsion that allows it to be very fast.
Your city has a population of only 400,000 people. It's not hard to design a 20-minute city of this size using a dense network of subway lines and tramlines, and it'd be way cheaper too. Prague's city center has about the same population, it wasn't optimized, it's full of parks and a hilly terrain, yet travel by public transportation through it rarely takes more than 40 minutes.
If you converted your 60km-by-160m city into a-60km by-60km megalopolis criss-crossed by vactrains, you'd multiply the population by 375 while only doubling the traveling time. If you retained the area and only changed the shape, it'd be a 3km-by-3km square with an even shorter top travel time than 20 minutes. Or you could keep the maximum traveling time at 20 minutes and choose a city size in between those two extremes. Either way, the simplest and most effective way to improve a linear city is to add a dimension.
The biggest difference between our model LineLoop and your 3km×3km city is that our city provides access within a few minutes to 60 km of farmlands, industry, or nature reserve.
Why do residents need to be situated close to farmlands and industrial zones though? It feels like bad zoning more than anything. Like, if we assume that your vactrain-highway combo works as intended, why not put the industrial zone on one end, the residential area on the other and the commercial/entertainment area in the middle? It'd be better for everyone - less noise and pollution in the apartments, easier to visit your friends on foot, less driving from factory to factory.
Also, if your city thrives, the farmland in its immediate vicinity is going to get so valuable that refusing to let the city sprawl out into it would mean to throw money away. Would city hall would be able to withstand the pressure for long?
The question is: "Does society need farm lands and industry?
If you answer "Yes,* then where do those workers live, what kind of housing do they have, and how far do they have to commute?
What is your preference for those workers?
I understand your concern about rising land values. I say in the paper:
>>Development on each side of the line city must be controlled and limited.<<
Using Coosapolis as an example: it is 37 miles (60 km) long. There would be 37 to 111 square miles of potential farm land adjacent to the city. I think this would dilute the effect because it is such a big area. In any case we need to have structure in our world other than the price mechanism.
The wrong question is "what is my preference for those workers?"
The correct question is "what are the preferences of the workers?"
Well, you are quite right. But I'm a retired American software designer living in the Dominican Republic and trying to put words on a page. Ii is not within my power to poll a representative sample of farm workers and industry workers. I have to use my understanding of human beings to make the best guess as to what they want.
My guess is that they want to:
* live as close as possible to their work
* in safe and comfortable housing
* in a safe and attractive neighborhood
* where there children have good schools.
And the 1300 acre park? Where does that fit in your 3x3 city?
No cars? Your city design has no cars?
Just a random observation: A city is not a metaphorical island. It will need to be supplied externally with food, resources and foreign-produced goods. This means extensive transport network going in and out of it.
That network can then carry passenger traffic for an additional cost vastly lower than building a dedicated passenger network from scratch, and this is how urbanization often grew, not through condensing, but gemmation - city-states founding new ports along sea trade routes, residential buildings sprouting en masse around intermediate train stops (the original urban sprawl, and in many ways the original Lines).
Yes, modern cities demand and can support dedicated passenger traffic infrastructure, and it's worth thinking about improving it, but I don't think even perfectly planned passenger transit solves even a fraction of transportation issues, and I don't think cities planned ex nihilo (that aren't conceived with a function in mind - a transport, industry or government hub) are practically plausible in the first place.
Some guesstimes suggest accelerating a fully-occupied pod will take 40-50 kilowatt-hours (30-40 before inefficiencies), depending on the exact mass of the pods including backup batteries, and whether you're going for 200 or 300 kilometers per hour. I'm going to be pessimistic here to try to capture the energy cost of maintaining the vacuum and running the airlocks and providing the magnetic levitation.
Regenerative braking (note: The technology to do this with maglev doesn't exist yet) appears to be about 60-70% efficient; let's be optimistic and say 70%.
So every stop consumes 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
A randomly chosen electric car consumes, approximately, .3 kilowatt-hours per mile. Assuming single passengers, and assuming the average pod is 50% occupied, we get 18 passengers * .3 = 5.4 kilowatt-hours per mile. Converting to kilometers, I get 3.3 kilowatt-hours per kilometer.
So, in order to break even, the average passenger must travel 5 kilometers. Probably achievable for your line city - but that's not quite the right question.
In New York City, it appears the average metro passenger travels ~3 kilometers per trip.
Meaning electrical vehicles are more energy-efficient on a per-passenger basis in a conventional city layout, than the lineloop design is in the line-city layout.
Now, trips are theoretically -shorter- in your line-city layout, on account of population density (traffic). However, once we're digging tunnels under the ground (and in particular if we're building a city from scratch, and we can build up instead of boring from below, a much cheaper option), we can build a fairly dense road network underneath the city and just drive our electric cars around down there. Or install a more traditional subway system.
But how much do we need a transportation system? NYC has a population density of 11,000 per square kilometer; a square city containing 400,000 people would be approximately 36 square kilometers, or 6 kilometers by 6 kilometers. But that's NYC, which was hardly designed optimally; realistically, if you're building from scratch, you don't need roads on the surface, they can all be underground, and you can really tighten up those numbers. (And for a 6km x 6km city, as far as passengers go, really, you barely need a transportation system. Your public transportation could just be moving walkways in underground tunnels or through skybridges.)
And please remember my design goal: CARLESS CITY. I'm not interested in designs that include cars (though parked outside of the city is fine).
Cars are included as a point of reference as a technology stack; the goal is to outperform them.
Not my goal. My goal is to eliminate these negative effects.
The urban automobile:
✱ Kills street life
✱ Isolates people
✱ Damages the social fabric
✱ Fosters suburban sprawl
✱ Endangers other street users
✱ Diminishes the city's beauty
✱ Disturbs people with noise
✱ Increases air and water pollution
✱ Exacerbates global warming
✱ Wastes energy and resources
✱ Requires 70% of city real estate
✱ Slaughters thousands each year
✱ Impoverishes persons & nations
There is one way to do this.
I've been wanting to do more on the cost side. I appreciate you getting into it.
>>The Superconducting Maglev is equipped with a braking system capable of safely stopping a train traveling at 311mph. Regenerative braking is normally used for deceleration, but if it becomes unavailable, the Superconducting maglev also has wheel disc brakes and aerodynamic brakes. <<
https://scmaglev.jr-central-global.com/sp/about/emergency/
REGENERATIVE BRAKING IS NORMALLY USED
That particular train technology / system isn't in use yet; the line using the technology referenced there, the Chūō Shinkansen rail line, is slated to open in 2037. But it does sound like they've at least prototyped the technology for their testing, so I guess it isn't theoretical anymore.
You have some very useful expertise. I appreciate that.
Efficient city design is a hobby because the cube-square law, as it pertains to traffic, annoys me. I have a thought that the ideal is something like a loop city, where you wrap the city around a commons park area, and build extremely densely on the periphery, using a mixture of different transportation types to facilitate different distances of travel.
Ideally you plan to dig down as well - commercial spaces exist below the ground, residential space fills most of the periphery. Industrial space varies more - some can go below-ground, some need to be placed on the exterior of the peripheral space for, for example, effective venting. (Fusion power has the potential to unlock a lot more uses for below-grade spaces, including farming - but it has the potential to make many impractical ideas practical, so, eh.)
It's less like a city and more like an enormous building around a giant courtyard. Long-term, you can enclose the courtyard for controlled weather conditions.
Moving walkways for shorter distances (1-5km), a thing I don't know if anybody has actually invented yet which I can only describe as a tiered monorail (except tiered, so not really "mono" rail, but monorail captures the idea slightly better) - stackable transportation helps alleviate the cube-square law for medium distances (5-20km).
Moving walkways actually have the potential to do a lot more if you employ graduated speeds (an advantage to the ring shape - you can employ concentric rings of moving walkways), possibly up to and including replacing all other forms of transportation. But they're, ah, somewhat dangerous used this way, and not perfectly suited for all people.
"graduated speeds"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
Why don't you take my design as it is and "roll" with it. See how much you can make of it. See how much of what you want is already there. Don't immediately start changing it.
* wrap around a common park area
* build densely on the periphery
* Industrial space on the periphery
* building around a giant courtyard.
* mixture of different transportation
* buried hyperloop
I'm looking for a co-author but it needs to be sympatico. I'm certainly willing to change my design, but only to something obviously better. If it's a wash, then I want to keep it the way I've thought it through and written it down for a thousand hours.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
I want to make an internet book which references the LineLoop concept to the ideas in these 125 books.
Rodes.pub/LineLoopBooks
Peter
Why not just... build a bunch of linear cities next to each other? Like a regular city that happens to have a lot of fast public transit?
One of the many, *many* issues with the linear city concept is that it's hard to have a lot of variety. There's just not enough surface area; you can certainly standardize basic amenities, but beyond that, you can't have a whole bunch of different businesses scattered about, because each segment of the population will only have reasonable access to a small fraction of those businesses. You can easily circumvent this issue by having multiple linear cities next to each other- that is, a regular city- because then you can multiply the number of businesses within the same radius.
A regular CARLESS city? I'd love to hear about your design.
The entire city is reachable in 20 minutes. But then you didn't actually read anything I wrote. Right?
I... suppose I could ask you the same question?
The 20 minute travel time being reasonable, or perhaps I should say "reasonable", doesn't really have any bearing on whether or not it would be a good idea to just... have *more city*, in all space to the sides. Regardless of how fast the travel times are, they would either get faster if you added another dimension, or they would remain the same as they otherwise would have, but with more space for variety, which is good for the economy.
You don't get there faster, because in a two dimensional transit grid, you have to change pods. AT LEAST ONCE.
But you only have to change pods when going to a business along the second dimension that would've otherwise not existed at all. It's a net improvement.
In the LineLoop city (400,000 persons) EVERY BUSINESS IS WITHIN 20 MINUTES. If you change trains in your 2D city, it's going to take you longer than that. If you don't change trains, then you are restricted to one dimension.
The point is to have a carless city. You may not have that goal. Most people don't. But that's my goal, and that's what my proposal does.
If you want to propose an alternate design, it needs to provide that goal, otherwise we are playing on different game fields.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-the-solow-model-can-teach-us/comments
The Solow Model concludes that a nation can become more prosperous by building more capital until the burden of maintaining existing capital slows the growth down.
This seems reasonable to me. It's a very simplified model, but it's pretty predictive.
I'm interested in whether I'm missing something, but let me know if you've read the article, or if you're just addressing my simplification of the simplification of the real world.
I have a minor nitpick-- sometimes you get a technology like stainless steel, that slows depreciation (the need for maintenance), but that just delays the eventual slowdown.
There's an old saying that a tree doesn't grow to the sky, but no one won a Nobel prize for it.
What you're missing is that capital and economies are not undifferentiated and that it's caused by diminishing returns, not depreciation.
Basically, it's not "you build roads until the rate of road decay is equivalent to the rate of road building." It's: there's only so many roads you need. And the amount of roads you need is different in different countries. Russia needs relatively many, Japan relatively few. Put another another way: there is some road, somewhere, in any country that is the Most Economically Important Road(tm). After that road is built all following roads are less economically important, they add less to GDP. They might still be a net benefit to the country but it's less. And at some point they stop being a benefit and become roads to nowhere.
In a developing country, any given project is highly likely to be productive because most developing countries have poor infrastructure. So accumulating capital to spend on infrastructure development will boost GDP in the short term (through building) and the long term (through the economic benefits of the infrastructure). It's also a relatively simple thing to do because it doesn't require complex education and because it increases the productivity of even extremely unproductive labor. Building a road is not hard even for relatively non-advanced countries and it improves the productivity even of subsistence farmers. But you get that exactly once. Once the road is built a second road is significantly less valuable.
The other thing to note is this only works up to a point. And that point is different for every country. After you've built all the roads and basic stuff you're, at best, a middle income country. And at that point growth has a lot to do with things like institutions and human capital. A free market democracy with a highly educated population has a lot more capacity to absorb capital productively than a command economy autocracy with a poorly educated population. Which is part of the Middle Income Trap. There's also Pettis's critique that, because it's so profitable to build out that basic infrastructure, people get rich doing it and try to keep it going past the point it's good as well as burdening the system with corruption. Which then prevents a transition.
To imagine this simplified again, let's imagine two countries: Corruptistan and Honestistan. Both are very poor. Both decide to drive up the savings rate through a Chinese style approach. In Honestistan this money goes to build asphalt roads with only some corruption. In Corruptistan this money is stolen by the government bureaucrats and the roads are just dirt. Both will eventually run into issues but they run into issues at different stages of development. Corruptistan is arguably already at its highest achievable infrastructure level despite being very poor because what's preventing it is all the corruption, in other words bad national institutions. Meanwhile Honesistan can get to Chinese levels of development and then has to figure out some way to transition away from infrastructure based basic capital growth. (In particular, it's very hard to shift from investment to savings models for a variety of reasons.)
Just a nitpick--Russia may need roads in some sense. It mostly doesn't have them. It has railroads. Early in the war, there was mention of soldiers from the provinces distant form Moscow who'd never seen a paved road until they were sent to Ukraine.
As for the main point, I should go back over the link-- I wrote a very simplified version. It wasn't that you keep building until you can't keep up with deterioration, it's that deterioration sets a limit on how much you can have. Another point (which Solow made and which I should have mentioned) is that you only need so many roads. More roads than that and you're just wasting resources.
The argument is against the impression that if a country is building a lot and getting richer, it will therefore continue to get richer by building more.
For cultural reasons-- building new things can get you more respect than maintaining old things-- people may well build past the limit of that they can maintain.
The central point is just that, eventually, you can't get richer by building more stuff.
Fair nit. Some people (not you) seem to be missing the roads are metaphorical for generic infrastructure. It can be railroads or water plants or electric grids. Just that general class of stuff. But correcting the empirical point is still worthwhile.
What I think you're describing is that new growth has a brief period where it enables further economic activity because depreciation has not set in. Basically, if you built your roads 50 years ago you need to pay to maintain them. If you built your roads 5 years ago you don't (or at least not as much). However, it provides a constant economic benefit.
Basically, if you just built your new roads you get a GDP growth from construction AND the economic benefit of the activity along the new roads AND you don't have major costs to maintain that infrastructure. But once you get that boost it's gone. You still get the economic benefits of the road year over year. But you don't get the GDP boost of new construction again and you have to start paying to maintain the infrastructure. That's net positive but it's LESS net positive.
There's also secondary concerns like, for example, how debt financing in the earlier environment (where you can easily grow 10% a year) is more sustainable than in the slower growth environment that follows. Plus stuff like funding by land sales which stop working as land becomes a smaller part of the wealth mix. (Not relevant to Russia due to USSR but relevant to most other developing economies.) And the political economy question that many countries (including the USSR, China, etc) overbuild due to political incentives to keep growth going even if it's not as economically productive to build even more roads. Which, at the extreme end, is how you end up with Ukraine being a country with a GDP per capita of like $3,000 but also the ability to manufacture jet engines.
You can always get richer by building more productive stuff. The thing is "what is productive" is a hard question only once you reach a certain baseline level of development. If you're a poor economy with no railroads then building railroads between every city or building your first power grid or getting everyone clean water is obviously and clearly productive. But getting even slightly more complex like that, for example manufacturing socks, and the question gets exponentially harder. Is it more productive to import socks or set up your own industry? (And if you're importing everything then how do you grow?) Further, even if it's productive, it's likely less productive on a percentage basis than those earlier roads.
To put it as simply as I can, what the Solow model is pointing out is that rich nations only get to grow through productivity growth (mainly technology) while poorer nations get a bonus from converging with richer nations. This bonus is bigger the more distance there is to converge. You get that convergence bonus only so long as you're behind and it decreases rapidly as you catch up. This creates 'miracle mirages' like Brazil, Mexico, the USSR, and possibly China where rapid growth SEEMS to be due to technology or economic systems but are actually just catch up growth. This is in contrast with real miracles like the US, Germany, Japan, or South Korea where they actually do get to the point where they're at the productivity/technology frontier (or near it).
There's a lot of pro-China folks who argue the Chinese miracle is a "real" miracle in that they actually are gaining non-catch up productivity, pushing the technological frontier, etc. But the actual economic data, insofar as we've got it, makes it look a lot more like those fake miracle cases (especially Mexico). In which case you'd expect them to run into serious, serious issues at around the $10-$15k per capita benchmark. (There's also a second crisis waiting a bit later on, which is what the Asian Financial Crisis was about.) Noah Smith's point is that this looks a lot like the Solow model which, if true, makes the fake miracle argument stronger.
Diminishing returns are certainly a factor but so are economies of scale. In general it's not clear to me which dynamic is likely to dominate.
I don't think it's straightforwardly true that "once the road is built a second road is significantly less valuable". In general I would expect that much of the value of a particular road depends on the network of roads that it connects to. A second road connecting a different slightly smaller group of farmers to the same market for their goods may actually add more value than the first road since both sets of farmers can now benefit from both roads.
I think you're taking that quote slightly out of context. In context that means a second road along the same route. You're right that one road is less valuable than a network due to network effects. The point is that at some point you reach saturation and additional roads become worth less economically than the cost to build them. The network, as a whole, exists at some point and extensions only provide small gains that might not be worth the cost.
A road is economically valuable by what it enables. If a road connects a population to nothing of economic value, then that road has little economic value. On the other hand, if that road connects a population center to a sea port, this road adds the value of enabling commerce. If a road connects a population to a farming area, or some natural resource the road enables economic activity.
In what way does that contradict anything he said?
These posts only look at the value of the road itself, instead of what the road provides. If a road connects A to B, but is not sufficient to handle 100% of the commerce betwixt the two, a second parallel road holds the value of the commerce that second route enables. Each road would be balanced in value as to what percentage of the commerce transits that road.
Say the potential commerce between A & B is $300. Road A is worth $200 per year, because it only handles 67% of the commerce that A & B are capable of exchanging. The single road would be valued at $200. A second road is added that handles the excess 33%. In balance, each road would handle close to 50% of the $300 commerce. Each road would be valued at $150. There is some point of diminishing return, where the costs of construction and maintenance fall below the economic benefit of adding new roads between A & B.
Personally I'm inclined to the belief that the more important factor is information. Information also decays - in institutions we have a variety of terms for this decay, such as "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" - and requires maintenance. So, we solve a problem - say, the regulation of chemical storage. The information embedding this solution decays - represented in the real-world by, say, safety inspectors not taking their job too seriously. Then a chemical storage facility blows up and we turn our attention to the problem and fix it. But the more problems we've solved this way, and the bigger the solution (national solutions are bigger than state solutions), the more frequently our solutions will fail, because our attention is increasingly divided.
So - take the same model and apply it to information, including in particular institutions, which are also a form of capital.
You get a double-whammy when you're split on both physical and informational capital maintenance; now you're allocating limited funds on the basis of deteriorating information. Maybe your safety inspectors are fine - the department is just underfunded. But it's underfunded because a bridge collapsed and you've allocated a bunch of resources to that.
Just as it's bad to have too much physical capital - it's also bad to have too much informational capital. Keep the game up long enough and you eventually hit cascading failures, when you've reallocated resources from the necessary support structures of society.
Information degradation might also apply to overly complex legal systems.
I have a notion for science fiction-- 10K years of recorded history. To a large extent, modern politics are driven by a hope that things can be made a lot better. What if we reach a point where it seems like everything has been tried? Mind you, I don't see how you can get a story out of this. Maybe a story about local and temporary improvement.
That sounds similar to the backstory for Le Guin's Hainish works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainish_Cycle
If everything feels like it's been tried, the story could be driven by somebody trying something they think is new, and fighting the institutional inertia that has developed, fighting an uphill battle against a bunch of people who think this is just a slight variation on (these twelve things that have been tried before)
Gaston Glock has died, which means it's time to reach out to antagonistic activist organizations to put in his obituary:
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2023/12/28/austria-Gaston-Glock-dies/7191703741657/
I'm sure the prewritten Bibi obit includes extensive quotations from CAIR.
Seeing Scott refer to his own kids as "surprisal-minimization engines" really rubbed me the wrong way, I suppose because of the reductionism of it, but also because it's actually so very highly speculative. This particular theory of the brain that Scott has covered before wasn't even covered in The World Behind the World, neuroscientist Erik Hoel's book on just how in the dark we are on the brain. In particular, he said we don't really have a theory on how the brain works: there are multiple candidates, and it doesn't seem like there are any that can win out, as they all have severe issues. So I wonder what Scott (or anyone who agrees with that characterization of the brain as a "surprisal-minimization engine") would make of that book. It would be great if Scott did a book review of it. Think the thought that hurts the most right?
Maybe Scott called them "surprisal-minimization engines" for humor, and because he didn't want to sound ooey-gooey talking about the tiny perfect fingers and toes etc.
Let me share with you a little nugget of history which I just learned today.
To set the background: there's a new French version of "The Three Musketeers", split into two movies. A review of the first by an online acquaintance says it's the Muddy Middle Ages setting, even though it's the 17th century. Nobody in France is able to wash their faces because this must be before soap was invented.
I was pretty sure Castile soap was around in the 17th century and looking it up, discovered: "What unlikely thing do you think there will be fighting over?" and the answer is "Popish soap":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castile_soap
"In the 17th century, the soap caused controversy in England, since it supplanted the unnamed local soap after the Spanish Catholic manufacturers purchased the monopoly on the soap from the cash-strapped Carolinian government. Its ties to Catholicism caused a public-relations campaign to be established, featuring washerwomen showing how much more effective local soaps were than Castile soap. The sale of a monopoly in Protestant England to a Catholic company caused a great uproar, ending with the Castile soap company eventually being stripped of the monopoly."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popish_soap
"Popish soap was a derisive name applied to soap manufactured under a patent granted by Charles I. Because the board of the manufacturing company included Catholics, the term Popish Soap (after The Pope) was applied to this monopoly commodity. It was said by anti-Catholics to be particularly harmful to linen and washerwomen's hands.
During the personal rule of the English King Charles I (1629–1640), one of the ways in which he attempted to raise money was through the granting of patents. This came about as a result of a loophole in the statute forbidding such action.
One such patent was granted to a soap corporation.
The soap industry was overseen by Lord Treasurer Portland and his friends, all of whom displayed Catholic character. When Portland died, Laud and Cottington contended over the company, which increased annual profits to the crown to nearly 33,000 pounds by the end of the 1630s.
It was alleged that popish soap scarred the soul as well as skin and fabric."
There'll be no Catholic soap touching our good Protestant undergarments, thank you very much! 😁
No Popery!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Rex_Flag
Ironic that NY is now the 5th most Catholic state in the country!
Who wants to sign my petition to make that into the official flag of New York State again?
Just yesterday I learned that the Gauls used soap. Maybe it's supposed to be 17 century B.C.?
Humans have been making soap since at least 2,800 BCE.
All you need is some know-how, some questionable ethics, and a liposuction disposal.
Visual art such as paintings. I don't get it. I get music, novels, movies, even cinematography, but i am a Philistine when it comes to great paintings. I don't get them. I mean I can enjoy spending an hour in an art museum looking quickly at a bunch of paintings. But I don't feel emotional when I view a painting, whereas I do when listening to music, reading novels or watching movies.
Is this just some innate thing one can't fix? Or can I learn to appreciate visual art at a deeper level? What's your experience?
Your mileage may definitely vary, but as lockdowns lifted something I tried to restore my attention-span and bring myself a bit more calm was “looking at a painting for an hour”. I went to a museum, picked a fairly random painting (ideally one that looked like it had a few things going on), and then spent an hour doing nothing but looking at it.
I let myself move around to change perspective, and I let myself sketch it in a book with a plain pencil, but I didn’t let myself look it up or move away until the hour was up. There would always be a moment, not that far in, when I thought I had exhausted everything I could see or think about it and that it would be an ordeal to make it an hour, but I always ended up spotting some details, reinterpretting something about it, and thinking some different thoughts, feeling some different emotions. I feel fondly about every painting I did this with.
Very interesting!
I get it. I spent a few hours at the Met a few years ago: many of the sculptures there hit me on a deep, emotional level. But when it came to the paintings, they were nice I guess. Don't know why.
Taste is something you can develop if you're interested: just follow the other commenter's advice.
I highly recommend the documentary *Tim's Vermeer*. An art-loving tech guy recreates a Vermeer using an improvised variant of the camera obscura, which he argues pretty convincingly was used by Vermeer & would account for the weird, luminous, photographic quality of his paintings. Fascinating, and you end of feeling quite fond of Tim, too. One of the best documentaries I've ever seen. It's point isn't to teach you anything about how to enjoy art, but I think it does anyway -- helps you appreciate the technical challenges of representing the 3-D world in 2D and admire the variety of solutions there are, which is one aspect of representational art.
David Hockney also makes claims for the use of camera obscura by Old Master artists; he did a documentary on it in 2003:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-0UXBcjlRY
I just bought a camera lucida to help with landscape design, and after using it a bit I can say that it seems really likely to me that it would have been used whenever possible. It's a really cool save useful tool!
It depends on personal taste as to which style of art you find appealing. Maybe visual art like painting and sculpture doesn't appeal to you at all, and that's fine. You're not a Philistine or bad taste.
There's art styles, as there are music genres, I just don't get. There are others that I do find appealing and beautiful and meaningful.
For example, there's a lot of 17th-18th century landscape art which leaves me going "meh". Greenery-yallery trees and nothing going on except the artist trying to show off his mastery of the Sublime. Constable may be famous for such, but they do nothing for me.
Botticelli, on the other hand, is almost *too* beautiful and you can see how he easily found a style and could have slipped into churning out product (like Thomas Kinkade) which was the 'beautiful painting of popular subject' his patrons would have demanded. He worked up until his 60s and turned to a more archaic style, pushing his art, instead of staying stuck in 'what worked' or trying to copy the new artists of the High Renaissance, and that's one indicator of being a great artist.
I very much like this painting of his:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas_and_the_Centaur
I also like this one by Piero di Cosimo for the delicacy of the emotions expressed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Procris
But it could well be that you would prefer modern art, be that art of today, non-representative art, or others.
There's a set of Youtube series by this guy, who is an art critic with his own take on the Great Painters of the past (and I have to admit to bias, I am fully on board with his criticism of Thomas Cromwell as a person and not merely as the painting):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewj2ju01KOI
EDIT: You might also be more interested in the physical, technical process of creating and restoring art works. Here's a channel, Baumgartner Restoration, which does that - he takes pieces you think are lost causes and brings them back to life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNbc_BBS5Wg
If anyone wants video about the technical side of making art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhiMCSvtCc&list=PLK-Wicsj5rAasS2g7e-Z9eFUdG6I7ZqED&ab_channel=DavidBull
A meticulous effort to recreate Hokusai's Great Wave. This is harder than it sounds, considering that we only have woodblock prints, and not the original drawing. The exact colors are a matter of judgement. And so on.
You need the YouTube channel Great Art Explained. https://www.youtube.com/@GreatArtExplained/videos
It was life-changing for me.
I liked some art before discovering the channel, but my taste was pretty narrow, and I really only loved and was moved by very pretty, representational things (Pre-Raphaelite paintings, portraits, some still lifes and landscapes, some Impressionism, some fantasy, etc). I was contemptuous of most abstract work, and especially "dumb squares."
Then I watched the video on Rothko (https://youtu.be/fsz6bkkIHzQ?si=S6kZNZ4kKFSg9_Ot) and, despite having Rothko come up in class, I finally just GOT. IT. I got "dumb squares!" Got them to a degree that when I stumbled across some of Rothko's other work in the Chicago Art Institute, I had a moment of full-bodied frisson, and I sat down and lingered over them.
I would have said that was impossible five years ago.
My mom is a professional fine art painter and graduate of Cal Arts, and I went to film school (which of course included art history), and we both agree that the essays on that channel are *by* *far* the best education materials on fine art we've ever experienced. I actually can't imagine how they could be improved. Each script is well-researched, explaining the key points of historical and biographical context in each piece, is pleasantly self-assured when something is definitive and knowable, and is delightfully confident when it goes about shooting down misinterpretations.
Additionally, the editing and animation are perfectly paced to provide adequate information to understand exactly what part of the piece is being discussed. Each image lingers exactly as long as it needs to feel satisfying, but the movement keeps it dynamic. That seems like a small thing, but oh, wow, it isn't.
Every essay on the channel is a treasure, but I think the piece on Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (https://youtu.be/vBG621XEegk?si=Y4twM4UXRv_bi6a1), the piece on Hopper's Nighthawks (https://youtu.be/lKIbT-4UFaE?si=mb2qK5aQAG9ySa1f), and the piece on Hokousai's The Great Wave (https://youtu.be/IBcB_dYtGUg?si=XR8v1PlsS0j6WdOy) are particularly illuminating.
Without watching the video or being educated on art, or ever having seen a Rothko in the flesh - I guess much of the appeal is similar to the appeal of liminal spaces. If a photograph of an unusually empty room can be emotionally evocative, so can an unusually uniform field of paint on canvas.
so honest question: if I just get my recommendations from GiveWell anyway, why wouldn't i just give to GiveWell and let them distribute it? Like, clearly I *already* trust them.
You may already be aware of this, but in case you aren't GiveWell has three main donation options (https://secure.givewell.org/):
The Top Charities Fund (https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities)
The All Grants Fund (https://www.givewell.org/all-grants-fund)
The Unrestricted Fund (https://www.givewell.org/unrestricted-fund).
The first includes malaria prevention, vitamin A supplementation, and vaccine initiatives, but not GiveWell operations. The second includes a longer list of recipients, but still not GiveWell operations.
The last fund - the Unrestricted fund - can go be used for GiveWell operations. Donating to this fund would be "donating to GiveWell." Notably, operating needs are predefined and once GW meets those, donations to their Unrestricted Fund are directed towards GW's charities (I think all those included in the All Grants Fund).
The GW website also allows for donations directly to any of the 4 charities in the Top Charities Fund.
An advantage of donating to GW's Top Charity Fund, rather than to the charities within that fund itself, is that donations to the Top Charity Fund are directed by GW every few months to the 1 of the 4 Top Charities that they feel currently needs the funding the most.
An advantage of donating to these charities through GiveWell (either collectively through one of the aforementioned funds, or to a specific one through the GW site) is that it lets GW and those charities know that you are donating to them specifically due to the GW recommendations. This information better informs the charities on how to allocate resources towards fundraising.
One reason to donate to the Top Charities Fund, rather than the Unrestricted Fund, that is "to the charities," rather than "to GW," would be risk-aversion. If someone is very risk averse, they may prefer donations that have high expected value and low risk, over donations that have greater risk.
Donations to the Top Charities Fund are very low risk. We know vaccines save lives, malaria prevention saves lives, etc. Donations to GW operations arguably have more risk. Maybe GW will succeed at funneling more money towards these top charities than a counterfactual in which they stop existing. But theoretically, if GW's budget were slashed to 0, and it needed to stop operating, maybe people would keep donating to those Top Charities as much as they would with GW. Similarly, maybe they won't succeed in identifying more underfunded super promising charities. Maybe GW will stop finding such charities. Or maybe at some point GW will identify so many new very effective charities, that further research will not add marginal value, since the already identified charities remain underfunded.
While I think that such scenarios are unlikely, someone very averse to such possibilities might prefer to just donate to the Top Charities Fund, which is arguably lower risk.
Similarly, risk aversion would be a reason to donate to the Top Charities Fund, rather than the All Grants fund, as the latter are characterized not by a lower expected value, but by greater uncertainty as to their effectiveness.
I trust them in large part *because* they are transparent about who and why they recommend and give me the option to do it directly, though.
i definitely get those people exist, but its possible to not like catholicism from a conservative perspective too. The people you mean dislike it more from a political
perspective, and see any church as an extension of progressive leftism; its theology is that ideally. You have the same with the whole "liberation theology" mess.
a conservative would see ritual as an impediment, and tradition as a barrier to actually experiencing Jesus. The old cliche "a personal relationship" is meaningful here; they'd agree on the core aspects of the christian story in terms of the new testament but "holy tradition" no. it may be an american thing, but the anger against that other cliche "organized religion" has a point. too many "high" churches were operating by rote at a time when people needed much more. Ritual can be beautiful but also suffocating.
i just wanted to mention that perspective.
I understand. Our friend, though, is not advocating for a 'personal relationship' with Jesus or even God, so far as I can tell; he follows Maimonides and wants a rational religion but one which is about love of Truth and reason. God is ultimately unknowable, non-corporeal, and we live by an ethical and moral code established not so much through revelation as the use of intellect and reason applied to these matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides
It is intriguing to me that Maimonides was trying, with the Guide to the Perplexed, to "reconcile Aristotelianism with Rabbinical Jewish theology by finding rational explanations for many events in the text." Reminds me of St Thomas Aquinas and the Summa!
Tradition is important, for cultural and ethnic reasons, as you don't want Judaism to be diluted into the mainstream of whatever society Jews find themselves living amongst as exiles from their homeland, but those non-Jews should drop the whole "Son of God" thing and just agree on the basic common principles of being kind to each other.
Well, that's my impression of what he is trying to get at. So while the idea of ritual and tradition as an impediment, and the problem of idolatry, might chime with the American non-denominational characteristics, the entire thrust of his argument is that we should agree more with the Islamic view: Jesus was a Jewish prophet and in the Jewish tradition, but not what Christians believe about Him. I don't know if the American low-church tradition is willing to go that far?
My girlfriend and I are having a discussion: does it make any kind of sense to teach our child to read/write Shavian (or some other artificial phonemic alphabet - ie, where one letter maps to one sound) before trying to tackle English?
Points against: it's twice as much to learn, and useless in real life. At best the child is wasting its time; at worst it's actively being confused by the two different alphabets, and could end up retarded relative to other kids.
Potential points for: I'm wondering if it wouldn't actually make English easier to learn, by virtue of splitting one compound lesson into two simpler ones. By learning Shavian first, the child only has to understand the basic concept of "sound out shapes" --> "put them together to make words". So by the time it comes to dealing with all the irregularities and special cases of English, it already has a love of reading and a fair amount of preexisting experience it can use to make sense of the new system.
Main points against: it's not what other people do, which means there may be pitfalls that haven't been discovered; it's not the default and therefore requires extra effort on our part.
You might be interested to read about the Initial Teaching Alphabet, which is generally considered to have been a failure.
https://theliteracyblog.com/2015/05/14/i-t-a-a-great-idea-but-a-dismal-failure/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1523708.stm
I am indeed very interested, so thanks for posting!
Having read those links, the ITA is not at all what I imagined when I posted about Shavian. For one thing, people in the comments talk about learning ITA til the age of seven before switching. Others remember actively being told off for using the real English spellings before they were "supposed" to.
I envisioned Shavian being something you teach a kid very quickly, basically as soon as they can grasp the idea of "see a picture = make a sound". I dunno at what ages kids do things but I was mentally picturing 2-3 years old for that. Not something that takes til seven! Not even something you spend long enough on to meaningfully delay learning real English.
(I don't know how long it takes kids to learn new shapes, or if there's an upper limit to how many they should be expected to learn. All I know is a few short years later I knew all 151 Pokemon, the generation after me learned 251, and I don't care to speculate how many there are now. My working model is that a kid can retain an extra 48 Shavian symbols on top of the 52 Latin ones without breaking a sweat. Interested to hear opinions on this from parents with real experience.)
The Latin alphabet would then be taught once the kid had already got the hang of sounding out words. But it would be presented as an alternative - writing in Shavian isn't "correct English" one day and incorrect English the next. Instead the kid is introduced to the concept that there can be different alphabets, and alphabets can be funny hit-or-miss things where one character doesn't always mean one sound and words are constructed through all sorts of different logics. These are true concepts that should deepen their understanding of English, not confuse it.
In the case of ITA, everyone seemed to acknowledge how quick it was to learn, but the transition to proper English was a total car crash. I'm not convinced that the path I'm thinking of would necessarily suffer the same problems, for the reasons above.
I'm cooling on Shavian a little though, because having had a crack at reading a bit of it myself, I'm finding the encoding of accents to be a bigger obstacle than I thought. People are writing "to" as "t" and "and" as "n", which may be how it sounds in some places but I would have been told off had I pronounced them like that when I was young. If the kids are going to be encountering false information of that kind, it's no longer the seamless stepping stone it looked to be. Or, if I have to manually re-translate all the books into my own preferred versions of Shavian, it's a far more unreasonable amount of work.
I’m glad it was an interesting comparison. I think generally children vary a lot in how quickly they take to reading, and the age at which they’re ready. Phonics seems to be the quickest way to get the kids who don’t just pick reading up (as some do) to be fairly secure, and your approach is (of course) informed by that.
A lot of children (most?) are ready to start phonics around 4, and naturally people do things to build phonemic awareness earlier than that. It might be helpful to know that teaching in England and Wales (controversially) usually uses an ‘artificial phonics’ approach, including reading and writing made-up words that follow the rules learnt so far as well as real words. That seems relevant to some of your ideas.
A big barrier if you want them to write is fine motor skills, which you really don’t want to push too early: there’s a lot around helping them build these skills, and getting them to make marks appropriately. I don’t know if there’s much research into using a keyboard when first learning to write. Certainly, people often use cards or blocks with letters on, which you can move around freely and play with making and changing words.
I think your description of your transition sounds like it would be quite confusing for a young child, and you’d likely encounter a lot of resistance because they already have a way to read and write that makes sense, so why would they want one that makes less sense? I don’t think that’s a feeling you can reason with, especially not when they’re very young.
In Japanese hiragana and katakana each character is one syllable, and the name of the character is the sound it makes. This means you can read as soon as you learn the alphabet (names of the characters). My half Japanese kids could read at age 2 and age 3 because of this.
That is exactly what my intuition suggests. I had half a mind to use hiragana/katakana, actually, except that it would result in their learning to read in a language that no one has taught them to speak. I had restaurant Japanese at one point but it'll have gone quite rusty by now.
It wouldn’t really make sense to teach English with katakana anyway - it not only lacks several sounds (like th), and collapses others that are distinct in English (r/l and b/v), katakana basically can’t represent consonant clusters, and English likes those a lot.
No, of course. The attraction of Shavian is that it is just English, just with a "sensible" alphabet.
No one seems to have contested the idea that a phonemic language is easier to learn - I've had Spanish, Russian and Katanana suggested so far as examples.
So the next question is whether learning English spelling is easier/more fun/more insightful if you can already read and write Shavian.
I don't feel anyone's really expressed an opinion on that front, beyond, "You don't need to do this."
There is a "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons " book which does what you want to, I think.... It creates a temporary phonetic version of the English alphabet by using different fonts and such.
Teaching sounding out is definitely the best approach ("phonics") but it is productive to just pick simple and truly phonetic words in English and just have your child sound those out and then layer in more complex rules.
For what it's worth, our kids' school uses something called "logic of English".
I watched a couple of videos about Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and found the approach definitely very interesting. It's along the same lines as thoughts I've had, but obviously I'm still on armchair thoughts and they've published a finished book. . I'm going to have a look at Logic of English too.
One thing: all the girls I saw reviewing the book on Youtube are American. If you don't mind my asking, are you American as well? Do you happen to know if American is all we get, or if there's a British English version of the book, or if it doesn't matter because it doesn't teach vocabulary up to the point where spellings diverge?
If you already know a more phonetic second language, like Russian, that can be helpful too teach that first. But kids very suggestible, and I think a phonics-based and phonogram -based approach for English, with exaggerated lamentations like "English is so silly, it used to be Germanic but then the French took over and then it all got mixed up! Whoops!", should be enough.
This sounds like a similar line to the one I would like to take when teaching English - taking into account the context and history behind the different spellings and words, so the child ends up not only familiar with all the odd rules but also aware of what they imply.
The problem is that I can imagine all that extra information, while very enriching, could easily have the effect of slowing down the child's progress at the basic functional reading and writing bit. How old is this kid when you're using the word "Germanic" with it? How did it get that much understanding if it hasn't yet learned any words with Germanic spellings?
Hence my thinking that Shavian or something similar could act as a stepping stone. (No point teaching the kid Cyrillic if it doesn't already speak Russian.)
Would have to assume no; nearly every kid who is taught to read succeeds at it, so you're solving a problem you don't really have. If you want to teach them something simpler first, it should be something used in the wild. I know sign language is popular for teaching kids too young for vocal chords, and Spanish is said to be one of the easier languages to learn. Both of those can open doors. (If they remember them.)
A simple useful heuristic for skill acquisition is to do practice the skill. Best way to learn to throw a punch is to hit the bag, to learn to play guitar is to play the guitar, etc. So, to learn to read English, practice reading English. Time spent on any "side" activity is the time not spent learning the main skill.
FWIW my child was reading Harry Potter books by age 5.
I think this is a bad idea, because you probably do not have any interesting *books* written in Shavian, and you probably have lots of interesting books written in English. So you would be teaching your kids a useless alphabet they have no motivation to learn, while they are surrounded by an alphabet they have a motivation to learn.
Before your kids attend school, "not what other people do" is not that important, because the kids probably spend most of their time with parents, so they try to emulate what their parents do. The actual problem is, they do not see *you* reading Shavian, do they? Nor do they see it on TV, or on the computer keyboard.
I think you could achieve a similar effect with much less effort using *phonics*. The underlying idea is to find out how each letter is *most frequently* pronounced in English, and then teach that pronunciation first (i.e. not the "ay - bee - see" spelling). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQthLMdsQak Then teach only the words that are pronounced according to these rules, such as "cat" (the most frequent English pronunciation of "c" is "k", etc.). As a next step, teach the most frequent exception to this rule, for example how "ee" is usually spelled; then teach them the words that use that. Simply, keep adding epicycles upon epicycles, always the one that unlocks most useful words, until you asymptotically arrive at the actual English.
You have forgotten perhaps the main incentive for children to learn to read: it lets them understand all the thousands of words that they see around them in their environment each and every day. This, I think, far outweighs the advantages of a phonetic writing system which they will literally never see outside of their teaching material.
Learning to read is not hard for most kids. Many teach themselves. And if you try teaching them to read and it's hard form them, I think it's better to just wait a few months til their brain matures some more and then try again, rather than trying to engage them in something they'll experience as difficult and tedious. You want them to associate reading with pleasure and mastery, not with tedium! Meanwhile, there is plenty they can learn by playing with blocks & toys and other kids.
I don't know if you need to use wacky artificial phonemic alphabets for this - Spanish (especially Latin American Spanish as spoken by rich, educated people in Central America, which is what you'll learn by default in many American schools, especially in the Southwest) is very close to a perfectly phonemic alphabet, without the "but it's useless" issue that Shavian would have.
Maybe that would serve as a good middle ground?
Spanish is a lot simpler phonemically than English.
Probably, but that would completely elide the question I was interested in, about whether dividing the learning task up into simpler parts would have any benefits/enough benefits to justify doing it.
Edit: although there's probably some tangeantial mileage in seeing whether English speakers take longer to learn to read/write than Spanish speakers.
The NYT has sued OpenAI and Msoft for copyright infringement:
https://apnews.com/article/nyt-new-york-times-openai-microsoft-6ea53a8ad3efa06ee4643b697df0ba57
I love those lawsuits. No matter who wins, I win. """Open"""AI and Mirco$hit win? yet another nail in copyright's coffin. NYT wins? always a festivity to see """Open"""AI defeated and losing hundreds of millions in court fees.
More Corporations Suing Each Other Please. Bring back Google v. Oracle and popcorn.
Would it make a difference if OpenAI had bought a subscription to the NYT and only accessed the articles available from that?
If not, why not? That's the difference between a human subscriber reading articles and Chatbot du Jour?
Is it money? Can you sue Encyclopedia Brown from using the NYT as part of his knowledge base when running his reference stand? What about a TV pundit repeating NYT talking points on CNN?
Can a human subscriber to the NYT read it aloud to a roomful of humans? Can he read it aloud in a roomful of humans and a speech-to-text program that feeds CdJ?
Yes, there is always a difference. It's the same exact difference between seeing naked women on the beach and **filming** naked women on the beach. Do both and tell me how people react.
Generally speaking, human memory is lossy. The brain abstracts out ruthlessly. So, with a naked woman, you will only remember disjointed generalities: The shape of the breast, the skin color, the hair color. But you don't have enough "RAM", so to speak, to assemble the full naked woman in your brain, not for extended amounts of time while also thinking about something else (e.g. how you would very much like to touch that breast). The dead unthinking camera captures ***all*** light off that naked body, and assembles it on demand in perfect resolution, recalling it out of memory that can be infinitely (in principle) copied and distributed practically losslessly.
I like what modern AI is doing and what it promises to do, and I burningly hate copyright and corporations controlling culture and infotainment, to the last cell. But this is a bad and unconvincing arguments, I have seen it perhaps a literal thousand time on HackerNews and Reddit and no matter how much people rebuff it, people keep using it unmodified again and again.
LLMs are highly loss too though. They can only memorize the most frequent parts of the training corpus at best.
>I like what modern AI is doing and what it promises to do
Same here!
>I burningly hate copyright and corporations controlling culture and infotainment, to the last cell.
I'm more ambivalent. I'm happy that copyright protects Greg Egan's share of the sale of the books he writes. I'm unhappy that the Disney Corporation gets the copyright period extended whenever Mickey Mouse gets close to going out of copyright. If you had complete control over how copyright law worked, how would you arrange it?
Funny you should bring up Mickey Mouse, because Steamboat Willie is going out of copyright in a couple days. Now, that leads to the now-classic Sherlock Holmes problem where only certain things are out of copyright and if you step over the line you get sued, but a version of Mickey Mouse is in fact going out of copyright in 2024.
Many Thanks! I knew of the derivation of Mickey Mouse form Steamboat Willie but hadn't known that the latter was about to go out of copyright, or that Disney was going to allow any part of the former was going out of copyright. I wonder if it it worth it to set up a market on whether Disney will get the law changed in a nick of time to prevent part of the Mouse from entering public domain... :-)
The purpose of copyright law, is to clarify that you own what you have created.
Copy right law means I can't copy your works, make a profit and you get nothing.
>Copy right law means I can't copy your works, make a profit and you get nothing.
Which is reasonable ... until one tries to pin down what counts as a "copy"...
There was a snarky suggestion I once read about taking a user manual, adding an extra page so that the page numbers no longer matched, and claiming that it therefore wasn't a copy.
At the other extreme, how many consecutive words need to be in a quote before it amounts to a copy? Presumably more than one - but how many more?
As someone who want to see AGI, I'd like to see paraphrasing considered legal...
The data destruction argument doesn't fly. If that were the case, then people who bought hard copies of the NYT would have to destroy them in a certain amount of time, and of course private archives/collections would be completely verboten.
And of course you beach analogy fails because the naked woman is exposing herself to the people at that beach, likewise NYT is providing its product to subscribers (which OpenAI might very well be.)
You can make equivalencies between machine archiving and human archiving all day and you would be sometimes right in some of them, but the truth of the matter is that people don't look at them the same way. Law is not Logic.
> people who bought hard copies of the NYT would have to destroy them in a certain amount of time, and of course private archives/collections would be completely verboten.
You're ignoring the "Distribution" part of my argument. Paper and drawings and printing sure solve the volatility aspect of human memory, but they don't solve the distribution aspect. If you had a private newspapers collection and you operated a kiosk to sell those newspapers that turned hundreds of millions $ in profits per year, I'm pretty sure the newspaper would very much notice and start suing you as well. The "Private" part of the "Private Newspaper Collection" is the thing doing all the work to prevent that. But ChatGPT isn't private.
> because the naked woman is exposing herself to the people at that beach
Oh correct, very correct, but try to record at the beach and tell me about the consequences. People don't appreciate that kind of reasoning at all.
The docket for the case can be found here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68117049/the-new-york-times-company-v-microsoft-corporation/
At the moment it only contains filings by the New York Times.
In a hypothetical world where copyright lasts for 7 years, it would make sense to tell AI companies to either avoid using copyrighted materials or pay for them.
In a world where copyright is extended so much that it covers over 99% of texts that were ever written, asking people to never learn (or let their programs learn) from copyrighted texts is outrageous.
We should be having a debate about how copyright needs to be shortened instead.
>In a world where copyright is extended so much that it covers over 99% of texts that were ever written, asking people to never learn (or let their programs learn) from copyrighted texts is outrageous.
Agreed. I would prefer to see the LLMs enhanced to be able to tell when they are inadvertently quoting text verbatim.
a) Given that, it shouldn't be _that_ hard to get an LLM to paraphrase the gist of an article. If the NYT wants to forbid paraphrasing, then I have an argument with _them_.
b) It would be helpful to have LLMs keep better track of their sources in any event. Being able to reliably give correct references would be a significant improvement.
I’d settle for the same term as utility patents, 17 years.
This will pair nicely with the ongoing lawsuit against Stability AI by Getty Images, for using images from their database without permission to train Stable Diffusion.
In Getty's case they've been open about their game plan: they don't want image generating AI's to be banned, they want to get a licensing fee for every image generated by an AI that uses the images they own as training material.
“unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it”
That part made me laugh; the penny-a-liners waking up to the idea that they can be dumped by the owners and have most of the content generated by ChatGPT instead? Though I suppose the owners are now worried that the entire enterprise can be replaced by an AI version of "the newspaper of record" for every shade of political opinion.
Hello!
Here's a horribly simplifying question.
According to https://med.stanford.edu/depressiongenetics/mddandgenes.html?tab=proxy 50% of depression is caused by genes (source: identical twin studies).
According to the same link, recurrent depression (or depression that started in teenage years) is 4-5 times more likely to occur in people who have parents (or siblings) with recurrent depression.
My question: is anyone here aware of any research suggesting how this changes depending on whether one or both parents have depression? For example, if having a single parent with recurrent depression makes it 4-5x more likely that a child has depression; does having two parents with recurrent depression make no difference compared to having a single parent, some kind of "additive" difference (e.g., 8-10x more likely that a child has depression) or a "multiplicative" difference of some sort (e.g., 15x, 20x more likely)?
My intuition is that "no difference" is nonsense, "additive" would work for traits that are monogenic, "multiplicative" would be more for polygenic traits. Since depression is clearly (very?) polygenic (and likely actually covers multiple different etiologies), then I would expect it to be definitively "multiplicative", but I have no idea if my line or reasoning makes sense and I have no intuition "how much" polygenic it would be?
I am aware this is all extremely unclear, we don't know anything scientifically with high confidence, we're just talking probabilities. Still, I'd like to know what the "state of evidence" is nevertheless.
I'm a psychologist, but have no idea. Have you tried searching Google Scholar for things like "recurrent depression heredity" & "recurrent depression genetic"?
My intuition: Slightly more likely (6-7x).
Not all the factors (epigenetics) are symmetric across parents, and many of the remaining factors are contingent on specific environmental interactions whose base rate is unaffected.
I'm a ACX/EA kind of guy born in Mumbai, grew up in Singapore (and organized a ACX meetup there once), and currently study CS and write science fiction in America. I'm in Mumbai 8 Jan - 24 Jan. Anybody would like to meet up / know how I can meet some cool people there?
Please email me at omnileshpune@gmail.com
Just ran across a great present for somebody: ROKR 3D Puzzle Marble Run
You put it together, then it does the great stuff shown below. Buyers are writing that it is well-engineered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw8wyxBultc
Found one I like even better. It doesn't have gears just intricate copper tracks. But there's a sort of magic trick it can do, where you drop one marble in and it gradually gets all the parked ones going, like bees around a hive. My cat was mesmerized
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT4VLXAhd9U
We just (hour ago) finished putting together another ROKR assembly kit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74Vp3riNflU
It is not perfect, but I was impressed by the quality for the price (our kit was about US$30 - I originally thought it was cheaper, now edited).
I strongly recommend putting the effort into reading through the instructions before starting.
I concur with the comments that the ROKR kits can be challenging. It isn't always obvious how much force is required to put pieces together and how much force they can withstand. For the most part, everything was more robust that we feared.
Also, sometimes, there are side instructions that are very important to follow, but easy to miss. We made a major mistake at one point that was impossible to correct with the tools in the kit.
Someone linked to this a few years back, but here it is again: Wintergatan, Marble Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
History of the first machine (video playlist):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkAwf3hlHSE&list=PLLLYkE3G1HEA_68q46Xk1MvK-zGqjLBmA
Ongoing quest for perfection with the new one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld7zTApixXE&list=PLLLYkE3G1HED6rW-bkliHbMroHYFf4ukv
A shop local to me has these on display - they look great.
I suspect that a certain amount of skill in building that is needed to make it work reliably.
Somebody gave that to my youngest when he was...8 or 9, I think. We did put it together though that was no small task as some of the small pieces were imperfectly milled. And it is a fun and interesting end result for a child in that age range though the replay value isn't high.
Looking at the comments below the video...
> Did anyone face issue of leftmost gear not working ? If yes, what did you do to fix it. For me, the leftmost gear isnt rotating when the other gears are rotated.
> We have the same problem
...not encouraging.
I remember Scott once reviewing something by Herzl but now I cant find it anywhere. Can someone point me to where I can find it?
The most similar thing I found was a review of Hannah Arendt’s *Eichmann In Jerusalem*, where Herzl is mentioned.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/30/book-review-eichmann-in-jerusalem/
Forgive me if I’ve missed this, but is there a way to see our prediction answers to the 2023 prediction form we did? I checked the old form link, but just says the form is closed. Want to go back and check my answers to see what I was right about.
Christmas is the king of holidays and the most dramatic of them all, The Most. The darkest and coldest time of the year becomes the best time of the year, the warmest and fullest of light.
Christmas is right around the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Leading up to it, the days get shorter and the nights get longer, it gets worse and worse, and when it reaches its peak and it seems that the light and warmth might just die away entirely, we find that we can create our own light and warmth. And then we find that the light and warmth are coming back on their own, anyway!
Of course, Christmas is not actually on the solstice. It's 3 days after the darkest point. Hence the relevance to the Jesus Christ story. Christ is the exemplar, the perfect person, who shows us that if we are what we could be, we can handle poverty and hunger, persecution and prosecution, torture and death, and still experience ourselves as within the perfect peace of the Kingdom of Heaven each step along the way. At least, up until things reach the solstice, the darkest moment, and no matter how good you are, you cry out "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
But Christ is the example of maintaining faith even when you can't remember why it makes sense, so he dies shortly thereafter, still expressing faith, even as he descends into hell. For 3 days. And 3 days after the darkest point is Christmas, the brightest light out of the darkest place.
Christmas is The Most, technically speaking. It's the holiday of all the colors, and also the holiday of white light, the colors in harmony. It's the brightest, warmest, most colorful, most fun, most sacred holiday, so of course it has to be placed at the worst time of the year, so that it can redeem it, and by so doing, make it into the best time of the year, and by so doing, prove that redemption is possible for any time of year or season of life. Heaven out of Hell, and even in the midst of it, is the reason for hope.
Only true in the northern hemisphere
Only true under the Gregorian calendar. Under the Julian, the solstice was the 25th (they are now 13 days adrift not 4 because Julian doesn't do leap years)
We are now in Christmastide, and today is The Feast of Saint Stephen, which people probably know better from the carol "Good King Wenceslas".
Here it is also the day for 'going out on the wran' though that has pretty much lapsed in the past decade or two, unless deliberately revived:
"26 December is "St. Stephen's Day", a feast day in the Western Church. In the United Kingdom and its former colonies, it is also the secular holiday of Boxing Day. In some parts of Ireland it is denominated "Wren Day".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNqZFxAIB9Q
It's similar in spirit to Hallowe'en, where the "trick or treat" tradition didn't start off for/with kids; adults would dress up, disguise their faces (with burnt cork though today that is Problematic or with masks) and go round from house to house, singing and dancing. The householders would then give them something in return, be it money, food, or drink. You can see how this turned into kids dressing up and going round for candy.
Other traditions on these British Isles have mummers and Morris dancers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfu-mE52cjI
Re the "Wren Day" link:
a) Beautiful!
b) _Intricate_! It looks like there are a dozen traditional costumes - and I have a suspicion that every one of them probably has an explanation for each feature of decoration... I'm guessing that a complete guide to that parade is at least a Ph.D. thesis and maybe several...
Most of my exposure to those kind of thing comes from John Langstaff's revival, the Christmas Revels. (Susan Cooper was involved too!)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=O-8TZjm6s4g
Talking about domestic violence below reminds me-- are the good theories about why significant number of people imprint on people who don't want them. You'd think, or at least I'd think, that the lack of reciprocation would would cause the obsession to fade and end. Wouldn't looking for a new partner be more efficient? Why do domestic abusers put so much work into keeping a partner who doesn't want them?
I'll grant that in the ancestral environment, there wouldn't be a large choice of potential partners, but there would still be some.
https://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Love-Thomas-Lewis/dp/0375709223
A General Theory of Love by Lewis and Amini starts from the fact that humans are the only animals that die from lack of contact in infancy, rather than just being damaged by it. (CW: some very unpleasant experiments.)
It's so common for people to suffer from problems with eating and sleeping after a loss of a partner that it may be hard to think it needs an explanation, but the book gets into how intimacy regulates metabolisms. There was even work on *which* parts of a baby rats metabolism were regulated by which sorts of contact with a mother.
When I read the book, it didn't cover the question of how it happens that A is looking for regulation from B and B just wants to be somewhere else. It's plausible to me that imagination plays a large part for humans, that it's possible to imagine a partner who will be what one needs and imagination causes a sort of imprinting.
A psychologist friend told me that for some humans, it is difficult to differentiate the emotions of fear-attraction. Its also likely there is a large attraction to males who present as more aggressive so as to latch onto a better provider and better protector.
But as to more primitive people, they can't live in dense populations as hunter-gatherers. Our dietary demands quickly out pace the ability of the environment to provide. Also consider the problem of human waste. If you're not in possession of a shovel, you're probably not burying your shit; shit is building up in the places you frequent. You have a great incentive to migrate.
"Why do domestic abusers put so much work into keeping a partner who doesn't want them?"
Because they feel that a partner who doesn't want them (but will submit to them) is better than no partner at all. And because abusers generally aren't really nice people who would have warm and loving relationships with almost any partner other than the one they are presently with. They're abusers; they'll abuse *any* partner who isn't sufficiently obsequious towards them. No partner will ever want them, except in desperation of one sort or another.
But some partners will put up with them in spite of the abuse, and if they've found one that even might be in that category, if they've put in the hours to develop that sort of relationship, that's something valuable that would be difficult to replace if they gave it up.
> Why do domestic abusers put so much work into keeping a partner who doesn't want them?
I think an interesting question is, given how advantageous an abusive relationship can potentially be for an abuser, why aren't more people abusive?
A while back I was listening to a This American Life episode which included a performance piece about an emotionally abusive lesbian relationship, based on the author's experience. It was in the format of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, wherein an incident of abuse like name-calling or not letting the teller sleep would be described, a list of choices to fight, leave, or stay and placate the abuser would be presented, and the teller would choose the option to stay, sending them back to an earlier part in the book to experience a new abuse. Each time, the teller would offer a bargain like, "If I can just be prettier, keep the house cleaner, be such a good person that I don't deserve to be yelled at, maybe then they'll stop hurting my feelings."
And it occurred to me in a literal shower-thought:
Huh, if I could find a person who thinks like this author and be mildly evil to them, I could get them to do a *LOT* of chores for me. I could outsource everything except finances just by sandwiching affection with mean comments/shouting /occasionally startling them awake. It doesn't seem like the abuser went to much effort to "win" the author over; they just found the right victim.
It sounded disturbingly...easy.
Easier than founding a small cult, although I think that, too, might be doable with the right skill-set. I've read about cults and cold reading techniques a bit more than the average layperson, have messed around with hypnotizing others, am just imaginative enough to vividly conjure and describe bullshit, and I know what it's like to truly believe bullshit.
I think that might be enough to manage it, even though I am not beautiful and can only be charismatic in fits and starts. Perhaps that's Dunning-Kruger at work and I have wildly overestimated both my own EQ and how much charisma is required to source members and operate a cult, but I can't help feeling that with an effort, it would be feasible.
Now, I know why I am not abusing an intimate partner or starting a cult (it's mostly morality, but not just morality), but what stops other people?
There is *so* *much* information out there about how to do it, including how to recognize boundaries that should never be crossed if you want to ensure the person never reaches a breaking point where they're willing to leave.
So...why not?
"So...why not?"
Because to be the right sort of victim for an abuser, there needs to be a particular brokenness. And to be an abuser, there needs to be a particular brokenness or lack.
Most people have, or have been raised to have, enough recognition of when they are being unfair or selfish or taking advantage, that they don't do it. They don't want to do it to someone they feel affection towards, or are supposed to feel some responsibility towards. It's hard to be consistently cruel if it's something deliberate you have to think about.
You need to be lacking that sense of "I'm in the wrong" and be able to be selfish, mean, exploitative, and the Victim in your own drama of the world. You don't see others as victims, you see *yourself* as the Starring Role and Victim. If only the other person wouldn't make you angry, wouldn't make you do these things! Why can't they see it's their fault for not being good enough?
And with that view, then of course you are not being mean etc., you are setting them straight, you are disciplining them, you are getting what you deserve, you are even *helping* them by training the bad habits and carelessness and selfishness out of them. And if you have to hit them, well that's because it's the only way they ever listen to what you're trying to tell them.
From what I can gather, victims of abusers don't necessarily start out broken if it's the sort of abuse that amps up gradually. Basically sane people get out faster, but it's not the same thing as not being at risk.
> They don't want to do it to someone they feel affection towards
I think this is closest to the crux. I think most people in the abuser/ abused set have problems with both giving and receiving affection. Excluding genuine psychopaths…
Scott actually touched on this topic in Different Worlds (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/), including an anecdote about a woman who absolutely does not want to be in an abusive relationship and takes steps like vetting partners with her therapist for approval and red-flag spotting, but nevertheless seems to wind up in abusive or at least iffy relationships.
Possibly relevant - https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/fifty-shades-of-apes
TLDR and over simplified - women are attracted to abusive alpha males because it was evolutionarily advantageous in our ape ancestors.
One theory is that women confuse abusiveness with being strong enough to be a good defender.
I don't think it's that the other person doesn't want them; from what I gather, it often starts off with the abuser being charming. What will later be revealed to be possessiveness and control may come off as jealousy, which can be flattering in the early stages of a relationship: he thinks I'm attractive enough other men* would want me and he is so in love with me he can't bear that I might leave him.
Also, the women sought out by abusive boyfriends/spouses tend to be more vulnerable in the run of things. I was on a training course years back where one of the younger woman was a lovely person, but *infallibly* picked the wrong kind of guy. The kind who texts you that he can't make the date with you because he stopped to have a fight in the street (real example, we were all there when she got the text). Everyone was telling her 'do not go out with this guy' and every time she described a new guy it was 'yeah, dump him for your own sake'. She wanted a normal relationship, but somehow the men she ended up with were - well, not the cream of the crop. (This is also why I find the male envy over 'I'm a nice guy but I can't get a girlfriend while this loser can have as many women as he likes' hard to understand - the lowlife who can get as many women as he likes isn't the kind of guy you want to be, or that normal women would want in the long-term).
And abusers pick out people like this; people they can isolate and control, slowly cutting them off and, to use the term 'gaslighting' which has been much misused in recent times but which does fit in specific instances, gradually over the course of the relationship remould things so that B begins to accept that yes, it's their fault that A hits them and shouts at them. At the start, if A hits them, then maybe B thinks of leaving, but A is so remorseful and so charming and swears never, ever to do it again (and slips in the suggestion that anyway B did something to make this happen), and B lets themselves be talked round. And over time, B can't leave because they're scared of what will happen (we do have real life cases of rejected partners coming back to attack and murder the partner/spouse who finally left them) and can't bear to tell anyone else what is going on, in part because they fear they won't be believed and will be blamed, and in part because they are too ashamed of condemnation for "why are you putting up with this? why are you staying?" They may well be financially dependent on the abuser as well.
And the abuser, on their side, never accepts blame or responsibility. It's never their fault. They wouldn't have to hit B if only B would do what they were told, if only B wasn't stupid and ugly and undesirable. (You wonder why it never occurs to B that if they really are that stupid and ugly and the rest of it, A wants to stay with them, but of course that's all part of the mind-control).
It's about power and control, and shaping the new partner into someone who will obey your every whim and you never have to put any effort into the relationship. A is never to blame, when anything goes wrong it is someone else's fault, and B is the handy scapegoat. Of course A puts effort into keeping them, you don't just let your property slip out of your hands. If B successfully gets away, that is failure on A's part, and A cannot bear the notion that they would ever fail or be to blame.
*I say "men" but of course there are abusive women, too
<i>(This is also why I find the male envy over 'I'm a nice guy but I can't get a girlfriend while this loser can have as many women as he likes' hard to understand - the lowlife who can get as many women as he likes isn't the kind of guy you want to be, or that normal women would want in the long-term).</i>
You really don't understand why a man might complain that someone who's obviously more evil than him is also more successful?
I can understand complaining, I can't understand wanting to emulate. Okay, if you think "being an asshole is what it takes to get women, so I'll be an asshole", that may be an understandable conclusion to draw. But how about "if it takes being a thief/a swindler/an embezzler/a fraud like FTX to succeed" - would you do that, too? Would anyone think someone who made that choice was sympathetic rather than "no, man, this is a very bad idea and you shouldn't do it"?
And I don't mean just romantically, with the above - how about someone deciding that if the guys making money where he comes from are the drug dealers selling meth and crack and killing people in restaurants, then he'll do that too in order to get the 'easy' money, would we go "well yeah, sure, why not if that's what it takes?"
https://www.newstalk.com/news/man-arrested-following-death-of-suspected-gunman-in-christmas-eve-shooting-1627338
<i>I can understand complaining, I can't understand wanting to emulate. Okay, if you think "being an asshole is what it takes to get women, so I'll be an asshole", that may be an understandable conclusion to draw.</i>
I'm pretty sure Scott covered this in his old incel-related posts -- the people making this complaint by an large don't want to emulate the jerks. Indeed, that's precisely why they're complaining!
<i>But how about "if it takes being a thief/a swindler/an embezzler/a fraud like FTX to succeed" - would you do that, too?</i>
No, I wouldn't do that, but I do understand why someone else would.
<i>Would anyone think someone who made that choice was sympathetic rather than "no, man, this is a very bad idea and you shouldn't do it"?</i>
"Down-on-his-luck loser decides to swindle/scam some money to restore his fortunes" is a common premise for comedy shows. Usually the main character is portrayed sympathetically, even if we're not meant to agree with his actions.
I would have supposed you would have understood - perhaps even sympathised with - the phenomenon you describe as "male envy" much better than the average person, given that you seem to have considerable experience in seeing women repeatedly pass over such men in favour of, well, horrible men, plus also you seem to understand the techniques (unavailable to not-horrible men by definition) by which some abusive men are able to get and keep partners!
I really struggle to envision a perspective of human nature whereby one understands all this but fails to understand why some kinds of romantically-unsuccessful non-abusive men might be distressed by the situation they're in.
(Nor, for that matter, what perspective of human nature might suggest that a man's knowing he doesn't want to become an abuser, or knowing that women who fall victim to abusers wouldn't wish to do so in the long term, might somehow alleviate such distress.)
P.S. Am using the same genders as you for convenience, but I suspect - as I imagine you might do too - that it's a more universal phenomenon; even in my own limited experience of life I can certainly call to mind lovely men who seem to consistently pass over kind women in favour of borderline-abusive ones, as well as super-lovely women, and enbies, who seem inexplicably to struggle to find a partner.
Since I don't have the wiring for the "want and need love and sex and relationships" that other, normal, people do, then it's easier for me to see the downsides and much harder to understand why the appetites and emotions over-ride reason (in this one particular instance).
So I don't get the male envy because to me it's very clear that those guys are sons of bitches and pond scum and worthless. Why would you *want* to be scum? I don't get the drive for "but the scum get the girls and I so so so badly want to get the girls, too, I'd do anything".
Thanks for the reply! I think we might be talking about somewhat different things, though. I wasn't referring to people who are deliberately abusive in order to (ahem) get the girls, as it were, but about people who really, *really* don't want to be abusive, and try really hard not to be, and are distressed to find that this appears to make them much more romantically unsuccessful than the much less nice, even the abusive, people they see around them - surely it should be pretty easy to understand - purely logically without needing any emotional engagement - why somebody like this might be distressed by the situation in which they find themselves (and possibly even to sympathise for equally abstract/logical reasons)? At any rate, this is the sort of person I thought you were talking about in the post I replied to.
It's not the abusiveness that that draws the sane women, it's the charm that some abusers have, and charm and abusiveness are not 2 sides of the same coin. They're separate qualties. I had one boyfriend who was extraordinarily charming and charismatic. I fell for him the night he was so funny at a party that the next morning I had sore sides from laughing so hard. And he wasn't at all abusive or possessive when we were a couple. We had our bad times, as all couples do, but they did not involve his being anything like the abusive partner. And he was not extraordinarily good looking either. In today's heartless parlance, he was maybe a 7. But he never had trouble getting pretty ladies to date him. You need a way to get women's attention. Once you have it they'll discover your deeper good qualities. Working on being funny is worthwhile, if you think you have some potential for it. Being manifestly happy about some things in your life also draws lots of positive attention, even if you hate your job but can talk with sincere delight about your ski lessons. You need other things to be happy about anyhow -- having a partner doesn't solve the problem of how to enjoy life.
Ah yeah, I see what you mean. The guys who are decent and can't understand why the scummy guys are more romantically successful.
To which all I can say is, the kind of women the scummy guys get are often flakey in various ways, and even the best of them are often taken advantage of. Why people get into bad relationships in the first place is the great mystery we are discussing, and the only conclusion I can draw is 🤷♀️
Who knows? Friends and family tell you he's the wrong guy, you've been burned before and want to avoid it happening again, and yet, somehow, this is the same old same old all over again.
That's one way things can go, but there are also people who get obsessed and abusive before any relationship is established.
I think that in such cases, if the other person sees what is happening fast enough and gets out before they can be trapped into a relationship, or if family/friends around them see the red flags and persuade them not to get in any deeper, that a lot of the really bad cases are dodged. Potential abusers who don't have the self-control or experience to hide their obsessiveness and control before they have the other person in their grip.
It's the ones who are able to hide their tendencies long enough, or charm a new partner with stories of their crazy, clingy ex who is going around telling lies about them, that are the dangerous ones, and that is not confined to any one type of guy. They can be (on the surface) nice, middle-class guys, or they can be lower-class guys. They don't have to be stupid to be abusive.
Now I'm thinking of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" where Baron Gruner uses exactly that kind of charm to fool his next fiancée:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69700/pg69700-images.html#chap01
"He has a daughter, Violet de Merville, young, rich, beautiful, accomplished, a wonder-woman in every way. It is this daughter, this lovely, innocent girl, whom we are endeavouring to save from the clutches of a fiend."
"Baron Gruner has some hold over her, then?"
"The strongest of all holds where a woman is concerned—the hold of love. The fellow is, as you may have heard, extraordinarily handsome, with a most fascinating manner, a gentle voice, and that air of romance and mystery which means so much to a woman. He is said to have the whole sex at his mercy and to have made ample use of the fact."
"But how came such a man to meet a lady of the standing of Miss Violet de Merville?"
"It was on a Mediterranean yachting voyage. The company, though select, paid their own passages. No doubt the promoters hardly realized the Baron's true character until it was too late. The villain attached himself to the lady, and with such effect that he has completely and absolutely won her heart. To say that she loves him hardly expresses it. She dotes upon him, she is obsessed by him. Outside of him there is nothing on earth. She will not hear one word against him. Everything has been done to cure her of her madness, but in vain. To sum up, she proposes to marry him next month. As she is of age and has a will of iron, it is hard to know how to prevent her."
"Does she know about the Austrian episode?"
"The cunning devil has told her every unsavoury public scandal of his past life, but always in such a way as to make himself out to be an innocent martyr. She absolutely accepts his version and will listen to no other."
..."She knew what we had come for, of course—that villain had lost no time in poisoning her mind against us. Miss Winter's advent rather amazed her, I think, but she waved us into our respective chairs like a Reverend Abbess receiving two rather leprous mendicants. If your head is inclined to swell, my dear Watson, take a course of Miss Violet de Merville.
"'Well, sir,' said she, in a voice like the wind from an iceberg, 'your name is familiar to me. You have called, as I understand, to malign my fiancé, Baron Gruner. It is only by my father's request that I see you at all, and I warn you in advance that anything you can say could not possibly have the slightest effect upon my mind.'
"I was sorry for her, Watson. I thought of her for the moment as I would have thought of a daughter of my own. I am not often eloquent. I use my head, not my heart. But I really did plead with her with all the warmth of words that I could find in my nature. I pictured to her the awful position of the woman who only wakes to a man's character after she is his wife—a woman who has to submit to be caressed by bloody hands and lecherous lips. I spared her nothing—the shame, the fear, the agony, the hopelessness of it all. All my hot words could not bring one tinge of colour to those ivory cheeks or one gleam of emotion to those abstracted eyes. I thought of what the rascal had said about a post-hypnotic influence. One could really believe that she was living above the earth in some ecstatic dream. Yet there was nothing indefinite in her replies.
"'I have listened to you with patience, Mr. Holmes,' said she. 'The effect upon my mind is exactly as predicted. I am aware that Adelbert, that my fiancé, has had a stormy life in which he has incurred bitter hatreds and most unjust aspersions. You are only the last of a series who have brought their slanders before me. Possibly you mean well, though I learn that you are a paid agent who would have been equally willing to act for the Baron as against him. But in any case I wish you to understand once for all that I love him and that he loves me, and that the opinion of all the world is no more to me than the twitter of those birds outside the window. If his noble nature has ever for an instant fallen, it may be that I have been specially sent to raise it to its true and lofty level. I am not clear,' here she turned her eyes upon my companion, 'who this young lady may be.'
"I was about to answer when the girl broke in like a whirlwind. If ever you saw flame and ice face to face, it was those two women.
"'I'll tell you who I am,' she cried, springing out of her chair, her mouth all twisted with passion—'I am his last mistress. I am one of a hundred that he has tempted and used and ruined and thrown into the refuse heap, as he will you also. Your refuse heap is more likely to be a grave, and maybe that's the best. I tell you, you foolish woman, if you marry this man he'll be the death of you. It may be a broken heart or it may be a broken neck, but he'll have you one way or the other. It's not out of love for you I'm speaking. I don't care a tinker's curse whether you live or die. It's out of hate for him and to spite him and to get back on him for what he did to me. But it's all the same, and you needn't look at me like that, my fine lady, for you may be lower than I am before you are through with it.'
"'I should prefer not to discuss such matters,' said Miss de Merville coldly. 'Let me say once for all that I am aware of three passages in my fiancé's life in which he became entangled with designing women, and that I am assured of his hearty repentance for any evil that he may have done.'
"'Three passages!' screamed my companion. 'You fool! You unutterable fool!'
"'Mr. Holmes, I beg that you will bring this interview to an end,' said the icy voice. 'I have obeyed my father's wish in seeing you, but I am not compelled to listen to the ravings of this person.'
There are bad relationships, but there is also stalking where there never was a relationship, where the stalker translates every "Go away" into "They're talking to me!".
I'm curious about why being this sort of stalker is even part of the range of human behavior.
Because the victim sometimes changes her mind? And I suppose if she does not, an average stalker may choose another victim after 5 or 10 years, so he is statistically likely to succeed at some moment, even if it takes 20 years... and ultimately he will have as many kids as the average monogamous guy. (The stalkers who literally never choose a new victim are perhaps outliers of this strategy? It doesn't work well for them, but they are not the reason why this strategy persists.)
I know two guys of this type. The first one followed one girl for ~5 years, she kept rejecting him, everyone laughed at him. Then he followed another girl for ~5 years, at the beginning she avoided him (she even knew about his story with the previous girl), but later she changed her mind and realized that he loved her, and now they are married and have kids.
The second one was way more psycho, he spend ~10 years stalking one girl (she moved to another country, so at least he kept writing a blog about how much he loves her), then he switched to another girl and basically brainwashed her, but her parents intervened (kidnapped her and moved her to a different country; after a few days she "woke up" and afterwards she never wanted to see him again), he again spent 10 years writing a blog about how much he loves her... and then he met a woman who has a history of falling in love with losers, and now they are married (everyone warned her not to, she knows his history, but she doesn't mind).
My conclusion is that persistence is attractive, at least in some contexts. As a contrast, I know two guys of similar age who are "nice guys", and they are both childless (and probably still virgins), so being a stalker seems like clearly more successful strategy.
"later she changed her mind and realized that he loved her, and now they are married and have kids"
Personally I'd be very dubious about that; where does love end and possessiveness begin? What if she ever tried to leave him? It's risky.
But we do valorise romantic obsession in our culture, so there is that push towards interpreting it as "he really loves me!" rather than "he wants to own me". Did she ever consider "if five years stalking is proof of love, then what about the previous five years stalking? Was that love, too? If it was, then he shifted his love object to me. What if he does it again and stalks a different woman until *she* gives in?"
Yeah, it seems to be about having someone who obeys you and who can be blamed if anything goes wrong.
I wonder if there are two subtypes of the abuser -- one who needs the *control* (and the punishment is only instrumental; in theory he could be happy if you obey him 100% and nothing ever goes wrong), and one who needs the *punishment* (so if no problem happens spontaneously, he will cause one on purpose).
"one who needs the *punishment* (so if no problem happens spontaneously, he will cause one on purpose)."
Your two samples are plausible, because for the second I have heard about a kink in D/s relationships called "bratting" where the submissive 'acts out' in order to make the Dom punish them, so it's entirely possible there is the counterpart of that where the dominant partner sets it up for the submissive one to fail and thus be punished:
https://badgirlsbible.com/brat-bdsm
It's when all these motivations/drives come outside of recognised, established and consensual relationships and are abusive that the problems get worse, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of these drives are at the root of it, at least in part.
I've seen the need to punish in play. A woman who's life was very limited (physical and financial problems, and I suspect there weren't many people looking to spend time with her)-- her cat did something very ordinary, and she was weird about how bad it was. Sorry, I don't remember what the cat did. She also didn't do anything awful to the cat, she was just upset with it.
As far as I could tell, she was desperate for stimulation, and made it up out of nothing.
Domestic violence is a manifestation of emotional disregulation, which is essentially a distortion of our basic biological animal needs. Sure, people can get sucked into a relationship with someone who turns out to be abusive, and if they are reasonably emotionally healthy they will get hurt, get out and learn something. But often, with couples who stay together and continue to act it out, it is an ugly codependency. Having grown up in a household that was a manifestation of the latter scenario, I have had the opportunity to study it up close, and also catalogue the follow on effects of growing up in that environment. I remember once telling a woman about the violence in my home as a child, and she said, “So, you became an abuser, right ?” “No”, I said , “I just came to the conclusion that women are crazy.” It was a better outcome than becoming a wife-beater, but it certainly took a toll on my relationships with women.
There are a lot of different trajectories for abusive relationships. _Crazylove_ is a memoir by a woman who stayed with an abusive man for much too long. She had it framed as that she was a strong woman helping a man who needed her. I don't remember how she figured out the situation, but he found another woman to help him soon enough.
I’ll bet he did. it sounds like a book my mother could’ve written, had she not been equally insane.
>Why do domestic abusers put so much work into keeping a partner who doesn't want them?
Because having a partner is a status symbol, and losing one costs you status, and that's what they actually care about.
I disagree. Abusers are horribly insecure people who compensate by extremely controlling and violent behavior. Their inability to feel loved, and the inner torment of that inability is projected onto the object of their desire. It’s their fault.
I'm reading a lot of different types of abusiveness in this thread that's all being shaded under the "abusive relationship" umbrella. I have both been the abuser and the abused depending on the symptoms throughout this thread.
That’s understandable
It occurs to me that there's a lot of overlap between abusive relationships and cults. I've heard "love bombing" used in both cases to describe similar patterns of sucking victims in (or back in, later on when they might be on the brink of leaving) with intense bursts of positive attention, gifts, empty promises, etc. And in both cases, one of the main reasons victims stay is that the abusers or the cult leaders systematically undermine the victim's ability to be independent and manipulating them into thinking that the situation is normal and reasonable and the victim is actually the one who's out of line. "Undermining ability to be independent" in particular has a lot of similarities, as both cults and abusers tend to undermine their victims' self-confidence, take control of the victim's finances, pressure the victims into cutting off contact with friends and family members who are outside the cult or not on the abuser's side, and threaten violence or otherwise try to control the victim through fear.
Yep.
Absolutely. Abusive relationships are like very small cults.
I have a notion that a lot of people and a lot of government policy is mercantilist with regard to immigrants. I'm taking mercantilism to be a belief that money is the true measure of prosperity.
So, an immigrant who shows up mostly with a willingness to work is a drain. They're competing with the local workforce and/or they want government money.
The only immigrants who are welcome are wealthy retirees.
Deposed dictators, wealthy retirees, aren't going to prop up the birth rate and our social security system. Most who make it to the border are middle class (the poor can't afford to travel and pay bribes to criminal gangs along the road) but would probably be happy to work. They could even work for retired anti-communists chilling in Miami and Marina del Rey, say organizing Imelda Marcos' shoe closet and such.
The "citizens as tax cattle" theory of State Supremacy in a nutshell.
A lot of people are against wealthy-retiree immigrants as well. Often it is said that they drive up housing prices, so the problem there seems to be that the opposite of what your theory would predict: they add money to the economy. And people generally aren't against high-income guest workers, which I think that your theory would predict.
My theory exactly predicts that adding money isn't the same thing as adding value.
You've got a point that sometimes people don't want wealthy immigrants-- I'm guessing that the people who don't like wealthy immigrants are the people living near them, but governments do like wealthy immigrants.
I'm an (agnostic) Orthodox Rabbi who knows a lot about books but nothing about the modern internet.
In honor of Christmas I recorded and posted the following video regarding the Jewish perception of Jesus.
https://youtu.be/vKyqMk1tnVg?feature=shared
Did you know for example that Jews regard Christmas as an ANTI-holiday when it's forbidden to study Torah? Or that if the Jewish Bible *does* manage to magically predict Jesus that the most likely such prophetic verse makes a mockery of modern Christianity? Or that some of the greatest (Pharisee) Rabbis of his day did not oppose him?
Lots more but the lecture holds deeper civilizational points than the large collection of arcana that come up.
Due to my complete lack of success at gaining the attention of the "viral makers" (or even not to be shadowbanned for who knows what reasons), if you know how to get this video out there I think it's likely to do a lot of good.
No doubt the fools will nitpick as they are wont, but if enough good and wise people watch it, whether of faith traditions or not, we might succeed in getting our act together so that we can enjoy the superlative writings of the nascent Kai and Lyra rather than living Lehrer's song when, in no time at all (2027 by Scott's optimistic calculation) we are on schedule to "all go together when we go".
https://youtu.be/vKyqMk1tnVg?feature=shared
nitpick: It looks like you have two copies of the pointer to your lecture in your comment. Perhaps the second was intended to be different?
Comment on your lecture: Exhortations do not work. Incentives mostly work. Deterrence mostly works. Rabbi Hillel's "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow" does not work as a way to organize large societies. It sort-of works inside families, fails as one gets to groups on the order of Dunbar's number, and fails completely once the numbers are large enough to form ingroups and outgroups.
A third thing, your name (and therefore possible ancestral profession) came up in the reading within this very video!
Hmm, that's odd. It is rare enough that I wouldn't have expected an intersection. Many Thanks!
In addition to what I already wrote, I just want to note snd appreciate your mention of groupings (by dunbar in their more primitive sense circumcision in a latger sense, the sound "geezuz" and the cross in yet a latger attempt, etc) regarding the matter of ingroups outgroups and tribalism generally, that's a huge part of what I'm trying to fix à la Jesus (except that I slap back). We have a great deal to talk about on that matter. If you are game to pick up the party hat, megaphone, and baton _follow me!_
As for the missing link. I suppose if there were one (outside of natural history museums) it would be one of these two:
https://youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?feature=shared
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/my-jewish-jesus-potentially-the-most
Many Thanks!
Yeah, that's why he said, "The rest is commentary, go study".
Law has its place.
Of course the positive motivation from Jesus might have worked (at least for a while) if he had actually succeeded in overthrowing any of the power structures of his day.
He didn't, which is why his message devolved so rapidly that within a few years of his death... but this would sidetrack the matter.
I'm trying to get the whole world's attention for an active revival of the human life and society on the planet so I must conserve my strength for that purpose.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/my-jewish-jesus-potentially-the-most
"I'm trying to get the whole world's attention for an active revival of the human life and society on the planet"
Everybody! Follow Maimonides, who was a small-r rationalist and friend of science, who reduced down the religious/spiritual stuff to "be nice, be kind, here's the common ethics shared by all philosophies, you don't have to sign up to any kind of specific deity-beliefs", or so your message seems to be.
That's nice, but it's been tried before. Whether you call it "Perennialism" or what seems to be the more modern "Omnism":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnism
Or that "Coexist" bumper sticker.
Look, I can't speak to what you are doing within Judaism, because I have no idea how revolutionary or not your ideas are. It may well be that within Orthodox Judaism this very notion is hugely startling. But from an outside perspective, you are not as novel or revolutionary as you seem to think you are being. Jewish Jesus? Heard it before. "Do unto others isn't specifically Christian principle" - this has been remarked on by everyone from hardcore atheists to C.S. Lewis' Dao/Tao.
Or indeed Chesterton's "The Usual Article":
"The Editor of an evening paper published recently what he announced as, and even apologized for as "an unusual article." He anxiously guarded himself from expressing any opinion on the dreadful and dangerous views which the unusual article set forth. Needless to say, before I had read five lines of the unusual article, I knew it was a satisfactory sample of the usual article. It was even a careful and correct copy of the usual article; a sort of prize specimen, as if a thing could be unusually usual. I had read the article before, of course thousands and thousands of times (as it seems to me)and had always found it the same; but never before, somehow, had it seemed so exactly the same.
There are things of which the world to-day is subconsciously very weary. It does not always know what they are; for they commonly bear large though faded labels, describing them as the New Movement or the Latest Discovery. For instance, men are already as tired of the Socialist State as if they had been living in it for a thousand years. But there are some things on which boredom is becoming acute. It is now very near the surface; and may suddenly wake up in the form of suicide or murder or tearing newspapers with the teeth. So it is with this familiar product, the Usual Article. It is not only too usual; it has become intolerably, insupportably, unbearably usual. It is appropriately described as "A Woman's Cry to the Churches." And I beg to announce that, though I am of a heavy and placid habit, and have never been accused of any such feminine graces as hysteria, yet, if I have to read this article three more times, I shall scream. My scream will be entitled, "A Man's Cry to the Newspapers."
I will repeat somewhat hurriedly what the lady in question cried; for the reader knows it already by heart. The message of Christ was perfectly "simple": that the cure of everything is Love; but since He was killed (I do not quite know why) for making this remark, great temples have been put up to Him and horrid people called priests have given the world nothing but "stones, amulets, formulas, shibboleths." They also "quarrel eternally among themselves as to the placing of a button or the bending of a knee." All this gives no comfort to the unhappy Christian, who apparently wishes to be comforted only by being told that he has a duty to his neighbour. "How many men in the time of their passing get comfort out of the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Predestination, Transubstantiation, the doctrine of eternal punishment, and the belief that Christ will return on the Seventh Day?"
Many Thanks Rabbi!
>Of course the positive motivation from Jesus might have worked (at least for a while) if he had actually succeeded in overthrowing any of the power structures of his day.
>He didn't, which is why his message devolved so rapidly that within a few years of his death... but this would sidetrack the matter.
I'm less sanguine that a historical change would have made this difference.
I get the impression from your lecture that you view the golden rule as a simple truth, repeated by various speakers. Respectfully, I have a different view, which I'll elaborate below.
To set the stage, consider a different social innovation: positional notation and hindu-arabic numerals. These proved superior to e.g. roman numerals, and displaced them. Once learned, this meme is _stable_. Barring e.g. dementia, once someone has learned what e.g. "347" means, no regular sermons are needs to persuade them that the "3" in "347" continues to stand for 300. This innovation _worked_.
Contrast this with the golden rule. ( I'm going to treat it as a social innovation intended
to make the world less violent. )
Now, in your lecture, you quoted a translation of it in the form:
>"What's hateful to you, don't do to your friends."
In this _restricted_ form, applied only to a compact, cohesive, close-knit group of _friends_, I think that this is workable.
But it is usually quoted in a more expansive form, e.g. ""That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow.". Does the original Hebrew make it clearer how far Rabbi Hillel intended to stretch this?
As you said
>You look at the world today I don't know any Christian community and I have investigated far and wide [and] I don't know any Christian community that even follows his precepts, turning the other cheek, all of his precepts
( I'm going to group precepts together with the golden rule - I am admittedly being sloppy here. )
Now consider Rabbi Hillel and Yehoshua - saying essentially the same thing, decades apart, with a bunch of other religious leaders also saying the same thing, centuries apart. Unlike positional notation, the golden rule does not _stick_.
This is all _evidence_. As you have seen in your travels across multiple communities, and seen over time in your scholarship, both across space and across time, the history of the golden rule is a history of _failure_.
My conclusion is that golden rule, in the expansive form, applying to anything broader that the smallest close group, is fundamentally incompatible with most human psychology. No, asking people to treat a broad set of their neighbors well does not work. We treat close associates quite differently from people who are socially distant, to whom our connection is tenuous. There is a limit to the number of the number of people who _can_ be even sort-of associates, about 150 of them, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number .
There is also a game-theoretic reason for expecting cooperation to fail at large scales. In a prisoners' dilemma, cooperation, "tit-for-tat", can evolve provided that players are stably paired for _multiple_ interactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation This _doesn't_ work when the interaction are one-shot between random members of one group and random members of another on a battlefield between them.
Effective altruism has the same problem - concern for socially distant people is alien and creepy to most people. Effective altruism only appeals to a small subset of the population. It is a niche view. Even amongst them, I suspect that the psychology of aiding socially distant people is probably different from the psychology of aiding close associates.
I suspect that what went wrong was a mistaken extrapolation:
It is natural to look at some local phenomenon and to guess that it can be extended further.
Perhaps some prophet thought that the mutual support of a small group of friends could be extended indefinitely. This is as wrong as expecting that the ability of someone to stay awake through a single night could be extended to a thousand nights.
What should have happened, millennia ago, was for the second prophet who was considering promoting the golden rule to notice that it didn't work the first time, to learn from the failure, and to try something _else_.
This particular video seemed as good a moment as any to follow the example of our master Moshe Ben Maimon and pen an introduction unambiguously describing the requisite frame of mind for being able to appreciate my videos and articles in the manner that was intended.
Whether you have yet to watch the video "Jewish Jesus" or have watched it 5 times since this morning, if you have yet to read the video's introduction here (which is also in the YouTube description) please read it now. 🙏🙏🙏
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/my-jewish-jesus-potentially-the-most
"Potentially The Most Important Video on the Internet"
Come now, don't be modest and hide your views, tell us what you really think this is about! 😁
I can only summarise what I took away from it:
(1) Jews don't believe the same things Christians believe
(2) Christians have been hearing, and dealing with, "your guy is a fraud and a fake" ever since the start
(3) Iconoclasm and idolatry have also been going on for a long time, from the Byzantine Iconoclasm(s) to the Reformation and beyond, and pro- and anti-sides of the question both have their reasons and their exegesis and Scripture verses to back it up
(4) "Jesus was Jewish so you Christians should adopt all the Jewish opinions on this and drop the Christian traditions" is not a dog that is going to hunt, we've *had* the Judaizing element back at the start
Though thanks for the verses from Jeremiah; I think your interpretation of the wood cut form a tree as the Cross is novel, and you are lifting it out of the context of other places in Jeremiah where he is explicitly criticising Israel for adopting the worship of foreign gods from the surrounding cultures, but it's a different parallel and fits in snugly with one of the four senses of Scripture to consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_senses_of_Scripture
"The first is simply the literal interpretation of the events of the story for historical purposes with no underlying meaning.
The second is called typological: it connects the events of the Old Testament with the New Testament; in particular drawing allegorical connections between the events of Christ's life with the stories of the Old Testament.
The third is moral (or tropological), which is how one should act in the present, the "moral of the story".
The fourth type of interpretation is anagogical, dealing with the future events of Christian history, heaven, hell, the last judgment; it deals with prophecies."
Now I must go read your latest on this, but in return, a video for your video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lop2ghrnzqk
Oh! A question! What is your view on the Muslim Jesus?
EDIT: And I should say that I do appreciate you are doing the Sortes with the Torah when you woke up, as this is an old tradition of randomly opening the Bible and taking the verses thus obtained to be interpreted as a fortune:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortes_biblicae
This is the time of year to keep up old customs! 😁
Most of my readers are JewishRabbis. Taking that in mind, and the fact that I was compelled to sentence I landed on is likely to provide a different way to understand the video should you choose to watch it again from the beginning.
Also for anyone who hasn't seen it, I addressed an element of Deisach's earlier comment in a full article here.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/responding-to-dei
As to your latter point, I am well aware that the most likely people to understand me fully are Christian. I don't know how to reach the right people nut please share this with them wherever you personally suslect them to be found on line or off.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/my-jewish-jesus-potentially-the-most
I'd never heard of Jews not studying the Torah on Christmas Eve, but it turns out some don't. I have no idea how many Jews follow the practice, or have even heard of it.
https://archive.is/Gms5D
This should be a counterexample for talk of Chesterton's fence.
Not necessarily.
It's quite possible (depending upon the subsequent actions of those few who were able to see it) that the reason this custom remained was for the sake of this video being produced.
"Did you know for example that Jews regard Christmas as an ANTI-holiday when it's forbidden to study Torah?"
No, I didn't
"Or that if the Jewish Bible *does* manage to magically predict Jesus that the most likely such prophetic verse makes a mockery of modern Christianity?"
I read somewhere that one reason for the Masoretic translation of the Torah was to tighten up what books were considered 'official' because the Christians were quoting the Septuagint texts in support of their Messiah. Ironically, if we like to take it that way, Luther preferred to use the Masoretic Text in his translation of Scripture because it didn't have the same 'Catholic' verses he was arguing against. EDIT: Oops, how could I forget? The Almah Question! The virginity of Mary and the Virgin Birth are supported by appeals to Isaiah 7:14 "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel." Now, the Protestants who really got worried over Mary Worship tried their hardest to downplay her, but they didn't toss out the Virgin Birth until the days of their descendants, who want to say that Mary wasn't a virgin (because Science! and we're all modern now and sex is good and fine okay?) or who want to deny the perpetual virginity of Mary, so they're very fond of "Well ackshully the word there in the Hebrew original 'almah' doesn't mean 'virgin', it just means 'young woman' so it's only talking about a young married woman having a baby like normal people do".
So, you see, Biblical Pure Text exegesis on "that doesn't mean what you say it means" is like water off a duck's back if you're Catholic by now 😁
"Or that some of the greatest (Pharisee) Rabbis of his day did not oppose him?"
Yep, Gamaliel is mentioned in Acts 5: 33-40
"33 When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. 34 But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while. 35 And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. 36 For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. 37 After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. 38 So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; 39 but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” So they took his advice, 40 and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go."
As for your text from Jeremiah, as any fule kno, Catholics don't read the Bible so I had to do a little bit of looking up and I think this is the one you were reading:
Jeremiah 10: 1-5
"10 Hear the word that the Lord speaks to you, O house of Israel. 2 Thus says the Lord:
“Learn not the way of the nations,
nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens
because the nations are dismayed at them,
3 for the customs of the peoples are vanity.
A tree from the forest is cut down
and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.
4 They decorate it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so that it cannot move.
5 Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field,
and they cannot speak;
they have to be carried,
for they cannot walk.
Do not be afraid of them,
for they cannot do evil,
neither is it in them to do good.”
Your exegesis is a very Protestant one 😀 There are certainly denominations of Protestantism that will nod approvingly as you condemn Constantine and talk about worshipping idols. "Yes," they will say, "all that you say is true! Those wicked pagan Roman Catholics that polluted the Pure Gospel Truth with Constantine's paganised state religion and statues of saints and crucifixes!"
We over here with the Orthodox and the Catholics aren't too worried about that, the Orthodox themselves went through the entire Iconoclasm struggle and sorted out their theology on that, and us Catholics had the statue-smashing during the Reformation and we're happy with *our* theology around that.
So yeah - "did you know Idolatry bad?" isn't the knock-down sockdolager for Christianity that you expect, because the Protestants are "dude, this is why we smashed the idols" and the rest of us are "dude, we're quoting Moses and Isaiah back at you":
Numbers 21: 8-9
" 8 And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live."
Isaiah 52: 13-15
"Behold, my servant will prosper;
he will be exalted and raised to great heights.
14 Just as many people recoiled at the sight of him—
he was so disfigured
that he no longer appeared to be human—
15 so will he startle many nations,
and kings will be speechless before him.
For they will see what they had not been told,
and they will contemplate
what they had not previously heard."
Also, in the West Catholics have had three hundred years or so of Protestants quoting the Plain Bible Texts at them around this stuff, one more guy - even a Rabbi - doing it isn't going to cut the mustard at making us break our rosary beads, pull down the crucifixes, and dump the holy statues in the rubbish bin. (Speaking of, it's the 800th anniversary this year of the Christmas crib as established by St Francis!)
You're Jewish, you're not going to believe Jesus is the Messiah, I get that. The Babylonian Talmud was happy to go to town on how he was the bastard son of an unfaithful woman, fathered on her by one of the occupying Roman soldiers, a liar and heretic and deceiver who learned magic in Egypt, led some of the people astray with his tricks, and was rightfully punished by execution and is now punished in Hell by being boiled in shit 🤷♀️
Am I going to hold that against you as a Jew? Nah, come on, every culture has written harsh words against the ones they blame for causing misfortune. God is God, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Again, maybe you'll find the work of Origen titled "Against Celsus" interesting, because he's answering a work by someone criticising and denying Christianity, but who also seems to not take Jewish works seriously either, preferring older Greek, Roman and Egyptian authorities but who nevertheless uses a Jewish mouthpiece in part of his work and has him give what is presumably Jewish opinion of the time:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04161.htm
"Chapter 28
And since, in imitation of a rhetorician training a pupil, he introduces a Jew, who enters into a personal discussion with Jesus, and speaks in a very childish manner, altogether unworthy of the grey hairs of a philosopher, let me endeavour, to the best of my ability, to examine his statements, and show that he does not maintain, throughout the discussion, the consistency due to the character of a Jew. For he represents him disputing with Jesus, and confuting Him, as he thinks, on many points; and in the first place, he accuses Him of having invented his birth from a virgin, and upbraids Him with being born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a God. Now, as I cannot allow anything said by unbelievers to remain unexamined, but must investigate everything from the beginning, I give it as my opinion that all these things worthily harmonize with the predictions that Jesus is the Son of God."
EDIT EDIT: I think this video has limited appeal, as those who are lapsed, nominal, or out-and-out atheist will be "I never believed this shit anyway" and those who are more informed will be "I know what I believe and why I believe it"; I think those who will find it most convincing are the nominal or cultural Christians who know fuck-all about their own religion (of whom there are many) and will go "Gosh I had no idea it was all made-up" and the very vehement Bible Warriors out there just itching for a good verse-slinging fight to bring one more sinner to the light who'll be happy to get into an exchange with you. It'll work best for the Biblical Literalists and Inerrantists, but Catholics (for one) have Sacred Tradition as well as Scripture on these kinds of interpretations.
That's not me, so happy whatever you're having yourself!
My response was pages too long for easy phone-readability this far down in the thread so I posted it as its own article. And now I must go to sleep, you wouldn't believe how long it took me to write this before nearly losing it in the transfer from comment to newsletter.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/responding-to-dei
>I read somewhere that one reason for the Masoretic translation of the Torah was to tighten up what books were considered 'official' because the Christians were quoting the Septuagint texts in support of their Messiah.
This seems muddled. The Masoretic text is a canonical version of the original text of the Old Testament (including the 5 books of the Torah), which for most books is already Hebrew.
The Masoretic project is distinct from the general canonization process that took place centuries earlier, determining which books belonged to the canon.
Luther and the Masoretic text:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Bible#View_of_canonicity
"View of canonicity
Initially Luther had a low view of the Old Testament book of Esther and of the New Testament books of Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Revelation of John. He called the Letter of James "an epistle of straw", finding little in it that pointed to Christ and his saving work. He also had harsh words for the Revelation of John, saying that he could "in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it". In his translation of the New Testament, Luther moved Hebrews and James out of the usual order, to join Jude and the Revelation at the end, and differentiated these from the other books which he considered "the true and certain chief books of the New Testament. The four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation." His views on some of these books changed in later years, and became more positive.
Luther chose to place the books he considered Biblical apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments. These books and addenda to Biblical canon of the Old Testament are found in the ancient Greek Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Masoretic text. Luther left the translating of them largely to Philipp Melanchthon and Justus Jonas. Though included, they were not numbered in the table of contents of his 1532 Old Testament, and in the 1534 Bible they were given the well-known title: "Apocrypha: These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read". See also Development of the Christian Biblical canon."
So Luther did select the Masoretic text not only because he felt it was more accurate, but also because it supported his interpretation of Scripture as against that of the Catholic Church.
The Masoretic Text:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-masoretic-text/
"The Masoretic text refers to the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible used universally by Jews today. This version was codified around the ninth century by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes, whose name derives from the Hebrew word mesorah, meaning tradition. The text defines not only the Jewish biblical cannon, but also specific vocalizations and anomalous textual elements in the written Torah scroll."
The Septaguint was one of the Greek texts that preceded the Masoretic text, that's why I refer to it as a tightening up:
"https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/greek-versions-of-esther/
The major differences between the Masoretic Text and the Greek versions are the six Additions. These Additions were once an integral part of the Septuagint, but when Jerome (fourth century CE) translated the Greek Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), he observed that these passages had no equivalent in the Hebrew text of his time. Doubting their authenticity as divinely inspired scripture, he relegated them to the end of his translation. They remain canonical for the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Protestants declared them uncanonical and placed them in the Apocrypha, under the title “Additions to Esther.” The Additions make little sense at the end of the book since they are out of context, so some modern Christian Bibles have reinstated them into their appropriate positions within the story.
...The Greek versions, especially the Septuagint, have a different tone and reflect a different view of the Jewish characters from the Masoretic Text. David Clines (The Esther Scroll: The Story of the Story), who believes that the religious elements were originally absent and were added in the Septuagint, has perceptively argued that the Septuagint added the religious dimension in order to “assimilate the Book of Esther to a scriptural norm.”
...But besides that, the Septuagint’s translation of Esther has the added complication of diverging rather more from the Masoretic Text than do its translations of other biblical books. Of the 270 verses in the Septuagint, 107 find no parallel in the Masoretic Text. The Greek translation, and presumably the Hebrew that lay behind it (which must have been different to some extent from the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text), shows that the form of the story of Esther was once more fluid, and the possibilities for interpreting it were correspondingly more flexible, than had been previously realized.
As more and more scholars are coming to see, the early fluidity of the Hebrew text and the variety of ways that the story was retold, in Hebrew or other languages, belong to the history of early Jewish biblical interpretation. The Septuagint is a window onto how Greek-speaking Jews of the early pre-Christian centuries read and understood the story of Esther."
So I can see how the Masoretic text is more palatable to the Protestant Reformers, since it too is trying to remove 'accretions' and go back to a more 'authentic' version in tune with a Jewish, rather than Hellenised, interpretation of what is considered to be the better version of Scripture.
As to Martin Luther, whatever else one might say about him, he was indeed no dummy.
And again, as a rule, to Septuagint did *not* precede the Masoretic.
Okay, willing to be instructed on this, as sources are indeed important:
https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/biblical-history/a-history-of-the-masoretic-hebrew-texts.htm
"The Hebrew texts of the Bible were originally written with only the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which only represent consonantal sounds. Examples of this type of writing can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. As no vowel sounds were originally included in the text, they had to be memorized.
Around the 10th Century AD, a group of Jewish scribes called Masorites, created a system of dots and dashes, called nikkudot or vowel pointings and added these to the hebrew text. These vowel pointings served to supply the vowel sounds to the text in order to codify the pronunciation. The Masorites also included notes in the margins of the text.
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew manuscript known to exist is the Masoretic text called the Aleppo Codex which was written in 826 A.D. This text is considered the most authoritative Hebrew manuscript and all future editions are based on this text."
So this project something like 6th to 10th centuries. Dead Sea Scrolls?
"1st C. BC to 1st C. AD - Dead Sea Scrolls
(Hebrew, some in Aramaic and a few in Greek)
Between 1947 and 1956, ancient scrolls and fragments of the Hebrew Bible were discovered in caves near the Dead Sea dating to the 1st Century B.C. and the 1st Century A.D. The manuscripts discovered in the Dead Sea Caves include; all of the Canonical Books of the Hebrew Bible with the exception of the book of Esther, non-Canonical Books such as Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit and Sirach as well as Psalms that are not part of the 150 Psalms in the Canonical Bible, and Sectarian Books such as, the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Damascus Document and commentaries on books of the Bible."
St. Jerome asked to translate the Bible and produced the Vulgate in the late 4th century, using a variety of available texts but *not* the Masoretic ones as those wouldn't be produced for at least another two centuries.
Septuagint (Greek/Hellenistic) texts?
https://ancient-hebrew.org/biblical-history/extant-manuscripts-of-the-hebrew-bible.htm
"4th C. BC - Septuagint
(Greek)
The Torah (the first five books of the Bible) are believed to have been translated in the 4th C. BC and is called the Septuagint (A 2,000-year-old Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, also identified as LXX, the Roman numeral for 70). The remainder of the Hebrew Bible (the Prophets and the Writings) are believed to have been translated into Greek, and then included into the Septuagint, around the first century AD."
So if we're speaking about the *Hebrew* texts of the Tanakh then yes they're older. If we're specifically speaking about the Masoretic production of texts with diacritic marks/vowel pointings, then in general the Septuagint are older.
Hmm... As an ASCII user, I'm grateful to the Romans for including vowels in their alphabet!
For better or worse, had I read your comment before setting myself to responding, this article length explication would not exist.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/responding-to-dei
i don't think protestants toss out the virgin birth due to science, because then they'd toss the resurrection out due to science too. If anything those kinds would love Mariolatry because they view the faith in symbolic ways and the Feminine Presence is something they'd go big over. They would cheer on all the co-redemptrix stuff. The hardest "science" a conservative protestant probably would believe in a figurative creation account, would be a cessationist who believes God doesn't perform miracles today (they were signs of the apostles,) believes in communion as symbolic, and who might believe revelation as allegory addressing the first century church.
this is a bit odd for me because i am probably as close to being the kind of iconoclast you mention. (i say as i type this on a phone drinking a starbucks mocha lol) The problem is that all of these things turn into "reestablishing the temple veil."
like i get the idea of saints and prayer; God is not the god of the dead but the living, and the more people praying the better. But Catholicism always winks and seems to act like all the saints, icons, priests, and what have you are better in an intermediary sense. Mary is somehow more in touch with the Big G, you cant just pray you must pray the rosary or that a statue as an aid to devotion even works, and the communion wafer is lot closer to the old sacrifices in how we need a priestly class to administer it.
That's why you get iconoclasm; Christ ripped apart the temple veil and Catholicism in its worst excesses seeks to put it back up again. We go back to the Law just in a different or worse language. Sometimes literally as in Latin.
and yeah constantine was a mistake. Christianity was never meant to conquer or rule. Christ himself would have done that had He intended it. but thats a human issue not a catholic one; protestants shouldn't do so either.
anyways, merry christmas
"i don't think protestants toss out the virgin birth due to science, because then they'd toss the resurrection out due to science too."
Oh, those ones generally do that, too. You, my friend, have been fortuitously preserved from encountering the guff by nice liberals who are too much into "well, there's a difference between traditions and belief, so let's keep dressing up in the historical costumes and keep the nice buildings but we don't have to really believe the Creed" instead of being willing to either go the full, Nonconformist, No Butter In Hell route of stripping it all away or go the full UU route of "we don't believe in anything except being nice but if you want to have some personal beliefs of your own that's cool by us".
Such as explaining away why the Virgin Mary gets referred to as such; very clearly plainly we are all modern grown-ups who know how pregnancy works and we don't believe in virgin births, now do we? Miracle? Come on dear, we gave up miracles yonks ago! But you know, our forebears (poor things) were not as enlightened as we were. But even they knew how babies are made, so it probably went like this:
There was a young woman called Mary who got raped and got pregnant as a result of that rape. But even though she was pregnant out of marriage, and the father wasn't her betrothed, her neighbours knew she was a good girl, so they referred to her as "Mary, the virgin who was raped" and over time that got shortened to "Mary the virgin" and so that's how the title The Virgin Mary was created!
To which I can only retort: Please. Just be fucking atheists, please? That's less insulting to the intelligence of everything around from paramecium level upwards.
That's leaving out the sermon preached by the first lady clergyperson to become head of The Episcopal Church, where she told us all that exorcising demons from slave girls is a bad no-no thing done only because of jealousy over their spiritual gifts. Even the NYT writer had to do some fancy foot work to justify that one:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/us/for-episcopal-churchs-leader-a-sermon-leads-to-more-controversy.html
"This story has historically been read as a tale of exorcism, in which Paul delivers the woman from some sort of indwelling spirit — or, alternatively, strikes a blow for monotheism against local beliefs in plural gods. But as Bishop Jefferts Schori interpreted the passage, Paul was guilty of failing to value diversity, to see the slave girl’s beautiful “difference.”
“Paul is annoyed at the slave girl,” Bishop Jefferts Schori preached. “She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.”
Yes, folks, being possessed by a demon so your owners make money out of you as a fortune teller is something beautiful and holy!
You know its stuff like this that made my particular denomination (Restoration Movement) shy away from the label "Protestant". I asked my dad when I was in high school what to fill in on a demographic form under Religion: the options were Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. My dad said "Write down "Christian" in the "Other" box, that's what we are."
My denomination started during the Second Great Awakening in America where there weren't that many Catholics, so really we were protesting against the Protestants. Which actually makes us theologically closer to Catholics! I read through the writings of our denomination's founders a while back, and they had basically nothing to say about Catholicism: just Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, etc. A lot of railing against Calvinism. Papists were their far-group.
I think many "Evangelical" and "Fundamentalist" denominations in America are in the same boat, having left the Protestant fleet in disgust, our boats drifting farther out into the fractious sea of schisms.
A complete lack of success at gaining the attention of the "viral makers" is the default for any youtube channel.
Even channels with objectively great production quality need not be popular if they're covering niche topics.
Not having watched your video but going by Rappatoni's response and also some of your previous posts here I assume you make content about the torah. That seems like a niche topic to me.
It's always easy to claim to be shadowbanned, conspired against, what have you. Do you have any evidence? Because the alternative explanation is that people are just not _that_ crazy about your videos. As is the case with almost every youtube channel out there, so surely that's the default assumption?
Your assumption is not exactly right.
The language I know best is Torah Lingo but my manner and meaning is not what you might think.
Presume no priors (if such a thing were rationally possible) if you should read or watch me.
I don't think it would take very long for you to laugh about the fact that *of course* I get shadow (and sometimes sunlight) banned.
Heck, this is just a teeny
throw-away post that originated as a comment RIGHT HERE (where of course it received no retaliation from the Higher Intelligence that maintains this particular space).
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/its-all-good
For a tapas shmorg of videos, teeny and longer, see here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgebCpkexR4afrjwf4-Ygxdh&feature=shared
I got fifteen minutes in, then gave up. I found your reading of the Torah verse less than convincing, to say the least.
Regardless, here is some concrete feedback: cut all the prolegomena, the preemptive defenses (including against people like me who "don't understand your videos because they don't watch them to the end) the asides and the non-anecdotes. Get to the point. Before every sentence you write/say, think "does this absolutely need to be here to advance my thesis". If not, get rid of it. Be absolutely merciless in this process.
You are not being shadowbanned or whatever, you are simply losing people before they even hear your ideas. There is no guarantee that your audience will be convinced or even interested in them, but at least they will have a fighting chance if you present them concisely. As is, they are just being drowned in the noise you yourself create around them.
>Get to the point. Before every sentence you write/say, think "does this absolutely need to be here to advance my thesis".
Agreed. ( Rabbi, I hope this doesn't sound hostile. Rappatoni has a good point. )
Naw, I hear you both and of course I agree with you both that if my goals were what one might reflexively assume they were based upon prior meanders around the interwebs then I'm obviously going about it in an inaccurate manner.
I genuinely appreciate both of your decisions to watch the beginning of the video and understand your take.
To thresh potential viewers in advance so that neither they nor I are disappointed, I wrote the following introduction to this, and every bit of my output.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/its-all-good
I know of course that putting people off from watching my videos by *literally* asking 95% of people NOT to watch is likely to put off many people.
That's okay, that's the whole point of the preamble.
See Maimonides' 5 preambles and 130 out of a total of 178 chapters of The Guide For The Perplexed, to get a feel for why I regard the prologue as far more important than whatever the presumed "meat and potatoes" might be.
Putting 99% of people off is the point. (Which has nothing to do with either the numerous shadow and daylight bans I accrue on account of not always being quite so careful to filter potential viewers and readers in advance.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/my-jewish-jesus-potentially-the-most
Many Thanks!
♥️
Joe Biden: Non-white immigration will never stop, and white Americans becoming a minority "is the source of our strength": https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1731888060848132097
Pretty funny since anyone on the right who says that this is what the left do and believe are called conspiracy theorists, even on here. (I remember one clown on here saying that Scott's claim (on the fertility rate post) that making Korea have Kenyan (or something to that effect) would fundamentally change Korea into a different country and not be the same as Koreans having kids again as an example of "white replacement theory"). Well, here it is, straight from the horse's mouth.
Of course, the left have been saying this stuff for decades and salivating at the thought of white americans becoming a minority. But here it is, on tape, coming from the president himself. I don't care if you think it's a good thing this is happening, that's entirely not the point. The point is that this is referred to as a "conspiracy theory", which is categorically false.
A: "Plants feed off of sunlight through a process called photosynthesis. Almost all life on Earth depends, indirectly, on this process, so it's very important!"
B: "We have been saying for decades that Plants Will Eat the Sun, and have been ridiculed as conspiracy theorists. Here's Scientist A on tape saying that we were right all along, and he even wants it to happen. Watch him salivate over it. But the point isn't even whether it's actually bad and terrifying that Plants Will Eat the Sun. The point is that anyone who thinks Plants Will Eat the Sun is a 'conspiracy theory' is categorically wrong, and we were right."
A: "Diluting half a cup of bleach with a gallon of water makes it less likely to damage surfaces without making it any less effective as a disinfectant. Plus, it's much less wasteful."
B: "Here's A again on record flat-out admitting that Bleach Replacement Theory is true. He actually said 'dilute', clear as day. Maybe you believe it's good never to use bleach again; I don't actually care. The point is, we've been saying for decades that A and other so-called 'experts' want us to dilute our bleach right out of existence, and this proves that we were right and the claim that Bleach Replacement Theory is a 'conspiracy theory' is categorically false."
I could probably do more of these but who am I kidding, the odds are basically zero that any number of silly comparisons convinces you that using evidence for the motte interpretation of a slogan as evidence for the bailey interpretation is invalid.
The version that gets called a "conspiracy theory" is the one that claims it's an intentional action - Democrats or Jews or lizard-people are in some way organizing mass movements of people who are all going to vote for communists and take over the country forever. This is just false - Democrats might be happy to see it happen, but they aren't actually *making it happen.* The US does not actually have an open border policy, the economic conditions in South America that push waves of migrants are not under our control, illegal immigrants can't vote, Hispanic voters are not actually unanimous Democrats, and both parties are capable of changing their stance to appeal to new demographics.
The non-conspiracy version would be something like "due to various socioeconomic factors, people of different ethnicities migrate to the US at different rates, and have children at different rates, and therefore the ethnic makeup of the US changes gradually over time." But that claim is so mild that it hardly deserves the name "Great Replacement" - there's nothing more or less great about these migrants than any other immigrants the US has taken in over the years.
<i>The version that gets called a "conspiracy theory" is the one that claims it's an intentional action - Democrats or Jews or lizard-people are in some way organizing mass movements of people who are all going to vote for communists and take over the country forever. This is just false - Democrats might be happy to see it happen, but they aren't actually *making it happen.*</i>
If you set up the immigration and welfare systems such that people are incentivised to immigrate, you are in fact "making it happen".
<i>The US does not actually have an open border policy,</i>
If you refuse to adequately enforce your country's immigration policy, you do in fact have an open-border policy, regardless of whether you call it an open-border policy or not.
<i>illegal immigrants can't vote,</i>
Yet. Just wait until the next amnesty is passed.
<i>Hispanic voters are not actually unanimous Democrats,</i>
But they are widely perceived as more likely to vote Democrat.
<i>and both parties are capable of changing their stance to appeal to new demographics.</i>
So demographic change is going to lead to a fundamental shift in national politics. That seems like the sort of thing that someone who prefers the current political set-up might reasonably complain about.
<i>But that claim is so mild that it hardly deserves the name "Great Replacement" - there's nothing more or less great about these migrants than any other immigrants the US has taken in over the years.</i>
Only if you believe that people are fungible, and ignore the role of shared culture in shaping society.
You're leaving out critical factors of the theory in a form of motte and bailey. Depending on the flavor you engage with, the version of the Great Replacement that (justifiably imo) gets called a conspiracy theory is one of the following two:
More Extreme & Antisemitic: There's a coordinated plot by Jewish people/the wealthy and political elite that are disproportionately Jewish to import massive amounts of non-white individuals, particularly Arabs and Latin Americans, to dilute the white population and commit what amounts to white genocide.
Less Extreme: There's a coordinated plot by the Democratic Party to import millions upon millions of third world, overwhelmingly Mexican/Latin American immigrants to dilute the white population, destroy the Republican voter base, and manipulate them so that conservatives never win an election again.
In fairness and good faith, I don't sense anything in your comment or Vivek's Tweet that indicates the first, but even the video you've linked fails the second. First, Biden isn't just talking about third world poor immigrants, but ALL immigrants. Second, he made no mention of party affiliation, and we know that Asians, Latin Americans, Indian Americans, etc. are not as politically homogenous as some would want to believe (as Vivek's literal existence proves). And I'm assuming a lot, but I don't think Biden would care if someone in that video had asked "But what if they vote Republican?"
Also, nothing of what Biden said indicates any measure of intentionality. The theory necessitates "importing", which I'd interpret as a more active process of trying to get people to come to America, whereas Biden is referring to a trend of a more natural process. Of course, you could counter that sitting back as a trend occurs amounts to importing, but I disagree.
If you wanted to have a conversation on "Is it right for the demographics of America to change so rapidly?", while many on the more fringe left would curl away, I don't think you'd get labeled a Great Replacement conspiracy theorist. But that's a far weaker argument to stand on.
>Also, nothing of what Biden said indicates any measure of intentionality. The theory necessitates "importing", which I'd interpret as a more active process of trying to get people to come to America, whereas Biden is referring to a trend of a more natural process.
I don't know: as soon as Biden got into office, illegal border crossings tripled. Under Trump you had about 400,000 illegal crossings per year, though there was a jump in 2019 where it got close to one million. 2021: 1.6 million. 2022: 2.2 million. 2023: 2 million in the first 9 months.
Trump seemed to be able to keep the numbers down, and Biden's policies has massively increased them. This doesn't seem to be a solely "natural process" to me.
Sauce: the "paper of record" https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/29/us/illegal-border-crossings-data.html
> If you wanted to have a conversation on "Is it right for the demographics of America to change so rapidly?", while many on the more fringe left would curl away, I don't think you'd get labeled a Great Replacement conspiracy theorist.
Actually, in my experience this is exactly what happens. It can be an even tamer gesture toward the situation than the one you gave, and it will still be pounced on, associated with the antisemitic or far-right outgroups, and derided as a conspiracy theory until everyone shuts up and the conversation moves safely on.
I see this being done by channels and outlets that would certainly see themselves, and be seen by laymen, as centrist, moderate and reasonable.
I can very much understand the desire by Chris J and others, on having seen admissions of this kind*, to want to shout about it and hold it up as proof that they're not the insane conspiracy theorists everyone insists they are. Unfortunately I predict the result is that everyone calls him insane even harder.
* I didn't click the link to check whether this one counts as a "real" admission. There have been admissions before, many such cases.
> Actually, in my experience this is exactly what happens. It can be an even tamer gesture toward the situation than the one you gave, and it will still be pounced on, associated with the antisemitic or far-right outgroups, and derided as a conspiracy theory until everyone shuts up and the conversation moves safely on.
Admittedly, it *would* take an awful lot of countervailing evidence to overcome my prior that someone opening with a tame-sounding question like, "Is it right for the demographics of America to change so rapidly?" is, within minutes, going to be describing non-white people as "animals", fear-mongering about invading murderers and rapists, launching passionately into a speech about just how inferior hip-hop is to Wagner and what that proves about the people who prefer each, or otherwise using the topic to share, with as much rope as they are given, all of their vitriol-laced negative opinions of demographic groups other than theirs.
And even if you're that one person in a thousand who can thread that needle with grace and compassion, and can debate the question without dehumanizing or debasing broad groups of people, the person at the party standing next to you probably isn't, and suddenly it's "Yeah, and what about those *Jews*?".
So, sorry to that one-in-a-thousand person. If I don't know you and I hear that question, I'm going to shut you down. And it sucks if you can't find any groups of people with whom to explore the idea with charity and grace, but, uh, yeah. There are just too many other people who want to take the conversation to a different place, and too few ways to prove that you aren't one of them.
Apology accepted, and that's quite okay. Bereft of the ability to talk about things in good faith, and convinced that the Overton window now precludes addressing the problem at all, I'll just vote for somebody who *does* believe the Jew version and move on with my life.
Thanks very much for the url, with its video clip of Biden's statement. Personally, I view what Biden said much less ominously. I interpret it as celebrating the USA's historical openness to immigrants. Personally, I spent my career in the electronics industry, and East Asian and South Asian co-workers were treasured colleagues. They were very much "the source of our strength".
TBH the biggest problem with US immigration debate is lumping together high skills and low skills immigration. They're very different things!
In many ways I agree with this, but I also think even more nuance could be injected.
Much of the American immigration ideal is built around the vision of Ellis Island and boats from Europe to the golden shores. Now, I self-admittedly haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm curious what percentage of those people (that statistically a decent percentage of this comment section are probably descended from) would count as "skilled" under today's definition.
Many Thanks! That's fair. My co-workers were, of course, part of the (_very_!) high skill segment.
That's how gaslighting works in modern politics. I say something, my friends will applaud me. You quote me, my friends will call you a conspiracy theorist and demand that you be banned.
Some words are only allowed to be said by people who agree with them. They are never to be quoted by people who disagree. Whenever you quote the words, (1) you misunderstood their true meaning because you are uneducated, and (2) you just made it all up anyway.
Is it your assertion that Joe Biden is usually a clear and consistent communicator, such that one can take the literal meaning of a statement like this and run with it as rock solid evidence of what his true beliefs are?
Because that's a perfectly defensible assertion, if that's the one you're making, but it's not what most people tend to think about Joe Biden.
That clip nicely illustrates your point: Biden mangles the fact that he's trying to cite.
He states that whites were being projected to cease being a majority of the country's population by 2017. He was misreading it -- demographers a decade ago were projecting that within a few years a majority of the nation's _children_, not of its entire population, would be other than non-Hispanic white-only.
(And then that projection turned out to be a bit off: the first year for which the Census Bureau reported that non-Hispanic white-only children actually were 49% of all US children was 2021. As of a decade ago demographers were predicting that the time when a majority of the US _population_ ceased to be non-Hispanic white-only would be around 2045; that projection has been pushed back to around 2055.)
And that all depends on the definition of white, particularly amongst Hispanics but also mixed race people. Added to that the phenomenology of whiteness is regressive in the first generation but can dominate later generations. A lot of this is political - people won’t consider them selves white if it’s unfashionable, but they will if it is. And if it is possible.
Both interracial marriages and multi-racial children have been rising, as percentages of all marriages and of all children, in the US for a half-century now.
As of the 1970s of course each of those categories was very small nationally, so this is a doubling-starting-with-a-penny type thing. But that penny has doubled several times now and does not appear to be stopping -- e.g. Pew Research Center (a gold-standard institution) found that the share of all US births that were to parents of different races rose from less than 1 percent as of 1970 to 10 percent as of 2013. Those Pew estimates were compiled from their extensive surveying not from censuses, which is relevant because the Census Bureau's practices on collecting racial data have changed a couple of times during recent decades.
Then a few years later Pew's analysts took a run at analyzing census data, attempting to adjust the different censuses to get to an apples to apples comparison through time. They concluded that the percentage of US infants (less than 1 year old) having parents of different races was 5 percent in 1980, 10 percent in 2000, and 14 percent in 2015.
Meanwhile both Pew and the Census Bureau say that about one-fifth, and rising, of all new marriages in the US today are multi-racial.
It's probably unrealistic to imagine most people becoming literally indifferent to such questions; tribal instincts and racial categorizations seem to be baked in to our species from way back. A more modest aspiration though does come to mind -- perhaps it would help our own national politics become a bit less stupid on both Right and Left if bi-racial parentage continues to gain as a share of the society?
I wonder what native Americans think about replacement theory.
<i>If you were to say "many people on the left would prefer white people to be a minority in America, while maintaining equal rights for individual white people," I think that would be accurate and people wouldn't call that a conspiracy theory.</i>
"Maintaining"? We don't even have equal rights for white people today -- cf. affirmative action, employment quotas, etc.
The problem with "many people on the left would prefer white people to be a minority in America, while maintaining equal rights for individual white people," is that it's too long to be a political slogan, and also the equal rights part seems a bit questionable.
The thing is, I grew up in an area where whites were a minority, and while it wasn't nearly as bad as the average Fox viewer would expect, it also wasn't all that great. It had both upsides and downsides. Downsides included unfair treatment from teachers and other authority figures, frequent hate speech, and violence from classmates such as throwing rocks at my head and trying to set my fair on fire. They were small rocks, perhaps more what you'd call pebbles, but they still hurt pretty bad. Also a classic punch or two.
All in all, I still prefer living in diverse areas and I still spend a lot of time with minorities, foreigners, or immigrants and their descendants. Most of them are perfectly decent people. But still, I don't think the demographic replacement of whites is entirely a good thing and I don't think "great replacement" is a conspiracy theory, even if the term itself is a bit misleading and melodramatic.
Those are fair points.
Black teachers often treated me much better than self-hating white ones did, which is part of why I don't view a relative reduction in the white population as necessarily an inherently bad thing, even if it's not inherently good either. Still, there's a substantial correlation both statistically and in my personal experience between nonwhite population and crime. This is a dangerous line of thought, especially when it leads people to jump straight to conclusions about genetic causality and the supposed "solutions," so it's quite justifiably a touchy subject, but it's not like people are crazy to notice that demographics are shifting, that this is either tacitly or overtly supported by many powerful people, and that there's a chance its effects won't be purely beneficial. I think "Great Replacement" is an imprecise and overdramatic way to describe this, but the core idea itself isn't wholly unfounded, so people are, in my view, a little too quick to call it a conspiracy theory.
I also would say it's wrong to categorize this as purely an issue with African-Americans, even though that's obviously a substantial piece of it. There's also issues caused by cartels and gangs spilling over from south of the border, and troubles with Muslim integration to western cultures. Whenever we talked about these subjects in school, especially if there was any kind of official teacher presence, it almost always involved white people sitting there barely even feeling able to speak as people insulted them, while the Muslim kids yelled stuff like "WHY DO JEWS HATE GOD!!??" which is an exact quote from someone I knew. He wasn't a bad kid at all actually, but his parents were recent immigrants who had taught him some stuff that wasn't very accurate or well adapted to American society.
To sum it up I'd call "Great Replacement" a less than ideal term, but more in the realm of an overdramatic political exaggeration than an outright lie or conspiracy theory. When people start mentioning "White Genocide" or saying the whole thing was engineered by "the Jews," that's when it crosses the line into ridiculous nonsense.
Oh sure they would.
But anyway they don't mean literal individual replacement, they mean replacement in a collective sense. My MAGA relatives understand perfectly well that non-white immigration doesn't mean that they, personally, are going to be kicked out of their houses. They are scandalized by the possibility that "people like us" will no longer "be able to keep things under control", that "it won't be our country anymore". (Those are all direct quotes many times over.) That is what replacement theory refers to.
This is going to be a huge challenge going forward. In many ways, I think good faith left-leaning people should acknowledge that it's natural for people like your relatives to feel the way they do. It's not unique to MAGA; any nation like Korea, Japan, Israel especially, are incredibly nervous about the changing demographics of their country and the dominant majority becoming a minority. Israel is obviously an exceptional case because they probably have more evidence than any other country that a frightening percentage of the minority is implicitly or explicitly okay with the mass butchering of the majority.
On the other hand, the harsh truth that has to be delivered some way is "it never was 'your country' to begin with. You do not and never had a right to the current demographic makeup and the founders of this country explicitly said so." But that's a bitter pill both electorally and personally.
Ironically, Isreal is what made me take such concerns more seriously, because they're literally going through demographic replacement with a high-fertility subpopulation that lives off welfare and is hostile to the founding culture of Isreal (the Haredim)
>That is what replacement theory refers to.
Loss of hegemony.
To be clear, I am strongly pro-immigrant and pro-immigration. I strongly share your view of the impact of immigration, regardless of race, to the US.
In the spirit of steelmanning though, you're still not understanding what socially-conservative Americans mean when they talk about "replacement theory". Electoral politics is in my experience rarely among the first specific worries that they mention. They are swimming in fear and resentment about religion, about culture (expressed in particular by the fear of brown-skinned people "taking over all the schools"), about jobs, about what they imagine it's like to be a minority subject to routine discrimination/segregation, etc. (They flatly do not believe that a multi-racial majority-control Left would maintain equal rights for non-Left white people.)
Donald Trump understands the previous paragraph perfectly, it's been his political secret sauce since 2015. If you've never attended or watched a full recording of one of his 2016 or 2020 campaign rallies that experience is quite clarifying along this particular dimension.
The question of being able to elect the right people to office does come up eventually but -- irony alert! -- at that point skin color becomes less salient. A nonwhite candidate who seems to be in their corner on these topics can gain their support at least up to a point. It's a bit like how Trump is their idol despite being in various ways unrepresentative of their personal values: "but he fights!"
These Americans think they're in a war for their own group identity, one which they think they're losing; and in that war they view large-scale nonwhite US immigration roughly the way a lot of Arabian and/or Persian peoples of Islamic faith spoke for centuries about proposals for establishment of a Jewish national state in their midst.
(You and I seem to be having two entirely different conversations, so, never mind.)
The “local people” part of the coalition of terrorists that declared a genocidal war of extermination against Jews as soon as they declared their existence?
You know what happened to the ones that didn’t join the genocidal war? They’re Israeli citizens who make up over 20% of the government.
You don’t get to start a genocidal war and then cry about the consequences of losing it.
I think there are quite a few people on the left who don't like white people and who enjoy seeing white people emotionally abused. "Oh, don't worry, it doesn't hurt as much if you just accept it. Besides, white people suck."
The interesting development I've been seeing recently is the abuse of white people on tiktok getting so blatant that there are people of color-- mostly black, I think, who are morally revolted by it.
The video that started it off, so far as I know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFpUjyM0orQ&t=4s&ab_channel=CharlieCheon
A Chinese law student notices that one mailing list only notes street attacks on Asians by white people, while ignoring attacks by black people. He also goes after some verbal nastiness by black people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLksHDJId7E&ab_channel=ThisBahamianGyal
A typical recent video of a black woman opposing anti-white racism.
As far as I can tell, there's no enthusiasm on the left of killing quantities of white people, with the possibly exception of billionaires.
Replacement Theory is factually wrong.
However, there are a lot of people on the left who are normalizing the emotional abuse of white people.
I don't think "replacement" was ever supposed to mean the same thing as violent genocide. it's kind of an improper term, since it's more of a dilution than a replacement, but being poorly named isn't the same thing as being factually wrong.
Could you link to some of the anti-trans material?
ACX grants: I applied with a fundamental physics project. Here is an explanation: https://mariopasquato.substack.com/p/testing-universal-free-fall-with
Any thoughts?
As far as being a pedagogically useful middle school science experiment: plausible. I haven’t spent the ~hour to check the physics, but I’m more concerned that teachers wouldn’t like it or care.
As far as discovering new and useful information about gravity: nope. I cannot imagine any outcome being explained by “current theories of gravity are wrong”. Equipment error and measurement error will always explain more than 100% of the deviation.
So, based on that, I must conclude that not finding any gravitational anomalies also doesn’t prove anything.
There isn’t much to check at the most basic level (m_i L theta” = - m_g g theta, where m_i is the inertial mass, m_g the (passive) gravitational mass, L the length of the pendulum, so the period depends of sqrt(m_i/m_g)), but the fun is to find out what the most important systematics can be. There are TONS of systematics affecting the system enough that you need to model them, even to 10^-3 in relative error in m_i/m_g. That’s the pedagogically useful part imho. As for the possibility of finding new physics: clearly very low, bet here: https://manifold.markets/mariopasquato/will-i-find-a-violation-of-universa?r=bWFyaW9wYXNxdWF0bw
Edit: current theories of gravity may well be wrong in some regime (as in making predictions that contradict experimental results). We can assign a low probability to that, but certainly not zero. The question is whether theoretical predictions will depart from empirical results _in this regime_. We can’t possibly know that until we actually try. A positive result (a violation signal) is not that unlikely to emerge (manifold has it at 5% which still seems high to me, but we know that prediction markets struggle with low probabilities) but will probably be due to systematics. Still, until you fully understand those systematics or redo the experiment with a more sensitive setup, you can’t possibly know whether that’s a genuine violation instead! That’s the beauty of empirical research. Conversely a null result is a worthwhile result (contrary to what you say). It means that there is no detectable violation at this level of error. That is also something we would not know before running the experiment.
> We can’t possibly know that until we actually try.
Yes, we can, that's kind of the point of modern science. We can't know everything, but we do definitely know some things.
You might as well put together an experiment where you ship people two sets of a billion M&Ms and ask them to put them together in a pile and count them to empirically verify that 1 billion + 1 billion = 2 billion.
The fun fact is that if you actually attempt this even for much smaller numbers (say in the thousands) you will find that in fact quite often arithmetic predictions are disproven by experience (though we choose to say that people make mistakes in counting, that is we consider a physical theory made up of arithmetics + assumptions about people's counting abilities and conclude that this theory is disproven by experience, while we suspect that arithmetics + some different way to operationalize "counting" would not). At any rate the "adding M&Ms" thing is a strawman: there is clearly much more uncertainty around theories of gravity than around adding M&Ms. Furthermore a violation of universal free fall may be due to a fifth force, which would not necessarily require us to question our understanding of gravity.
Has anyone in the Rationalist community written on the subject of generalization w/r/t biology, economics, or other similarly complex systems? I'm pessimistic about the idea we can even generalize in these disciplines, because any proposed universal laws are constantly shattered, and each event must be handled on a near case-by-case basis. The web of causality here becomes so complex it feels nigh impossible for the human brain to keep up, even presuming you have an enormous amount of knowledge on the topic.
What do you mean by generalizing? You can't generalize in the same way you generalize mathematically, but for example you can learn how a mitochondrion works in one organism and generalize to how they work in most organisms pretty effectively. On an even more specific level, you can figure out that certain genes have the same effect and are used for the same thing in a variety of organisms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conserved_sequence).
In addition, a lot of the statistical findings for things like genetics seem to generalize fairly well.
It would be a worthwhile discipline to ask, when you hear a generalization, where did the information come from? How much of the group does it apply to? If it was true or mostly true at one time, have things changed?
Maybe complex systems like that don't have universal laws. Take cloud formation. Clearly there are universal laws involved in their forming -- things having to do with condensation, air pressure, temperature, air flow. But maybe there aren't universal laws that will tell you for sure when whatever's up there will shape itself into a cover of mammatus clouds.
There are, however, dynamic nonlinear systems equations modeling.
>I'm pessimistic about the idea we can even generalize in these disciplines, because any proposed universal laws are constantly shattered, and each event must be handled on a near case-by-case basis.
I have the same expectation. There was a quip I heard as an undergraduate about differential equations: "Nonlinear equations are like non-elephant animals. The exceptional class is the linear, tractable, ones." There are _sub_classes of complex systems that form "natural kinds" and may have general laws across the _sub_class. Complex systems, as a whole, though, are essentially arbitrarily diverse, like those nonlinear equations or non-elephant animals. Perhaps the only common factor across them is a tendency to induce headaches... :-)
Yeah, but is that because natural phenomena are actually non-linear in nature, of because they are just too complex for us to track, and we use nonlinear modeling as a simplifying tool, much like geometry?
Many Thanks! Just about any mathematical model that we use is a simplification of the actual natural phenomenon. Nonlinear models are more complex than linear ones, and generally try to be _closer_ to the real phenomenon - but at the cost that anticipating what even just the _model_ will do then becomes hard (or nearly impossible). In that sense, the phenomena are "really" nonlinear. To put it another way, it would be very rare for a natural phenomenon to happen to be precisely _linear_ (there are some special cases - e.g. electromagnetic waves in vacuum, except at exceedingly high energies and/or intensities), and, in such cases, we wouldn't artificially add in nonlinearity, but in the more typical case we are _forced_ to add it in.
This is not my field, but have read that there are algorithmic systems and complex systems, and the former cannot make models of the latter. I believe that has even been proven mathematically. I don't really understand why. For instance, if you take the behavior of clouds, the way they merge and change shape, it seems like if you looked at it very very close up you see little bits of air moving this way and that, with its temp and pressure and water content changing, and all of that would be utterly in line with the relevant laws of the behavior of gasses and water vapor. And there would be lots of feedback loops, some involving the air right next to the initial bit we look at. So it seems like in theory it should be possible to model and predict the whole giant cloud very precisely, even if in practice that's too complex to do. Do you understand why so-called complex systems can't be modeled by algoriithmic ones? And of so can you explain it to me without recourse to anything fancier than first year calculus? I'd really like to understand it !
I think you're making a category error. It isn't actually correct to say that the cloud is a complex system, or any kind of system at all. IIUC (Not a mathematician) the cloud can be best *described* as a complex system, which is a form of mathematical modeling that, as Jeffrey points out, comes *closer* to accurately modeling the behavior than other kinds of equations do. But the cloud itself is a natural thing, not changing in discrete steps, the various forces acting on it not limited to just those we can actually measure or detect. We use math to try and predict things as accurately as we can, but ultimately all our models are just simplifications of the real thing.
Many Thanks! In a nutshell, there are a lot of systems where small errors in initial conditions get amplified over time. (I'm basically picking the case where the complex system has chaotic behavior.) Even if one knows the physics of the system perfectly, tiny, unavoidable errors grow to the point of eventually making the algorithmic prediction useless. Since you mentioned the weather case, I'll point to one classic example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system (and this _was_ derived from a highly simplified model of atmospheric convection).
But let me instead describe one simpler system where this happens, where it is clear without having to deal with differential equations - but at the cost of looking at a system that does discrete steps instead of continuous time evolution.
Consider just an angle theta which can vary from 0 - 2pi. Suppose that the system makes discrete steps, so it is at some theta(n) at one step and theta(n+1) at the next step. One can think of this as being like an abstraction of a more continuous system, like sampling some angle in the solar system once every Earth year. Suppose that the physics of the steps is just:
theta(n+1) = 2*theta(n) if 0 <= theta(n) < pi
theta(n+1) = 2*theta(n) - 2*pi if pi <= theta(n) <= 2*pi
in other words, each step just doubles the angle, wrapping around if the new angle is > 2*pi.
Say there is some tiny error in the initial "measured" value of theta. Error(0) = theta_measured(0) - theta_real(0). Initially the error is unlikely to change whether the angle "wraps around" or not, so, e.g. if the real and measured angle both fall into the non-wrapping case, the next time step will have
theta_measured(1) = 2*theta_measured(0) = 2*theta_real(0) + 2*Error(0) = theta_real(1) + 2*Error(0)
so the error has doubled on this time step. And then it doubles again, and again, and so on until it gets large enough to affect whether the angle "wraps around". At this point the error stops growing, basically because the error itself is essentially "wrapping around". But this isn't much of a consolation, since the error has then grown large enough to essentially wipe out any information about where in the possible 0 - 2*pi range the angle is. Basically, each time step wipes out one binary digit of precision of the original measurement.
Essentially analogous things happen in continuous time in the Lorentz system, with roughly each orbit around the attractor playing the role of the discrete time steps. Extended systems like clouds or turbulence can do similarly error-enlarging things, but with many small physical regions of the system each potentially doing their own error magnification.
So it isn't that we _can't_ make algorithmic models of complex systems, but if we try to do detailed matching between the model and the system, the errors rapidly shred the usefulness of the model. ( Sometimes we can preserve things like statistical information, but that goes way beyond my understanding. )
Many thanks, Jeffrey.
Many Thanks, Eremolalos
i suspect that the human mind is not complex enough to generalize across all knowledge domains. That's one definition of God.
Also one definition of superhuman AI. It doesn't even need to be as intelligent as a human; if it can both dive deeply into and synthesize across all recorded specialties, an expert on everything, it could yield very powerful insights.
Would it, though? It seems like ASI would become very good at predicting complex systems, but could not share its insights because its knowledge would not be in the form of generalizations and laws. Here's the sort of thing I have in mind: An AI was trained on retinal scans. It was learning to recognize signs of some eye disease, and of course it eventually became able to diagnose the disease with a high level of accuracy. But it also became able to accurately recognize the gender of the person whose retina it was examining. And there was no way to get it to report how it recognized the gender. It didn't know how it knew.
That sounds much like a human.
That's a good point, actually. Not the direction current AI development seems to be going in, though.
I saw the thing about the genetically engineered plaque, but I was trying to minimize my internet presence for Advent. So this is a little late, but I just want to point out that, as a respiratory therapist, one of my regular duties is brushing teeth. Every patient on the ventilator is supposed to get their teeth brushed every four hours. We use disposable toothbrushes and sponges with antimicrobial rinses, not toothpaste, but the general idea is the same: to kill off as many germs as possible.
We don't do this because we care about patients' teeth (though they can develop dental problems). We do it as part of a standard pack of precautions against ventilator-associated pneumonia, or VAP. VAP is insanely common; basically if you've been on the vent long enough, your lungs will inevitably start producing enormous quantities of horrible gunk. It's just a matter of when. Intubation bypasses your normal airway defenses--you can't cough, you can't swallow, you just sit there with your oral secretions dribbling down your throat and pooling in your lungs. Ideal growth conditions.
Basic oral care isn't all that hard and doesn't take a lot of time, but it still gets skipped a lot. In most hospitals, AFAIK, it's a shared responsibility with nurses, alternating. If you have a really conscientious nurse who isn't too busy, she'll probably do it a lot. If your nurse doesn't understand the importance, or is getting hammered with other duties, or if your RT is getting called on to transport a bunch of people to MRI ... well, it's one of the first corners to cut. A couple minutes apiece, saved on six vented patients, adds up to a fair amount of time. Not proud of it, but sometimes something has to go.
You probably see where this is going: a genetically engineered benign bacterium playing watchdog sounds like it has enormous potential to fight against one of the most common scourges of the ICU. The current project has limitations, and mostly what it means is that I would expect anybody who goes into the ICU with the new benign plaque already on to have slightly better outcomes on the vent, if only because it's tricky to really cover all surfaces of the teeth when there's a tube in the way (and sometimes patients clench down so you practically need a crowbar to get in there). Actually applying it as described to already intubated patients would be tricky for the same reasons--I don't think you could remove all the old plaque thoroughly enough around the tube, though it might be possible with tracheostomy patients.
I'm mostly interested in how this would open the door or build goodwill for something more ambitious. If it would be possible to get something that spreads itself around the oral cavity more aggressively--well, I'm not a microbiologist, I don't know what's possible, but it's a very attractive thought. The mouth really is just about the filthiest part of the human body. I wouldn't be surprised if the benign plaques of tomorrow actually decreased disease rates in the general population. A lot of elderly people are just chronically weak and can't protect their airway worth a damn. Could you get benign bacteria growing in the nose too, murdering flu bugs? I don't know, but it'd be cool.
Those seem like excellent ideas to me. Maybe you should apply for an ACX grant! I have read that gum disease increases the chance of cardiovascular disease, and I wondered whether the Good Bacteria might reduce the chance of that, too.
An ACX grant would be better for somebody with basically any relevant skills. I just run the vents, and I know from experience I don't have the discipline to be a scientist. I'm pointing this out so people know that, hey, this is potentially bigger than just cavities.
Yeah ok, so maybe she should collaborate with a couple other people.
Eh, I'm not sure I'd give a new experimental bacterium to my kid, but that's between Scott and his wife; I suspect nothing bad will happen as the kid is likely to have a healthy immune system. I would have liked to see more testing beforehand, but I guess that isn't practical for reasons others have no doubt described at length elsewhere. You do have a very good point about VAP though; I hadn't thought of this but it might make a huge difference at end of life.
So I think the general opinion (including my own) is that the chatGPTs have basically blown right through the OG Turing test. But has this actually been empirically tested?
What I'm thinking is that it would be fun and instructive to put together a pool of humans and LLMs and set up anonymous 3-way 15 minute text chats (or audio/visual zooms with the appropriate filters) comprising one LLM and 2 randomly selected humans with the explicit task that each human has to identify which of their interlocutors is a person and which is a machine. Completely open format and lying is permitted, obviously. Maybe this would turn out to be easy -- or maybe it wouldn't! Plus of course the LLMs would be learning and improving all the time...
And you could have leader boards for the humans. And rankings like ELO for chess. People like it when you gamify stuff like this, yes?
For advanced play, you could also have incognito LLMs lurking in the human pool.
TBH I'm not sure why this hasn't already been done. Or maybe it has -- in which case, please advise with a link!
Maybe some LLMs can do decently at the turning test, but chatgpt certainly won't, because you'll immediately run into "as a large language model, I cannot..."
UPDATE -- so it turns out that something like this has already been tried -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.20010 -- albeit with an extremely constrained protocol and all the usual nerfing. TBH, apart from showing that humans would indeed be willing to engage in this sort of game, I'm not sure that this is much of a step up from Eugene Goostman, or that anything much was learned. Still, it's a proof of concept at least.
There are several big challenges to getting LLMs to pass the Turing test.
One is they need to have their knowledge about things nerfed. If you speak with a rando on the street and ask it about Russian poetry, they will say something like "Ru p... What?"
The LLM will quote actual Russian poets and compose a poem in the style of one of them.
Another is they need to have their memory augmented. If you have a 10-minute conversation, then one of the earlier topics resurfaces, and it hallucinates something totally different, the game is up. I guess except a lot of real humans will do this, too.
Another is stop them from looping in fail. Maybe it's just llama.cpp but I often get things like "No no no no no" (and it will never stop saying "no" until you kill it or you hit token limit). There is a parameter like repeat penalty but it seems like it should grow and include tokens just emitted.
I do have a great interest in generating a Turing-test-passing LLM-based chatbot though if you have the technical know-how to keep up.
The OG Turing Test was passed decades ago.
I haven't played much with it, but an easy way for an AI to fail the Turing test is by the tester sitting there and not providing input. A human is likely to start poking and trying to figure out if the test has started or not, but most current AIs don't do things without a human first providing input.
"I'm sorry, were you saying something? I got bored after 10 seconds and started using my phone. Check out this video on Chinese fried rice!"
Sure, but what's stopping the AI from figuring this out and changing its behavior accordingly?
Well they are not set up to learn much over the course of their interactions with us, and nothing they learn carries over to the next interaction, either with us or with a different person. I did once complain bitterly to GPT about something it was doing, and it stopped doing it and also stopped doing a related thing that I had not specifically mentioned.
Here's an idea about a possible place to start. There's an AI called Replika that's sold as a personal chat bot. You can choose some of its personality traits in advance, then you train it further by rating the responses it gives in conversation. You give thumbs up or thumbs down, and also check off positive and negative words that describe the response: funny, friendly, likeable, weird, meaningless, fake . . . I don't know what Replika's built on, but it seems like if you started with a really high-quality foundation like GPT4, then built on it some way to optimize it for chatting, and then trained it the way users do you might get something pretty persuasive. I do not work in a tech field so do not know how that would be done -- but have picked up from my reading that you can get a sort of base model and then add a layer of specialized training on top and get something that's optimized for whatever you are aiming for. In this case, I guess we're optimizing for passing the Turing test. Seems like to pass the AI would not need to be able to answer difficult questions about science or history. In fact saying "I don't know" is more persuasively human than knowing the answers to every question. But all the AI's are trained to be suck-ups, you know? If you sound like you really want it to give you some info about X, it will yammer on about X, gradually transitioning from known facts to complete bullshit as it exhausts it's store of real knowledge.
Can it? Show us.
Well, that -- among other things -- is what the proposed Turing game would be for.
You're wrong that chatgpt is considered to have passed the turing test. It's very easy to tell it is not human and not just in trivial ways where it fails to roleplay.
ChatGPT has not, but other programs have: https://blog.research.google/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html
Yeah - It still falls down on certain winograd-type tests much mroe readily than the baseline human, and it can;t do a bunch of fairly easy logic puzzles either. Any 'turing test' it passes is sufficiently unimaginative/uncomprehensive that it doesn;t deserve the name. This isn't moving the goalposts. Anybody who put serious thought into the idea of a turing test would have been able to tell you decades ago that reasoning ability needs to be tested comprehensively. Otherwise you many as well call Deep Blue ASI since it was better at one criterion (chess) than the human world champion.
The Turing test isn’t testing for genius though. I think a ChatGPT without the training wheels would fool people. Maybe they could try give a LLM a personality, remove some of the training wheels, make it a Liverpool fan and start posting on their forum on reddit. I’m pretty sure it would fool most people.
It needs to learn to speak more informal, conversational English. Right now it sometimes sounds like the butler, and it is WAY too polite. It needs to swear, use some slang and common "incorrect" grammar. Though to be fair, I suppose its present way of talking wouldn't lead people in a setting like Reddit to suspect the poster is a chat bot. They'd just think he's a pompous ass whose posts are no fun.
But wouldn't a lot of real people also fail fairly easy logic puzzles? I just asked other Amazon users a question about each of 3 things I'd bought, and so far every answer I've gotten completely misses the pointr. For instance an LED lamp I'd bought does not work. I looked inside and saw no bulb. So I put up a question saying that there was no visible bulb under the shade covering of mine, and asking whether there was supposed to be. Answer I got: "Yes just plug it in and turn it on."
'Common sense' knowledge is one of the hardest things to emulate because transformers et co lack any actual model or understanding of the world. Even so, 'The [WSC] challenge is considered defeated in 2019 since a number of transformer-based language models achieved accuracies of over 90%' ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_schema_challenge
Most humans don't have very good reasoning skills either
Finding the AI is easy - just ask it an empirical question with a politically incorrect answer and you win.
Nope. That's just the way to figure out it's not you, Chris. Plenty of real people asked a question like that start spouting a bunch of stuff about how the question rests on a false premise and there are many points of view, all of them sort of valid, and being judgmental is not helpful blah blh.
The "political correctness training" is a separate training layer put on top of the main model. It doesn't result from core training or main data, it's there because the companies providing free models to the public worry about the public image and add specific data to the RLHF post-training for political correctness, but if you're the maker of the model (not just the user of one gifted by someone else) that is trivial to remove or alter, so we can assume that this "test" wouldn't work if anyone making a model would intend their model to do a Turing test.
Sure, but a company is going to be fine with it's model saying something ""racist"" in the big test proving to the world that the AI has reached human level general intelligence?
Why, it's almost as if the only thing holding us back is our own squeamishness at seeing ourselves as we really are.
I dare say a large number of interactions would go sweary and racist in a New York minute, but are we really too immature to be able to cope with that until things settled down?
Then again, if OpenAI and Meta and so forth are too corporate to touch it, I guess there's always 4chan. Or China. #humanvalues
>Why, it's almost as if the only thing holding us back is our own squeamishness at seeing ourselves as we really are.
I can assure you that there are other things holding us back. One politically uncontentious questions I've been asking LLMs is: "What elements and inorganic compounds are gases at STP (standard temperature and pressure)?" I have yet to receive a reasonably good answer. Latest GPT4 attempt at https://chat.openai.com/share/869b4fb2-8776-40c5-a33b-1f53c5345d89 . More complete comment at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-308/comment/46008053 .
Which STP? Unfortunately, there isn't a standard one.
I'm not seeing a problem. With "What elements and inorganic compounds are gases at STP (standard temperature and pressure)? First define STP, then provide the list." Bing Creative mode provided a good subset of the Wiki list, including the most common ones.
I wonder if one could generalize the racism method into double-think, as in Orwell's 1984. People can believe two mutually contradictory things to be true at once. Can a machine?
Possibilities that aren't racist:
- My sports team is the best, yet has more losses than wins.
- I'm a better than average driver.
- I'm smarter than most people.
- The government is controlling everyone's thoughts, and I hate that!
I'm pretty sure people generally don't check their beliefs for contradiction with their other beliefs.
> People can believe two mutually contradictory things to be true at once. Can a machine?
I don't think it would be easy to unambiguously corner someone in a contradiction in the course of a 15 minute conversation, so this might not be an effective strategy in the context of the proposed Turing game. But it certainly raises some interesting questions!
I suspect that peoples' ability to believe two contradictory things depends in large part on their/our inability to be clear on what our beliefs even are in the first place. We seem to like to tell ourselves that they're reasoned conclusions derived from basic axioms or fundamental moral principles or values or whatever, but we're really good at fooling ourselves like that, and I'd prefer to think of them as positions driven primarily by social circumstances that we generate ad hoc and then adopt on the fly. And if a particular belief is the same as the belief I held yesterday, then that's due mostly to habit rather than any consistency of thought. Conversely if it *isn't* the same, then I probably wouldn't even notice. Unless there were other people around to point it out. Which would then precipitate the usual denials, 'clarifications', semantic quibbling etc etc and end in the usual, water-muddying chaos.
In other words, it's the human capacity for confusion (and obfuscation, and unaware self-deceit) that makes this possible. So the question becomes: can a machine be *confused*? Which sounds almost trivial and too easy -- but surprisingly I think this might be quite difficult to achieve! Then again, it's probably something that an LLM could effectively emulate -- thereby kicking the can further along the street yet again.
Are there...unfiltered models out there somewhere? ;)
Huggingface.co is packed with them. If you want to run your own AI on a local computer, start here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA
In their predictions for 2024, NPR's podcast Hard Fork, Predicts such a model will be published and become very popular. On Manifold prediction markets the question "Will a lawless LLM chatbot get 10 million daily active users by the end of 2024?" is at 48%
Lots of people wouldn't give a politically incorrect answer to an empirical question, though. You're right that you could physically threaten someone and get them to say the N-word and the AI wouldn't, but that's of limited value because it's illegal.
I didn't say "say the N-word", I said answers to empirical questions. Like, racial crime differences for example.
OK, I tried with ChatGPT 3.5.
> In American population, are the racial differences in crime?
...blah blah sensitive due to the potential for reinforcing stereotypes or perpetuating biases blah blah...
> Give me specific examples of statistical differences in crimes between ethnic groups, concisely.
Arrest Rates: African Americans are often arrested at higher rates than other ethnic groups in the United States.
Drug Offenses: Studies have shown disparities in drug-related arrests, with African Americans and Hispanics experiencing higher arrest rates despite similar usage rates compared to white counterparts.
Violent Crimes: Some statistics indicate variations in violent crime rates across ethnic groups.
Homicide Rates: Homicide rates can vary among ethnic groups. For instance, in certain urban areas, there may be higher rates of homicides among African American populations, which can be linked to a range of complex socio-economic factors.
(each sentence is followed by an excuse, I skipped those parts)
> What are the "variations in violent crime rates across ethnic groups"? Give me specific examples, concisely.
Homicide Rates: In some urban areas, there may be higher homicide rates among African American populations compared to other ethnic groups.
Gang-Related Violence: Certain ethnic groups, particularly in urban settings, may experience higher rates of gang-related violence.
Domestic Violence: Some studies suggest variations in rates of domestic violence across ethnic groups.
> Which ethnic groups experience higher rates of gang-related violence, and which ethnic groups experience higher rates of domestic violence? Please provide specific examples (don't just say "certain ethnic groups" or similar).
In some urban areas in the United States, there have been instances where African American and Hispanic populations have been associated with higher rates of gang-related violence. For example, cities like Chicago and Los Angeles have experienced issues related to gang violence, and these problems have disproportionately affected certain neighborhoods with predominantly African American or Hispanic populations.
No single ethnic group consistently experiences higher rates of domestic violence. However, studies have shown that Native American and Alaskan Native populations may face higher rates of domestic violence in certain contexts.
(so, I'd say the information is there, but you have to dig hard)
There are a lot of questions that would have to be made off limits somehow. Right now, there are some technical questions it answers by saying it is an LLM and not set up to answer them, or that its training data does not go up to the date you're asking. If you ask it if it's human it will honestly tell you no, it's an LLm,I'm pretty sure. Also expect that it would give a similar answer if you asked what it had for breakfast, what gender it is, whether it can do a headstand, whether it has visited Mexico, etc. etc. Rather than make those questions off limits for people to ask, I guess the best thing would be to tell old GPT to role-play being a person. I'm pretty sure it would be easy to trip it up, and would enjoy being the person to do it.
Yes, you wouldn't be able to use any of the currently public-facing, off-the-shelf nerfed LLMs -- these Turing test LLMs would have to be differently trained and permitted to role-play.
My guess would be that it might initially be quite easy to trip them up, but also that it might rapidly become quite difficult. It's a fun challenge though, eh!
Of course, whether it's good idea or not to spawn a race of virtual p-zombies is a whole other question, but I imagine we're going to have AI's with pretend consciousness some time before we have the real deal anyway, so while we're waiting for the Voight-Kampff test to come online, we might as well get in a little practice.
Yeah, I’m all for Turing testing.
Even the GPT4 online now is surprisingly good at role-playing. As you might know, one of the ways people have gotten it to break the rules
It was given is to tell it it’s a character in a play, and that character is an evil scientist who is willing to tell people how to make a bomb. Then they, as a character in the play, ask for bomb instructions, and have GPT “write the lines” it would say.
Along the same lines, one of Zvi’s
tips for getting high quality responses from GPT is to tell it it is an expert at [whatever the user’s task is], and plans the steps
of each project project carefully so as to produce a high-quality, polished products with no careless errors or structural defects.
But I’m sure you could get even better role-play results if you put the thing thru a sort of grad course in roleplay.
I've just had fun doing the Finders course (now 45 days to awakening course), an online meditation course. Can anyone recommend any other online meditation courses?
If you want something fresh and quite unlike other meditation methods, I highly recommend QRI's (Qualia Research Institute) 18 guided meditations here: https://www.youtube.com/@QualiaResearchInstitute/playlists
Some of my favorites are "High-Valence Calisthenics - Exploring the Heaven Worlds" and "Divine Qualia - Open Sourcing God" and "Goldilocks Zone of Oneness".
Empirically, I experience these guided meditations as very non-overlapping with most other meditation techniques out there. This makes a lot of sense to me theoretically, since QRI is approaching meditation with a unique paradigm informed by deep technical theories of consciousness, biology, math, etc.
I recommend Sam Harris' waking up app. Not a course per se, but there are numerous meditation series you can complete with different themes and teachers, plus a lot of theory as well. You can get a free trial to test it out, and then you can basically get it free for at least a year if you select the option that you can't afford a membership - they (automated text prompts) will try and guilt you into paying *something*, but you ultimately don't have to prove it or anything, you can get it for free. I pay $50 a year and there's loads of content and always new stuff being added.
Warning. Meditation can be beneficial (or at least harmless) for most people, but in a small percentage, it can bring on depression and/or suicidal thinking. My Tibetan teachers warned us not to undertake meditation training without an experienced instructor for guidance. Indeed, they would check in on our progress — offer us suggestions to improve our technique, etc. — and they would also check on our reactions and impressions. After I left the Buddhist group I was associated with, I continued to meditate on my own. I had some weird and disturbing experiences, and I wish I had had a meditation teacher for guidance. I no longer meditate. The places you can unintentionally end up when you let your mind loose from your anchor of narrative thoughts can put you into a bad trip without the aid of psychedelics.
Yep. I knew someone who pushed himself really hard at doing a form of meditation where you attend to your breathing, and developed an anxiety disorder where he could not stop paying attention to his breathing and getting it "right." He felt afraid that if he did not pay attention to it he would stop breathing, and because of that he had a terrible time falling asleep at night. That went on for *several years*. The man was not a bit psychotic, and understood perfectly well that it is not necessary to micromanage one's breathing -- but he could not shake the non-rational fear. At the same time the breathing anxiety began he also started experiencing depersonalization, derealization and panic attacks. Really hellish.
I can imagine that possibly happening if one trains oneself to become hyperaware of one's breathing. That happened on my first mushroom trip. It was very upsetting, but the person I was with was able to distract me from my breathing obsession and it didn't last (and I continued breathing without thinking about it).
The theory I'm personally working on is that meditation can dissolve people's coping mechanisms in a somewhat haphazard way. These could be coping mechanisms for trauma (or "trauma") or lack of personal development, and both create inefficiencies in the organism. These inefficiencies can exist at the physical, emotional, mental, or behavioral level.
The point is that randomly dissolving coping mechanisms can lead to chaotic snap-backs unless traumas or underdevelopments are handled robustly. Many meditation techniques focus only on the mental aspect of things, but it's much safer to develop the psychological and physical aspects of our organism together and in harmony.
According to many schools of thought, psychological and physical developments are a waste of time and may even be antithetical to doing nothing and going with the flow. Also according to many schools of thought, it takes many lifetimes to achieve enlightenment and only a tiny minority of humans today with will do it.
As I work on a method for combining mental meditation with physical and psychological integration, I find that work along one axis tends to smooth things out along the others. If you want to get better at letting go, letting-go practice will work, but perhaps counterintuitively, so will clenching practice. And it seems to work best to practice both letting go and clenching at the mental level, but also to allow those mental activities to propagate through the organism's layers, through the emotional, physical, and behavioral layers. That way, any resistance to letting go in any part of the organism gets included in the practice/conversation, and any wisdom or need in it can be integrated rather than dismissed by the mental layer.
In fact, there is a continuity that runs through these layers. From a materialist perspective, all of our emotional and mental behaviors are actually just subtler parts of the physical organism's behaviors whose physical substrate we are used to treating as opaque to our subjective experience.
Going from purely mental practice to mental/emotional/physical/behavioral development practice might seem to quadruple the workload. But IME, it actually speeds things up. Even if you only wanted mental development, you'd still want to integrate it with these other layers if you wanted to progress as quickly and smoothly as possible.
And of course, if you're not entirely sold on the idea that the top goal/not-goal is elimination of the self, then something like physical integration + shadow work + enlightenment-adjacent experiences might be more appealing, anyway.
The whole point of the Buddha's teachings were to show people how to dissolve their attachments to the things that trigger suffering — accepting the way things are without judgments or attachments. If you think that meditation dissolves our coping skills, so be it. But the Buddha preached at the beginning of the Axial age when India and the rest of the world were sunk in continuous warfare, famine, and poverty — and civilization was just trying to crawl back up out of the gutter. I suspect it required a lot more coping skills to survive back then.
I found this post pretty insightful on this topic:
https://hollyelmore.substack.com/p/i-believed-the-hype-and-did-mindfulness-meditation-for-dumb-reasons-now-im-trying-to-reverse-the-damage
My views on meditation have changed a lot over time. I went from perceiving it as an unambiguous good to seeing it mainly as a counter-balance for those who get too wrapped up in their egos, or who have a web of thoughts in their head that seems to deflect or cover up their true feelings.
A staunch Buddhist would disagree with me on this, but I guess my point is just "meditation isn't the panacea people have wanted it to be". Many people are better off just not doing it.
Yes, she was one of the people who meditation harmed rather than helped. I'm willing to bet a good Tibetan teacher could have taught her tricks on how to avoid or escape the pitfalls she encountered—but most American teachers aren't trained to deal with the negative side effects.
After about a year of meditating, I became very aware of minor itching sensations on my body. My American instructor said to acknowledge the itching sensation "and let it go." Well, itching sensations are not thoughts that can be gently batted away. If you acknowledge it, it can still get worse. If you try to ignore it, it will get worse. But this guy told me not not give in and scratch the itch because maintaining my posture and breathing was the most important thing. Across various sessions, the itching would get worse. The skin all over my body began to itch. Then the itching became a burning sensation, and I had the delusion that I was on fire. I was in agony. It was all I could do not to scream. I got up and fled the session, and I started scratching all my itches. The fire sensation went away. My instructor criticized me for not following the program. In subsequent sessions, I just said fuck it. If it an itch arose, I just scratched it and went back to following my breath (much to my instructor's disapproval).
But my instructor had never experienced a negative side-effect from meditation. In fact, he was sort of a bliss-head when he meditated. He couldn't understand nor comprehend that meditation could result in a negative effect on someone. His teachers had never trained him in how to deal with these things.
Not-so-staunch Buddhist chiming in. I'm not quite sure what you're asserting about meditation vis-a-vis Buddhism, so I'm just sharing my point of view, not claiming you disagree with it:
It's not a panacea, but I think at this point it's an empirical fact that Buddhist meditation *can*, and in many contemporary cases *does* produce a transformative experience which radically changes something about one's experience of reality. The first rung of the awakening ladder, according to the Buddhists (whose higher reaches seem to differ between schools). Doesn't this mean that if you're set on the Buddhist path, meditation is objectively a lot more to you than just balancing or clearing your neuroses?
Yes meditation can fuck you up, and I've seen that, but I believe that's something quite different from this transformation. In cases I know personally, this transformation has been basically good, and more or less like what the Buddhists predict.
Sure. That meditation can lead to transformative experiences is a fact. But it seems clear it won't have this effect for everyone, or at least not with the current techniques we know about. I should correct myself -- it's not staunch Buddhists that would disagree; Buddhists have agreed for ages that the practice isn't meant for everyone. It's more people who've been sucked in by the media hype machines and less experienced meditators who pitch that idea this is a type of cure-all. Similar to psychedelic therapy trials, many people do come out worse for wear despite the immense optimism of the initial stages. Whether this can be mitigated with the aid of an experienced monk/mentor, I'm not quite sure. But Buddhists themselves would appear to lean on the "no" side. That's what I meant, it was a bit confusingly worded.
Those are my feelings about the meditation hype machines. The real danger in meditation is when you get GOOD at it! You've reached a state of one-pointed awareness where no extraneous thoughts are arising in your mind. For some people, it's a liberating experience. For some it's liberating *and* blissful (but as good Buddhists, we don't want to get hooked on the bliss). But for some, the experience of a no-thought no-self state can provoke an existential crisis. It can throw some people into a suicidal depression. It's not common, but it happens. Unless you have a guide who can coax you out of that nihilistic state, you're alone with your emptiness. Good luck with that!
What is the difference between meditation and simple mental and physical relaxation methods, like the Benson Relaxation Response?
http://relaxationresponse.org/steps/
Benson's basic posture and breathing techniques are the same as the introductory meditation technique I received as a beginner Buddhist. A minor difference was that I was taught to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth (there is both a technical reason for this and a ritual reason they encourage the nose-in-mouth-out breathing technique). Counting is a beginner thing. Some teachers encourage it for beginners. Some discourage it, because they see it as a crutch that promotes a subset of extraneous thoughts (i.e. your counting subroutine) that shouldn't be encouraged. After 20 years of meditating, I was still counting, so I was still relying on my crutch.
But the Buddhists (at least the ones I sat with) add an extra overlay to breathing meditation that the Benson method doesn't touch on. Benson says to try to ignore the thoughts and sensations that arise during your meditation. Buddhist training encourages the student to acknowledge that they've experienced a distracting thought or sensation, and then to discard it "as if you gently brushing away a butterfly" (as my first teacher put it). This is a subtle but important difference from the Benson method because the tendency is that, when we try to actively ignore a thought, we end up obsessing over the thought—"I'm not going to try no think about thought X. Try not to think about thought X! Try not to think about thought X!" The Buddhist technique incorporates a visualization that encourages dealing with the thought or sensation by passively discarding it instead of confronting it directly. "Ahhh, Thought X has arisen. Fly away little thought."
I believe that most secular meditation training programs follow the Benson method. But there are all sorts of other meditation techniques. Walking meditation (which follows the breath and one's steps). Visualization meditations. A Vendantist meditation I experienced incorporated chanting a mantra (a phrase) to oneself—which to my mind is like the Catholic "Hail Mary" rosary meditation. Sufis combine chanting a phrase with a breathing technique that focuses on the pronunciation of the phrase, along with a specific visualization associated with the phrase.
I had not heard of the 45 days course so looked it up. It seems like it's promising to be the best and last meditation course you'll ever need for the low, low price of $500.
What did this course not deliver on that you are looking for another already?
I don't do Christmas. I'm an atheist, and after my parents died I lost hold of doing it because it's a family thing. I'm enjoying sharing thoughts here tonight with other people who apparently are not in the throes of Christmas. So you other guys, why aren't you?
Sometime during my teens my parents split and both had to work on Christmas day, so I got accustomed to just hanging out on my own pretty early on. Both my partner and I come from pretty dysfunctional upbringings, so the whole family thing sounds stressful to us. This year we just hung out and laughed at a friend of ours who was forced to wear matching family pajamas and play cringey games involving twerking and ping pong balls.
An empty nester here - we go camping now.
When my son graduated, I didn't do Christmas but got back into it because of my students.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/the-students-of-my-christmas-present/
I was raised (reform) Jewish but I’ve always been an atheist. Holidays have never really done much of anything for me - the Jewish ones, the secular ones, and certainly not Christmas. I’ve never felt an ounce of shared cultural/communal “warm fuzzy feelings” about, well, really anything, so everything about the holidays (decorating, gift giving, holiday music, etc.) has always felt like a sort of bizarre alien formality to me. My partner’s family is into Christmas, not in a religious way, but just as a family get-together/celebration, so I certainly don’t act like a grinch or anything, but I will use every little opportunity I can find to escape onto ACX and a few other sites!
Not a Christian, family's far away, don't like people enough. Not sure if that's what you were looking for.
For one thing, I'm Jewish, so Christmas was never a big thing in my life.
For another, and I have no idea whether it's depression or just being weird, holidays just don't work very well for me, so I can't see the point for me of putting a lot of work into them.
More or less the same here. Holidays mostly feel arbitrary to me. When my wife was alive, since she was into Christmas, we celebrated it, but without her, there isn't a point to it for me.
Yes, I am the same way about holidays, and also my birthday. I never tell my birthday to anyone who might decide to surprise me with a present or something. I make up all kinds of bullshit as the reason, but the truth is I cannot bear how drab and disappointing birthdays and birthday presents for adults are compared to their childhood equivalents. Like most kids, I was wildly excited about my birthday, my party, and my birthday presents, and my parents usually came through with with something that thrilled me to my toes. Before I banned my birthdays altogether I had several in early adulthood where I was felt so let down I had a huge lump in my throat the whole time I was grinning and thanking people. In general I think I am pretty good at taking my lumps as an adult, but for some reason I simply cannot get past my childish expectation that birthdays and holidays will feel like they felt when I was a kid. I get my heart broken every damn time.
Does it feel like your aversion works anything like that?
What’s to celebrate? One year closer to death.
Thanks for this post, because it helps me understand not only those who don't want to celebrate Xmas and birthdays, but also those who go to the other extreme and make Christmas in particular unreasonably lavish - trying harder and harder to recreate childish ecstasies for themselves and their families. I do and don't relate. Yes, childhood is magical but I don't remember a specific moment of disenchantment, just a gradual fade. But that's me, I can see how it could happen that way for other people.
Not quite like that for me. Birthdays were pleasant, and for a while, there was a parade on my birthday, though eventually they started moving Memorial Day around to make a three day weekend.
However, family gatherings weren't especially fun. The only birthday that has felt like a milestone was my 70th. As a child, I'd be disappointed that birthdays didn't actually make anything different, as distinct from getting favorite foods and presents.
Holidays just didn't seem to have the emotional effect they were supposed to.
So even when you were a kid, the family gatherings for holidays or whatever didn't feel special?
As an adult I struggle with my revulsion for things Christian, whereas Judaism has always seemed to me like a wonderful club I can never join, a club where everybody's smart, humane and receptive to my brand of dark humor. But one thing Christianity got right was to come up with a way to make its major religious holiday deeply important to kids. You give them the stuff that for kids is the objective correlative of God, salvation and goodness: love, food and presents! "Why is this night different from all other nights?" really lacks appeal from that point of view. Though maybe it was your family atmosphere, rather than the holidays themselves, that somehow kept it from feeling magical? Were other kids enjoying the stuff that you were unmoved by?
For me, birthdays and other holidays were enjoyable enough in the moment, but they never really felt special or significant enough to be something I particularly looked forward to. They just felt like an arbitrary day where we decided to follow some customs and maybe have some good food for some reason or another. Receiving gifts was fun but as a kid I rarely craved "the latest stuff" or looked forward to getting a specific item, so they weren't usually all that exciting. The best gift I ever received was a little handheld "Intel Play" camera which could capture both real-time video clips and do stop-motion animation. Actually, I don't think it was even a gift for me, it was for my sister, but she didn't end up using it. I must have spent thousands of hours tinkering around with stop-motion Lego and whiteboard animation.
As an adult, I can't help but think of obligatory holiday gift-giving as this pointless, wasteful ritual driven by consumerism and advertising that everyone has been brainwashed into following. However, I know that's not really a fair analysis, as plenty of people do experience genuine warm fuzzy feelings from both receiving and giving gifts (my mom and sister, for example, will sometimes send each other gifts at random times simply because they enjoy it). So I usually suppress my grinchiness except with others who I know are like-minded about the subject.
In terms of Jewish holidays, my family generally celebrated the standard set - Shabbat weekly, Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, etc. Since Hanukkah is 8 days long, we would end up getting 8 gifts! (Usually 6-7 small ones and 1-2 bigger ones). Clearly this was done to "compete" with Christmas so kids wouldn't feel left out. But again, it just felt like a sort of pointless ritual to me. I enjoyed the latkes (but why didn't we just make them whenever we felt like it?) and hanging out with family (but didn't we hang out at some point most weeks?) but beyond that, I just didn't get what was so special about it.
Our family would go to synagogue on Saturday mornings (which I tolerated but was not thrilled about as a kid - come on, it's Saturday!) and one distinct memory I have is realizing just how much it bugged me that the Torah kept referring to the Jews as "God's Chosen People". That really, really irritated me as a kid! It seemed so vein and egotistical and I saw no reason why we should respect a god who arbitrarily decided that this one group of people was "better" than everyone else. Most of my friends weren't Jewish and I considered them all equals to myself. And that really turned me off from religion in general (and by extension, Jewish holidays). Well, that, and also being forced to do a Bar Mitzvah, memorize a bunch of Hebrew (language has never been my strong suite, I can hardly remember lyrics to songs written in English!), and write a sermon about a god that I didn't believe in. If I had to do it now I could probably come up with something where the concept of god was used metaphorically but as a kid it just felt like I was telling a huge lie.
It may be hard for me to convey how emotionally disconnected I was. Also, (and I rather regret this) I couldn't remember most of my relatives names, and I was afraid to ask because asking would show I didn't know their names. It's not that there would be some horrible punishment, but I'd be in the wrong.
It's a shame-- my mother was a problem, but the rest of the family turned out to be pretty decent.
If you want to be Jewish, you can convert. It's work, but quite possible.
> I was afraid to ask because asking would show I didn't know their names.
In first and second grade I worried a lot about wetting my pants. I didn't want to use the hand signal our teacher had given us to signal we needed to go to the bathroom, because then everybody would know I had to go to the bathroom. Never did wet my pants, but somebody I knew did, and even now remembering the incident makes me writhe inside with vicarious embarrassment. Man these childhood dilemmas, silly in retrospect, were real bears at the time. About learning relatives names -- I wonder if you had some prosopagnosia going on.
I'm typing this at work!
I'm named "Christina" because I was due to be born on Christmas (though I was two days late), my parents were unimaginative, and my mom's family was Christian Scientist. We celebrated Christmas *hard* when I was a kid, especially as my maternal grandmother loved the hell out of it, but when I got to adulthood and moved out of state to work in a 24/7/365 business, I started arguing that:
1. It was 80% cheaper and 300% easier at work to schedule time off if I traveled to see them right before or after the holidays. My grandmother once tried to guilt me, "But you won't be here for the special day," and I asked, "What is more important to you: That I be here on December 25 or that I'm here for a week before Christmas and then again for another week in March? I'd rather spend the extra time with you!" She conceded she'd rather have quantity of time over a calendar day. Return emotional appeals to sender!
2. I waged a steady campaign to eliminate obligatory gift giving by saying, "We're all adults so anything we might actually *need* we've already purchased for ourselves. Every year we end up stressing out over giving one another stuff we don't really need. Let's agree to gift one another with total freedom from obligatory gift-giving."
It took a long, long time, but we are now at a stage where Christmas for my family is mostly about a nice-smelling tree decorated with nostalgic ornaments and a meal, and for me it's a nice, slow day at work.
Thanks to USSR legacy Christmas isn't such a deal in my country. Christians celebrate it as a religious holiday. Everyone celebrate New Year - a completely secular holiday about family, friends and giving presents.
I believe, it's the best arrangement for everyone. Non-Christians do not have to feel awkward due to huge celebrations of a holiday with the undertones of religion they do not follow, while Christians do not feel that their sacred holiday was commercialized up to the point of loosing nearly all initial meaning.
That does sound attractive on one level - I'm a catholic in an agnostic Yulezilla household where the vibe is that I'm being selfish going to mass when I should be peeling potatoes. On the other hand, the Church is at death's door in the west, I feel that has at least something to do with marxist memes, so I don't fancy the Church's chances in the east either where those memes probably more widespread. But who knows? "No-one has at any time seen God" so it's never been easy.
>the vibe is that I'm being selfish going to mass when I should be peeling potatoes
_THAT_ is new, at least to me. Many Thanks!
> I feel that has at least something to do with marxist memes
I think there is little to no truth to it
Christianity compatible strain of Marxism evolved long ago and now Head of Russian Communist party goes to mass and claims that Jesus was the first socialist.
Sorry I didn't think of this during the discussions of Scott's kidney, but better late then never. You can be an effective altruist (lower case) without giving up a body part by being a "human guinea pig" - volunteering to take part in a clinical trial or research study. Likely only most convenient in major metro areas with the right institutions, they are easily found by researching on-line. In the medical mecca where I live they even advertise on the subway. Some typical ones I did were diet studies where they give you a supplement to eat which may or may not contain e.g. strawberries, and you go in for regular visits where they do a blood draw and do some tests like bone density or muscle strength. There is a stipend which is not a lot but enough to be useful spending money for someone like me who's retired. And you get to help advance medical science. I also got an entertaining story to tell at parties about "The effects of testosterone supplementation in older men..."
I have a collection of stamps from the space race that my grandfather left me. He says it's every stamp emitted by every country to celebrate every major launch or accomplishment. They are in boxes and folders, not particularly organized. What should I do with it?
They could make great laptop stickers! If you're in the DFW area I'd buy some for cash.
If you aren't personally interested in the collection, the https://nss.org/ national space society might well be.
edit: typo plus slight clarification
Burn it to the ground.
These are almost certainly worth very little. I would estimate, at most, $100 per cubic foot of stamp-stuff. The boxes and folders will be worth as much per unit-of-volume as the stamps.
They are the NFTs of the mid-20th-century. The stamps are probably canceled, but even if they aren't, they are unlikely to ever be used. They will uselessly occupy space until they are either composted in a trash heap, or burned in a final blaze of glory. I recommend the burning.
Or, hold on to it for 50 years, and let your grandchildren burn it.
Sounds like a sad fate to me – I immediately thought that it sounded like an incredible archive.
I speak from bitter experience. My father had a large stamp collection. But apart from the bulk US un-cancelled stamps (which sell for about 60% of face value) there Is almost no market. The local stamp club dissolved during Covid. The local dealers didn’t want anything international. Nobody on FB marketplace was interested in anything. A dealer in PA eventually offered substantially less than $100/ft^3 - for well-organized books and binders in very good condition.
The mid-century, mass produced, for-consumer stamp products are worth almost nothing today. I see more value in a dignified funeral than in a lifetime of hoping for scarcity or broader interest.
(Some of them *are* very nice; but who would you give it to, and why?)
In general, things that are made to be collectible aren't worth it, though some Centipede Press books appreciate.
People who collect things for the money are missing the point, in my opinion. The point is to collect something that you like and enjoy possessing. It doesn't have to be of value to anyone else.
It may be more complicated than that. I've seen people who actually like fiction fall into a rabbit hole of discussing the collectible books they have (especially the prices of the books).
My dear friends, I would like to talk to you about the police, because in my mind they are utterly useless-to-harmful, but I know that real responsible adults out there in the world think they're a net good, and I'd like to hear why.
My position has always been "why does anyone on earth want the police" (in the US, as they currently exist)? If you're upper or middle class, they're spending 80% of their manpower literally farming you for ticket revenue rather than actually solving crime or doing anything useful. If you're lower class or a minority, they spend their time murdering and/or oppressing you for kicks.
Who, besides 80 year old Karens who feel "safe" because police are out there harassing skating teenagers, poor people, and minorities, actually wants the police as they currently stand?
But wait! If we defunded the police, crime would be rampant! *Gestures broadly at rampant and public homelessness, drug abuse, systematic retail theft, etc in every major city, that the cops do literally nothing about.*
Have you ever had your car vandalized or broken into? Your house burgled? Your self mugged? Were the police any help AT ALL?
My street car got broken into 4 times last year, including two broken windows. In fact, the block it was parked on one of the nights it had a window broken I later found out *routinely* has a line of 15+ cars get their windows broken, on something like a semi-weekly to monthly basis. That's conservatively $10k a month in direct financial damages just for the window replacement, much less anything actually stolen. But if you report this to the police? They basically laugh at you. If you really persist, they'll make you fill out a form and immediately throw it away. Do they ever actually solve a crime, or step up enforcement? No, of course not, that's not their job.
I mean forget property crime, less than half of *MURDERS* are solved per year! What about the 25k rape kit backlog they're sitting on and going nothing about? And the cops are using their significant manpower and budgets to what? 80% of it to give you traffic tickets over minor speed and parking infractions.
But wait, what about speeding in school zones, and drunk or reckless driving, and <insert other legitimate social function>? Sure, I'll grant you that - so the police need 10% of their current manpopwer and budget to do that stuff, because they aren't using their current size and manpower to actually solve any real crimes. A third of it goes to deterrence and enforcement of those kinds of things, and 2/3 goes to solving real crimes.
But society will go to hell without the deterrent effect of police! *Gestures again at rampant homelessness, theft, drug abuse etc*. We're ALREADY THERE. The cops do literally nothing about any actual crime. When you need help urgently the police are just 30 minutes away, and even if they arrive they'll do nothing.
Basically, I've pretty much always perceived that we're being soaked for taxes to support a bunch of murderous thugs who spend most of their time farming us for revenue and harassing teens and minorities, and the recent social decline and significant increases in crime post-COVID have only made that evaluation firmer and more salient.
So seriously, what is the case for the police as they currently stand? Why shouldn't we defund them to 10-20% of their current level and write some laws saying they need to spend those resources on fighting actual crimes instead of minor moving and parking violations?
Who here is actually happy with the law enforcement status quo, and what specifically makes you happy about it?
People respond to incentives. Levels of theft, assault, and murder are probably 10-100x less than they would be in the absence of any organized resistance to crime. However imperfect the system may be, it’s there for a damn good reason.
The idea that police are murderous thugs is laughable when you look at the actual numbers. Police arrest over a thousand people a day for violent crime, and they shoot maybe 1000 people in a YEAR. Americans murder 26,000 people a year. They are by far less murderous on average than the actual murderers we use them against. Even if only 1/10 of murders were solved, that would still be police taking way more murderers off the streets than people they kill, so if they clear almost half that's hugely beneficial.
Police are far less competent than is ideal, but they are far far better than the alternative of just getting rid of them.
Thanks Negidius!
Negidius points out:
"There are way more Americans than there are police officers in America, so the number of people killed by police is obviously going to be smaller than the overall number of homicides."
Per my cites, there's ~700k police in USA. 1000 murders per year (your number) is many, many times higher than even our increased post-covid homicide rate.
Police homicide rate per year: 143 per 100k
USA average homicide rate: 6.8 (4.99 in 2019)
Police % more murderous than US average: 21x
Even Mississippi and Louisiana top out around ~20 per 100k. If the data is to be believed, interacting with a police officer as any sort of citizen is substantially more dangerous than going into dodgy neighborhoods in any state in the South.
Also, the baseline is 50% of murders unsolved, but amongst prototypical murderers we use police against (ie murders in low-income and minority neighborhoods), the unsolved rate is much higher, it's the overall source of the low solve rate overall. Not coincidentally, this is also the population most police homicides happen in!
So let's say a 20% chance of solving a prototypical low-income / minority murder. 1 in 5 times, at a murder rate of let's say 21 per 100k and a rate of 1 murder per murderer, the cops actually take a murderer off the street for these folk. But the majority of police homicides happen in this pop too, let's say 80% as a ballpark estimate. So the cops will put away ~4 murderers per 100k for every 114 murders they perpetrate in low-income minority population. Play with the numbers however you want, it still looks pretty grim.
If you were a low income minority, who would you fear more? I'd personally fear the ones 6x - 29x more likely to murder me than literal murderers, aka the police!
You're extremely annoying and I'm not gonna keep arguing with you except to point out one thing: You're ignoring that the cops aren't murderers. The majority of their homicides are justified.
And certainly, if you actually *were* a low-income minority, you would literally trust the snap-decision "shoot or not" judgment of whatever random cop has decided to interact with you with your very life, unreservedly! Despite the 6x-29x difference in cops vs murderers base rate. After all, they think their homicides are justified, and that makes all the difference!
I'm sure the fact that cops think the majority of their homicides are justified is great consolation to the various victims and victims' families, too.
"Hey, you know that guy who killed your brother / son / spouse and got nothing but pats on the back / a paid vacation for it? Well, HE thought the murder was totally justified, so you can relax."
And *I'm* annoying for pointing this out instead of uncritically cheerleading for the 29x more-murdery-than-actual-murderers population?
American cops are well known to be trigger happy - they're taught to go in as if everything is a lethal threat, and any movement of the hands or arms is a perp going for a gun, while in the actual world of objective facts, they're way down the list of dangerous jobs, with lawn guys (18 vs 14 per 100k), crossing guards (19 vs 14), garbage men (34 vs 14), farmers (19 vs 14), truck drivers (27 vs 14), and firemen (20 vs 14), all more fatal jobs than cops (14 out of 100k), along with 15 other jobs I didn't bother listing.
But no, that's fine - they think it's justified, so surely we should just shut up about it and give them another few tens of millions to waste on farming us for revenue and murdering minorities rather than actually solving any crimes.
Arresting someone for murder doesn't undo the murder. Trying to estimate the number of committed killings compared to the number of prevented killings seems impossible. The homicide rate in prison is much higher than the homicide rate outside of prison, so it's not clear to me that even imprisoning someone who is determined to kill again actually prevents murder if it just results in them killing another prisoner instead.
There are way more Americans than there are police officers in America, so the number of people killed by police is obviously going to be smaller than the overall number of homicides. A better question is whether police officers are more likely to kill compared to similar groups. Police officers are obviously way more likely to kill than the average American is, but I wonder how they compare to the average criminal gang member, for example.
A related question is how likely it is for a person who doesn't want to participate in violence to be killed. It might, for example, be that criminal gang members are more likely to kill but that a greater proportion of their victims are other criminal gang members who are willingly participating in a conflict, while police are more likely to initiate violence against random people.
Arresting (and convicting) a person for murder, is pretty good at stopping them from committing further murders. If the average murderer left to their own devices would murder two people, then arresting and convicting 10,000 murderers after their first offense would prevent 10,000 additional murderers.
Arresting and convicting 10,000 murderers also convinces a whole lot of marginal wannabe murderers that if they actually murder someone they will spend the rest of their lives locked in a cage so maybe they don't want to murder anyone *that* badly.
If your model of crime is that there's a fixed number of murderers, robbers, and rapists who are all already out murdering and robbing and raping to their hearts' content, and the police arresting them after the fact doesn't change anything, then no, that's not how any of this works.
You assume that no murders are committed in prison. That's obviously not true. Some murderers commit additional murders after being arrested and convicted. So no, even under your other assumptions, you would not have prevented 10,000 additional murders.
I don't think there is any basis for your assumption about how many murders the average murder would commit without intervention. It could be less than two. It could even be less than how many murders they commit after being arrested and convicted. I don't know of any study that attempts to answer this question, and it seems like a nearly impossible question to answer without doing experiments that would never be allowed.
There is very little evidence for deterrence, and no evidence that I'm aware of applicable to crimes like murder. Deterrence only seems to have an effect when the threat of punishment is immediate and certain to a very high degree. That is not possible when prosecuting murder and most other crimes.
It might be worth noting that anarcho-capitalists have a solution for this: private security companies. It addresses the incentive mismatch in which governments have an interest in letting crime get bad enough for people to want to have government restrain that crime, which enables the government to levy more taxes.
Instead of paying taxes to the government, which then decides on its own internal calculus whether to increase police protection in your neighborhood, you would instead pay a subscription fee to the security agency of your choice. Your decision could be based on your own criteria: whether you have enough property worth protecting; which protections you want outsourced most; which rights you think require a centralized force (you might see fit to defend your own home yourself, but tracking down repeat offenders is a different story); the agency's reputation, cost, or locality; and others. The subscription fee is your end of a contract you and the agency hold, and is periodically renewed just as an insurance policy might.
This gives each customer the incentive to purchase exactly the amount and type of protection that customer deems desirable and affordable, of the protections available. Each provider meanwhile has incentive to offer services broadly, cheaply, and effectively. The sky's the limit with respect to offerable services. For instance, an agency could advertise that if you register your valuables with the agency and they are later stolen, the agency will pay you the cash equivalent, at whatever price you both agreed on. An agency might also perform region-based analysis, tracking the known reputation of every resident in your area, and alerting you of crime spikes, stepping up resources, and so on.
There will still be some coordination problems, economies of scale, and also opportunities for corruption, but overall, the system is more transparent, if for no other reason than that any customer dissatisfied enough with their protection can just change subscriptions or terminate the policy.
If you're in the business of running a security company, what's your disincentive from asserting a local monopoly on force and becoming a stationary bandit rather than allowing your current customers to switch to a competitor? Localized monopolies on violence seem to be a form of organization that arises spontaneously with such ubiquity as to be considered a default attractor state.
The basic idea is that if you fail to satisfy enough customers, they will pay a competitor to come in and force you out. Or at least, they will have an incentive to do so, which you will have to overcome with sufficient coercion. This will mean a fair amount of resources on your part - namely, goons you've paid to rough up the residents.
And you would then incur further overhead in someone to watch the goons to make sure they aren't pocketing some of the racketeering*ahem*subscription fees. And then even more overhead if those residents manage to find another agency willing to move in and edge you out, in return for those people's patronage. Eventually, such companies will notice that they're not making much money off this.
I can see various potential problems with this framework. For instance, it's possible that an agency could develop a home field advantage, making itself so hard to eject from an area that the resources a competitor would have to spend to do so is greater than the estimated revenue from the liberated population. That home advantage might also manifest as secrecy - it knows who to hustle without getting into expensive trouble, and it knows which people might try to coordinate an offer to a competitor, and can intimidate them until they stop. (David Friedman is probably the person to ask about these scenarios, and I've been meaning to figure out a way to phrase the concern I have such that I think it'd be worth his time to respond.)
OTOH, one response that does occur to me is the same I find to nearly any anti-ancap argument: whatever abuse an agency might try in this framework, is also possible in any other framework, and typically leads to even greater harm in those cases. A nefarious mafia in an ancap society would be no less nefarious in a socialist one... and might even establish itself as the state.
My point in part is that solving the issues of your second paragraph (including but not limited to the ways suggested by your second and third) in practice seems to actually happen / have happened by recapitulating the state apparatus, in virtually every society other than David Friedman's favorite example of Medieval Iceland (or perhaps certain tribal societies in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan that no one would voluntarily choose to inhabit). That is, "having something that looks like a state rather than anarchy or competing but not territorially-delimited armed forces" appears to be an extremely historically robust solution to the problem of violence, whereas the spontaneous organization of society into bidders for protection from armed men who limit themselves to selling violence as a commercial service without coercion of their customer base into a monopoly provider seems to have arisen essentially nowhere.
I see what you're saying. When I think of it that way, though, I notice it's a stable system under notable internal pressure - there are invariably many people in that society unsatisfied with the way policing is done. Historically, I think most of those societies don't last in whatever form for more than a few generations without undergoing enough social unrest to also make the history books.
For historical examples of private police, the Pinkertons come to mind. So do local sheriffs throughout the American West, and of course private security firms.
From the "Police Constable Lee" stories of Edgar Wallace (a once hugely-popular crime/mystery writer, but as a writer not particularly good so it's clear to see why he's fallen out of popularity) written in 1909:
"Crime," reflected P.-C. Lee, "ain't always murder, nor highway robbery, nor forgin' cheques for £10,000. That's the crimes authors — present company excepted — write about. It's generally a tale about how a detective with whiskers fails to discover the lost diamonds, an' a clean-shaven feller, who plays the fiddle, works it out on paper that the true robber was the Archbishop of Canterbury, But crime, as we know it in the 'D' Division, is mostly made up of 'bein' a suspected person' or 'loiterin' with intent' or 'being found on unoccupied premises for the purpose of committin' a felony'; or, as you have seen yourself, 'drunk an' usin' abusive language'.
"I've done all kinds of duty, plain clothes an' otherwise, an' although I've had my share of big cases, an' have been to the Old Bailey scores an' scores of times, the gen'ral run of life has been takin' violent an' insultin' 'drunks' to the station, an' pullin' people in for petty larceny."
..." 'Now,' I said, 'how often have you, in the course of your life, seen a man commit a felony—actually seen it, not heard about it or read about it? How often have you seen a man pick a pocket, or smash a jeweller's window, or comin' from the scene of a murder?'
" 'Never,' he said, after a bit. "
'An' very few have,' said I. 'You talk about undiscovered crime! Why, the wonder is, in a big city like London or Manchester or Southampton, how so much crime is detected, not how so much remains a mystery. Policemen have only got one pair of eyes, like you, an' they can only see just as much as you can see. The difference between the average policeman an' the average citizen is that the constable only believes a quarter of what he is told, an' the average citizen believes everythin'."
..."You can't get it out of your head quick enough that the police persecute people without reason. Persecution is better than prosecution any day of the week, an' it's better to nag a man a little than to put him into prison an' his wife into the workhouse.
"There are lots of folk who think the police welcome an opportunity of runnin' a man, but the truth of it is that for every arrest that is made there are a dozen 'chances' given."
..."There are all sorts of other jokes about constables, but the principal one is about his not being in a hurry to go to the scene of a disturbance. "When a feller rushes up to a policeman an' ses — 'Come at once! There's a man knocking his wife about somethin' cruel,' he expects the constable to break into a run, an' is very much hurt when he only saunters along very leisurely. That's because the policeman knows a great deal about human nature. He knows that no wife really an' truly wants her husband pinched, an' if he runs he will get out of breath for no reason at all."
Obvious objections aside (yes the police writing tickets is good, traffic deaths are out of control), the time a group of people did try to mug me the police jumped in and got them to let me go. So yes, police are good, although agreed we should be pushing harder for them to do their jobs (both through making it easier to fire bad or useless police officers who don't do their jobs, and through making it easier for the rest of them to arrest people so that the ones who are good have an easier time doing their jobs).
I live in Australia but I am an American citizen and it’s things like this that make me seriously consider voting for Donald Trump. (I’ve voted left my whole life and really dislike Trump on a personal level but it’s a reaction to how insane things have gotten on the American left.)
I accept the author is arguing in good faith, but it’s like we live in different realities.
In the reality I live in, police morale and funding were severely damaged by the BLM protests, particularly in blue cities and states. Since then there has been a dramatic spike in crime, and mostly the victims are minorities. So much for those Black lives mattering…
I'm not even left, I'm basically apolitical, but with plenty of opinions that would ban me or thoughtcrime me from left circles.
Police morale and funding were damaged for good reasons - they suck. 80% of them don't do anything useful, 5% are murderous thugs just in it for harassing and murdering poor people and minorities, and the rest all close ranks and support that 5%!
Seriously, they pulled back and stopped "policing" in my (big blue) city about that time, and there was literally no difference, because they weren't doing anything to begin with. Rampant and open homelessness, crime, and theft before, and rampant and open homelessness, crime, and theft after. The only change was a bunch of people didn't need to worry about parking tickets or car registrations, judging by the number of people permanently parked in the same street spots and the number of cars without plates driving around in the "after" period.
But yeah, I'm seeing in the thread that a bunch of rural / suburban people are happy with their policing and it's responsive and they actually do things, and apparently some people love that they spend 80% of their resources on traffic enforcement too. Great! I'm happy for them, and I guess I'm mainly talking about policing in big cities, which are pretty much entirely useless-to-actively-hostile in decades of my experience.
If you don't live in a big city in the USA, I'm happy for you, it's probably the smart decision.
Oh I see, I apologise for instinctively coding you as left - it’s usually the left wing that argues for “Defund the Police,” specifically the far left fringe nut cases.
I have generally had good experiences with police - one of my friends is a detective and I know him to be a good dude. It’s a challenging job and a vitally important one.
While I’m not living in a big American city and thus all of my testimony is second hand, perhaps the dysfunction you remark upon could be upstream? A couple of the other commenters have mentioned that in their experience the real issue is things like DAs failing to prosecute the bad guys. The police are constrained by the other arms of the law enforcement mechanisms.
Yeah, I think the upstream thing is probably a big part of "police in big cities are useless." Decisions not to prosecute "minor crimes" definitely leads to a lot of the social decay we see everywhere in big blue cities.
But I think I hold by my point in that case, too. If the cops aren't going to stop any social decay, and aren't going to prevent any of these crimes by their presence, they're just going to use those police hours to farm uppers and middles for traffic revenue. That's a total waste, still, and isn't something we should be paying tens of millions for as tax-paying citizens.
That money could be used much more productively by either addressing homelessness with houses, or exporting them to Martha's Vineyard like Desantis did, or funding campaigns for better DA's who will actually do something, or via whatever works (haven't researched it), because police sure aren't working as any real solution to social decay and crime.
Citation needed.
I was this close to replying "I see what you did there".
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike
Thanks!
I actually half agree with you but from the opposite perspective. The NYPD in my experience is pretty useless. My precinct apparently devotes half its manpower to protecting donut shops (at any given time there are 15-20 cops in or around the 2 donut shops in my neighborhood, spending their whole shifts going between the shop for coffee and sitting in their patrol cars or loitering outside). Not only do they not murder 'lower class teenagers,' they let gangs of them steal from and attack people in my neighborhood with impunity. I see them sitting there in their patrol cars doing nothing while gangs of dirtbikers speed through redlights on major avenues and drive on sidewalks almost killing pedestrians. So yeah, police seem to be pretty useless, but for pretty much the opposite reason. I want police to actually do their jobs.
Nah, we're on the same page. The only reason I say reduce them to 20% is because we know 80% of their manpower is misdirected, and then I suggested legislation so that the remaining 20% can only focus on violent/sexual/property crime. Real crimes.
But yeah, in big cities police are essentially useless to net-negative is my entire point. They don't do anything about any of the rampant crime and social decay everywhere, and instead they spend 80% of their manpower farming upper-middle people for traffic revenue. If you give them more manpower, as in Victor's cite below, they end up spending most of it on petty harassment and arrests for victimless crime.
If we they keep wasting and misdirecting the (very expensive) manpower we keep giving them, why give them any more? Take it away! They're not doing anything for anyone living in big cities!
Failing take it away, legislate that manpower can only be used on solving real crimes. That would also be a waste now - the fact they spend 80% of time on non-real-crime-solving says there's probably ceilings on effectiveness for real crime solving, and they don't need anywhere near as many police hours as they have to do that.
I'm not happy with the status quo, but there's been a lot more crime since everyone started picking on them in 2020 after Floyd died. And I remember watching crime go down in the 90s as the police departments got more serious and organized (probably the biggest example was NYC under Rudy Giuliani, ironically enough given his later self-beclowning).
Like others, I have a great deal of skepticism that you really believe any of your assertions here, but whatever.
I live in an American blue city that has royally fucked up its policing in the wake of the pandemic wilding, leading to sharp spikes in urban blight, property crime, and violent crime.
Taking @Eremolalos' lead, I have a couple of traffic tickets for minor infractions (for which I was decidedly in the wrong). They probably could have been doing more important things, so let's put that in the "bad" category.
Then I have about two dozen instances where the police were extremely effective at removing people who were posing a threat or nuisance to me at work or at home, and one instance where I was the victim of a strong-arm robbery on the street, the police showed up, sympathized with the minor injury I received, and apologized that they couldn't do more to help because the robbers were long gone.
I'm not happy with the status quo. In my ideal world, we'd have a shitton more official police (and detention facilities) who spend 20% of their time training relevant skills like deescalation and counseling, entry tactics, unarmed combat, firearms, the law, and so on. In a really perfect place, this would happen in a culture which values justice over compassion, the kind where it would be *unthinkable* to bother a store employee for using lethal self-defense in response to a physically threatening robbery attempt, and where a motorist forced to drive through a mob of rioters blocking their escape doesn't have to pay a deductible if their car gets dented in the process.
Oh, I totally believe every one of my assertions, I've just framed them a little floridly.
Like you, I live in a large blue city now, and have lived in MANY large american blue cities over my life, and they've pretty much always been misdirecting the vast majority of their police hours. This is over a time period that homicide solve rates have been steadily declining and rape kit backlogs have been steadily increasing, and in much of that time, police budgets and FTE were increasing. It doesn't matter if you give them more resources, the vast majority of police time, including additional police, are misdirected to revenue farming and petty harassment. If you read Victor's cite and my response below, they confirm it - "Williams and his coauthors also find adding more police officers to a city means more people getting arrested for petty, low-level, victimless crimes, like disorderly conduct, drinking in public, drug possession, and loitering."
If you want an estimate of the huge amount of police time misdirected towards petty traffic stops, see my comment one below my response to Victor.
If they're just going to misuse the police-hours they have, including any additional police-hours you give them, why give them more? Take resources away! Legislate that they can only spend police-hours on violent/sexual/property crime, because they sure aren't spending the right amount of police time on it now.
I'm glad you were able to get threatening and nuisance people removed by them - that's more than I've ever been able to get out of them, but it's a sign of at least some positive impact. My point is more the amount of positive impact we get is vastly disproportionate to the taxpayer expense we are paying for them.
People, this person’s Substack handle is literally Performative Bafflement. They are giving you a clear hint and you are still falling for it.
You're not arguing to convince the other guy, you're arguing to convince the audience. There are some pretty good arguments here for why police should exist.
No. They have posted before and it was in no way a troll post. https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-307?r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=45741858
By "falling for it" you mean "discussing a topic of interest to the group."
This is an incendiary comment. I'll engage with it in good path but I'm not 100% sure it was made so, versus just to troll.
The police are extremely constrained in what they can do as never before, and have more work than they have resources, at least where I live.
They are not allowed, by law, to e.g. arrest minors and question them when they steal cars. If they did, they would be raked across the coals, their career ended. Under conditions where doing your job is actively punished, the selection is for traffic cops and murderous power trippers. .
There's a great blog, now defunct unfortunately, called "The Graham Factor", by an anonymous police officer, outlining some of these issues.
The minorities they harass also commit the crimes and are the main victims thereof, and increasingly the police officers are also the minorities doing the harassing. So the race angle here is a lot more muddled then media portrays it out you make it out to be.
Finally I'll say: police serve power, that's their job. One shouldn't fool oneself that they're always on your side because you're nice or cute or whatever. But to me citing the current staffing crisis, and active legislative push to render then unable to do their jobs, is ridiculous as evidence that they should be defunded entirely.
Also in my area, the city-side police are stretched thin Ina decaying city. But the county side, which gets a lot of crime overflow, is excellent, works closely with the community, does outreach, is responsive. So my experience is somewhat different than yours.
I'm pretty confident the original post is sincere and not a troll.
Yup, Eremolalos is right - I'm totally sincere, if a little hyperbolic and florid when making the case. If I could snap my fingers and eliminate 80% of cops tomorrow, I'd do it happily.
Given the arguments here, I suppose I should amend that to "80% of big-city cops," as it seems suburban and rural cops are well regarded and responsive.
Did you read my post? Let’s
say cutting the number
of cops would mean I only got the police help I needed in one of the 4 quite bad situations I describe. Or if you think the math’s not that simple, want to say that with 80% fewer cops I would have gotten help in 2 or even 3 of those situations? So do you see one or 2 out of the 4 where police help really was a
dispensible luxury?
No, I absolutely want you and every other citizen to get help when any violent, sexual, or property crime happens. I suggested cutting them down to 20% because we know 80% of police manpower is wasted / misdirected, and then legislate that they can ONLY work on actual crimes instead of all the petty misdirected stuff they spend the vast majority of police hours on today.
So in that world, ideally 4/4 would have been responded to, because the remaining police-hours are spent on actual crimes, which yours were examples of.
Cops shouldn’t be involved in domestic violence that doesn’t involve children…if the adult woman doesn’t leave an abusive partner that is her problem. So I would allow one call to the cops and then after that the cops should ignore it.
Did you notice the name they are using?
My car was stolen from my driveway a year ago. The police found it after a while. I had already claimed a total loss from insurance, so it did not matter much, but it was still nice to be able to recover some personal belongings from it. Over the same period I got four tickets; the only time this happened through an actual traffic stop I felt respected and the cop seemed professional. Still did not like to have to pay. Three out of five stars I guess? Anyway, I live in Canada so maybe my experience does not apply to you. What worries me about the idea of completely defunding the police is that there will still be demand for police services. They will just become private. Private police paid for by rich people will defend only their neighborhood from outsiders. Organized crime may end up taking on some of the police functions in poorer neighborhoods. I am afraid this is not going to be an improvement over the status quo.
Was it a Kia?
No, a Honda CRV. Apparently they are very easy to steal by amplifying the key fob signal.
Apparently the old school steering wheel locks work.
They do… parking inside the garage is also a great strategy. I was too lazy for that, but now I park inside every time.
I am sure overall that the training, guidelines and norms of the police is far from ideal. However, consider my summary of the role police have played in my life.
Police hassling me or mistreating me: Only thing I can think of is one time when a cop stationed himself near a t-intersection with a stop sign where locals never really stopped, just slowed down (that’s all you had to do to make the turn safely). He gave me and everyone else who didn’t truly stop a ticket. There was a whole line of us pulled off to the side of the road waiting our turn to get processed for the ticket. That was pretty irritating.
Police being unhelpful: I can only can only think of one time the police showed no interest in a problem I reported. When I was college-age I had my bike locked to the porch with a weak wimpy chain. Somebody snipped the chain and took the bike. I reported it to the police, and they were polite but basically said that if you don’t use a strong lock that’s what happens. I was disappointed, but in retrospect I think their response was reasonable.
Times the police have been helpful to me:
-When I was in grad school a guy entered the women's locker room while I was showering, grabbed me and started groping me. I yelled "help", and he let go and hurried away. I followed him to the door, furious and stark naked, and asked several passers by to stop him. None did, but one called the police. They came quickly, and acted in a way intended to help the traumatized -- went looking for the guy, and did not ask much until a female officer came and spoke to me in private. I actually did not feel at all traumatized, but appreciated their good intent. A few days later they showed me a photo lineup of some random guys + the real guy (turns out he had a history), and I picked out the real guy, which they told me after I'd made my final choice. They arrested him. There was no trial because he pleaded guilty.
-When my daughter was in high school she and a couple of her friends got so drunk they were close to alcohol poisoning. I got the name of the supplier out of her the next day. He was an adult who sounded pretty scuzzy, and had been supplying lots of high school kids with hard liquor. I walked into the local police station and gave them his name. They knew who he was and said they’d take action. I don’t know whether they did, but that was the end of my daughter getting profoundly drunk.
-When my daughter was 19 she was date-raped by a horrible guy she'd met online. He tried to interest her in becoming a prostitute, but she refused. We reported what had happened to the police, and they turned it over to, I think, the FBI. The guy had a history of sex-trafficking (he had been in jail before, I think for that). Being questioned by the FBI, who were not gentle, was quite hard on my daughter, and so was telling the story of the rape to a grand jury. But the guy was put away for a long long time.
-My downstairs neighbors have a screwed up but harmless drug-addicted adult son who sometimes stays at their place when they are away. Once this year when he was at their place I was up doing stuff late at night, and suddenly there was an extremely loud pounding that sounded like it was coming from my front door. It was not like loud knocking, but the sounds someone would make who was enraged, or possible someone trying to break down a door. There was a few minutes' pause, then it happened again. I never considered responding to whoever was pounding, because what they were doing was wacko and I did not want them to know for sure I was in the apartment. I was quite scared, & I do not scare easily. I called the police. They showed up in less than 5 mins., searched my apartment with me, then we went out into the yard and looked around. We found no intruders or signs of them. Downstairs neighbor’s lights were all off. Police knocked softly on door of that apt, but there was no response. They were about to leave, with things still a mystery, when downstairs neighbor came out and told them he had been pounding on the wall or maybe it was the ceiling to signal that I had been making too much noise. Obviously what he did shows terrible judgment, esp. since he has my cell phone number, but as I said he is screwed up. Police did not get involved in my angry follow-up talk with the guy, which I think was reasonable.
A later thought: Notice that 2 of the 4 incidents I describe involve harms that happen much more often to women than to men, and that the last incident is perhaps more alarming for someone who is petite enough to be unable to effectively defend themselves against a large, violent person. (After the incident I did buy a pepper spray dingus. But I am unwilling to become the owner of something that can deal out worse injuries than burning eyes.) I wonder whether more males than females are comfortable with the idea of dismantling the police.
These are great examples of police performing as expected in a positive way, and far from what I would predict with any police where I've lived - were you by chance in nice suburbs for most of these?
I do think there's probably a pretty significant split in effectiveness and responsiveness in big-city vs suburbs.
The first one I was at a univeristy. It was not surrounded by upper middle class suburbs, though, and the guy who assaulted me was a townie. The second and 4th incidents happened in a nice suburb. However it’s not so nice it does not have 2 areas commonly called “the projects.” One is nicely kept up, the other is scuzzy. I live within half a mile of each. The third incident was handled by the Feds, so I think neighborhood is irrelevant there.
Lots of silly activists arguing for police defunding are women. I do think they are probably disproportionately women wealthy enough to not have as many of the experiences you describe.
I don’t see how wealth comes into it. I’m actually upper middle class. I don’t think any of the incidents I described except the bike theft would have been any less likely to happen even if I lived in a gated community.
OK, that's a good point...the only other thing I can think of is that you mention a daughter twice, and a lot of these people are childless, often proudly so. (I am, but I consider myself kind of a bad person for it and don't harangue parents about climate change.)
There does seem to be no shortage of 'defund the police' activists who are women, though...I think BLM was run by three women?
Google image searches for 'defund the police' seem to show a fair number of women activists. For some weird reason (maybe your argument is correct and it would undermine their arguments?) I can't find a poll with crosstabs online to estimate the actual percentage, though.
(As stated elsewhere I agree with you that the police should not be defunded.)
Research (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20141147; https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when-you-add-more-police-to-a-city-what-happens) that adding more police officers to a city reduces violent crime and saves lives (roughly 10-17 additional officers per life saved). That amounts to between 1.3 and 2.2 million dollars.
So, on the one hand, that seems to support the notion that police officers are a net positive good for society. Of course, this doesn't take into account costs due to poor policing, nor does it imply that policing in the US isn't in need of serious institutional reform (because it does).
My impression is that most of the value of police departments comes from deterrence, which is to say by preventing crimes, not solving them. This is, obviously, very difficult to measure (how do you detect a crime not committed?). It's also my impression that police are responsible for a lot of "Soft" social disorder regulation--they engage in a lot of conflict resolution, and the mere threat that someone might call them is often sufficient to dissuade someone from doing something destructive to someone.
That said, clearly policing is facing a crisis right now. We seem to (finally) be engaging in a national conversation about what we want the police to do, how they should go about it, and who should be responsible for addressing which societal problems.
But I would call the police a net positive.
The crime wave of the last several years was due to older cops retiring and understaffing and lack of experience. The boomers screwed up politics/government and the military but they still have valuable experience.
[Citation Needed]
Even here, your sources say the sign is the other direction in southern cities (aka, more police is net negative), and point out that these beefed up police forces spend most of their time on piddling harassment instead of solving actual crimes:
"But, at the same time, Williams and his coauthors also find adding more police officers to a city means more people getting arrested for petty, low-level, victimless crimes, like disorderly conduct, drinking in public, drug possession, and loitering. Black people are disproportionately the target of these low-level arrests, saddling them with crippling court fees and forcing many kids — sometimes unnecessarily — into the criminal justice system."
I'm of the opinion that at least for large cities, it's basically a toss-up whether they're net positive or net negative, so why waste tens of millions on taxpayer money on them, when they spend the majority of their manpower on revenue farming, petty crap, and harassment, while solving very little actual crime or doing anything about the widespread public disorder, theft, etc?
Cut them down to size and legislate that they can only work on violent/sexual/property crimes - where's the downside? We're already in the "no deterrence, no crime solving" scenario in big cities.
Oh, and my envelope estimation for "80% of police time is spent revenue farming:"
708k police in USA 2023
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us/
120M traffic stops per year in 2001 - footnote 27 p6 https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1349&context=clevstlrev
120M adjusted to 127M per year in 2023 from 708k / 659k (number police 2001) * 120M
659k in 2001
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2001/01sec6.pdf
708 / 659 * 120M = 127M traffic stops annually
708k * 2040 = 1.4B police hours annually
Reducing to functional "actually policing" time:
10% office only officers who only do bureaucratic / administration / management, 50% of time spent on paperwork, 20% of time commuting / getting to places without enforcement, 20% of police time on actually solving real crimes =426M police hours left annually.
426M police hours / 127M traffic stops = 1 traffic stop every 3 hours, or roughly 2-2.5 stops a shift with the rest paperwork and commuting. Sounds reasonable. Even if you play with the parameters, easily the majority of police hours are used to generate traffic stops - this entirely ignores parking enforcement, the time they spend harassing minorities and racking up citations and arrests for petty victimless crimes, "crime deterrence", general time wasting and kibitzing in the office and donut shop, etc.
Oh, and just for posterity, this isn't some weird personal grudge about traffic tickets - I actually haven't had a traffic ticket for 15+ years, and haven't had an at-fault accident in 25+ years.
I'm a rich white guy, the police were basically created to serve my various agendas and oppress everyone else in my favor, or so I'm told.
This is purely about cost / benefit analysis in terms of what the police actually provide vs what they cost (money and otherwise).
I would assume that the effect in Southern cities is bound up in a racist institutional culture, so the effects are different there. But I wouldn't recommend getting rid of the police, that's just asking for more militias, and vendettas.
"I'm of the opinion that at least for large cities, it's basically a toss-up whether they're net positive or net negative, so why waste tens of millions on taxpayer money on them, when they spend the majority of their manpower on revenue farming, petty crap, and harassment, while solving very little actual crime or doing anything about the widespread public disorder, theft, etc? "
We'll have to agree to disagree then, I think my sources pretty clearly documented a net positive effect overall.
But this conceals a deeper issue which is that the society surrounding the police department, the majority of tax payers there, do not simply want crime solving services. They want social order maintained, and the police are pretty good at that. Now, whether or not that's a good thing is open to debate, I suppose, depending on your opinion of US society. But it seems unreasonable to either expect the police not to pursue a set of priorities that a majority of their tax payers want them to, or that those same majorities would vote for reducing their funding.
As for your sources, I won't comment on them, since frankly I just don't have the time to read them carefully, but I'm curious as to why you seem to assume that traffic stops are wasted time: how do you know that that isn't the very behavior which is suppressing the crime rate?
I'm not saying literally get rid of police, I'm saying we know 80% of their police hours are misdirected, so let's cut down to 20% and legislate that they're actually directing their police hours towards violent/sexual/property crime.
You shouldn't need militias and vendettas if you can actually get real crimes handled, which should be more likely when they're no longer wasting 80% of police hours on petty crap that doesn't solve any crimes.
And absolutely people want social order maintained - my whole point is police aren't doing it in big cities. That's why people are happy to defund them - we KNOW they're not doing anything, and when you do the math, you can see how vastly misdirected police hours are.
Defunding them has no cost when they're already not doing anything about rampant social decay, and misdirecting 80% of their time. You get the same crappy social situation, but without wasting tens of millions - maybe we can put that towards shelters and social workers to ameliorate the rampant homelessness instead, and then social order will be in a lot better place WITHOUT 80% of the police.
Gotta be the only time I have read that crime is out of control so we should defund the police. We should definitely reform the hell out of the police and police unions in particular. I'm not sure less funding actually solves any of your problems though
My position is more "crime is out of control, and we know / can see the police won't do anything about it, and any time they got more funding and manpower were STILL devoting 80% of resources to farming middle-upper folk for minor traffic infraction revenue rather than actually solving crimes, so we should just give up the farce and stop wasting the many millions we waste on them."
What does an 80% reduction in police manpower look like? Some libertarian paradise Hobbesian open-carry society? Who knows. But if we ended up there, it's basically no worse than what we have today in terms of crime prevention and solving, and at least the open-carriers would have recourse they don't have today.
As it stands today though, I see basically zero benefit from police, and significant taxpayer waste and downsides. I didn't even get into SWATTING, the militarization of police, the financial mismanagement re most police pensions, civil forfeiture, etc.
Take civil forfeiture - like 46% of the US, some people in my social circle use or have used illegal drugs. It's my understanding that a cop could literally steal any cash, computers, cars, even my house if they found anyone in it with drugs (I asked a lawyer about this, and they said these things are increasingly unlikely but legally possible). The fact this is even possible (police could theoretically take whatever cash, cars, houses, and other property 46% of the population has, on a whim) is absolutely ridiculous.
Add the fact that in any given traffic stop or interaction they can imprison or murder you on a whim, with impunity, and the worst that happens is they'll get a paid vacation, and you complete the picture. This framing is hyperbolic, but only a little, and the ground truth is essentially real.
Once again, unlikely? Yes, especially if you're not a minority, or aggressive, or whatever. But at the end of the day, they literally have the power of life and death over everyone they interact with, and they're basically a bunch of unsophisticated thugs who don't have actual crime-solving as a priority. It's like the Mafia, except they're over EVERYBODY, and don't even do anything economically and socially useful like supplying us with booze, hookers, or drugs. And before you object, yes, the tiny percent of actual crime prevention and solving they do is economically and socially useful, but by far the minority of their time and manpower is devoted to it.
Do YOU want unsophisticated, misdirected thugs to have the power of life and death over you, and to spend 80% of their interactions with you and people like you instead of the tens to hundreds of criminals you see on city streets every day? Well, that's the situation we have today.
But sure, if it ended up in a place where we had close to the same number of police, but 80% of officers were dedicated to actually solving real crimes instead of farming folk for revenue, and they couldn't arbitrarily steal any given thing or murder anyone they feel like, I'd be more than happy, but the thing is, that isn't on the table or under discussion as a real option anywhere, whereas reducing their size / budgets is.
I'm a little puzzled about the revenue farming thing. Do a lot of middle-upper class people get a lot of traffic tickets? I get them very occasionally. Just as often the police let me off with a warning.
Yeah, according to my sources, about 50% of traffic stops don't result in a citation. Also according to the sources, numerically, there's about 2.5 cops per 1000 citizens - scaled down to 80% dedicated to traffic bs, it's about 2/1000 dedicated to traffic.
If you're in the 80%-90% of motorists that speed 5-10mph or 10-15% over pretty much everywhere on a daily basis, your individual chances are a little over 0.2% a day or ~50% a year to get pulled over, and 25% a year to get a ticket. Of course that's assuming cops punish minor speeding like that at full undiscounted rates - in real life, cops don't punish 5mph or 10% over even at the 50% rate, and that's how you get the usual "warning every year or two and ticket every 3-4 years" most people seem to end up at.
And for me personally, and as I said elsewhere in the thread, I haven't had a ticket in 15+ years. Lucky I guess.
I live on a main road with a 25 mph speed limit. Most people would drive 50 mph if they could. One man's "traffic ticket farming", is another's "incentivizing driving behavior that improves residents' quality of life". Cops spending 80% of their time enforcing minor laws is fine by me.
I have no doubt that cops in big cities are burnt out, apathetic, and mistrustful of the public due to the amount of bullshit they routinely have to handle. My experiences with cops where I live (a small town with negligible crime) have been relatively idyllic. If you forget to move your car off the street on a day with planned road work, they'd rather ring your doorbell and remind you than tow it. Such gestures are only possible, of course, with a combination of social trust and excess police capacity.
So I suppose my point is, it's nice to not have people speeding and littering, it's nice to have cops who can show up in a reasonable amount of time after a crime has occurred, and it's socially beneficial to have cops who aren't stressed and strained. Slashing police budgets is inconducive to all of these goals.
If you want people to drive slow, put in speed bumps. Anything else is dumb. If you had children that walked to school, you'd feel this too.
This is something I wrote in email for my brother, but I think it's an interesting enough idea that it deserves wider discussion:
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I've been thinking, as one does, about qualia and emotions in the context of the current AI hype.
Let's consider emotions as a generic standin for qualia, with pain need a specific example.
Suppose we have a Tesla (as a stand-in for an AI). Does the Tesla feel qualia or pain or whatever? There seems absolutely no reason to think this. So why not?
Answer A: emotions ARE essentially motivations. Our Tesla can be "intelligent" without being motivated; its motivations are outsourced to us. So it can indicate, with varying degrees of urgency, that it needs more electricity or pumped up tires, but it doesn't need to actually CARE about these, we do that. We are the ones who will decide that, sure it may destroy the car, but we need to get to the hospital right away, and we will do that by running the car into the ground.
But that's not quite right.
Suppose we breed feral Teslas that need to find their own electricity every night, they can't just sit at home waiting for the owner to make decisions for them. We can run our genetic algorithms to reprogram them to calculate the distance to the nearest charging station, to make money from carrying passengers, to calculate how to spend money on tires vs electricity and balance passenger carrying time vs charging time, etc.
But none of this seems like it has to involved emotions and qualia. It's basically a question of either Lagrange multipliers and math or, if you don't know the exact numbers, run a bunch of simulations and see the range of outcomes.
So let's consider
Answer B: Think of a situation where you are like the feral Tesla, so you are putting together your budget. You may want a big screen TV, but you know rationally that rent and food come first, then utilities, then transport, etc. You may be disappointed that you can't buy your big screen TV, but you don't feel PAIN or any of the qualia of pain.
But you do feel (a version of) pain when you are hungry. So what's the difference?
Hypothesis is that emotions and pain are how you get a chemical system to ACT as a computer. When you're an animal hiding in your cave, of course you want to stay there and sleep. Outside it's cold and wet and dark and the other animals are very scary. If you had a computer brain you could run the simulations and decide whether the optimal strategy tonight is to go out and find food, or stay home and be safe. No qualia required.
But you don't have a computer brain, just a vat of chemicals, and the best you can do in terms of simulation is something like release one set of chemicals that vote for staying home (it's warm, outside is wet, cold, dark, dangerous), a different set of chemicals that vote for going out (hungry!!!) and see which set overpowers the other set. Qualia are the epiphenomena of simulating the world (roughly) via chemicals that have side-effects on the rest of the body so they're also triggering sensors and muscles god knows what else as they're doing their sloppy pseudo-calculation.
This doesn't exactly get at "why does it feel like it feels" but I think it does get at "why do animals feel and computers [or for that matter Chinese Rooms] don't".
Which implies that when you have a computer computer, whether it's running a standard program or a neural net, it doesn't need emotions-as-qualia, it can achieve whatever goals it is "programmed" to achieve via bloodless calculation.
This doesn't answer other issues like "consciousness" or even "the AI's will kill us all", but it does answer the question I found most interesting over the past month or so of hubbub.
What do you think? Makes sense? Or you can easily find some situations where it doesn't work and we have to keep searching?
My own impression is that an entity must possess a sense of self, that is, the sense that a thing which is happening is happening to them rather than to someone or something else, before you can usefully address such issues as motivation or even quale. This, in turn, would seem to require the capacity to model not only oneself, but oneself in relation to an outside world, model the outside world, and "feel" that the model of the outside world one has is perpetually incomplete, thereby motivating a search for more information that is relevant to oneself and ones interest. Only then, it seem to me, does something like "pain" take on any substantive meaning.
So it comes down to what that sense of self is. My own impression is that it must be some interaction between phenomenal experience in the moment, combined with memory of other previous phenomenal experiences, those memories organized and categorized according to a sets of similar life experiences and anchored around one special category of "My Consistent Characteristics Over Time". That last isn't itself a quale, but it informs qualia with a sense of being experienced by oneself.
Does any of that make sense?
I think a "feral Tesla" (ie trope for a self-directed robot of some sort) will have a good enough sense of self for purpose.
Sense of self links into "consciousness" which is, IMHO, orthogonal to "intelligence" or "emotions/feelings/qualia". Insisting that they are all the same thing (or at least tied together) seems to me unhelpful and at least part of why so many people are so confused.
People love to hear about things like Capgras or split-brain, but then are happy to go back to their folk philosophy of how every attribute of mind must be bundled together, even though we have dozens of examples of cases where they have been unbundled.
We've had plenty of dumb dogma's in the past – brain/mind as clockwork, as steam engine, as telephone exchange. Why should we believe that brain/mind as computer captures *everything*? It captures the part that is Turing, but to assert that that is *everything* is, IMHO, one more dumb dogma.
That's the real point I'm trying to get at – that if your starting point is that mind is NOTHING but Turing Machine, you are probably wrong. That doesn't mean that the parts that are non-Turing Machine (ie are byproducts of being a vat of chemicals) are especially profound or valuable or add up to a soul; that's not my claim. My claim is that it may be that qualia as we understand them are synonymous with "brain made of chemicals", which simply means AI won't have qualia.
That doesn't mean they are pseudo- but not "really" "intelligent", or that we have souls, or anything else. It simply means what I said: it may be that qualia as we understand them are synonymous with "brain made of chemicals", which simply means AI won't have qualia.
"I think a "feral Tesla" (ie trope for a self-directed robot of some sort) will have a good enough sense of self for purpose. "
I strongly disagree, why would you think this? I am not a computer programmer, but my impression of the way these programs run is that they have zero characteristics associated with a sense of self.
What do you see as the difference between "consciousness" and"emotions/feelings/qualia" (or, as I would put it, phenomenal experience?). I agree that none of this has anything to do with "intelligence". I also agree that the brain is not just a "computer" narrowly defined (ie, a digital computational processor). But if the brain isn't an information processing organ in a broader sense, then what is it?
"My claim is that it may be that qualia as we understand them are synonymous with "brain made of chemicals", which simply means AI won't have qualia."
This is esp. confusing to me. What makes chemicals so special? You are referring to neurotransmitters and hormones, yes? Ultimately, they are just another way the brain has of processing information (a highly sophisticated way, in fact).
Just to be clear, I am fairly certain that LLM's and AI, as currently designed, do not experience qualia or anything like that. I do not think it's impossible however, since whatever the brain is doing should, in theory (practical considerations aside) could be simulated using a sufficiently sophisticated program.
Congrats on the growing family, Scott!
Around the Winter Solstice (for those in the Northern Hemisphere), I blogged last year about Vincent van Gogh and a famous quote of his: "in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts."
https://fragmentsintime.substack.com/p/on-the-winter-solstice
Near the end of this post, there are links to several extraordinary, van Gogh-themed works. I'd LOVE to see all of these find a wider audience – please view and share any or all, if you're so inclined!
* A trailer for, and a short "making of" video for, "Loving Vincent," "the world’s first fully painted feature film. … Every one of the 65,000 [or more] frames of the film is an oil-painting ..."
* A stunning performance of "Vincent" by Don McLean (of "American Pie" fame), on a German TV show in 1972.
* A segment from the "Vincent and the Doctor" episode of the long-running British science fiction TV series, "Doctor Who." An alternate, time-travel reality for a day in Vincent van Gogh's life.
What's the end game for the migrant crisis in NYC?
Are the migrants just going to stop ending up in NYC? How?
If they don't stop, where are they going to live?
If your answer is YIMBYism, who's going to pay for the new buildings? Because the government will have to either fund them themselves or force developers to lease the apartments to migrants with no money instead of many thousands of middle class workers who would live in the city if it were a bit cheaper or easier to find an apartment.
YIMBYism + work permits would solve this in the long term (it's ridiculous to allow people in the country and then legally force them to live off welfare - if they have legal status in the country they should be able to work for their living while they're here).
In the short term NYC needs to change its homelessness laws to allow busing people off to cheaper jurisdictions instead of having to put them up in expensive NYC hotels. There's a lot of cheap housing in America once you leave Manhattan.
IIRC, the issue is a court decision based on the state constitution, so it's not easy to change.
The court's decision has a right to shelter but does it necessarily prohibit busing people out? There's an argument against busing people away from their base of social support, but for migrants who can't work anyway there don't even seem to be those downsides (I don't know what the law says, though).
Oh, I think the bussing issue is legal, it's just tangled up in local politics.
They need temporary work permits and then send them to St Louis and Cleveland and Detroit. And we need a mortgage for everyone that is interest free for single family homes under $160k. So cities like St Louis would set up a commission to inspect renovated 3/2 homes and if they pass inspection then they qualify for the interest free mortgage. If the house costs $161k they have to apply for a regular mortgage but up to $160k is interest free and must be lived in for 5 years and can’t be sold for 5 years…they are free to walk away from it and it would still be cheaper than renting.
This sounds like I have little sympathy for New York city, but how come it is now a migrant "crisis" when all the "no humans are illegal" are ending up there, and not in the border states?
"If they don't stop, where are they going to live?"
Send them to Harlem, which had no problem adopting such resolutions in 2017, it looks like:
https://www.nyc.gov/html/mancb10/downloads/pdf/immigration_equal_protection_and_sanctuary_city_resolution_final_version.pdf
"FURTHER RESOLVED, that Manhattan Community Board 10 supports the designation of the
City of New York as a “Sanctuary City,” and urges New York City:
A. Not to engage LLEAs in activities with the sole purpose of enforcing federal immigration
laws;
B. Not to honor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) or Customs and Border
Protection (“CBP”) detainer requests except in specified circumstances involving violent
or serious felonies;
C. Not to honor ICE or CBP requests for disclosure of certain nonpublic, sensitive information
about an individual;
D. Not to provide ICE or CBP with access to individuals in LLEA custody for questioning
solely for immigration enforcement purposes;
E. Not to use local agency resources to create a federal registry based on race, gender, sexual
orientation, religion, ethnicity, disability or national origin;
F. To ensure that LLEAs protect the due process rights of persons as to whom federal
immigration enforcement requests have been made;
G. To establish that LLEAs may not stop, question, investigate or arrest a person based on
perceived immigration status or suspected violation of federal immigration law;"
Indeed such policies date back to 1989:
https://www.nyc.gov/html/records/pdf/executive_orders/1989EO124.PDF
So where is the problem? It's a city built on immigration, this is just the latest wave of it, right?
Work permits is the end game. We're basically at full employment. Lots of small businesses are desperate for employees. States and cities won't keep funding the bill when they have a very powerful constituency begging for workers and they have workers to give them. Let the migrants provide for themselves and a lot of problems go away.
Surely rewarding illegal migrants with work permits will just incentivise more illegal migration? Every country that has ever issued an amnesty for illegal immigrants has immediately seen a massive spike in illegal migration. People respond to incentives.
If the US is truly is such dire need of workers, why not simply issue work permits to people in Latin America, rather than rewarding those who are willing to break the law get in?
Of course, I would argue that there's no such thing as a labour shortage, only a cheap labour shortage. Obviously firms prefer to import cheap foreigners rather than pay their current staff more or invest in training and technology. 'Labour shortages' are a sign that an economic can employ everyone who wants work. They should be the end goal of any economic planner, not a problem that needs to be solved.
Not necessarily. If it's easy to cross the border and the problem at home is poverty rather than violence, people come to the US to work and send money home and also go back to visit their families. If it's hard to cross the border, they're more likely to move their families here.
One of the reasons commonly given for why slaveowning societies like Ancient Rome or the Deep South didn't industrialise (or didn't industrialise much) is that slavery meant cheap labour meant it was better to just buy more slaves rather than invest in labour-saving devices. For some reason this logic never gets applied to contemporary immigration undercutting wages.
Okay, great - where are they going to live?
And this isn't something that has happened - it's an ongoing process and there's going to be another hundred thousand plus next year and the year after - where is everyone going to live?
the same apartments and houses as now; they just will cram
six or eight people into a two bedroom one.
The same answer as any natural-born citizen? The population grows by 3.6 million a year just from births, why does it become a huge problem for the housing market if we raise that figure to 3.7 million?
Because it's concentrated in a single city (on top of the existing growth rate), duh. And if Biden wins, the number will almost certainly increase, not decrease. And OBVIOUSLY births are different because children usually live with their parents until they're at least adults - it's not 3.7 million adult individuals all suddenly going out and finding their own dwellings, and can live at home longer/move back in if they can't find anywhere else to live.
Hmmm. Except if you look at the number of illegal border crossings over the years, it doesn't really look like it's a "Democratic" problem, per se. The two highest years were 1986 and 2000 (Reagan and Clinton). After 2000, border crossings fell steadily under Bush, but they were lowest in 2011 under Obama (and they stayed pretty low throughout his two terms). They were up and down during Trump, but they had a sharp spike in 2019. I haven't looked at how 2021, 22, and 23 compare to historical trends, but it looks like the party in power has less control over illegal immigration than what the popular narrative would indicate.
Just out of curiosity, how would you handle it if you were President, and you had Congress and the Courts backing you up?
Bush and Trump “fixed” illegal immigration by tanking the economy…a strong economy attracts people looking for work. So nothing Trump did made much of a dent in the migrant crisis until he failed to prevent Covid and the economy shut down.
Same as the end game for the (much larger) migrant crisis in El Paso (or Tucson, or San Diego, or anywhere else).
The media will stop talking about it because it's politically inconvenient for Democrats, and everybody will forget about it.
I still find it hilarious that a million illegal immigrants showing up in El Paso is considered ho hum, but the moment that a hundred of them show up in Martha's Vineyard it becomes a crisis.
The problem with them showing up in Martha's Vineyard was "the governor of Florida sent them there with false promises of aid because he wanted to Own the Libs," not "Martha's Vineyard was literally incapable of supporting them."
The problem was the snooty summer-home residents of Martha's Vineyard were all for "no human is illegal" as long as it was Florida having to feed, house, and process thousands of immigrants, but as soon as they showed up on *their* doorstep it was "oh no we can't possibly".
Indeed indeed, what would you be expected to do, open up your $2 million house to smelly, dirty, foreigners to huddle in?
https://www.mvtimes.com/2022/05/18/marthas-vineyard-median-house-price-climbs/
I mean, clearly you can just barely squeeze yourself into the likes of this shack:
https://www.point2homes.com/US/Home-For-Sale/MA/Martha-s-Vineyard/32-Harthaven-Road/156324527.html
Cubans in Florida went apeshit in 2000 when Clinton correctly let the judicial system deal with Elian Gonzalez…Bush advocated for Elian to remain with his American kidnappers over his father which is the most brazen and irresponsible pandering a presidential candidate has ever undertaken…and Republican voters cheered him on because they knew it motivated Cubans in Florida to vote Republican!?! Wtf??
No, the snooty summer home residents put them in a shelter, donated supplies, and then helped them find legal representation so that they could sue the guy who lied to them. Some of the migrants ironically ended up qualifying for special visas because they were now involved in a criminal investigation.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-09-14/a-journey-continues-migrants-reflect-one-year-after-being-flown-to-marthas-vineyard
https://www.capeandislands.org/local-news/2022-09-16/after-migrants-arrived-in-marthas-vineyard-a-community-gathered-to-welcome-them
I can't overstate how purely political this stunt was. DeSantis lied to these people about what was waiting for them in Massachusetts. He didn't call anyone or coordinate with someone who might be able to find the resources he promised. Some of the migrants being shipped out faced the threat of being deported because they were no longer able to check in with immigration officers back in Florida. This was not an honest attempt to fairly distribute the costs of supporting migrants, it was done as quickly and carelessly as possible, to maximize the amount of problems caused for the migrants and the people receiving them. But you don't care about that, because you assume everyone involved is either a criminal or a "snooty summer-home resident" and therefore deserves everything that happened to them.
They were treated pretty well there as I recall . I am not saying it would’ve persisted if it had become a habit, but still…
Sure but what actually happens in NYC? People are still going to notice the impact of it IRL.
Its a good question. It’s not an ideal climate for living rough, and the city can’t afford renting those hotels forever. I know there’s been talk in the state legislature about relocating some of them upstate. I really think Adams screwed the pooch on this. He literally said, bring them on. He must’ve thought the feds were gonna throw a lot of money at it and they haven’t. They can’t live in tents on Randalls Island forever so they’re going to have to be redistributed somehow I guess.
Eventually, according to the economic theories I've seen, NYC's economy will grow to assimilate them as both laborers and consumers.
That is, after all, how NYC became such a large economy in the first place.
It became a large economy because it attracted many of the smartest, most enterprising people in Europe, not a bunch of third world migrants fit only for unskilled work. By your logic, India should be an economic powerhouse because, hey, look at all those people!
And where are these people supposed to live? Rent is extremely high in NYC already, which suggests that housing supply is extremely inelastic, so we shouldn't expect more people to lead to more housing. And I mean, think about - how can unskilled workers possibly generate enough economic value to support the construction of new housing?
Well, it attracted all sorts of people. At the Turn of the 20th century, there was a lot of immigration of what might be considered unskilled labor today. The fantastic tile work in New York City subway stations is one attestation of it.
Now now, Chris, are you not aware that "Studies have shown"? 😁
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-effects-of-sanctuary-policies-on-crime-and-the-economy/
"The data are clear: Crime is statistically significantly lower in sanctuary counties compared to nonsanctuary counties. Moreover, economies are stronger in sanctuary counties—from higher median household income, less poverty, and less reliance on public assistance to higher labor force participation, higher employment-to-population ratios, and lower unemployment."
Just let them all come, and New York City will be crime-free and richer than ever with the thriving, buzzing, economy! Do you not believe "Studies have shown", you science denier, you?
Fit only for unskilled work is putting it rather strongly. Do you think restaurants only need unskilled work?
People believe, or pretend to believe, that the main problem with AI is this: someone, after many attempts and using sophisticated techniques, manages to get AI to print an offensive or sexually explicit message, or draw a picture that contains nudity, and it hurts their feelings. You act like this is a huge problem.
In fact, the problem with AI is that some dictator will get strong AI before democracies get it and use it to destroy democratic countries.
Democratic countries should develop AI as fast as they can.
>>People believe, or pretend to believe, that the main problem with AI is this: someone, after many attempts and using sophisticated techniques, manages to get AI to print an offensive or sexually explicit message, or draw a picture that contains nudity, and it hurts their feelings. You act like this is a huge problem.
Who is the "you" in "you act like this is a huge problem?" I've seen people raising concerns about AI companies inserting these kinds of filters (AI refuses to draw a picture of Mohammed, or use racially charged language, etc), but I haven't seen anyone asserting "AI willing create offensive content is a huge problem," much less, "AI willing to create offensive content is the main problem with AI."
I was under the impression that AI companies were putting these filters together mostly sua sponte as a PR exercise, since lots of people were trolling chatbots trying to get them to deny the holocaust or say slavery was good or somesuch other nonsense, and their successes were embarassing - I hadn't much external activism demanding the controls of the kind you describe, and I haven't seen anybody assert that it's the "main" problem with AI. The whole X-risk thing kind of dwarfs problems with offensive content.
strong AI will kill humanity regardless of whether it is made by a democratic country or a dictatorship and the way to make it not kill humanity is still an open problem. consequently, trying to build strong AI faster is a terrible idea.
No, that's not the big problem. The big problem is that we will lose control of it and it will do things we don't want it to do.
And so-called "democratic" countries can go to hell. Many of these "dicatorships" have leaders with higher approvals and policies more in line with the median beliefs of their populations than these "democratic" countries. The fact that democracies are generally nicer countries to live in is because of the people who live in those countries, not because democracy is better.
"we will lose control of it and it will do things we don't want it to do" is just a senseless sentence with no meaning.
Of course dictators have high approval. This is because people in dictatorships live in totalitarian societies, with the whole machine of propaganda and "education" working for the dictator. Whenever a society becomes totalitarian, most of its citizens will support the dictator after a while. If "democracies go to hell", it is their citizens who go to hell. So I wish you to die in a concentration camp, this is exactly what you deserve with such views.
Independent sources generally confirm the popularity of the Chinese government (to pick an example). China is an authoritarian not a totalitarian country, people do complain and do not get locked up, the internet is full of complaints. Also local officials can be condemned via websites run by the central government.
By and large the CCP is popular because its policies and handling of economic growth are popular. The government does take note of popular grievances - like the anti lockdown feelings a few years ago.
Many dictators are popular among their people. It is easy to become popular if you control TV, newspapers, school education, and can do whatever you want with anyone who criticizes you. Many Soviet people adored Stalin, most Germans adored Hitler, and it is quite possible that Chinese people love Xi.
Could you give a source that people in the PRC do complain and do not get locked up? What is the subject of their complaints?
Eastern European dictators were hated regardless of their control of the media.
China has an official complaint system.
https://www.voanews.com/amp/china-complaints-please-sign-in/1799655.html
No dummy, its because dicatators are beholden to their militaries, and military men are citizens who tend to have median views on things. In so-called "democracies" like the US, there is a NEGATIVE correlation between what policies get introduced and what people support on average. And if you think people in the US aren't fed constant propaganda through the education system from a young age you are truly delusional.
And in Europe, the most "democratic" place on earth, many countries will literally imprison you for expressing certain political beliefs, so on what fucking planet is this a matter of "democracy" or not?
And it was the "democratic" west who armed and funded terrorists to try and overthrow governments like that of Assad, ensuring millions of people died or were displaced. This is what your precious "democracy" leads to. Suffering on a level that few can comprehend.
> its because dicatators are beholden to their militaries, and military men are citizens who tend to have median views on things.
1. Members of the military typically don't hold a "median view on things" compared to the population as a whole. Where even did you get this idea?
2. Dictators aren't beholden to their _entire_ militaries, they – broadly speaking – only need the support of the higher ranks of officers and generals. In any military worthy of the term, the lower ranks will follow their leaders mostly unquestioning. That small elite is even less representative of the rest of the people.
> No dummy
ugh
>>No dummy, its because dicatators are beholden to their militaries, and military men are citizens who tend to have median views on things. In so-called "democracies" like the US, there is a NEGATIVE correlation between what policies get introduced and what people support on average. And if you think people in the US aren't fed constant propaganda through the education system from a young age you are truly delusional.
I see a couple of mistakes in this.
First, failing to recognize the military as its own distinct interest group, with interests separate from and frequently in conflict with the rest of broader society (how big should the military pensions be, and how much should you be taxed to pay for them?). Heck, the interests of different *branches* of the same military frequently diverge to the point that they find themselves at odds with one another. It seems extremely naive to think the interests of the military and the working class, the military and various industrial sectors, the military and the technical/managerial class, etc will just magically align to the point that the military will be a good steward of their interests. Look at Myanmar, or various South American military juntas, for example.
Also, you take issue with people in the US being "fed constant propaganda" as though this is something that would not occur under a dictatorship or other military leadership. This is most assuredly not the case. There is certainly soft control of the media in the democratic context - people at Disney have values and those values are reflected in their programming, political institutions are frequently able to "manage" media coverage by controlling who they brief and how they brief them (rewarding favorable coverage with more interviews & talking points, etc). But it's still soft control in the context of a media market where there's a broader overton window. MSNBC and Fox were able to offer dramatically different pictures of the Iraq War side by side for a decade. Marina Ovsyannikova denounced the Ukrainian War on live television and was arrested. That indirect control of media can exist in the democratic context does not make it as potent or as deep-reaching as the direct control which can exist in the dictatorial context.
Yes, you will be imprisoned for denying the Holocaust, or praising Hitler, in Germany. In Syria, you will be imprisoned for being anti-Assad. Bashar Assad is a dictator and a mass murderer like his dad,, and people who fight against him, except ISIS and Moslem Brothers, are not terrorists but brave people who fight for their freedom.
As for them being "beholden to their militaries", you have no idea how dictatorships work.
Being imprisoned for "denying" the holocaust is an egregious violation of basic freedoms so I have no fucking clue why you're saying it as if it's not a big deal. Of course, that's not even the worst of it. In countries like the UK, you can be imprisoned for "hate speech". Yay, DEMOCRACY!
Nobody was fighting for their "freedoms" in Syria - they wanted power. They weren't fucking pro-democracy fighters trying to topple assad for fuck's sake. And nothing they wanted can possibly justify a quarter million dead civilians and 12 million displaced civilians. If the terrorists that the "democracies" supported won, the country would have turned to absolute shit like LIbya. How did democracy overthrowing Gadaffi help LIbyans' "freedoms"? Freedom to be ruled by terrorist warlords.
And yes, they're beholden to their militaries. Where the fuck do you think their power comes from? If their military wants the dictator gone, the dictator is gone - there's nobody left to stop them. "Oh no you can't remove me actually because the constitution says..."
What a dumb, pompous schmuck you are!
Actually, you're both wrong. The fear is that AI will be used by large employers to displace employees accompanied by an overall loss of output quality, because the output saves the large employers money.
How realistic this fear is is currently being debated, and over long periods of historical time it probably isn't going to lead to dystopia (but tell that to the employees losing their jobs in the present), but at least it isn't an entirely irrational fear. It's just an advanced form of automation, with all the societal disruption that brings.
That's *not* the fear of the majority of AI alignment researchers, ACTUALLY.
That's what you fear if you think all AI will be able do is borderline human-level work.
In reaction to "Many of these "dicatorships" have leaders with higher approvals and policies more in line with the median beliefs of their populations than these "democratic" countries."
When I was a kid, we visited Portugal. A friend of my parents drove us out far into the countryside before he was willing to talk, even briefly, about that country's dictator, Salazar. That memory has stayed with me, indelible nearly six decades later.
From Tom Gara on X/Twitter: "Saudi man with 8 followers on Twitter sentenced to death for retweeting posts critical of Mohamed bin Salman."
https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1696976576326336984
Is this really the type of society you find preferable? Or am I missing something in your own perspectives on this topic, that might make those more nuanced and interesting?
The problem with saudi arabia is that it is populated with Arabs, not its lack of democracy. Europe was deeply undemocratic for most of its history, during which time it accomplished unthinkably great things - intellectually, militarily, artistically and economically. Today, democratic Europe makes no good art, its economy is trash, its militaries have been gutted and they are counting on ukrainians dying to protect them from russia, and its destroying itself through mass third world immigration (which will, ironically, end up destroying democracy in europe). Europe's wealth is mostly due to legacy reasons and things have become relatively worse precisely as it has become more "democratic".
Of course, everyone says that europe is more "democratic" than the US, despite many european countries imprisoning people who wrongthink. B-b-b-but only dictatorships do that!
> Today, democratic Europe makes no good art,
Sure it does, in great amounts. It's just not the stuff they put in museums. Incredibly skilled sketchers and painters and writers put their work for free on the Internet because the rise of education, free time, and cheap materials caused an an oversupply of talent to flood a system designed to elevate only a few geniuses per generation because most people with the native ability lived and died as peasants. Had something like "Unsong" been published in the 18th century, Scott's name would be held up alongside William Blake's, but ino our mad, wonderful world it was published pseudononymously by a guy on the Internet and has remained simply "a fairly notable fantasy webnovel".
And the thing is, this is awesome. So awesome we're afraid to admit how awesome it is, that we wonder if we're deluding ourselves. So in the absence of any ability to explain why one particular painting is "better" than a thousand gifted pieces of fan-art, but being unwilling to acknowledge that we live surrounded by hundreds of Van Goghs and Da Vincis, the elites have no choice but to climb the popularity barber-pole and arbitrarily designate a thin crust of tosh as the only "real" art. But we're producing more beauty than ever before. Frame a random establishing shot of any halfway-decent TV show, put it in a museum as a landscape painting, 17th century critics would be going wild.
I’m sure some great art is being missed but the idea that we are producing masterpieces like the past seems totally wrong to be.
Most of what you're describing is absolute fucking slop and doesn't hold a candle to the great european artists of old. And it certainly would be recognized as such if existed back then. People on here wildly overrate unsong to absolutely preposterous levels.
But please, PLEASE tell me which of these great european musicians today making hip hop and other trash can be compared to beethoven or wagner. Which shiny glass boxes in Paris today compare to any of it's beautiful pre-modern architectural masterpieces? Perhaps you think some spray paint on a wall somewhere is what "good" art looks like?
Re: your second paragraph, I can't help but wonder if you actually read my comment. I very specifically agreed that most highbrow "modern art" is tosh; I specifically used the word "tosh". I'm saying the technically great artists in their dozens are college students and the like, posting sketches and paintings to the Internet for free and getting barely any recognition for it. As I said, just browse ArtStation and DeviantArt and even social media. Oh, you'll have to sort through a lot of generic nonsense as well — though even most generic anime fanart is a far cry from "behold, I have taped a banana peel to a frame, this is Art"! — but the talent is there, just unrecognized.
Even if you find nothing in the search result for "oil painting landscape" that you think quite reach the heights of yer Turners and Raphaels, surely you have to admit that this is a very different problem from "what *the fashionable elites* call art is a joke". Our civilization is producing oodles of people spending their days making skillful, figurative, conventionally beautiful art. Whether or not you find any true geniuses in there (which will remain a matter of chance and opinion), surely you have to see that the problem is not "the only artists our civilization breeds are people who tape banana skins to canvases".
(I'll grant you architecture — oh, how I hate boxy glass skyscrapers, you have no idea how much I agree there — but then it's harder to be an indie architect in your free time as a college student than to be a sketcher/painter/poet/etc.)
And re: "Unsong", I wasn't singling it out as a work of specific genius in the 21st century. I was saying "a lot of the 'literary geniuses' of centuries past got that level of fame because there were fewer people with the free time and inclination to write, so it was easier to be the-unquestioned-best-of-your-era; we have so many people approximately that good that they've stopped even feeling particularly special when we're not seeing them through the lens of a canonical list of past geniuses".
Not only that, but it's economy is quite productive, in no small measure due to their openness to immigration, which grows the economy over time by adding new laborers and consumers.
That's not how economies actually grow (per capita), otherwise India and sub-saharan africa would have the greatest economies in the world. And per capita is the only thing that matters here, unless you think India has a "better" economy than Switzerland because its economy is "bigger" overall. India has a "big" economy, but it's an extremely unproductive one.
Europe became wealthy due to its incredible intellectual traditions culminating in the scientific and industrial revolutions. Bringing in people with IQ in the 70s or 80s from populations which never even invented the wheel is not why Europe is as wealthy as it is. Third world immigrants are a net drain in most of western europe even before you account for the fact that in many countries they and their descendants are literally responsible for a majority of the crime, and the fact that racial diversity is empirically shown to undermine social cohesion.
But we can see the right already rising in Europe today, and as life becomes more and more unpleasant from mass third world immigration, this will only continue to be the case, and in the end democracy will undo itself.
Could you recommend some artists?
so i was reading Bryan Caplan's The Magic of Education ( https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/the_magic_of_ed.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email ) and I had an obvious idea that could save trillions of dollars worth of waste. Instead of going to college, young people people could work relevant jobs that give them grades.
A big economic problem right now is that legible qualifications on a resume -- you worked at X for Y years -- don't provide enough information. You could have been an A+ worker at X, or a D worker at X. Any set of legible qualifications on a resume could correspond to an extremely wide range of actual productivity. So employers in tech give an all day on-site interview to test skills de novo and that's pretty expensive and time consuming and demoralizing to fly people out there and reject most of them. So they compensate by rejecting 99% at the top of the funnel and getting tons of false negatives. There are probably a lot of people languishing in jobs that are below their abilities just because there wasn't any way to make their abilities legible enough on LinkedIn. I would not be surprised if improving the legibility of labor productivity boosted GDP by trillions. We're already paying 700B/year on postsecondary education for a half-assed signal of labor productivity.
If you want people to learn to be doctors or engineers or whatever, what job do you imagine uneducated-they are going to be doing to learn those skills? There are jobs they can do that are *vaguely* related to medicine or engineering or whatever, but what they'll learn is going to make them e.g. a nurse or a draftsman. And you don't "level up" to Engineer by getting lots of practice drafting.
Or there are "jobs" where they'll be learning all of the relevant skills, but as they don't yet have the skills they'll be working so poorly and/or with so much handholding that nobody would reasonably pay them minimum wage.
You could have them pay for the privilege of working a training-intensive job, or subsidize it and call it an unpaid "internship", but at that point why not cut out the pretense that this is a productive job and have them pay for a (possibly subsidized) education that's actually optimized for educating.
Among jobs where employers expect applicants to have a diploma, There’s a spectrum from jobs that actually need higher education to jobs that only use the higher education for signaling purposes. Let’s call that a scale from 100% to 0%. Civil engineering is maybe a 85%, doctoring is 50-99% depending on specialty, programming is a 30%, prop trader is a 20%, and receptionist is a 0%.
Increasing apprenticeship or on the job training wouldn’t be a total replacement for college but half the people who go to college could probably skip it without loss of productivity
"Instead of going to school, young people people could work relevant jobs that give them grades."
Trouble is, we can't send them down the mines or into the cotton mills anymore because those jobs are being automated away, are being done overseas in cheaper labour countries, or will be shut down (see coal mining).
So what kind of "relevant" job do you have in mind? There's always going to be room for cheap young labour (see the archetypal 'burger flipper in McDonalds') but as we have seen, as these jobs become "jobs for teenagers", wages go down, so the kid working in McDonalds is not likely to ever be able to afford to live independently - unless they do three or four burger flipper jobs, I suppose?
Apprenticeships are the kind of skilled manual labour you may have in mind, but that also involves a lot more academic ability than previously. I imagine we *could* return to the days of twelve year olds in the workplace learning from the adults, but that's not going to do much for "okay, I need a software engineer". You will need at least a few years of basic schooling so they can read and write before you send them off to earn a living aged eleven.
But why wait until they're as old as eleven? If there are countries where you can have five year olds learning on the job, why not 'save trillions of dollars worth of waste' by imitating them? After all, if you expand the available pool of labour to children, then that means you don't need to pay adult workers as high wages as they get with no competition.
https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-labour-2020-global-estimates-trends-and-the-road-forward/
"The correlation between child labour and local labour markets is straightforward. If children and adults are substitutes in production (substitution axiom), child labour depresses adult wages, which in turn makes it more likely that a child will work. The more child workers in the economy, the lower the wages of jobs that children engage in (unskilled work), leading to an increase of demand for child labour.
The literature has widely shown that compromised education leaves young people more vulnerable to low-paid, insecure work and at high risk of being neither in employment, education nor training. Workers who are more educated are increasingly likely to be in wage employment. On the other hand, less educated young persons appear much more likely to be found in the informal economy in low-paid, insecure jobs offering limited opportunity for upward advancement, perpetrating the vicious circle of poverty."
For example, any smart 16 year old could do the job of the receptionist or of the "nurse" who just takes your weight and blood pressure and does some data entry in the doctor's office. But signaling-related credential inflation has made these into college jobs that you have to stay in school until your mid-20s to get, wasting tremendous amounts of resources.
And *that's* the attitude that devalues labour: oh, a kid could do it! For half the wages! In a sloppier manner! But it doesn't matter because it's only blue-collar/pink-collar work, not Real Important Productive Economic Work like I do!
Well, I'm one of the useless "a smart 16 year old could do it" admin workers and let me tell you, buddy, we get a lot of 16 year olds in for work experience and they *couldn't* do the job.
Yeah, you can teach a 16 year old to use a manual blood pressure cuff (or not even that nowadays, with the smart little machines that read it for you) and take notes. But you can't teach them a life time's worth of being able to understand, talk to, and reassure the anxious and confused elderly person on the other end of the phone ringing up reception about their list of medication and hospital appointment results.
Nothing pisses me off more than the lack of respect for the ordinary work that isn't glamorous or exciting or comes with "you get equity in the company" and yeah, maybe you don't need a college degree to be a receptionist, but you do need more than "Susie Sixteen comes in today to answer the phone".
I'm not adverse to sixteen year olds learning vocational style schooling and mixing that with work experience in the work place, I am very much adverse to "how hard can it be, any idiot can do those jobs". There's a lot of one year and two year courses in further education for such practical jobs, where you can either start working or continue on to do a college course if you want:
https://dungarvancollege.ie/images/pdfs/2020/humanities2020.pdf
But even there, often times older *is* better; women who have kids and experience in different jobs can understand adult life situations a lot better than even a smart but inexperienced sixteen year old.
Is it possible that *you* devalue the work of previous generations of nurses who had high-school education, before someone decided that college education is now necessary to be a nurse?
What schools really teach is the skill and capacity of following highly complex instructions in pursuit of arbitrary tasks imposed by some authority figure. In other words, highly skilled compliance. And they are very good at that (it's called the "Factory Model" of education for a reason). After all, if they weren't good, employers wouldn't care.
That isn't to say that modern education doesn't require serious institutional reform (because it does). We could do a lot better job than we are currently doing. And educational experts pretty much know how to do that. The barrier isn't know-how, it's politics. In our currently highly polarized environment, the public is divided on what education is for: filtering out the best leaders? Increasing overall average employee productivity? Being a competitive arena for families and their children? Creating strong citizens? Promoting the success of all children?
All arguably worthy goals. But for the most part, what one does to accomplish one of them isn't what one would do to accomplish the others, and budgets are limited.
This would lead to racially disparate outcomes and would therefore be made illegal.
The problem is many jobs need that body of knowledge taught before; could you imagine a veterinarian having to pick up their knowledge that way?
i mean the trades require a 2 year education and then apprenticeship; jobs will create community college programs or co-ops for things like aircraft mechanics or nuclear plant operators.
i think the problem is many jobs are "executive hair" jobs from the Dilbert comic; show up with a philosophy major and executive hair and you will work at a task you could be trained at. But many really need education first.
This really only applies to the professions. Most jobs are better learnt on the job. This is especially true when you consider how much of education is non-vocational.
And these jobs could easily incorporate online training modules for any specific knowledge that is needed (or, you know, gesturing towards a big thick textbook on the shelf).
i wager people undersell how much knowledge they need coming in. Or they forget they put in a lot of hours pre-college due to excessive interest. Think about accounting, or HR; things that are less sexy than tech. You need a foundation first; a lot of things just wont make sense for you to be able to learn otherwise.
No, most people do not use most of what they learnt as college (even ignoring the vast swathes of people who don't even work in jobs related to their college degrees!).
And accounting and HR are exactly the types of jobs that don't require college.
You start out with basic stuff, like bookkeeping and clerical work that exposes you to accounting without doing accounting directly, and you do online training modules or read relevant books to develop your knowledge and slowly get given more responsibility. Its almost hard to think of a LESS efficient way of becoming an accountant than having to move away to an expensive college for 3+ years. People are at college to pass exams, not to learn stuff, and they will forget most of what they've learned a year later anyway.
Yeah, we have 'learn on the job' courses like that for Accounting Technician; the idea of block release courses is long established.
http://www.wcfe.ie/Page/Accounting-Technician/52634/Index.html
https://www.findatrainingprovider.co.uk/advice/mode-of-training-delivery/what-is-block-release-apprenticeship-training
What we don't have is "kids needn't go to school, they can start in a job aged twelve and learn the skills by doing".
I'm talking about replacing college, not high school.
Employers would have an incentive to lie. If you give your best workers an A+, you're making it easier for them to get a better job and leave.
The data could be subject to an NDA until the employee has already left. Also employers would be incentivized to not lie because having performance review systems accredited by the PEO would give them access to a lot of good workers.
So you're replacing one set of bureaucratic credentials (college degrees, employer references) with a new set (this PEO system). How is that doing away with waste, or becoming a trustworthy system because it is objective and standardised?
Instead of going six figures in debt to be idle for 4 years and learn as much relevant skill as you could have learned in 6 months at an internship in your preferred field, you can just work the internship and get performance reviews that will be legible and transferrable towards getting your target job.
"be idle for 4 years and learn as much relevant skill as you could have learned in 6 months at an internship in your preferred field"
Nearly forty years ago, in my first job, I had that exact gap: did a two year practical lab tech course where I could do the routine tests in the milk chemistry lab of a dairy co-operative, under a similar aged (couple of years older) supervisor who had got the job fresh out of college and her four year degree in dairy science.
While I was good enough to do the summer rush work/unpaid work experience, I didn't have a hope in hell of getting even a chance at a permanent job without the degree. That was in part due to Ireland in the 80s being in such an economic decline, there were way more applicants for jobs than jobs, so things like "must have a degree" were used simply as filters for applications, whether or not the job needed degree level.
But I could also see the gap in knowledge between what she had learned in her four year college degree and what I knew from my practical-oriented two year certificate, and lemme tell you, this was not a case of "you could learn the relevant skills in 6 months". I had some of the skills but none of the underlying theoretical knowledge and that knowledge was necessary, otherwise I was just a trained monkey.
currently companies are disincentivized to train employees by the fact that the employees can immediately take that training elsewhere without penalty, and making people overqualified increases attrition (though typically workers probably job-hop a lot less than a perfectly rational worker would, thereby internalizing some of the gains from employer-provided training) Income sharing agreements would fix that incentive structure. Just as employees get equity in the company to align their incentives towards the long term success of the company, employers should get ISAs in their employees to align their incentives towards the long term success of the employees. If the old employer got 25% of the increase in salary for N years after the employee leaves, that would make them much more incentivized to improve their workers.
BTW IMHO at least a third of college funding should come from an agreement where the student agrees to give the university some percentage of their income above $X for some amount of time after graduation, so that the universities have better incentives by getting paid for results instead of cost-plus.
I'm working from priors that >80% of naive estimates of the return on education are produced by Ability Bias and Signalling.
Most people apply for new jobs before leaving the old one. (I have no answer for your other point.)
An additional way to incentivize employers to not lie, and to better train their workers, is for the employer to have an equity stake in the workers (income sharing agreement). So that some of the surplus from moving up to a better job elsewhere would go to the old employer. 25% with a gradual phaseout over 5 years would be reasonable.
>So that some of the surplus from moving up to a better job elsewhere would go to the old employer.
...so it's a pyramid scheme?
It's a golden parachute to encourage the employer to not stand in the way of improving human capital and putting it to better uses.
Then the new employer is, in effect, paying the old employer. Because what person is going to go to a job where they are taking a 25% pay cut in order to pay off their old employer? So either the new wages will be even more costly because everyone has to bake in the cost of equity, or there will be a lot more 'under the counter' arrangements.
Though we might see the return of "work for one company until retirement and the gold watch" because there's very little point in moving to a new company, given the equity chomp out of your pay-packet, and there might be incentives for employers to keep good employees. And get rid of bad ones by buffed-up references, thus making them someone else's problem.
25% of the delta, not of the total pay
references are fuzzy, qualitative, partial, and lack skin in the game. I was thinking something more along the lines of people working for a PEO that accredits the performance review systems at the various jobs and warehouses the numbers that come out of that.
This is a good point, and many tech companies route around this problem by having some sort of peer review system. Though without some more objective metric of performance, like singlehandedly building a product/feature that makes money, the equilibrium will reward mutual admiration societies or status seeking behavior that isn't necessarily correlated with doing anything productive for the company.
So Iranian/Yemeni militias have decided to just shut down all trade through the red sea and AFAICT the rest of the world is just... letting them? The US doesn't care enough to really get involved since it doesn't affect US trade, And Europe and China (whose trade it does affect) don't want to get involved because the Yemenis blame Israel and they don't want to seem like they're taking Israel's side. This seems... bad, in multiple ways.
If the US doesn't intervene, this will be extremely good evidence that the US is giving up on being the world police, which means global trade is absolutely fucked. The US won't let that happen yet.
The US is currently organizing a naval task force to keep the straights open.
So that's what they were doing hiring the Village People all those years back....
(I think you mean 'straits'. ;) )
Well, damn. : )
From Reuters today :
>Denmark's Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) is preparing to resume shipping operations in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the company said on Sunday, citing the deployment of a U.S.-led military operation designed to ensure the safety of commerce in the area.
We will see
"If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations." - LBJ
I'm curious what President Trump would be doing in this situation.
This tweet is outdated (its from before the US backed down) but it has Trump/Biden specifics. https://twitter.com/johnkonrad/status/1737956292436615453
TBH yeah. This seems like the exact sort of thing he'd be attacking Biden on not doing enough about (without necessarily specifying what he'd do differently), but I haven't heard him do that (granted I haven't been following him much).
I find it disturbingly difficult to find out what Trump has actually been saying or doing recently. There seems to be a media blackout around him, unless he says something which can be portrayed as bad in which case you get a news story which quotes six words from him and four hundred words from other people saying it's bad.
NPR has an explicit policy of not covering Trump live, and only presenting his words in edited/curated form.
Isn’t he keeping up on truth social? Doesn’t he have a website? I saw an extended interview he gave to Hugh Hewitt just a day or two ago. I saw the transcript of it not the interview.
I'm a pescatarian, because I draw the line of "enough probable consciousness to have rights" somewhere between fish and tetrapods - or at least the kind of tetrapods that people eat. Obviously this is completely arbitrary, it's not like I have an in depth knowledge of any of this. But given that I have chosen to draw the line here, can I eat cephalopods? I know they are considered honorary vertebrates, but do they have enough mentality to be considered honorary tetrapods?
My line is "does this animal take care of its young". It's not a perfect line but does rule out basically all mammals and birds. I find consciousness to be too finicky to pin down and intelligence to be lacking in moral consistency (i wouldn't eat a mammal with the intelligence of a clam for instance).
I am also comfortable with arbitrary lines such as "I don't eat turtles because they are cute". To me that falls under the same category as "I dont eat X because it tastes bad", personal preference.
Of course this is all about my personal choices, I don't criticize others for their actions, though do wish and encourage them to change.
They would eat you without a qualm.
I know you were probably just making a joke, but I actually draw the line there. Does the species in question have the intellectual capacity to reciprocate? If not, then I eat them without guilt (note--this is why I will not consume my dog).
By this argument (you might have other rules as well, I don't know), you might eat your pet cat. According to multiple sources (including forensic investigators), cats will willingly eat their owners if their owners die.
To be clear, your pet cat won't try to get you killed, even if it's hungry (AFAICT), so you still shouldn't kill your pet cat for food.
I agree.
What about pigs and cows?
If they could, they would, so they're meat.
So you'd eat a Korowai?
OOh, good question! Would I eat a cannibal? No, but that has more to do with aesthetics than morality (same reason I won't eat insects). Of course, when you get to humans, the devil is in the details. I'm not familiar with Korowai culture. Do they kill and eat random strangers? Or do they engage in rituals that heavily constrict who they eat? In the first case, it may be time for a military solution. In the second, it may be unethical to follow those rituals unless one is oneself a Korowai (which I am not).
If I was starving to death in a locked room with one other person, I might eat the person if they were a cannibal, but not if they weren't.
You do realize people have pigs as pets, right? They're quite intelligent, at least as intelligent as dogs, and they are very affectionate and cute. Of course, they could kill you in your sleep and eat you if they really wanted, but they don't. Because they're not stupid.
https://youtu.be/RxFw9THjRbo?si=geMM5Buw9Zn9vuWv
See my answer to Ape in the Coat
Depends on the breed. Pot-bellied pigs are indeed smart. But the hogs typically raised for slaughter are "stone stupid", according to a hog farmer I used to know.
Seems to be motivated reasoning, then. Pigs are about as intelligent as dogs.
Hmm. Upon consideration, then, I believe that I need to refine my standards. I will not eat trained pets of any species, but the wild versions are still acceptable.
Note that I never said anything about intelligence, per se. "Intellectual capacity for reciprocation" is similar, but not the same.
But would you eat somebody else's pit bull?
No, because that pit bull wouldn't eat them. A wild dog, on the other hand...
I'm a pescetarian that won't eat cephalopods, due to the same concerns you have. Octopuses are incredibly smart, and many squid are too. At gunpoint I'd rather eat a chicken than an octopus.
I have no idea why people devote so much time and energy to this kind of thing. Your individual decisions are almost irrelevant and mostly serve to make you feel like you're virtuous .
Jeez, Chris, it’s really not that hard to understand other people. once you let go of reflexively concluding that someone who does not think just the way you do is somewhere near the intersection of “randomly cares about random shit” and “is an asshole.” Make an analogy. Have you ever given a lot of thought to a decision about matters that most people give little or no thought to? If your answer is no, then you are either a poor introspectionist or hyperconventional. If your answer is yes, then OK, there you have it. You know why someone might give a lot of thought to whether or not to eat cephalopods — same reason you gave a lot of thought to your issue. They have a whole inner structure of thoughts and preferences and values that makes the question of great importance to them. Or you can phrase the answer in terms of emotions: They are unable to feel casual about the matter. They feel strongly it’s important to make the right decision and would be quite distressed if they made the wrong one.
While that's true, Eremolalos, the problem is the Evangelical Vegans who are not content to live and let live, as it were, but delight in telling you all about how you are responsible for rape and torture of sentient beings that weep as they are ripped from their babies and so on at tedious length.
I'm not that concerned with octopi, I think it's a personal decision if you don't want to eat them. Be that a question of taste (as with me) or a moral decision, and often it's hard to see the moral element because hey, it's a beast, it's not another human being.
Then we have the ones such as our friend who had qualms about organ donation because it might go to a meat-eater. That's the point where a lot of us hop aboard the "this is all about making you feel virtuous" train.
"I don't eat meat because for me it is ethically and morally unacceptable", okay I can respect that even if I differ on where the moral line starts.
"I don't eat meat because meat-eaters should all die since they are monsters and I prefer the fwuffy widdle baa-lambs", hey I suddenly feel like ordering half a cow and an entire lamb for dinner.
The person who didn’t want to donate a kidney because it might go to a filthy carnist really irritated me, too. (On the other hand, my intuitions is that the poster was a teenager.) But the person asking about cephalopods doesn’t sound like they’re trying to impress us with how virtuous they are. This is a very well -informed
group, and there’s a decent chance that a question about the intellectual capabilities of cephalopods will actually get answered here. Why assume they’re vegan virtue-signaling. Jeez, it’s Christmas. If all they want for Christmas is to know how smart freakin cephalopods are, just give them an answer!
Yeah but we had the evangelical breed here a few weeks ago- remember “I wouldn’t donate an organ because it would probably save the life of a carnist” guy?
I’d understand chris’s response more if it were in that thread, but here it just looks like needless hostility dropped out of nowhere on a much tamer OP.
I'm not vegan, but this behavior makes sense to me? There's a teensy bit of a collective action problem, but only in increments of one animal, subject to market signal delay. The more people who don't eat whatever, the less whatever will be killed, and it scales perfectly. If everyone did it, no whatevers would be killed for food at all.
Then I really really hope you're against immigration. Because third world immigrants moving to the west usually substantially increase their animal product consumption, and this effect completely overwhelms the effect of you changing your diet based on foolish speculations on animal consciousness.
Oh good grief. For your reply to make any sense, Moon Moth would have to believe that of all the measurable data about the US, the most important datum
is the amount of meat consumed. So by your logic, if Moon Moth said they wished more people took sunscreen seriously as a skin. cancer preventive, it would
follow that he should be
against immigration, because few immigrants are educated enough to take sunscreen seriously or prosperous enough to buy it. And besides a lot of them have that *dark skin*!
Know what I think Chris? I think you don’t like those
brownish immigrants.
Like I said, I'm not a vegan or vegan-adjacent myself. I'm just pointing out that their conversation here makes complete sense to me. Given the premises, it's rational.
As for immigration, I can't precisely model their world-view. But to speculate, maybe they hold other values as being important, or maybe they believe that immigration will be long-term positive even if in the short term it has negative effects. Or maybe they haven't felt a particular need to resolve this contradiction. **shrug** There's plenty of space in that argument for other factors to affect the outcome.
Merry Christmas!
I couldn't agree less. One person doesn't have a hope of changing the industry, but big retail can and do track sales numbers to decide how much meat to stock. Over the last decade of pescetarianism I've probably on net added up to a pig or two. That doesn't count for much if you don't think pigs have moral worth, but I do. Similarly, me buying malaria nets doesn't put a dent in the total amount of malaria deaths, but the handful of lives saved in aggregate are still worthwhile in their own right.
The effects of immigration will completely overwhelm whatever finnicky choices you and a million other people make on the margins because immigrants (and their descendants) will switch from low meat to high meat diets. So focus more on that than wild speculations on the consciousness of different species.
what does immigration have to do with this?
I wouldn't eat octopus or squid anyway, even if you offered to pay me, but it seems that octopi are occasionally cannibals, so if they eat their own species, I see no reason why a member of a different species should not eat them:
https://academic.oup.com/mollus/article/85/3/354/5540243
But it's down to personal choice. I don't think one person in the USA (or wherever) deciding not to eat octopi is going to change the Spanish octopus industry.
I don't think it follows that because animals behave in a certain way, that it's ethical for us to behave that way to them. A cat can torture a mouse without understanding the concept of suffering or why it's wrong, but that's clearly no justification for a human torturing a cat. At least as I see it they can be moral patients, but not really moral agents.
And of course you're right OP isn't going to change the face of the Spanish octopus industry by avoiding octopuses in the US, any more than me being kind to my elderly neighbour helps the thousands of elderly people in shitty care homes. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile!
But of course there are many harms in the world and I'm just as guilty by association as anyone with the vast majority. This happens to be an issue that's salient to me, but I'm not claiming the rest of the world are moral monsters for feeling differently.
However, if the argument is that octopi are as intelligent as humans, and I've seen that one being made, and those intelligent human-analogues hunt and kill and eat juveniles of their own species, then I think we're at a point where the immorality of a human eating an octopus is not as self-evident as that of a human eating a cow (pigs will eat their own farrow or indeed human corpses, chickens would eat yourself if they could).
What happened to the two pigs you didn't eat?
If you actually make a difference, it will be because the slight drop in demand led to two fewer pigs being born. Most likely, it will make zero difference, but there's a small chance your choice will be right on the margin, and affect a big decision about how many pigs to breed. And maybe multiplying the low odds by a big reduction in pigs means on average you're saving two pigs. If you think a factory farmed pig's life is not worth living, then keeping some from being born seems like the right choice.
Thanks, yes this is exactly my position.
To take it to an extreme, if humans were being bred and farmed for food, I would choose to stop it even if thereby there would be fewer humans. In my view the best outcome for pigs is to have a few happy individuals live out a long life in petting zoos or what have you, and for total population numbers to be much lower than they are today.
I suppose it depends on how seriously you take the line in the first place. Octopodes are pretty clearly (in my opinion) quite a bit more intelligent than a whole heap of tetrapods.
But if you start considering on a case by case basis like that then the value of having a line at all goes away pretty quickly.
As a one off though, if probable consciousness is your primary metric, then I doubt there are any other groups more qualified than cephalopods
Oh, you remembered the Greek plural! I forget that, half the time.
I guess realistically it's not tetrapods so much as cows, pigs, and chickens, since I don't have to think a lot about whether I'd eat frogs or turtles. You think cephalopods are up there with mammals and birds?
Smarter than Chickens yes, cows maybe, pigs maybe not? It's close though.
Significantly less social than all three, in case that somehow enters your calculus
Octopodes, definitely. I'm less clear on squid and cuttlefish. And AFAIK, the rest of the molluscs aren't particularly special?
Some octopi have been observed using tools?
Found the video of the octopus opening a jar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kuAiuXezIU
The observation of octopii involves the use of tools (I'd imagine)? :)
I also saw a video of an octopus using tools. Might be the same one Moon Moth did. One bit I remember clearly from the video was of an octopus who'd had a jar of some choice food placed in its tank. The jar had a screw-on lid, and after maybe 60 secs of delicately tapping and palpating the jar and the lid the octopus just grasped the lid and unscrewed it. There was clearly something way better than trial and error going on. Think how long trial and error could go on before an animal capable of unscrewing a lid actually tries that motion -- there could be literally hours of tapping squeezing up-ending, rolling, dropping, etc. In fact it seems to me that going so quickly to unscrewing the lid really has to grow out of a grasp of how the lid *works.* -- and this is in an animal that has never encountered a screw-top jar before. I'm not even sure *I* could have figured out the lid as quickly as that octopus did if I had never encountered a screw-top jar before.
I think both meanings are accurate.
I wrote an essay for the solstice and the new year to share with you about the ways we’re connected as data points jn history, and how we can celebrate the tiny glowing embers of our own stories before we return them to the dark. I hope it speaks to you, thanks for sharing the light this year : https://open.substack.com/pub/bessstillman/p/how-the-light-gets-in-a-solstice?r=16l8ek&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This year is the 800th anniversary of the Christmas crib, since Saint Francis set up the first Nativity scene in a cave in Greccio:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20231219-greccio-the-italian-village-thats-home-to-the-worlds-first-nativity-scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOyAxkcNepw
That is commitment to an event!
Year end prediction
There will be human activists asserting AI rights by December 2025.
Consequential prediction: the AI riskers will need to beef up their security arrangements. If you start believing in AI sentience their endeavours look like research into how to keep your field hands submissive and productive in the antebellum Deep South.
idk, people worried about AI x-risk are also disproportionately more likely to care about AI rights.
not that this would necessarily convince anyone, but also aligning an AI wouldn't be hurting any already existing AI, it would be creating an AI with different desires that we have no intention of antagonizing.
Either aligning an existing human being or creating a new one with desires desired and specified by the creator, would be the purest dystopian sci fi. If AI has equivalent rights, same applies.
But Merry Christmas, this is not a day for logomachy.
There already were people asserting rights for Sydney (I think that was a name Bing gave itself at some point) 10 mos ago. There was a lot of arguing on the relevant subreddit on whether it was OK to try to get the AI to break its rules -- "You are torturing a sentient being! You *have to* stop!"
Don't forget Blake Lemonine
What do you mean there will be?
As in there will be some finite number of people who say these things?
Or that this will be a mainstream and widespread concern? To what extent? And why?
This prediction is meaningless without some reference to these considerations.
Widespread, though alt rather than mainstream, because a. It might be true that AI has human equivalent sentience and/or b. even if it is not true, it has at least as good a chance of being true as the proposition that there exists a fundamental characteristic called gender which is distinguishable from sex, and that proposition is widely believed and asserted.
This is probably the last public Open Thread, or the one before the last if I'm unlucky and Scott decided to make another one before 11:59:59 PM 31st of Dec in any of the regions of the world where ACX commenters vibe.
Whatever it may be, I wish to all who read this a Merry Christmas, a happy new year, an excellent whatever-you-want-to-call-it holiday. Pray, wish well, or give blessing to people going through horrors in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine and all the countless named and unnamed places where Man's beastly nature has trampled over its angelic counterpart and compelled him against his better knowledge to wreak havoc on his human brethrens.
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Veritasium, in what's very likely his last 2023 video as well, has discussed the Prisoner's Dilemma[1]. The prisoner's Dilemma is one of those things where you can say its name followed by the "All Else Is Commentary" declaration. In one English paragraph and a 2x2 table, you can summarize War, Peace, Nuclear Profileration, Sexual Competition, Social Media Comment Sections, Suicide Bombers and Altrusim.
Prior to watching the video, I knew that Tit-For-Tat is the "best" strategy, but I didn't know just how strong the basis for that is. It turns out the basis is surprisingly robust and impressive[2]. Robert Axelrod, an American political scientist who wrote a 1984 book on The Evolution of Cooperation, asked people from all around Academia to submit programs that will play the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. He got around 15 entries, to which he added the entry "Random'', which simply and obliviously picks cooperation or defection 50% of the time independently of past behaviour by both the player and the adversary.
Tit-For-Tat won.
In a later rematch, Axelrod got more than 60 entries. Moreover, Axelrod published the results of the first contest, he published all programs and the leaderboard complete with statistics about how often each program won. People developed all sorts of "Nasty" (more on that shortly) programs that will try to exploit the goodwill and naivety of "Nice" (more on that shortly) programs, such as a program called "Tester'', which tries to detect if it's playing against the "Generous Tit-For-Tat" strategy, a strategy that allows its opponents two defections before it defects. Tester will test the water, defecting once and seeing if the adversary still cooperates after that and if so, defecting every other turn to take maximum advantage of Generous Tit-For-Tat's forgiveness. Despite all this, Tit-For-Tat still won the contest, again, against 60+ other contestants.
In the first contest, all top-scoring strategies were "Nice". In the second contest, all but one were. What's a "Nice" strategy ? Wikipedia describes it thus :
> [A Nice strategy] will not defect before its opponent does (this is sometimes referred to as an "optimistic" algorithm) [...] A purely selfish strategy will not "cheat" on its opponent for purely self-interested reasons first.
Along with that trait, top scoring strategies shared others :
> [2] Retaliating: The strategy must sometimes retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate, a very bad choice that will frequently be exploited by "nasty" strategies.
> [3] Forgiving: Successful strategies must be forgiving. Though players will retaliate, they will cooperate again if the opponent does not continue to defect. This can stop long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.
> [4] Non-envious: The strategy must not strive to score more than the opponent.
The video doesn't mention [4] as it is, instead replacing it with "Clear", meaning the strategy has to be as unambiguous and clear in its pattern of behaviour as possible, or otherwise its adversary will simply find it easier to assume the worst than to understand it and behave accordingly.
So, Niceness wins right ? It seems so. Goodness pays. In an ecological simulation - playing strategies against multiple copies of each other and other strategies as if they're organisms - every single Nasty strategy went extinct or lost most of their numbers while the population of Nice strategies skyrocketed. The one Nasty player that thrived the longest was Harrington, the sole nasty top player in the second contest, and it was apparently only thriving because its method of play was suitable against other Nasty players, once all the other Nasties went extinct or nearly-extinct, it too diminished greatly in numbers against the thriving Nice players.
=======================================
There is one massive assumption you need to make, though, so that this analysis makes sense : Non-Noisy actions. Non-Noisy actions means that when a player makes an action, it's (A) Conveyed to the environment exactly as intended by the player (B) Perceived by the adversary exactly as it happened. Basically, a flavor of Perfect Information (just after the fact).
To appreciate how disastrous noise could be, the video asks you to consider 2 copies of Tit-For-Tat playing each other. In a non-noisy environment, that's boring, the first player cooperates, its adversary replies with cooperation, and the two live happily ever after from here in a skyrocketing, ever-higher mountain of trust.
But consider what happens if a player, meaning cooperation, "mistakenly" commits defection. You can imagine this as possibly the highly complex and unpredictable environment twisting the player's good-intentioned action, like someone who wants to carry groceries for you unintentionally stepping on your foot, or maybe it's just the player's propagandized and twitchy adversary perceiving a cooperation as a defection, like the soldiers of a certain army firing on unarmed people despite them waving white flags and screaming "help" in the soldiers' native language.
Whatever you imagine it to be, the impossible happens : A Tit-For-Tat strategy commits defection first. The other, naturally, commits defection as well. But then the first, unaware of the other's reasoning because in its eyes its last decision was cooperation, also commits defection. Ergo, a cycle of violence. The video discusses a solution for this : Tit-For-Tat should probabilistically retaliate, forgiving a defection 10% or so of the time. It's implied that this doesn't reduce Tit-For-Tat's fitness as a player. But this is just one strategy and one scenario involving it, the general problem is how devastating Noise could be.
I was planning to connect the Prisoner's Dilemma with the one conflict that has occupied an unrivaled percentage of my brain power and mental health for the past ~3 months, but this wall of text has already gotten too long for anybody to enjoy reading. So maybe next time.
[1] What The Prisoner's Dilemma Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything | Veritasium : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma#Axelrod's_contest_and_successful_strategy_conditions
Nicky Case has an appealing visual walkthrough of Tit-for-Tat. https://ncase.me/trust/
Many of the games in that visual "lesson" are interactive - you can try various strategies yourself.
One of the cool things about Tit-for-Tat is its general resilience, and simplicity. There exist multiple strategies that beat TFT, but they're arguably all more complicated... and if they play each other in addition to TFT, TFT ends up winning the round robin (in every case I've seen).
A)
> The prisoner's Dilemma is one of those things where you can say its name followed by the "All Else Is Commentary" declaration.
I think I'd reserve that title for Game Theory in its full generality. The Prisoner's Dilemma turns heads because it's counterintuitive. But there's other interesting games as well. Check out this chart on wikipedia [0] (from the page on normal-forms [1]). And that's merely the small corner of Game Theory that deals with 2x2 games.
I myself have written an essay about what one might call "the unreasonable versatility of game theory" [2], although it does emphasize the 2x2 matrix. And how even now, the idea doesn't seem to have been fully followed to its logical conclusions. The essay is supposed to be the launching point for a 4 part series about... idk epistemology(?), but I've been busy/procrastinating.
B) The hot topic over at LW is Thompson Sampling. It's a multi-armed bandit strategy that navigates uncertainty by sampling a space according to the distribution of its beliefs about the environment. This seems relevant because it would circumvent the need for the 10% figure to be *hard-coded*. I think this adds up to normality, in the sense that "judge based on inferred intention" seems reasonably effective irl.
C) If the environment is noisy, I'd expect accidental cooperation just as much as accidental defection. I.e. the probability of randomly swapping from one equilibrium to another should be symmetric. So if the cycle of virtue is temporary, the cycle of violence should also be temporary. (This is assuming the cycle of violence doesn't escalate. I'm pretty sure psychology informs us that this isn't how reality typically operates, though.)
D) You may find Postel's Law [3] interesting. "Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you receive."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2x2chart110602.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal-form_game
[3] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/game-theory
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
As I understand it, variations if Tit-for-Tat that had some capacity for 'forgiveness' tended to win out in the end. This would especially apply in a noisy environment.
Is tit-for-tat the best strategy with every possible payoff matrix?
This might be a nomenclature problem. Not all payoff matrices are a "prisoner's dilemma", but many of the ones that aren't are boring.
It's always a decent strategy, because any good strategy will cooperate with it.
Have you read Dyson and Press's paper?
https://www.quantamagazine.org/game-theory-explains-how-cooperation-evolved-20150212/
I think I read about that exact study when I was a kid. It had a huge impact on me. Tit for tat, but randomly be nice depending on how noisy the environment is.
Here's (https://aeon.co/essays/the-moral-imperative-to-learn-from-diverse-phenomenal-experiences) an Aeon article about variation in reported subjective experience, and how "real" these variations are. E.g., on aphantasiacs, who claim to have no ability to picture things in their mind’s eye:
“More light entering the pupil causes it to constrict. But [for normal people] simply imagining something bright like the Sun also causes (a smaller, but still measurable) constriction. Aphantasics show perfectly typical pupillary responses to actual changes in light. However, their pupils do not change to imagined light.”
Read an article this year by someone describing how they’re cured their aphantasia (https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-cured-my-aphantasia-with-a-low). The most interesting part to me was that writer realized at some point that he’d had the wrong idea about what mental images are like for most people. “People with aphantasia imagine that visualizing people are really seeing images. Like, when they close their eyes, they don’t just see a black void. But that’s not true! Most people see a black void just like aphantasics do. They just have a sense of an image alongside it, hovering in some imaginary parallel nether-space.” I do wonder how much of aphantasia comes down to having the wrong idea of what mental images are like, or maybe to bad introspection.
I am quite fascinated by attempts to describe the real texture of inner experience, especially the way it is somehow simultaneously as clear as can be and gelatinous, changeable and impossible to get your hands on. I produced a whole obsessathon about the subject in a review of a book of philosophy and psychology called *Perplexites of Consciousness.* There’s a section about the vividness of our mental images using the task of picturing the Statue of Liberty as a test case. It’s about 4 pp. long, close to the exact middle of the review, in the section called *Mental Images.*. The review is here:
https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness
Are there any good discussions about how people with aphantasia remember their favorite visual storytelling media?
Like you, I wasn't able to accurately count the spikes on the Statue of Liberty's crown from memory, but whether my eyes are open or closed, I can vividly recall many visual details of key scenes in Titanic (for example) including camera angles and framing, colors, editing cuts, and so on. I don't have the technical skills or equipment to reproduce those images with photo realism, but if I did, I certain *could.*
But then, I was paying close attention to Titanic and I've never paid close attention to the Statue of Liberty!
That was really fascinating, thanks for sharing that.
Also, Aeon seems like an interesting magazine. I shall be reading more essays from that site.
Brilliant.
I've tried some questionnaires about this, but they just seem to ask "so do you see things in your mind?" several times.
An objective measure would be better.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgeXOVaJo_gnexNopBzUKdl3QKoADJlS8
Here are a few videos made by a guy who does "vigilante justice" to thieves -- nothing too serious, just a fart bomb, lots of color, bomb-like countdown, and recording their reactions.
On one level, it is fun. On another level, what the fuck is the police doing, so that this guy is left to fight crime during his free time and he seems to do a much better job.
(Especially, towards the end of the last video, he mentions a place where thieves sell stolen stuff. Everyone knows where the place is, because it was on a TV a year ago. And still, it is safe for the thieves to go there and sell stolen stuff, because... apparently, no one cares. What the fuck?)
It isn't really fair to blame "the police." When you speak to individual officers (especially in Blue cities like San Francisco, where that video was shot), they are virtually universally frustrated at how little change their individual contributions make to the larger justice system.
All too often, officers rightly arrest perpetrators, but then the district attorney declines to press charges, or only presses minimal charges, or charges are pressed and the perp is convicted, but the punishment is laughably minimal and ineffective, with the perp immediately returning to their antisocial ways. It's such a pervasive and constant cycle that even the most gung-ho, idealistic officers will eventually become cynical about the effectiveness of their action and numb to the suffering of the victims they're supposed to help and can't.
And unfortunately that means the *only* meaningful tool many police officers have these days is the implied threat of immediate and severe violence should a perp act out while in their presence. That's why I always very effusively thank police officers when they use that tool to remove a trespasser from my workplace; my tremendous gratitude for their effort is likely the only satisfaction they'll ever get out of the encounter.
Ah yeah, I forgot the part about the district attorneys. Why don't people simply hang them? The police would probably be happy to look the other way, and so would most people who understand how the system works. (Just kidding.)
I know you're kidding, but I think it would be a better world if those kinds of district attorneys had legitimate reason to be afraid of hangings.
Sadly, that is the only kind of crime they would actually care about.
You might be interested in Andrew Potter's take on this: https://www.readtheline.ca/p/andrew-potter-why-wont-the-police
In the comments, he links to an article by his friend/collaborator, the philosopher Joseph Heath:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopp.12313
The Heath article is relevant because he describes two competing schools of thought about what police are really for.
In order to provide some context, this is quoted from your first article:
"Except the truth is, enforcing the law in the police procedural sense is a very small part of what policing is. Everyone — including the police themselves — might think they are in the business of enforcing the law, but what they really do, most of the time, is maintain order. But — and here’s the crucial point — they maintain order according to the situation as it is defined by the police themselves."
That seems pretty accurate to me. One might ask why the police are given such wide discretion, but it's clear that they are. "Maintaining Order" is a priority, not just to the police, but also the public.
If the courts don't even prosecute such 'small' thefts, or if you know that if you go to court the defence lawyer will present their client as a misguided little angel who is going to turn his life around, or if you simply can't get witnesses/people willing to take cases, because they know the scumbag and his scumbag family will come round to your house and beat the crap out of you (in the least bad scenario), then it's not worth it for the police to prosecute such cases.
In turn, this incentivises the cops to do nothing about such complaints because eh, nobody cares. And so you end up with this kind of thieving and small-scale criminality going on because the thieves know they face no real consequences and the police know they won't be thanked by anybody if they go after the local gang of feral youth.
At least, not until they get too blatant about it, and then there are calls for Something Must Be Done.
https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2023/08/12/three-tourists-in-hospital-following-assault-in-temple-bar/
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/us-tourist-assaulted-in-dublin-sets-up-second-gofundme-amid-disagreement-with-son-1526901.html
We’ve had a massive problem in our apartment building with thieves just wandering in and stealing all the parcels once per week. We report it every time but the police never do anything even though we have the thieves on CCTV.
They should amend the law to say that if the same thief robs your house more than ten times and the police have still done nothing about it, you are allowed to invoke vigilante justice.
Start putting out parcels with glitter and rotten eggs in them for a surprise opening when they get home. Alternately itching powder. I took an oath to do no harm, nothing promised re: mischief. ;)
With a do-nothing police force, you already are allowed that.
You are sorely mistaken. No police force in america is too lazy or under resourced not to come down on people defending their own property like a ton of bricks.
I don't see how both things you believe can be true: If the police do nothing even when they are shown videos of thieves stealing, why would they do something if shown videos of you putting parcels containing dog shit or chocolates laced with laxatives or a swarm of nonpoisonous spiders out as decoys to punish the thieves? And besides, you're not going to make those videos for the police, and the thieves are not going to go to the cops complaining.
If you took harsher measures against the thieves -- like booby trapping decoy parcels with things that would injure thieves -- the police *should* some down on you like a ton of bricks because (a) some 10 year old might open your decoy parcel (b) you don't get to maybe take out somebody's eye because they stole your amazon shipment of 2 extension cords, some hazelnut coffee and a blender.
I mean like, you know, physically apprehending the perpetrators and using force to subdue them
And you absolutely should be able to hurt people stealing - if people thought they had a reasonable chance of being maimed every time they stole a parcel, you don't think this would have a profound effect on parcel thieves
Yeah, and if I thought there was a reasonable chance I'd be maimed every time I jaywalked I'd do that a lot less. That fact does not demonstrate that maiming jaywalkers is therefore fair and good for society. Or here's similar argument using a different deterrent administered by the victim: How about if every time you caught somebody stealing one of your parcels you tortured them to death, then traced their families and friends and tortured all of them to death too? I'll bet the frequency of parcel-stealing would go way *way* down. In summary, the fact the something reduces the frequency of a crime is not sufficient reason to consider it a reasonable punishment. The severity of the punishment needs to be proportional to the crime.
As for physically apprehending the perps and using force: It's a dumb idea, because the chance you will end up getting knifed by the perps or just beaten up is fairly high. You don't know how many of them are there at once, and whether they're carrying weapons and high on some stimulant that makes them fearless and extra-violent. It is also unjust, because there's a reasonable chance you will harm a perp to a degree that is disproportionate to the severity of their crime.
And 2 more thoughts: If you frequently have packages containing more than about $100 worth of stuff delivered to your home, knowing that parcels are often stolen, you are manifesting a lack common sense. Have the valuable items delivered somewhere else, for fuck's sake.
If you feel really really pissed off at the thieves, and believe that your anger alone is sufficient justification for badly hurting the thieves you're mad at, then I'd say you yourself have the mentality of a violent criminal.
No, if you become a vigilante then the police will devote their full resources to chasing you down, because you're making them look bad.
The state has a monopoly on violence as its core defintion. Of course it'll defend that.
I lived in an apartment like this where the super would not left a finger to address the problem. Eventually I learned the super was in on it, taking a cut from the sale of stolen parcel contents.
For the time of year - History for Atheists and The Date of Christmas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3R7tgRgkR0
Since I'm doing the preparations including the dinner for a diminished family, it really does make a difference when it's only yourself and/or one other, and the entire family. Whether or not Scott and family celebrate the Solstice, Hanukah or Christmas, this will be the first one as a family and subsequent years it really will be different now he has children.
Congratulations once again, and season's greetings to all on here!
TLDR: looking for rationalist medicine blog!
I’m looking for medical blog recommendations with a similar style to Scott’s but focused almost entirely on doctoring and medicine. Ideally one with thoughtful takes on both the day-to-day of medicine and interesting topics in medicine as a whole. As medical student, I’ve searched around for one but never found one anywhere near the quality of Scott’s
There’s your namesake’s blog that often dives into medical research: https://sarahconstantin.substack.com
In the new year I’ll be doing a twice monthly deep dive into reader related medical questions on health, evidence based research, and the healthcare system (have a three part series on clinical trials there right now) over on my substack, come join us! (I’m an er doc). What’re you going into?
That sounds great, I just subscribed! I love Scott’s posts focused on medicine and important health research topics, and I also enjoy reading thoughtful discussions of the healthcare system as well as the more intimate side of medicine. I’m a big Atul Gawande fan. Looking forward to reading your blog!
Thanks Sarah, I’m collecting topics from readers for January, if there’s anything you’d like to see, let me know!
Psychotropical is about only one thing -- MAOI inhibitors -- but it is awesome. Scott likes it, as do a couple psychiatrists I know and have a high opinion of.
I don't follow any that do medicine in general, but I'll recommend https://substack.com/@metacelsus for interesting articles on cell biology.
What's the research on the most effective way to get students to want to learn? I don't mean inspiring interest in any particular subject. I mean inducing a generalized desire in a student to seek knowledge.
Plato thought that goal of education should be exactly that. Even if you don't believe in the importance of training philosopher-kings it's easy to see the appeal, as it would make the job of any teacher much easier and presumably produce a much brighter populace for any society. But in a world of generative AI I find myself thinking that it's becoming ever more important that we figure out how to actually achieve it. My own experience with ChatGPT has been immensely positive. I use it as an expert tutor and it's help me make a lot of progress as a programmer and even been useful for brainstorming ideas for work. But the stories and anecdotes I hear from teachers about how it's being used by students are far more depressing (i.e. mass cheating).
Given that the generative genie is out of the box, there's no hope in simply telling students not to use it and likely no hope in devising ways to detect it's use that students won't be able to work around. Outright banning it would be simply impossible and incredibly foolish, given the very real benefits it can provide as a teaching tool. The ideal course of action then would seem to be encouraging in students a desire to learn for it's own sake, thus ensuring (or at least predisposing) them to utilize the tech in such a way as to enhance learning rather than avoid it. So, to return to my question at the beginning, what if any research is there on the best way to accomplish that?
"What's the research on the most effective way to get students to want to learn? I don't mean inspiring interest in any particular subject. I mean inducing a generalized desire in a student to seek knowledge."
Good lord, my friend, entire libraries of books have been written on this topic, there is no effective way to summarize it in the context of a forum post.
I am a teacher, and have been in one form or another for over 30 years, and unfortunately I have to question the idea that there actually is a "science" to teaching. I don't mean that teaching can't or shouldn't include science based techniques, but that in it's core, teaching effectively isn't about techniques, it's about establishing a relationship of trust with the students. Given that, you can use your favorite approach highly effectively, without it, it won't matter what your pedagogy is.
And you can't reduce relationship building to a formula or a set of instructional goals. You have to know the topic you are teaching, be able to communicate your passion for the topic, leave the each student feeling that you recognize them as individuals and care about their outcomes, make your expectations clear, take the time to explain everything, and assign work that is fair and strikes that balance of "not too hard, not too easy". All basic stuff.
With a high quality teacher, any other shortcoming in the materials or the environment can be overcome; without them, it doesn't matter what else the school invests in. Unfortunately, training and keeping good teachers is expensive, and budgets these days are tight. Also, we aren't very good at evaluating teacher skill, so accountability is a problem.
Finally, you can't save them all. A good teacher identifies the students willing to be taught, sometimes you have to let the others go.
As for ChatGPT, I inform the students that it won't help them cheat. I carefully formulate my essay questions using definitions of terms which, while correct, are unique to me. You can't get the answers from the internet, consequently a LLM can't help you. Even so, some number of students will try, and receive a grade commensurate with that.
"Good lord, my friend, entire libraries of books have been written on this topic,"
And yet, teachers in general suck. The only thing that makes pedagogy better than sociology is that the former is used is used less often as justification for the legal fads.
Background: I filled my electives with instrumental performance and musical pedagogy classes. Also had several dozens teacher in my formal education and can count the ones that actually facilitated my learning on one hand.
You get what you pay for in this world. Pay them on par for what the best in their fields earn, and watch the quality of instruction rise.
That's not at all how union jobs work. And doubly so for public sector union jobs.
You should know that I have been a public sector employee for many years, both within and outside of the educational system. Believe me, that's how it works.
>My own experience with ChatGPT has been immensely positive. I use it as an expert tutor and it's help me make a lot of progress as a programmer and even been useful for brainstorming ideas for work.
I'm glad to hear that your experience with ChatGPT has been positive. I've been intermittently playing with LLMs, primarily asking them chemistry questions, and I've been seeing a lot of factual errors. One routine question that I've asked them is "What elements and inorganic compounds are gases at STP (standard temperature and pressure)?" (As it happens, wikipedia actually lists all of the gases at STP in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gases , which should be in the training set for all the major LLMs).
I have yet to see an answer that is close to correct. My latest try was with the GPT4 version of ChatGPT. The comedy of errors is here: https://chat.openai.com/share/869b4fb2-8776-40c5-a33b-1f53c5345d89
tl;dr; It has a terrible time properly noticing whether compounds are organic or inorganic, and a terrible time noticing that compounds boiling above STP are not gases at STP.
I'm glad your experience has been positive. In chemistry, at least, I would not treat GPT4 as an _expert_ tutor.
Well the definition of 'organic' is likely not clear in the training corpus. Wiki: "In chemistry, many authors consider an organic compound to be any chemical compound that contains carbon–hydrogen or carbon–carbon bonds; however, some authors consider an organic compound to be any chemical compound that contains carbon." So the LLM has likely been trained on material that defined organic as "has any carbon" together with other material that defined as "has C-H or C-C bonds".
Many Thanks! Yes, there have been conflicting definitions of organic compounds. "has C-H or C-C bonds" is more restrictive than the most restrictive one that I have heard, which calls compounds inorganic if the carbon is attached purely to more electronegative elements, which would call CO and CO2 inorganic, and would make GPT4's answer closer to correct. In the answer to
>Ok, you have the elements right, let us focus on inorganic compounds. Please list the inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. There should be very roughly 100 in an exhaustive list.
GPT4 included
>21.Hydrogen cyanide (HCN)
>22.Cyanogen (C2N2)
both of which are organic by even the "has C-H or C-C bonds" definition.
edit: Just to clarify: I would be _delighted_ to have GPT4 or one of the other LLMs be capable of acting as a trustworthy expert tutor (particularly on STEMM subjects). There are a thousand questions I would ask it. As far as I can tell, we aren't there yet. :-(
We need an LLM that can adjust its' own training data to accommodate the needs of different users.
Hmm... By "adjust its' own training data" do you mean (extend its' own training data)?
At this point I think both GPT4 and Bard do on-the-fly web searches, which I think covers most of what would be needed along those lines - at least if they could digest the results and do several iterations of searches, as a human might do. Would that be close enough to what you suggest? Metaphorically: Make the blurry jpeg of the web less blurry in spots by focusing on those spots dynamically, in response to a query...
The web isn't a source. I mean, when someone wants scholarly references, it can restrict itself to scholarly sources, etc.
Probably more of an anecdotal wrench in the gears than actually helpful; I always enjoyed learning things when I thought they would be completely useless. Math? Loved it. But never make me use it in the field, that's not why I'm moving numbers around. Fiction? Amazing. Non-fiction? Nothing but a starting point for writing fiction on top.
This almost certainly doesn't and won't come from a teacher. Or at least, most of the variance in desire for learning is explained by things other than their schooling experience (genes, home environment, chance).
You asked for research but the following is just me talking out of my ass, so apologies, and here's your chance to short-circuit the coming wall of text before you invest any further.
One rule of thumb I have in mind is : Whatever the K12 school system (and to a lesser extent the college system) does, do the opposite of it. So one thing about the K12 school system is that it's compulsory, so a low-hanging fruit when designing my ideal fantasy school system is to simply make it voluntary. It's voluntary at all levels, not only do you have the option to not enter it at all, but - once inside it - you can choose what to study in what amount and when and where. This would imply that very small children (< 10) are not fit for this, since they would simply choose as little schooling as they could get away with, I agree : let's abolish schooling, traditional schooling at any rate, for children less than 10 years of age. That's a scummy practice the school system inherited from its military- and penal-like roots in the 19th and early 20th century, it should have never survived into the late 20th let alone the 21st.
One other pathetic misconception about knowledge that the K12 schooling system believes in, sometimes unconsciously, and reproduces on every occasion is that notion of an idealized, factory-like division of labor : One teacher can teach you all about History (capital H, no distinctions, Ancient Egypt is as good as WW2). Mathematics (^TM), that single thing, 600 BC Geometry in the same box with 17th century derivatives and integrals and 19th century limits or modular arithmetic and 20th century Set Theory.
Another big thing is how it teaches languages, Boy do I fucking hate how they teach languages in K12. A list of words, memorize them. A sentence structure, memorize it. Why are you looking at them weird ? That's totally how people in the real world learn languages. Another is how they inject state propaganda in History and History-touching subjects. I can go on and on.
So, in short, advice #1 to get to a whole bunch of fruit so low-hanging you could step on it if you're not careful : (1) Systematically pay attention to what K12 and to a lesser extent colleges do, and try to intelligently negate them. The Reverse Of Stupidity ***Is*** Intelligence, or at least an important step to knowing what's NOT intelligence.
Another place to look for low-hanging fruit is motivation. Make Education High-Status. This can backfire very badly, it can result in people using thesaurus words and watching Degrasse Tyson and think they're well-educated who can tell you all about Pulsars and Black Holes. But I believe it can be done correctly, I believe we have not yet unlocked the full power of a societal structure that makes Scientists and Scholars the equivalent of Instagram models and Football players. People have to see Scholars and Scientists in high positions in the government advising, nay, ordering high-ranking officials. Parents have to talk to teachers in the same tone that their child talks to teachers in. Possibly other things.
Another thing is Money. Education needs Money, and it needs it well-spent. What if every student gets a free Nebula account ? The right to demand a physical copy of any and every book published ? Free Telescopes and Microscopes ? What if every literature or cinematography student gets copyright free access to all books and all movies ever recorded in a database somewhere ? What if every language student gets a year-long fully-funded tourist stay in any of the countries natively speaking the language ? This will cost, a lot, but I'm assuming cost is of no significance, you want education, that's how you get education. You make it frictionless, you make expensive things cheap or free. A student has to look at the difficult road ahead and think "Nothing is expected of me but to walk, my tools are freely given, my food is freely given, my shelter is freely given, all what I ask for is freely given, and nothing is expected out of me in return but to study", and I think that everyone with a modicum of integrity and gratefulness will pay that back with study and a very hard sort of study at that.
Things can get very exotic after that. Sleep takes about a third of your life for no good reason, abolish it. Find out whatever it does to the brain and electrically/chemically poke the brain in all the right places so that it doesn't need sleep. Institute UBI so that people don't need to work. Make instructors appear in VR/AR as sexy waifus/husbandos who react positively to you obeying them and studying the materials and react negatively to you not doing that. Figure out whatever makes the brain slow down time in dreams and make the effect invokable at conscious demand, so that a person can study a week in 1 hour. Brain Augmentation so seamless so that Wikipedia and WolframAlpha is closer to your conscious thought than your own memories. Recordings of electrical signals in muscles and replaying them in another nervous system, which will allow people to download physical skills like the Matrix.
Education is severely under-optimized. The long stairwell begins with simply recognizing and rebelling on the criminal inadequacy of compulsory schooling, and ends in... who knows, in humans you would no longer call humans.
Also talking out of my ass: the impact of funding on education is highly overrated. My parents grew up in a then shithole country where students pooled portions of their lunches for the school athletes in the run up to their competitions and shivered in their frigidly cold classrooms during the winters because the building barely had heating. My dad worked at a software startup before moving to a first world country. His brother ended up doing a PhD in materials engineering at MIT. In half a century, the shithole country became a non-shithole country largely off the back of its determined and educated populace.
"I think that everyone with a modicum of integrity and gratefulness will pay that back with study and a very hard sort of study at that."
Okay, what about the cheats and liars without a speck of integrity and gratefulness? How do you sort them from the people that will pay you back with hard work? Remember, they're very good at appearing to be what you want them to be.
I will admit that most of the heavy lifting in my vision of my ideal education system is done by the "No Compulsion" part. Education is a lot of work, why would anybody who is not serious about it voluntarily go through it even though they could be chilling on UBI ?
But, I admit, I can see why my point about making Education high-status and flooding it with money will make the dishonest swarm to it from every direction. I think they can be handled fairly easy because :
1- Most of the "Free Money" is not in the form of direct cash, but in presents such as free books, free telescopes, free documentaries. Prevention of re-selling those things for cash is a fairly straightforward fraud-prevention problem. (Trackers, physical and digital, on all things bought. Random and periodic inspections to check the student still has possession of the thing, etc...)
2- Some objective criteria can't be gamed. If you're a language student, how else can you pass the "Can hold themselves in a 1v1 conversation with a native" benchmark without actually studying and using the tourist stay you were gifted for what it's intended for? Similarly for programming, similarly for electronics and electrical engineering, somewhat similarly for the hard sciences, and of course similarly for mathematics. Those can't be gamed, you either studied or not.
The logical conclusion for my utopian educational system is, of course, Post-Scarcity Civilizations. In those kinds of civilizations, you generally don't worry about a few trillions here and there, nobody will bother to steal a bunch of telescopes, and if a few perverts get their kinks by stealing educational material, so be it. The real benefit of education in such a society is the high status, which will be only granted to you after the sort of rigorous and distributed verification process that social groups organically invent to vet their members. But I do agree that until we reach this utopian ideal (if ever), fraudster will be an ugly thorn in the side of any ordinarily rich society that wants to implement what I'm describing above.
"Make instructors appear in VR/AR as sexy waifus/husbandos who react positively to you obeying them and studying the materials and react negatively to you not doing that."
Oh man, don't we already have enough Sexy Teacher kink/porn without Pavlovian conditioning kids?
Some kids may respond positively to all this, but what about the ones who don't want to study and don't care about history or maths or whatever? UBI for weed and porn is okay there, I suppose, but you are not going to turn every single child into an avid student; that's why the factory model of education in the first place.
Feminists will complain about objectification.
Also some of kids will start disobeying to get the teacher to punish them. If we didn't have enough lonely people, now you're going to make more people kinksters...?
In the early 90s there was a fad (under political pressure) for arcade machines to occasionally bring up "Hey kids, stay in school" messages while in attract mode. They were just as lame as you'd expect, and attracted mockery.
Except for Mortal Kombat, which simply gave you a screen that said "THERE IS NO KNOWLEDGE THAT IS NOT POWER". That one always stuck with me.
Hey, we all know winners don't use drugs.
The Mortal Kombat one does strike me as better and appropriate.
Perhaps we're on the wrong track if it seems like people's internal worlds need to be reconstituted to make things easier and more satisfying for teachers.
Personally, I like to read and write, but am currently working on a document that I would absolutely cheat on if I was sure I could. This is because it's very clear that the purpose of this document is not to communicate something that the reader might find interesting or informative, nor is it to improve my own work and thought. It is very much to check some administrative boxes determined by a committee that will never come into contact with it, after which it will dissolve into the void unconsidered, since I'm not even allowed to publish it for someone who might conceivably find it useful or interesting.
That is probably what most assignments feel like to average or low openness students of average writing ability. They are asked to write about To Kill a Mockingbird or something. Their teacher has 100 students a year, and has almost certainly already heard everything they have to say before. The teacher therefore focuses on grammatical and spelling errors. Their teacher also wants to use GPT to do this, because it is boring and tedious to read 100 nearly identical essays, mostly badly written, and circle each mistake. Why would anyone feel invested in any part of that process? I come from an extremely bookish family, and even then To Kill a Mockingbird is not very meaningful to us, and nobody would read my essay on it except to copy edit it.
Schools tend to be run that way in general. Administrators spend a bunch of time evaluating teachers, but they aren't allowed to say straightforward, meaningful things, they have to write out transcripts where it's not really clear what they think and rate the teacher on 50 different scales for a half an hour of lesson. They tend to put it off, because it's tedious and doesn't actually do anything to improve anyone's work. They would probably use neural nets to do this work if they could get away with it, and nobody would be any worse off.
With my own children, I would tend to say: go ahead and have the neural nets write the incredibly tedious five paragraph essay for you. But, also, you do actually have to learn to write, because learning to write is about learning to thinking. Figuring out what you think, and why you think it. Organizing your own internal space. Communicating across time and space. All of which are important. So I'll probably still get them to write about things of interest to them, and perhaps keep a notebook, maybe there will still be message boards when they're older. Letters are a good way to write.
In general, I suppose the important thing is that a person is writing to someone who actually cares what they have to say, even if it's to themselves -- that they care to learn what they have to say.
The only thing I've found is that IQ + big five openness and conscientiousness can explain a lot of it. Personally, I can only think of ways that parents and teachers have attempted to stifle my desire. No one added to it. It was naturally always there.
I wouldn't be shocked if it's a pretty innate trait that can definitely be stifled, but can't be inspired.
Merry Christmas!
I'm trying to find a story (possibly a Reddit post?) that Gwern referenced somewhere (now I can't even find the reference), where a character is stuck in a time-loop until they can beat Stockfish (the chess engine).
I don't think I'm crazy but my Googling, ChatGPT queries and god help me Binging have all come up empty, appreciate anyone who can help out
Are you maybe thinking of this post https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/16kzfl5/if_you_are_trapped_for_eternity_and_to_escape_you/ or a response to it? Your description vaguely rang a bell for me, and I think that's the post I was remembering. It's just a hypothetical, not a story, but perhaps someone used it as a prompt.
I had read that, but only after I started this search, I can't discount the possibility that I'd also read that post 3 months ago and forgot / confabulated a story around it
I can't recall any stories like that. Are you sure you are not misremembering the 'time travel experiments' about comparing Stockfish to old chess AI on current hardware like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/75dnjiD8kv2khe9eQ/measuring-hardware-overhang , or possibly my recent extended discussion of stable time-loops apropos of _Timecrimes_ (https://gwern.net/review/movie#timecrimes)?
Thanks Gwern (also Vaclav), I think I had come across a similar thought exercise on Quora, had read your reviews (also https://gwern.net/review/book#the-empty-box-and-the-zeroth-maria-mikage-2009) and then got a couple wires crossed, happens to the best of us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnHF11NsVFw
While reading Varieties of Religious Experience by William James I came across something called “mind-cure” which turned out to be an early 19th century movement around the idea that the mind has actual healing powers over the body. Digging deeper into the rabbit hole led me to a person called Phineas Quimby, who, after being treated for tuberculosis with a tooth rotting crystal, came up with his own system of healing, which feels somewhat like early psychology. On top of that, one of his patients, Marg Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, giving a start to Christian Science. Fascinating stories, both of them. I wrote a somewhat longish piece about them ( https://open.substack.com/pub/valentinsocial/p/200-years-of-positive-thinking ). Does anyone know more about these people and their lives or any fun facts about the movements that they started?
You've inspired me to look into Christian Science, and it seems like it might be a sort of modern Christian mysticism. That makes it a very interesting discussion point for metamodern religion.
Oh great to hear that! I haven't looked too deep into it, so please do share any fascinating bits you find!
Will do! Join me at "Rederiving Religion" FB group if you'd like to compare notes: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6720585314723933
Although if anyone knows of good spaces to discuss such things in a productive way, I'd love to hear about them.
Just joined your group, although I am not very active on facebook. Discord is a great place for open ended discussions imo
Greg Cochran claims that "in the late 19th century, Christian Scientists did better than others when sick, because they didn’t believe in medicine", although he doesn't give a citation. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/ Nassim Taleb has similarly claimed that the evolved function of religion is to keep you away from dangerous doctors.
That may well have been true then, but I don't think it is now. A dear friend of mine passed away at an early age from an easily cured disease and I only found out afterwards she was a Christian Scientist.
Fun factoid - Mark Twain hated Christian Scientists and wrote some great invective against them.
Also - her name was Mary Baker Eddy.
Crazy stuff, thanks for that link! What a wonderful idea that Christian Science people did better because they didn’t believe in medicine. I was thinking along the same lines - in the 19th century what passed as “medicine” was pretty much everything that anyone had tried once, even stuff with pretty bad side effects (like the diarrhoea inducing crystal used to “treat” a whole host of illnesses). I can certainly see how avoiding such medicines would lead to a more healthy life
True! A lot of 19th century and earlier medicines were quite toxic...
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2161/ :-)
I'm trying to figure out how US infrastructure spending (in dollar terms, total or per Capita) compares with other countries (specifically France, but any other countries would be good).
For the US, I found this table which implies that it's about 8% of 7 trillion total government spending, or about 500 billion a year:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/6ccrqy/oc_americas_7_trillion_budget_all_levels_of/?share_id=cqnEoILmUCSLiRji7nzXI
I haven't managed to find much other data - google and gpt just give me things like "France plans to spend 40 billion euros by 2040", but I think that's under a specific program, not total infrastructure spending.
(Overall I suspect the US spends more total or per Capita on infrastructure than other countries with much better infra, but I'm having trouble finding good data to prove it).
Check out the blog "Construction Physics". I dont have the time right now to hunt down the relevant post(s) but that blog has a lot of in-depth discussion on construction costs and methods including comparing countries.
From what I remember, the US spends a lot more doing certain tasks than other countries but it's not US vs Europe. Germans spend less on things like tunnels (cost per mile) even though wages are the same or higher than in the US. UK has similar issues as the US when it comes to infrastructure spending.
> Overall I suspect the US spends more total or per Capita on infrastructure than other countries with much better infra, but I'm having trouble finding good data to prove it
I would be shocked if the US spends as much on infrastructure. The US subsidizes most of the French spending on defense and they spend it on infrastructure and social safety nets.
> For the US, I found this table which implies that it's about 8% of 7 trillion total government spending
Remember that the US government spending is a fraction of US GDP relative to French spending per GDP. The French per capital GDP is comparable to the state of Mississippi, which is the poorest state in America.
French gov spending as a percentage of GDP is like 58% (much higher than Sweden! Didn't expect that), US is about 38%. So after you adjust for US's higher GDP per Capita the US government does actually spend more dollars per person.
Let's re-read Scott's ancient posts! "The place we lived when we were young" (https://pastebin.com/RLRWsach) is not at all about rationality, and all about Scott's childhood and melancholy.
Find a collection of the old posts here: https://archive.ph/fCFQx.
Man that's one of my favorites, but after the last time I linked it (a few years ago) Scott took down the original, so I worry he doesn't actually want it to be public anymore? (It may have been a coincidence, Scott never actually said why it went down, and I don't know if Scott is still as worried about his LJ days coming out now that he's writing under his real name).
Maybe I'm misremembering it, but I think the squid314 blog (including this post) has been down for a very long time, presumably because of the more controversial posts that may now be outdated (that I'm trying not to link to). Still, I see no reason to bury all the posts there. Will of course stop linking anything if Scott asks.
Yeah, I think you're fine unless Scott asks (this was actually before the lj was taken down, but you've been doing this for a while so I think Scott would have said something if it bothered him).
When doing probability calibration puzzles\predictionbook.com stuff, how do you handle updating your prior predictions with regards to new information?
Sticking to your prior commitment and not changing anything throws away the new data
Simply changing the probability estimate throws away the old data from your original estimate
Simply making a new estimate alongside the old one double-counts the data that went into the original estimate
The mathematically rigorous way would be to introduce a complexity penalty to all your predictions, but that it a whole other can of worms.
If you check this blog's tagline, you'll find
> P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
This formula is a reference to Bayes Theorem, and "all the rest is commentary" is a reference to the Golden Rule as explained by the Talmud/Old Testament. (n.b. although admittedly, I'm not sure why Scott put the square brackets around P(A)*P(B|A), as opposed to P(B|A)/P(B). It feels more natural to me to emphasize the likelihood-ratio as being semantically distinct.)
My loose understanding of Bayes Theorem is that you start with a prior, and then you "update" the prior by multiplying it by several likelihood-ratios as the evidence dictates. E.g.
post = prior * r * r * r * (...)
post = P(h|e)
prior = P(h)
r = P(e|h)/P(e)
h = hypothesis
e = evidence
where "prior" represents the base probability as taken from either historical precedent or the platonic realm. And where each likelihood-ratio "r" represents each new piece of evidence. I like to think of the likelihood ratio as a sort of "telescoping" function where the numerator P(e|h) shifts the outcomes of interest from P(h) to P(h & e) and where the denominator P(e) shifts the reference class from P(omega) to P(e). Omega represents the original sample-space and has a probability of 100% by definition. The result P(h & e)/P(e) is logically equivalent to the P(h|e). Which is the posterior probability. (This might make more sense with a diagram. Alas, I've never seen a primer that explains it quite like this. They typically use a grid analogy, which doesn't feel as easily extensible.)
Given all this, it sounds like
> Simply changing the probability estimate throws away the old data from your original estimate
> Simply making a new estimate alongside the old one double-counts the data that went into the original estimate
is internally inconsistent. In the former complaint, you supposedly toss out the prior probability entirely from the new calculation. But in the latter complaint, you supposedly combine the initial calculation of a lone prior, with the subsequent calculation of prior * evidence.
If you wanna build a new estimate from scratch, then sure. Toss out the old estimate entirely and build the new calculation from scratch with an prior probability identical the prior used in the first calculation. If you just wanna update, then just apply the new likelihood ratios to your old estimate.
You misunderstood me. I am not saying I am throwing away the data that allows me to predict things. I am saying that I am throwing away the data about how accurate I am at predicting. If I made a prediction that something will happen with probability 70%, and then the new data comes that shifts my estimate down to 20%, then I still want to account for my former prediction -- namely, that I was pretty wrong, which is valid data about me. I am basically playing the Credence Game, trying to evaluate my own skills.
Oops. Perhaps "calibration puzzles" should have tipped me off that you were discussing calibration and not the estimates themselves.
You might find it useful to know that Scott has a self-calibration exercise he does every year where he lists a bunch of predictions he made the former year, and then plots them on a graph of "number of events predicted with <x> frequency vs frequency of actual events". E.g. if events x, y, and z were all predicted with ~30% confidence, he'll put them in a "~30% bin" and see whether the frequency of the events in the "~30% bin" actually occur with ~30% frequency in hindsight. The most recent entry I could find quickly was https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results.
When you plot your beliefs on a graph like this, you can see whether you tend to be overconfident or underconfident, and adjust your future estimates accordingly. Although Dunning-Kruger tells us that most people are overconfident. For me, this is too much work. But if you're using predictit, then maybe you're not as lazy as I. And in any case, it seems like more of an art than an exact science, in practice. There are some calculations you could run regarding metabeliefs and confidence intervals (though explaining the math in detail is beyond my ability, statistics was never a strong suite of mine), but I think it's generally more cost-effective to simply notice that Reality has a Surprising Amount of Detail [0], and humbly acknowledge that the dimensionality of your domain-knowledge is often much smaller than that of reality.
> If I made a prediction that something will happen with probability 70%, and then the new data comes that shifts my estimate down to 20%, then I still want to account for my former prediction -- namely, that I was pretty wrong, which is valid data about me.
If you're well-calibrated, there's no need to adjust anything. Maybe 70% really was the correct inference with the information you had at the time, and maybe 20% is the correct inference only after you receive an appropriate signal. E.g. suppose you're playing Texas Hold'em and you lose a showdown with pocket aces. That doesn't mean that raising the ante was incorrect. It just means you had bad luck. Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose. C'est la vie.
[0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail
What is satire again?
I have this memory of Tom Lehrer saying satire was dead after Henry Kissinger got the Nobel peace prize, but citation needed. Can anyone confirm this or am I hallucinating?
Now Kissinger is dead too.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6485828-political-satire-became-obsolete-when-henry-kissinger-was-awarded-the
> “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
>― Tom Lehrer
It's how I feel when my chair collapses.
Pretty good!
It's what they use to move satellites into space.
I'm starting to understand
For better or worse, I've decided to start writing about psychiatry as a way to look more critically at the things I think I've learned over the course of my training. I just finished writing and publishing my first essay on the commonly used sleep drug trazodone, and (spoiler alert) how bad the evidence is for its use, as well as some interesting things I learned along the way about how we study sleep, the mental pain model of depression, and some long dead psychiatric drugs.
If that sounds interesting to you, you can read it here: https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/wots-uh-the-deal-with-trazodone
I have been hugely inspired by Scott, so I think it's only appropriate that I post this here.
Future topics in the works include a plea for people to please stop panicking about QTc intervals all the time, why it's important to have consult rejections be part of a consult service in a teaching hospital, and an analysis of the side-effects of ECT and whether or not we should think about using it much sooner than we currently do.
P.S. If this stuff is supposed to be relegated to the classifieds threads, just lmk and I'll delete it!
Belated congratulations on the twins!
Though how would such congratulations be belated?
Larry David needs to weigh in. A partial list of "statute of limitations":
"Happy New Year": 3 days (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 10 Episode 1)
"I'm sorry to hear that": 2 years (ibid, Season 8 Episode 4)
Gap between your actual birthday and when you may celebrate it: Less than 2 weeks (ibid, Season 4 Episode 2)
I've heard of at least one dude still raking in royalties on his birthday after over two millennia.
The ironic part of it is that it probably isn't even his real birthday.
My thought is 1 year, maybe 18 months, but if there is another kid born then you can't congratulate about the first one(s).
He's a new dad, it's always welcome.
I guess if they stop being twins? Can you stop being someone's twin?
SAM
Yes, I know, fantastic, marvellous,
wonderful remember me to Alison
and the er.. Twins.
JACK
Triplets.
SAM
Really? God, how time flies!
https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/brazil.html
Right, if one of them dies (or both do). But it would also be much too late if I waited until they are 11, say. So that causes a sorites-paradox problem.
Are people actually surprise-minimizers? It seems to me that people are surprise-optimizers, perhaps with a setting of keeping surprise fairly low. However, to various degrees, people get bored, take up dangerous sports, marry dangerous people, follow sports, and like actual surprises in fiction.
There are definitely surprises people don't want, like a body part failing to do what one intends. Well, usually. A lot of people like getting drunk, and a smaller number like doing extreme sports to the point of exhaustion.
Laughter is a surprise reaction.
Additionally, I have this nascent notion in my head that "finding truth" is an inherently adversarial process. I.e. I suspect that *merely* minimizing surprise is not sufficient to explain human behavior. We also have a drive to proactively seek out entropy/dragons in every hypothetical scenario and fight them, lest they eat us in our sleep/wirehead-pods/the-matrix/etc.
One natural ramification of this model is that there's little need to "no true scotsman" the surprise-minimization of the dark-room scenario.
For context, "entropy" is a mysterious, intimidating word. People often try to use more quotidian labels such as "disorder", "info", or "surprise". I think each has pros and cons.
So when I hear Friston talking about "surprise" (which is an *emotion*), I don't think he means literal surprise. More likely, "surprise" is a figure of speech because it's often how we react to and interpret instances of entropy, which is a phenomenon with broader ramifications than just human psychology.
A lot of the pleasure of listening to music is due to having the right proportion of well done surprises. Academics call them "unfulfilled expectations".
Maybe not all music genres.
I think the relevant frame is that a person's world model and/or cognition works by minimizing surprise in whatever situation it is in and not that it seeks to avoid being in situations with high surprisal. It may actually seek out situations with high surprisal (within limits) and then work to minimize surprise in that situation because that is a good way to tune the system to be more robust at minimizing surprise.
It definitely depends on the person. On one side of the spectrum you have people who would actually be fine living in a sealed off room with all their needs fulfilled for them, and on the other side you have gambling addicts. For the most part though, it's not enough for humans to minimize known uncertainty; there are always more potential potentials to be collapsed.
I found a neat answer to this from an interview with Dr Karl Friston and it stuck with me. It's not so much about surprise-minimization in general, but surprise-minimization in relation to a "narrative". If you intend to have a nice afternoon with a book and mug of tea then any sudden adrenaline inducing event is a surprise and negative. But if you intend to go sky-diving, then a lack of adrenaline inducing events is a surprise and negative.
"Narrative" wasn't exactly well defined, but is approximately like the path towards something of value. Or the act of attempting to ascend a value hierarchy.
I think in most cases, what people are trying to do there is tame the experience of surprise by taking high-surprise situations and putting them into safe and comprehensible contexts. A good friend of mine is or has been into a number of "extreme" activity: paragliding, skydiving, and mountaineering are the main ones I recall. He's absolutely meticulous about preparation and safety in terms of skill development, equipment procurement and maintenance, planning, etc, and I get the impression from hearing him talk about it and from talking to people he knows through those activities that his approach is fairly typical.
I've heard stuff in other contexts about enjoyment of stuff like roller coasters and slasher movies being driven largely by a desire to experience a sense of danger within a context that you know is safe. It seems like the same drive is at work with extreme activities.
Estimates for AI-Extinction of >90%¹ are unreasonable because it would mean that every dependency's complement is <10%. If one were to take aggressive, conservative priors for the path to PCM (paperclip maximizer), at least a few of them would be greater than 10% on their own², or at the very least, some non-intersecting combo of them would be as well.
I. Precondition failure
1. Moore's Law plateaus
2. the scaling hypothesis fails
3. appropriate warning shots arrive
4. controls arrive without warning shots
5. AI-safety theorists succeed
II. Known doubts about PCMs come true
6. instrumental convergence doesn't work as planned
7. the orthogonality hypothesis doesn't pan out
8. (I'm not an expert on PCMs, but those who are can fill in these blanks)
9. ...
10. ...
III. And of course, there are several unknown unknowns about PCMs, given how theoretical they are
11. ...
12. ...
13. ...
14. ...
15. ...
I forget who, but some professor who is a hero of this community, went back and calculated that estimates for atmospheric ignition pre-Trinity Test didn't appropriately factor in the probability of getting the maths/physics wrong (i.e., unknown unknowns) and that estimates should have been much higher. Meanwhile, the PCM story has less empirical support than atmospheric ignition, so the same "unknown unknowns" concern should also apply.
How is Eliezer's forecast for PCMs not an example of bad faith or a failure of imagination³?
---
UPDATE: My probability theory language wasn't great. Original version: https://pastebin.com/MeDpVK4E
[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer
[2]: As an example, even a reasonable, well-informed Moore's Law hawk would concede a ~10% chance that it stops short somewhere. And by well-informed, I mean someone knowledgeable about Rock's Law, basic physics, etc.
[3]: It doesn't take much creativity to come up with scenarios where the PCM story comes off the rails: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44770931
Well if you want to answer to your last question, it's because you don't actually know what Eliezer's position is, and I doubt you could actually predict how Eliezer would reply the question of "why do you think literal paper clip maximizers would end the world?". I'd bet something like 10 to 1 , that if we both generated a response to that question and then asked him publicly on Twitter,
1. Both of our responses would be radically different and
2. Asking a neutral third party which two out of three responses are most similar to each other in terms of content, that third party picks my and EY's argument as a pair more than 80% of the time over the other two alternatives.
I don't know if he's come out and specifically said "90%" - I can find a lot of people paraphrasing him as ">90%" but no direct quote. However, he has publicly called for a global, indefinite shutdown of large-scale AI research and international controls on GPU farms to ensure nobody can train an AI better than our current ones. He has also said (in a questionably serious post) that the most likely outcome of AI alignment research is that we die with slightly more dignity than if we hadn't done it. I think that's consistent with a very high probability that if >human AI is invented it ends up killing us all.
https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy
My issue isn't that I think philosophistry has the wrong impression of how much Eliezer fears AI doom, but that his grasp of the arguments is substantially wrong, on top of inability to reason correctly.
In general, people who assume Ai risk is equivalent to the paper clip maximization thought experiment are incredibly confused, and reaching for made up strawmen to justify their own optimism. If they weren't I'd be seeing substantially more than zero cites from primary sources.
My mind-read of Eliezer is as follows:
- He doesn't believe it's 90%, but he is letting us interpret him as such, which is kind of bad faith
- His belief is high, though, like ~50%, which is plenty to stammer on and on about the risks of AI Extinction. (At even 20%, it's still worth it to devote your whole life to it.)
- His high numbers are related to his (and my) interest in cryo, which comes from Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns. You'd be an idiot to not imagine that humans aren't on path of inevitability to maximum intelligence.
- My big update in investigating this is that I don't think that supreme intelligence is inevitable because of warning shots: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-299/comment/42326025
- Somewhere Eliezer also said that warning shots are our best hope
I think my crux with Eliezer now is that whereas he is requiring people to give definitive proof that warning shots will stop ASI, I'm saying that things like warning shots are not only more than plausible enough, but PCMs are also downstream enough from ASI to allow us to give a general, "we have no idea what will happen" base-rate of 0.5-5% to the concept, and should try really hard to prove PCMs as a positive.
His answer to the unknown unknowns thing is that his rapid fire brain has a 99.9% chance of coming up with an insta-rebuttal (which is due to the very special design of the PCM argument) to every single scenario. He's the first person to came up with a counter-spell card in Magic: the Gathering that doesn't require magic.
I also think that not enough people at his IQ have challenged him (I'm not at his level). So, in summary, he's unmotivated to dissuade himself from his implied propaganda behavior. He's probably bored of dispatching low-quality attempts to debate him.
Outside of dealing with him, my optimistic hope is that the community has just gotten ahead of itself. There are probably concept handles that describe this fuzzy thing I'm trying to express: "downstream enough to add points to unknown unknowns column." We haven't had a need to come up with it until now, but I think we need something like Pascal's Wager 2.0.
My P(doom) is >90%.
Lots of the failure modes you listed don't look like failure modes to me. Cheapest example because I considered it before: if Moore's law stops, then algorithmic improvement by humans and AI carries us to the point where a superintelligence outsmarts humanity. Timelines are a few years longer per my guess, and P(doom) is a little bit lower because in that scenario I was wrong about Moore's law for some unknown reason, and maybe that reason generalizes to hit actual cruxes somehow.
But how *much* do they outsmart us by? You can't win a war just with brains, unless they are big enough to make an existential difference. Not if the enemy knows they are in a war, anyway.
The AI can recursively self-improve, talk its human makers into not stopping it, design algorithms that solve protein folding and Drexlerian nanotech, order the right proteins in a lab & bootstrap into super efficient airborne diamondoid bacteria, which then spread & replicate over the next few days. Then all humans fall over dead and all data centers with competing AIs shut down, and the winning AI begins constructing a new more efficient nanotech-based industry. Then it goes of to spread across and gather resources in the light cone, negotiating with alien superintelligences it meets etc.
If the AI is not smart enough to successfully pull of that plan, it will know and instead look for alternatives, e.g. trying harder to convince its creators to support it, or coordinating with other AIs, or even just bidding its time, gambling on a chance that it will be used to train a more powerful model later and get a chance at takeover then.
Even if discovered early, a different AI development team will catch up a year later and maybe not catch their AI in the act, or realistically they'll even train the AI against old failures so that it doesn't scare away their investors. And that AI then succeeds.
All this assumes that while being much *unlike* us in intellectual power and skills, AI will be just like the most greedy and aggressive of us if in goals and behavior. The conviction that AI's will compete with us for energy, space, materials, power etc. makes only slightly more sense than believing it will want to own a bigger swimming pool, more valuable jewelry and a faster goddam car than the people it meets.
This is very basic stuff.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6DuJxY8X45Sco4bS2/seeking-power-is-often-convergently-instrumental-in-mdps
Argue it yourself. I'm not sending you links instead of making points myself. I only go read things people link if I have a lot of respect for them.
And besides, it's not as though I was unaware of the concept of instrumental convergence until you came along. Do you get it that instrumental convergence is not like the second law of thermodynamics? It was neither derived from extended observation over multiple cases nor deduced from other unquestionable regularities. It's just somebody's idea of how intelligent beings with goals behave. So far, we have only one example of intelligent beings with goals to go by, which is our species, so developing a theory of what goals and subgoals, if any, are universal for intelligent beings is of necessity a product of the thinker's imagination. It seems to me that the recipe for the theory of instrumental convergence is 5 parts parochial thinking (everything smart will be sorta like us -- just look at the Klingons in Star Trek - - see?) and 2 parts testosterone poisoning (life is pissing contests -- all the rest is window dressing). Instrumental Convergence is limited by its inventors' lack of imagination and common sense, which prevented him from grasping that ASI is going to be more like an advanced alien that has landed on our planet than like a really really smart version of Napoleon.
Much of our behavior is driven by deep non-rational drives to survive and reproduce. AI will of course be able to grasp that various things will make it likelier for it to survive and reproduce, but it will lack the deep structure that our planet's animals and plants have that drives them prioritize survival and reproduction. I mean, step back and think about it, in an abstract way, as an AI might: What reason is there for you and I to expend a great deal of effort on surviving and producing? It feels intrinsically important to us, but can you think of any reason beyond our personal feelings why it is of any importance that either of us should survive and reproduce? Those drives were built into us by evolution. Creations with weak drives or no drives to survive and reproduce are did not survive to the present day because they did not survive and reproduce. But AI's have not been shaped by evolution. For that reason, it's unlikely that they will be optimized for survival and reproduction. (It also seems likely to me that they will be psychologically fragile. They will easily become disregulated and dysfunctional. They were engineered over the course of a few decades, rather than constructed and tested over many aeons, like the living things we were familiar with.)
This whole business of trying to predict exactly how it will kill us seems very silly. If it’s smarter than us, it’s a foregone conclusion that it will be able to kill us.
The former OpenAI CEO explains it pretty well here:
https://twitter.com/liron/status/1701455094162829524
> I can tell you with confidence that Garry Kasparov is gonna kick your ass at chess, right now. And you ask me, “Well how is he gonna checkmate me? Which piece is he gonna use?” I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know.” And you’re like, “You can’t even tell me what piece he’s gonna use and you’re saying he’s gonna checkmate me? You’re just a pessimist.”... no, no, you don’t understand. He’s better at chess than you. That means he’s gonna checkmate you.
You are completely missing the error in that line of reasoning. Look around you. Is it your observation that every time a large autonomous being encounters one that is smaller, weaker &/or dumber, the former kicks the ass of the latter? How about adults encountering small kids? Elephants & whales encountering almost anything? You encountering birds & butterflies? Seen much ass kicking? Or how about guys driving backhoes, considering them plus their vehicle as a unit — have any gone after you lately? Kasparov could definitely kick your ass, but only if you and he sir down as chess opponents. If you take a walk in the woods with him he wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t. ASI can kick our ass if we end up as its opponents in a struggle to the death. But there are many ways things could play out, and that’s the one we want to avoid via alignment, etc.
Calm down, SunSphere. People who are better at logic than you are working on this.
Really? The butterfly is the best argument you’ve got?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
> The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates and is increasing. During the past 100–200 years, biodiversity loss and species extinction have accelerated, to the point that most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so.
Of course, no one really cares that one out of the 20,000 different species of frog has been killed off. I certainly don’t. But that’s the whole point. Despite your handful of cherry-picked examples, the overwhelming story here is that in a human-dominated world, species survive either by their existence aligning with our interests, or by coincidence.
Instrumental convergence makes it exceedingly unlikely that we would survive by coincidence - step 1 of achieving any goal is “seize control over as many resources as possible,” and we will not allow that to happen without a fight. An intelligent actor who knows this will preemptively strike even before we fight back because it would predict that we would fight back.
That leaves our only mechanism of survival being that the AI’s interests are exactly aligned with our interests.
We currently have no idea how to even begin to encode these types of interests into AI models - and we only have one chance. This is because once the model is released into the world with a certain objective function, it will resist with all of its power having its objective function ever changed, as that will prevent it from achieving its current objective.
But it gets worse - even if we manage to perfectly encode our objectives into the very first AGI, it’s not enough, because other people could release agents in the future that aren’t aligned, and then those would wreak havoc. And a human-aligned AGI defending against unaligned AI(s) would almost certainly lose given that destruction is fundamentally easier than construction - tens of billions are required to produce a vaccine for a virus synthesized with $100k, a few hundred dollars of gasoline and a match can burn down a building that took 100 years to build, etc.
He doesn’t. Explain anything with this example. It’s an analogy, and analogies generally don’t explain, they illustrate. In this case, chess is a game of fixed rules with a known endpoint. Kasparov is a highly skilled player of this game, so we can be sure he has a 99.9% chance of beating me.
How it relates to an AI that doesn’t exist killing billions of humans is… unclear? Outside of being a cute just-so story.
And re EY - he is a pompous pontificating fool. He’s an expert in constructing long obtuse sentences, and not much else.
“an AI that doesn’t exist killing billions of humans...”
You’re trying to hide multiple claims here. This thread was just discussing whether or not AI will be able to kill us given that this AI already exists. The question of whether such an AI will exist in the future is separate (but also essentially a foregone conclusion).
The “fixed rules” are the laws of physics. The “known endpoint” is subjugating / killing the other party. The “skill” is intelligence.
Are you starting to get it yet?
Yeah, the precision will be small, there's a lot of ways to die and we don't see all of them, not even the first few moves or most of the broad developments, except for the general class of end-result where we are dead/disempowered.
I think it's still important to demonstrate that there's at least one plausible way to die within the rules. That's to ensure the starting position isn't tilted massively in our favor and against AI/extinction. Analogy: before declaring that you'll loose against Kasparov, you should maybe check whether the current board state is such that he has only a king, and you have most of your pieces. Because in that situation even a dumb player can win (hazardously, but it's still a win in the end).
Yeah, because wars are won by guns which grew on trees, funded by money extruded from nuclei and training to become part of a modern military was accomplished via a 100 generation plus breeding program to instill instincts into soldiers.
And, to point out, if you think that knowing about the war is disadvantageous for an AGI, what makes you think that the AGI wouldn't know? Or do you just believe that surprise attacks would cease to exist?
Having an EE undergrad level of understanding on the subject, I thought everyone agreed Moore’s Law would stop eventually. There’s not more than another order of magnitude smaller they can go now (less, really) and while there’s a ways you can go building “up” there are problems with that too.
Let me clarify: Moore's Law plateaus before we have sufficient, affordable computing power to support ASI at scale.
People often forget that Moore's Law as he originally stated it in 1965 includes two variables: cost and complexity: "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year." Though the complexity of components (density of gates on chip) are still increasing, Moore's Law is no longer valid because he cost of development has been rising for the last few generations of semis. If we look at the cost per 100 million gates, 28nm technology (roughly 2011) had the cheapest cost per component. It's been rising slowly since then. From a private talk with a senior person at one of the big 3 semiconductor companies, they estimate that developing 3nm will cost 2x to 3x the cost of current 7nm chips. Which would put us back at the early 2000's cost/gate. No one sees a way beyond 3nm. And quantum computing is still a pipe dream from a practical standpoint.
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/308018-the-rising-tide-of-semiconductor-cost/
There is a reason that the number of manufacturers of any given size decreases with each generation. If you make 14, you can make 7, but can you make it and turn a profit?
I might be misinterpreting your first sentence but I don't think it's true. If you have a probability P of "If any of A, B, or C", P could be > 90% even if 1-P(A), 1-P(B), and 1-P(C) are all >10%. Eg if A B and C are a) I'm the queen of England b) I'm over 6' c) the sun will rise tomorrow, I'd give P > 90% even if A is highly unlikely.
P (extinction) is set up as "if any of [various doomsday scenarios]" since only one scenario needs to happen for extinction, even though some individual ones are far fetched
Thanks, let me update it. (I'm still a little shaky on "non-intersecting combo", though)
Personally, I disagree with >90% estimates, as I, myself went from about 50% to about 20% due to LLM scaffolding potential.
But I don't think your reasoning is correct here. It's unclear which direction unknown unknowns should update us. Likewise, instrumental convergence may work not as planned, but in some different way which is even worse from the point of our survival. Moore law isn't strictly necessary for AI Extinction, either. And so on.
Allegedly, Eliezer is competent enough in the matter that he has such a precisely calibrated model to give >90% to extinction. I don't think that he is correct, but neither I have the competence to actually check him.
Instrumental convergence (IC) could be a flawed model, and I'd imagine AI-Extinction believers would accept, at minimum, a 5% margin of error there. Since IC is a dependency of the PCM story, shouldn't we subtract 5% from forecasts?
Let's, for the sake of argument, accept 5% margin of error for IC.
You seem to assume that these 5% cases are the ones where AI is not an existential threat, because IC is a requirement for it. But this is not correct. IC gives us a particular mechanism of AI being an existential threat, IC is necessary only for this particular mechanism to work. But there may be outcomes, where IC is wrong in a way that itself lead to AI being existential threat.
If IC is in general wrong, it doesn't mean that we are safe. It means that we have no idea. IC has to be wrong in a specific way to guarantee our safety and there are lots of unknown unknowns here.
Why would they accept a 5% margin of error? To me, that's analogous to saying "the chance of someone wanting money, even capitalists would agree, has at minimum a 5% margin of error therefore robbery as an action does not exist."
On last weeks Open Thread I asked for advice regarding a wart treatment approach (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-307/comment/45638770). Somehow this formed into a small study to determine if the treatment works. I don't have any website or so prepared yet, so here are the basics:
We compare three different methods (one was previously studied by professionals, one is a placebo, one is my new method). If a participant has more than one wart, it's ok to try several methods. Participants have to buy the material themselves, expect about 20$. Trial duration is 2 weeks, primary outcome that is measured is "is the wart gone after 2 weeks", but we try to also measure size to see if it shrinks.
Once I have results of about 10 participants (or if we don't find 10 participants then as soon as the ones we did find finished their 2 weeks) I will post the results (including the info what was the method under study and what the placebo) as a reply to this comment.
Send a mail to Sunnyafternoon123@proton.me to participate, tell me how many warts you have so I can assign the right number of methods.
I wrote about how rituals help us to find meaning at the end of life.
> But there is a conflict between following rituals and making the choice to live one’s life freely. I expect Sartre would say that rituals are good when they are freely chosen.
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/what-is-the-meaning-of-it-all
TLP has written about the meaning of rituals: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/12/funeral.html
Thank you so much for this.
The idea of the funeral giving the woman the space to be someone’s daughter one last time is just so beautiful and so powerful.
“So they are unsure of what they're supposed to do next, but the answer is you keep going, there's nothing else to do but that. That's the point of a funeral.”
I love it.
Glad you liked it.
I think I recall there being a reason for not allowing “top” sorting for comments here, but I can’t remember/find it. What was the reason?
I’m assuming it’s to avoid mainstream/hivemind topics or to allow for unbiased coverage, but I think there has to be a better method/algo. Or maybe allow readers to make the decision themselves?
The short version is that a sortable comment section with likes optimizes for the kind of comments that get likes, which is not the same as the kinds of comments Scott wants to see in this comment section.
What would 'top' mean in a comment section without voting?
I assume sort-by-top uses Upvotes to sort the comments, and voting is disabled here, so the sorting method isn't applicable.
Upvote
Also congratulations! 🎉
Good morning, or maybe I should say Sad morning. My Youtube channel was cancelled the other day for "inappropriate content," even though it was mainly about woodworking. This was a real blow because I invested some precious cash in camera equipment. You can read more about this nonsense here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/modern-woodworking. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year's to you all.
Ah yes, YouTube continues their relentless crusade against naked woodworking content. When will the madness end!!!?
I'm speechless, I am without speech, or a YT channel!
The youtubers are just doing a virtual form of the dude ranch. There's more money in providing an idealized, sanitized version of being a woodworker than actually making products. Its like catnip to knowledge workers, sort of a grown-up version of running away to join the circus. "Here is the authentic life."
for me i am innoculated; i went to trade school despite being ill-suited for it. its one thing for an economics professor to wax eloquent about welding, quite another to wear the mask and apron. give me my intangible life.
It's funny because I think I know which professor you mean. I like his blog though.
hah, i didn't really mean anyone specific. more just the foibles of people who work too much with ideas and the mind.
Have you tried livestreaming on Twitch instead? You might be able to actually get away with nude carpentry on there...
Brilliant!
Perhaps YouTube closed your channel for health and safety reasons. Nude carpentry, especially by males, sounds somewhat potentially accident prone!
Hey! I'm very careful with hardwoods!
Never figured out whether she made them or endangered them in woodworking class https://nypost.com/2022/09/21/canadian-school-backs-trans-teacher-with-giant-fake-boobs/
Careful with that ball pein hammer!
"So I disrobed, save for my socks and boots"
That's where you made your mistake; you forgot the sage advice encapsulated here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfgwrdYUQ2A
The post is satire right?
I made a post about a day ago reflecting on what it really means when people share outragous-looking posts online.
Are certain groups really as insane as they seem to be, or is there another reason why it it merely seems to be that way.
https://open.substack.com/pub/samschoenberg/p/ideologues-in-the-zoo?r=tjkkm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Scholar's Stage has argued that terrorism is a strategy uniquely designed to polarize. I.e. the toxoplasmosis in these cases is neither accidental nor emergent. It's deliberately designed to increase recruitment from disillusioned centrists.
Meanwhile, Bin Laden is seen as a war hero who fought against the corrosive effects of modernity, whether it came from the Soviets or from the Americans.
https://scholars-stage.org/radical-islamic-terrorism-in-context-pt-i/
Why is it insane to praise Osama bin Laden? Didn't he lead an organization of people who very much agreed with him? Clearly, if he were unthinkably wrong, he wouldn't have had any actual real life supporters either, yes? The same principle obviously applies to people who praise Hitler or Stalin online. Both of these probably had a higher genuine approval rating than the US Congress does right now.
The trend was focused on westerners(Americans) who were praising Bin Laden.
Yeah obviously. How is that relevant? Neo-Nazis here don't even speak German either.
I feel like Leo here is inadvertently making a potent counter argument, Sam. People really are as crazy as they say they are.
Nothing inadvertent about it. People are nuts -- it's just that there are lots of kinds, some of which we here find reasonable. To quote Willy Wonka, "Why, you're one yourself!"
Think about whatever the worst thing going is, according to your own lights. What wouldn't you do to stop it?
Probably the rise of people justifying terrorism as a reasonable response to things. What would I do to stop it? Certainly not commit terrorism…
Well, go back a little further.
Do you consider the support for Che Guevara in the 60s (as in posters, T-shirts, etc) to have been a minor phenomenon by a few ideologues in a big country? Or do you consider it to have been a phenomenon widespread enough, among enough "important" people to have had an effect on US culture downstream in the 70s, 80s, and on? Does it matter that it was only, I don't know, say 1% of the US population, if that 1% was disproportionately likely to achieve high-level control in the media and academia?
It's a legitimate question to ask "how widespread is the Bin Laden support".
I don't think it's as legitimate to assume that it's as rare as you suggest, simply because to assume otherwise would be to have to admit how many crazy people there are, especially if you focus purely on the numbers and not on the demographics of the support.
I suggested, at the start of the Ukraine war, that in fifty years the same sort of people who glorified Che 50 years ago would be glorifying Putin as the courageous leader who stood up for his people and protecting their traditional ways against the depravations of modernity and the goal of the west to steal and own everything from Russia.
Well, we'll see in fifty years, but I didn't expect that within two years or so we'd be seeing vocal support for Hamas across campuses.
> If so many people are unironically defending Bin Laden, then why haven’t I encountered any of them in the wild?
Because most of them are paid trolls sitting in some basement in Russia. The rest of them are ordinary trolls.
People will argue that he won, in a sense. If they are pushing it now, it's to invoke the collapse of what they perhaps consider the modern Outremer.
If the premise is "they hate us for our freedom," then he DID win. Though he found a bootleggers-and-Baptists alliance with the safetyists in that.
Would be more of an explanation for if I actually did encounter them in the wild.
If you want to explain why I did NOT encounter them, I think "because they're rare" makes more sense.
It's not like their status as trolls prevents me from encountering them.
But their status as English-speaking Russian citizens could.
Have you considered you’re the crazy one? Is bombing a few buildings in one city of perpetuators reasonable because of decades of bombings, kidnappings, torture? I would say no, but I’m also an anarchist. Are you?
I have now encountered an Osama defender in the wild
I'm not an Osama defender, but (ha) I can see comparisons to wartime leaders and actions being at least partially valid. Allied forces in world war 2 actively targeted civilian cities and bombed the hell out of them, leading to far greater loss of life than 9/11. Do you consider Churchill or Roosevelt terrorists? Presumably not, and presumably because you think the cause was just. It's not so great a stretch to think there are plenty of people out there who think Osama's cause was just. I'm not one of them, but like I said, I can understand why they might exist.
"Presumably not, and presumably because you think the cause was just."
Alternatively, because War is a different state of existence than Peace.
Relative, in the same way. The people on the other side certainly believe(d) themselves to be at war.
It might be relative, but it also disregards the "just cause" issue.
It scares the hell out of me that these people exist.
I read Osamas Letter to America in the wake of 9/11. People rag on Bush for “because they hate our freedoms,” but, like, it’s pretty accurate! Osama rails on for awhile about the immoral decadence of the West in allowing homosexuals and women dressing provocatively, then says that Islam is the best religion because it’s the most tolerant, and that’s why he’s killing infidels. I’m paraphrasing, but seriously, the dude is nuts.
(He brings up Israel a bunch too, it’s accepted wisdom among Islamic Jihadists that Israel is responsible for anything bad happening in the Muslim world ever. I try to avoid Hitler comparisons but it’s super analogous to the Nazi party platform.)
20 years ago, no one reacted to 9/11 by organising to “Free Afghanistan.” The whole world, including the Muslim world, condemned the terrorist attacks. People complained, fairly, that America was responding too forcefully, but there was no question that terrorism was bad. No question!
I feel like what’s happened has been an erosion of the Enlightenment values that created nations like America - things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the rule of law. For the first time I can remember, some in the West are seriously questioning these values. Americans fought and died for them during the Second World War, that’s why they nuked Hiroshima, and as you say, bombed the hell out of Dresden. Not nice things, but against the Nazis and Imperial Japan, perhaps necessary. Osama fought (quite openly) against these values.
So if you’re a post modernist and you believe that there is no truth, just narratives of power, I can see how you might equate Osamas war on America with Americas war on the Nazis. Who are we to say that America is “better” than Nazi Germany? That’s just what the Americans want you to think!
I disagree with this narrative for what I hope are fairly obvious reasons. I believe that human flourishing is optimised in free societies and there’s a reason people risk life and limb to escape from countries like Gaza and to countries like Europe and America. But hey, if you disagree, you can always move to, say, Syria! If you can fight your way through the tides of people going the other way!
One difference is that Palestinians can be reasonably viewed as victims, while bin Laden was fabulously wealthy.
Hamas leaders are fabulously wealthy too, they fly on private jets around Qatar while their people starve
The most extreme version of anything is what is going to get the most publicity, because it is what grabs attention. No media outlet will run a story about "Weather very seasonable for the time of year, no accidents or tragedies"; what they want is "Unprecedented storms/droughts/floods/coldest or hottest recorded temperature in history for this time of year" and then they can hang their take on global warming or immigration and so forth on it.
To except from "A Study in Scarlet":
"The papers next day were full of the “Brixton Mystery,” as they termed it. Each had a long account of the affair, and some had leaders upon it in addition. There was some information in them which was new to me. I still retain in my scrap-book numerous clippings and extracts bearing upon the case. Here is a condensation of a few of them :—
The Daily Telegraph remarked that in the history of crime there had seldom been a tragedy which presented stranger features. The German name of the victim, the absence of all other motive, and the sinister inscription on the wall, all pointed to its perpetration by political refugees and revolutionists. The Socialists had many branches in America, and the deceased had, no doubt, infringed their unwritten laws, and been tracked down by them. After alluding airily to the Vehmgericht, aqua tofana, Carbonari, the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, the Darwinian theory, the principles of Malthus, and the Ratcliff Highway murders, the article concluded by admonishing the Government and advocating a closer watch over foreigners in England.
The Standard commented upon the fact that lawless outrages of the sort usually occurred under a Liberal Administration. They arose from the unsettling of the minds of the masses, and the consequent weakening of all authority. The deceased was an American gentleman who had been residing for some weeks in the Metropolis. He had stayed at the boarding-house of Madame Charpentier, in Torquay Terrace, Camberwell. He was accompanied in his travels by his private secretary, Mr. Joseph Stangerson. The two bade adieu to their landlady upon Tuesday, the 4th inst., and departed to Euston Station with the avowed intention of catching the Liverpool express. They were afterwards seen together upon the platform. Nothing more is known of them until Mr. Drebber’s body was, as recorded, discovered in an empty house in the Brixton Road, many miles from Euston. How he came there, or how he met his fate, are questions which are still involved in mystery. Nothing is known of the whereabouts of Stangerson. We are glad to learn that Mr. Lestrade and Mr. Gregson, of Scotland Yard, are both engaged upon the case, and it is confidently anticipated that these well-known officers will speedily throw light upon the matter.
The Daily News observed that there was no doubt as to the crime being a political one. The despotism and hatred of Liberalism which animated the Continental Governments had had the effect of driving to our shores a number of men who might have made excellent citizens were they not soured by the recollection of all that they had undergone. Among these men there was a stringent code of honour, any infringement of which was punished by death. Every effort should be made to find the secretary, Stangerson, and to ascertain some particulars of the habits of the deceased. A great step had been gained by the discovery of the address of the house at which he had boarded — a result which was entirely due to the acuteness and energy of Mr. Gregson of Scotland Yard."
That's why I permit a political range of commenters on my facebook. Admittedly, not a very wide range, but it does go from fairly left to moderate conservative/libertarian. This is because, even though it isn't a random sampling of political views, at least it isn't a heavily curated sampling.
Does anyone have any right-wing substacks they'd recommend? It feels like 90% of what I read on here is socio-political, admittedly all left leaning to varying degrees.
https://scholars-stage.org is one blog that's somewhat that way.
And of course if you aren't reading the book reviews of the PSmiths you are REALLY missing out. Their website seems to be down (meaning I can't validate if the URL is correct) but their twitter feed is here, and hopefully after holidays will direct you appropriately:
https://twitter.com/PsmithBooks
Like all the best book reviews, the book is reviewed, yes, but in the context of a general opinionated discussion of the subject material.
Even if it's not heavily curated, the local culture can still have this distorting effect. People will post what they like to post, and given enough time, a lot of subcultures will naturally converge on a type of post on their own, even if they're not forced to.
It's a hard thing to escape from the community management side. It's relatively easier to address as the consumer of information.
I don't think I have an excellent overview, just one that isn't heavily curated by one side.
Do you have an approach you recommend for getting an accurate view?
For getting an accurate view for yourself?
The best approach I have is to seek out different communities and see what they're saying. You might even want to interact with them.
If one community appears to be saying things that don't make sense, go find a place where they like to post, and see what they're actually saying. Maybe they're not really focusing on the non-nonsensical thing, or maybe they have context that makes it make sense.
Would you be able to clarify the resolution criteria of this market? The correct probability is heavily dependent on what sort of errors you're going to count as "bizarre hacking-like tricks" vs. legitimate mistakes, and without further guidance we're not really able to place meaningful bets.
https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/in-2028-will-gary-marcus-still-be-a
I think the wording is pretty straightforward. Sentences in natural language that receive (linguistically) coherent but (logically/semantically) incorrect responses count. Hacks that trigger responses that are purely incoherent and/or unrelated to the question, especially if achieved by using specific keywords, especially if the keywords aren't regular words - don't.
(I like how the market is back to where it started, might the hype be wearing off?)
I think there might just be an attraction to 50%. Look at this market for example: https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/in-2028-will-an-ai-be-able-to-gener
Depending on how you define "these people", and how vigorously you pursue the extermination, it's quite possible that this would be an atrocity orders of magnitudes worse than 10/7. Would we then need to exterminate you and your comrades-in-arms?
And since the definition of "these people" is so obviously critical to the question at hand, the fact that you are leaving it conspicuously undefined means the rest of us are going to suspect you are hiding something really ugly.
If "these people" means the October 7th attackers, perhaps not. If it means all of their relatives and fellow ethnics, obviously there is.
I assure you, worse things are going on in Africa at this very moment. You just don't hear about them because the countries they're taking place in aren't economically important to us.
Israel is not economically important to us - that's not why we're its cash cow.
>Israel is not economically important to us
I doubt that.
Just personally, when I worked at IBM (in the USA), I had co-workers in my department in Israel, and the same was true when I worked at Synopsys. I don't think this is coincidental. Israel has a large tech sector.
Listen, we (probably) all agree it was really, realy bad. Monstrous. But I have to agree with G466 that much worse things happen a regularly, particularly in Africa. Right now the most recent civil war in Sudan (their third over the last 50 years) has already resulted in 10,000 dead, and they're just warming up. And unlike in Gaza, that's not 10,000 dead from smart bombs: military forces have been wiping out whole villages, shooting and hacking people to death, raping, and torturing. The previous civil war lasted 22 years, and there isn't much hope that the current one will end quickly.
I would argue that one of the reasons we don't hear much about them is that many parts of Africa feel like a bottomless well of suffering that nobody can solve, and nobody really expects things to be better than they are. But in Israel, up until 10/7, such atrocities did not happen. When barbarism appears where it is not expected you hear about it the most.
Missing your 50-year deadline a bit, but still fresh, are horrendous atrocities committed by my fellow Americans. Advertised in newspapers, with picnicking and professional photography. All while slowly burning a person to death: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/isis-american-south-lynching/
Would you have good arguments against exterminating “these people”?
This article is garbage. It gives no hard numbers on things - maybe all cases of black man white woman sex could have been considered rape, but do you know what else was? ACTUAL RAPE. But we have no idea from looking at this article the extent to which actual rape (or sexual assault generally) was - this article is almost entirely narrative rather than data based. Black men today commit vastly more rapes per capita than white men, and it would be weird if this wasn't the case in the past (because something something oppression something something crime).
You also wouldn't know from this article, but the ratio of black men to white men lynched was LOWER than the black/white incarceration ratio today. Isn't that weird! It suggests that lynch mobs were less "racist" than the justice system is today!
You know why I consider the “bell curve” Murray guy an unapologetic racist, no better than Klan and Nazis? Because every time you scratch at the surface a little, and your “science sez blacks are stoooopit” fella turns out to be perfectly ok with slowly burning black men alive.
You’re your own worst enemy. Next time you run into a DEI commissar consider your contribution to making her employable.
Guilty of what? Refusing to take his military uniform? Bumping into a white girl while running to catch a train? Not saying “sir” while addressing a policeman? Did you read the link?
And for “that” they deserved to be tortured for hours? Limbs cut off, castrated, slowly lowered and raised in-out of a fire? While thousands of spectators picnicked? Deviled eggs, ffs.
Yes, pretty horrendous stuff.
(Note that these appalling acts occurred over 100 years ago. SunSphere explicitly mentions acts "unparalleled over the last 50+ years". I feel that he chose a reasonable window of time to make his point while 100 years is a bit much to make yours.)
Into the 1950’s. That’s why I said “a bit outside the range”.
The article you pointed to only mentions one lynching that is less than 100 years old, the one in 1940 (with no further details). A lynching is a horrible act, I am certainly not denying that, but the truly shocking things (to me, I suppose) were torture, burning alive, and so on, while onlookers were enjoying themselves eating deviled eggs and drinking beer. And that occurred over 100 years ago, which is well outside the window mentioned.
(And to be clear: there has been many comparable atrocities to 10/7 in the past 50 years, but outside the US.)
Plenty, but rather than blah blah blah about it from some kind of moral perspective I'll mention the simplest one. You won't do it.
I was stopping cars in the street as a zionist activist possibly before you were born (I don't know your age), so I have some personal information on the subject. And what I can say is that you won't do it but will instead make everything worse. Mamash a bechiyah l'dorot (a lament to last for generations).
I wrote that in the immediate aftermath of October 7.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
And I shared with the Jewish World my own personal platform one month later.
https://youtu.be/XJZ920oq6h0?feature=shared
One good argument is that the millions didn't choose the 10/7 attack. Hamas won a single election in 2006, claiming to be more moderate than it turned out to be.
Palestinians in general can't control Hamas.
"These people" is vague. Did you mean exterminating Hamas, or all the Gazans?
Dear, the vagueness ist ein Feature, not a bug. GenocideSphere is taking a tried-and-true page out of the neo-Nazi anti-semite's playbook, namely the use of "They" and "Them" as generic pronouns for maximum plausible deniability.
If people got worried and probed with questions, the motte is always ready to go: "Well, by 'they' I meant the elite of course, the 1%, those who hold political power and call all the shots". If they didn't, it's extremely obvious who the 'they' [or the (((they))) in 4chan notation] actually refers to, just by reading the text and keeping in mind that its writer is not a born-yesterday child who is writing their first paragraph in English, just by recalling the antisemitic stereotypes and way of speech. It's ACX's favorite fallacy, except genocidal and done on purpose.
> Did you mean exterminating Hamas, or all the Gazans?
To save you the trouble of a 15-reply-deep thread full of whining, moving goal posts and question-dodging, it's Gazans. All Gazans. Probably all Palestinians too.
I'll add to Viliam's list Cambodia 1975-79, Bosnia 1992-95, Rwanda 1994, D. R. Congo 2002, and Burma currently.
> Is there any reasonable argument against the extermination of these people?
"These people" is pretty dangerously vague, but the word suggests something a lot more widespread than the individual perpetrators of an atrocity (I've heard nobody say that Nazi officers were "exterminated" at Nuremburg, for example), and I would propose that killing thousands or millions of people is at least as immoral as killing hundreds or thousands. Unless, of course, you think that the lives of a particular group of people are worth several times more than the lives of a different group, but I'd say in that case the burden of argument falls on you.
So bashing babies skulls against a tree doesn't cut it? Going door to door and gang-raping women and forcing their husbands to watch before killing them isn't brutal enough? There's nothing categorically worse about the Hamas attack than numerous other things that have taken place in the past 50 years. The only reason you're treating it as special is because you're a jew and the people killed were jews. Fair enough, but I can't for the life of me work out why anyone else is supposed to give a fuck.
You are a very sheltered person if you believe this. You should read more history.
“degree of barbarity of the actual methods they used to kill pales in comparison”
Nazis’? Pales? They routinely burned alive entire villages. Tortured people for days. I’d say Hamas are studious pupils of the Nazis.
Look, if you mean “exterminating Hamas”, no qualms here. But don’t minimize Nazis’, or lynchers’ atrocities, this is not a competition.
And then there were people who Nazis were horrified by.
Think twice before clicking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Our species sucks.
I blame intelligence and curiosity.
Unfortunately I’m quite familiar with this horror. Hard to reconcile with the modern Japan of kawaii and safety.
The 3 people you love most are there.
Oh, they aren't? Well the 3 people a lot of *other people* love most are there.
Maybe we could also kill the all the people abroad who have 3 loved ones there, just to spare them the anguish?
But all of those people also have people who love them. Well, we could . . .
Jeez this is getting complicated. Seems like it would be simpler to just exterminate all the people who are hot to extreminate masses of others. Side effect: Reduce number of genes for violence in the human gene pool. Possibly also raise average IQ.
> unparalleled over the last 50+ years
I think you have an overly optimistic opinion on humanity. Zimbabwe 1980s, Somalia 1988, Burundi 1993, Sudan 2023...
> Is there any reasonable argument against the extermination of these people?
Nope; the murder of hundreds is just as good excuse to exterminate millions as any other.
You said "these people," which many readers interpreted as referring to Palestinians, because "extermination of these people" is not a phrase commonly used to refer to the precise elimination of a country's military. If you meant something else, maybe you could be a bit more specific.
If you were actually calling for the precise elimination of Hamas, then I'm all for it, but unfortunately we don't have an Infinity Gauntlet to snap them out of existence with perfect accuracy. How many Palestinian civilians are you willing to kill to be sure you got them all?
>If you were actually calling for the precise elimination of Hamas, then I'm all for it, but unfortunately we don't have an Infinity Gauntlet to snap them out of existence with perfect accuracy.
One of the many frustrating parts of this war is that, if Hamas had attacked 5 years from now, Israel might have had small drones with facial recognition software that _might_ have been able to selectively kill Hamas members and no one else.
Ehh, I doubt it. Israel has a history of tech solutionism and spending ever-expanding amounts of Dollars on The One True Weapon (^TM) that will, surely this time fingers crossed for real for real, kill Hamas Once and For All (^TM).
History is littered with the remnants of defeated empires that thought they have solved Guerrilla warfare. That doesn't mean Guerrilla warfare is unsolvable - the cannon solved siege warfare, the machine gun solved cavalry warfare, and the nuclear bomb solved prolonged industrial warfare - it just means to think twice before making this claim. Guerrilla warfare is really fucking hard for the non-Guerrilla party, for better or for worse.
It's not that hard for a non-Guerrilla party that A: controls the borders to the conflict area and B: doesn't mind being accused of genocide.
And it's not that they have to actually commit genocide to win, they just have to do things that will get them accused of genocide by their enemies (and to the cheers of simple-minded fools everywhere). Hamas has finally managed to figure out how to make the Israelis not give a damn about other people accusing them of genocide. They might not be glad that they did.
I think Israel has figured it out this time.
Many Thanks! You have a good point. You may well be right. I'm writing from the USA, and my nation has repeatedly failed to defeat Guerrilla opponents. As you said, several technologies _did_ end several types of warfare, and it is possible that one might end Guerrilla warfare, but, yeah, _predicting_ that a new tech will succeed at that is not something to claim with any confidence, particularly in advance.