Does anyone have a good framework for finding a therapist? Ideally I’d like to find someone with an understanding of rationalism. I’m Bay Area based if anyone has recs for San Francisco.
When you have to lie this much, you simply don't have a case. Refuse to collect evidence, refuse an international investigation, just deliberately lie lie and lie. It's fitting, it's the Israeli story.
"This is really disturbing. Gal Abdush’s family say NYT journalists told them she was raped and her mom now believes there are witnesses. They actually spoke to Abdush’s husband after she was killed, and he told them she had been shot—just shot."
Thanks guys. I had that joke on my brain-shelf for a long time without talent to turn it into a picture that wouldn't embarrass me. I hoped for a few laughs out of a few people, and got them, and I'm grateful.
It's cute. Nice to see silly ideas can be easily expressed these days with the new tools available.
Have to say though, seems like a really appropriate time to be panicking, considering the riots in the streets due to the giant space bugs attacking helicopters in the sky.
As any hep cat will tell you, the place to go for movie reviews is the American Institute for Economic Research. Let me specifically recommend their article "Three Solid Movies on the 2008 Crisis."
The article covers two films you may well have seen ("Margin Call" and "The Big Short") and one you probably haven't, the 2013 documentary "Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve." All three are worth watching.
Both the Big Short and Margin Call get much better if you watch them as pure character studies (propped by excellent actors) and not as films with anything to say about the crisis itself. They're both rather loud and plodding though. At the end of Margin Call Kevin Spacey (remember that guy?) is digging a hole with a shovel, and I started to worry he would start hitting me with the shovel through the screen while shouting "Get it? Get it?". Luckily it did not happen.
Thought of a game-theory experiment which might produce interesting insights if somebody threw enough computing power at it. Infinite (or at least, arbitrarily vast) hexagonal grid. Each hex either contains an agent, or is empty. Agents play alternating rounds of Prisoner's Dilemma and "would you pay to swap places."
Swap always takes place between directly adjacent agents, Prisoner's Dilemma never does. Half the time it's with someone two hexes away, 1/3 of the time three hexes, 1/6th of the time four hexes away, or if the hex exactly four away is empty, the most distant agent in that direction - maybe way off on the opposite edge of the map. Accordingly, agents at the frontier could face duels with many different interior agents in between each opportunity they get to move.
Number of rounds in a given PD contest equals the distance between agents involved, plus the total number of empty hexes within five steps of either, including diagonals. Neither knows this value in advance, but they do know "last time I played with this specific agent, how much did I gain / lose," or the most recent interaction among ancestors if they've never played against each other directly before.
All agents always know their own current account balance, but nobody else's. Any agent who ends up in the negatives immediately dies, replaced by an empty hex. In addition to the usual cooperate / compete options, there's a third option, "spite:" lose half your current total to reduce the other's by two-thirds, regardless what they chose.
Attempt to prisoner's dilemma with an empty hex scores +1, no decision involved, no multiple rounds.
After any given iterated-PD contest is over, either participant can choose to send up to (current account balance) bytes of data to the other, or wait and listen, or a mix; next step proceeds only when both run out of bandwidth or have nothing more to say. Empty hexes repeat the last kilobyte received regardless of original sender - graffiti, effectively. If both go for spite in the same round, they can chat for up to as many bytes as the total account balances of everyone else on the board, and then each write whatever they like on their own grave... subject to the usual kilobyte limit.
For the movement phase, each agent bids "I would [pay up to] / [accept no less than] [X] to move in that direction" for each of the six neighbors, then rejects any bids from neighbors outside that acceptable range. Simpler algorithms go first when choosing among worthwhile offers. Empty hexes always bid zero.
When a swap produces at least three surplus (e.g. "I would pay 9" meets "I would accept no less than 6"), one third rounded down goes to each participant, remainder becomes the starting balance of a new agent in the nearest empty hex, with a probabilistic hybrid of both parents' strategies... unless the swap was into an empty hex, in which case clone gets the entire surplus. Either way, lower the offspring's starting balance, the more random noise and/or simplification bias in that transcription.
I recall an account of something vaguely similar, from the 80s. They had some system where grid squares were occupied by agents engaging in iterated prisoner's dilemmas with their neighbors, and successful ones would expand into neighboring territories, presumably of less-successful neighbors.
One of the stable results was an island of CooperateBots surrounded by a border of TitForTatBots, which grew and expanded. The TitForTatBots gained strength from having about half their neighbors also be TitForTatBots, which provided food that the outside chaos couldn't duplicated. I forget why the CooperateBots had a benefit over TitForTatBots; this may have been one of the games where they added noise, so TitForTat would presumably be ForgivingTitForTat (randomly cooperate, once in a while), whereas noise wouldn't affect a CooperateBot.
I'd call it "competition and survival of the fittest", since it's operating solely on principles that can be observed in single-celled organisms. There's no need to anthropomorphize the little bots. Heck, I'm sometimes dubious of the value of anthropomorphizing **humans**. :-)
(This puts me in diametric opposition with some EA vegans, I know.)
But ultimately, I think you're right that the games are operating on different levels, emulating different aspects of reality.
I kinda want to see your game implemented as a series of tutorial-style game levels. First there's a bare-bones stripped down version, probably just a variant on iterated prisoner's dilemma on a hex grid with scoring, and people play around with that until they find a dominant strategy. Then the next level adds one more moving part, which up-ends the old strategies and changes gameplay. Once they've got some winning strategies for that level, the next adds another moving part, and so on.
My thinking was to jump straight in and have AI scripts, defined in such a way that hybridization between them would have well-defined results, start playing against each other without preconceptions. World War 1 dragged on with no winners because everyone was over-committed to strategies for a different context.
On the pragmatic side of things, I worry that a) it will be too hard to do it all at once in a way that works, so you won't finish, and b) it will be too confusing for anyone to pick up an play with, so you won't get much of an audience. :-/
>there's a third option, "spite:" lose half your current total to reduce the other's by two-thirds, regardless what they chose.
This should be a hard number cost; otherwise you know people will just jump in and Spite every turn, trolling the other players and never dying because they only ever take percent damage. Losing 66% to trolls constantly will drown out any other effects.
Trolls are their own antiparticle - if two agents both choose spite on the same round, they lose 116% (rounded up - score is always an integer) and die. Spite-heavy builds will have to run with a relatively low account balance most of the time, which limits their bandwidth for internal coordination, their budget for mobility / reproduction, and their margin of safety for recovering from bad luck. Limited reproduction budget would mean they'd be mutation-prone, further corroding any complex internal coordination strategy.
A large community with elaborate prosocial strategies could use cooperate / compete to shift account balances from rich to poor-but-loyal, thus effectively pooling resources and transferring reserves across their territory to fight an invasion.
What type of interesting insights might it produce? If you'd said that agents do PD only with their neighbors, I could see it as a model to investigate the development and exploitation of subcultures of cooperation and defection. But you specified that agents NEVER do PD with their neighbors, which means this isn't a realistic model of any real-world behavior.
Never with their immediate neighbors (except perhaps indirectly through tricking them into disadvantageous movement), but frequently with those in a vaguely snowflake-like pattern two and three hexes away, which would include many neighbors-of-neighbors. That could be a useful model of "don't shit where you eat" norms, and subcultures with inherently porous borders, such as internet forums or high-turnover minimum-wage employers - which are common these days but not well characterized in historical data.
What's the incentive to move at all? Are there goodies on the hexes, do you get stuff for ground covered, is there a flag to find, what's the disadvantage to staying completely still (apart from boredom)?
As a first-order effect, if folks in one direction seem to hit "cooperate" more often, you'd want to move that way in order to increase the frequency of your interactions with them.
A clump of like-minded cooperators would want to find ways to avoid being invaded by predators, and could use the post-contest messaging - as well as the limited but far more reliably available channel of encoding information in the least significant digits of large negative movement bids - to identify each other and coordinate a sort of immune system.
Invaders would want to find ways to bypass such defenses... and so on.
Empty spaces acting as a "natural resource" which produce steady income without social complications, crowding modifying the number of rounds per contest, and vacuoles exactly four hexes away acting as a channel to contact the far edge of the map, could all create gradients which motivate any given agent to move toward opportunity or away from danger.
"From Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, auto-translated from Hebrew:
“The police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault or witnesses to acts from the Hamas attack, and are unable to connect the existing evidence with the victims described in it.”
Those of us who have pointed out the flaws in these sexual violence claims have been accused of rape denial. "
From that link, below the cherry- picked out of context bit you pasted.
>The number of dead bodies and the level of evil that the employees of the Institute of Forensic Medicine and the volunteers who came to help also faced heavy emotional difficulty: "I don't remember any incident like this. I was in very serious attacks on buses, during the second intifada, and there was no incident similar to this. Not in the evil and monstrosity that is there, And not in large numbers. People came and simply did a pogrom inside the country, against the Jews, and this has never happened. Maybe since the events of 1975 actually," shares the director of the Forensic Medicine Institute. "We have seen very, very difficult things here. My colleagues and I, I don't think we've cried so much at any event. We saw the cruelty and the terrible evil that is there, and the emotions could not stand it. I don't think there is anyone left who can be indifferent to these things. And above all, when you later hear the human stories behind these hard scenes.<
You know there are people who sincerely believe we never went to the moon? Well, NS here appears to sincerely believe Hamas didn’t do bad things on Oct. 7. There’s no arguing with that. It’s hopeless.
So many people are at that point regarding so many issues these days. I'm pretty sure the main reason is social media. Our species is sort of over-engineered and fragile anyhow, and society is now being badly disregulated by these novel electronic forms of communication, torture, seduction and persuasion. Why the fuck do people think shoveling a thick layer of plastic geniuses on top of this tragic mess is going to help?
But also: many of these beliefs are low-cost, low-effort identity markers. If you want an identity of “awesome guitar player”, it takes years of deliberate practice to get there. OTOH “flat earth” or “Hamas is kind and loving” requires no effort, imposes no cost, and instantly provides an identity and a community. So why not?
This is why - once you figure out that this is the driving force - engagement is almost always futile. The changes-of-mind happen, and are all the more amazing when they do, but their rarity underscores the point.
Of course no one is immune. I used to be - many years ago - a food-combining fool, fervently believing that not eating carbs and proteins together was key to good health. Embarrassing to think of that now…
The point is to highlight they've been bullshitting about specific rape claims rape. They can describe a scratch against a Jew as a crime against humanity, worthy of slaughtering thousands of infants over, they are Jewish supremacists. They've been saying this same spiel from the beginning muh unrecognizable, unbelievable, super horrifying innit. One by one their lies get refuted+plenty of evidence from witnesses, generals, reporters that Israelis slaughtered their own that day. I don't need to help my case. Israelis are doing it for me, in spite of their incessant lying.
""On the 7th, there were no direct attacks on civilians, only collateral damage. Out of the 769 names on the Haaretz dataset, 462 were military personnel, including 55 soldiers, 13 privates, 59 corporals, 200 sergeants (45 of whom were sergeant majors), 48 commanders, 32 lieutenants, 5 lieutenant colonels, 6 colonels, 37 officers, 10 inspectors, 6 intendents, and 2 Lance Corp. This was a military defeat, and they are taking it out on the rest.
Out of the 1148 total names, 403 were military personnel, 59 belonged to the police, and 668 were civilians. This means that the collateral damage on the 7th was lower than any of the iTf "mowing" operations, which has a ratio of 6:1. The ratio of civilians to military personnel killed on the 7th was 1.6:1, with 462 military personnel out of 1148 total. When including all casualties, not just deaths, the collateral damage ratio of the "mowing" operations is 162:1 and not "just" 6:1 based on analyzing UN OHC data from 2008 to 2022.
A 162 :1 ratio means that for every 162 civillians, 1 military personnel is a casualty. The 7th had a ratio of 1.6:1, a hundred times lower.
The reported (not all have their ages listed) ages of the victims are as follows:
True. But I bet rainy weather also makes people in restaurants noisier. You have to talk louder to get over the background noise, and this sets up a positive feedback on speech volume.
"Anyone who has studied 1930s Germany knows that this is straight from the Nazi playbook. After the 1936 Nuremburg Laws stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship, the Nazis tried to force the Jews to migrate. Reinhardt Heydrich, the 'Butcher of Prague' presented a plan to Himmler to forcibly relocate Jews on the Island of Madagascar, but the onset of WW2 scuppered the plan. The ghettos sprang up across occupied Poland and finally, the Final Solution, the Genocide of the Holocaust began.
"
Israeli officials have been conducting secret negotiations with the African state of Congo and several other countries on the potential acceptance of refugees from the Gaza Strip, Israeli media reported today.
“Congo is willing to accept refugees, but we are in negotiations with others as well," confirmed a senior official of Israel's security service to journalist Shalom Yerushalmi, reports the Times of Israel.
Why don’t Israeli’s move to Congo if they like the place so much? Then the Palestinians can live in peace on their own land.
Haaretz later reported that another source in the Israeli government (likely saner and more responsible) denied those claims, and there are deep division in the current ruling coalition between the normal-scummy politicians who know that Genocide is a red line especially in light of the ICJ case, and the full-on Genocidal whacko clowns like Ben Gavir and Smotrich who can't keep their mouths shut.
While that is probably about right, at the end of the day they clearly represent wide swathes of the electorate. And the goal of the electorate does not seem to have changed in 75 years. It's always the same thing, steal more land and kill whoever you need to. The electorate does not want to be fair because theft is their goal as it always was. UN partition "offer" that zio leaders accepted, knowing it wasn't even the full end game for them is an example. They had intent to go well beyond it but accepting it as it was shows how unjust they were from the beginning. Any reader should bear in mind, the UN proposal was not binding, it was a suggestion that the UN had no ability to enforce it. This is the kind of "deal" arabs were supposedly unjust for rejecting. This is at a time jews owned at most 6-7% of the land despite whatever claims zionist liars have made about them purchasing tons of land before. They owned very little by the time the partition deal was suggested.
To frame the perceived unfairness of the 1947 UN Partition Plan in terms of a ratio, similar to the "three-fifths" rule used historically in the United States, we can calculate the relative value assigned to an individual Jew and Arab based on the proposed land allocation and population sizes.
Calculation of Relative Value
Assumed Equal Land Rights:
Under the assumption of equal land rights, each person, whether Jewish or Arab, should ideally be allocated land in proportion to their population size.
Population Proportions:
Jews: Approximately 33% of the population.
Arabs: Approximately 67% of the population.
Land Allocation According to the UN Plan:
Jews: Allocated 56% of the land.
Arabs: Allocated 44% of the land.
Expected vs. Actual Land Allocation:
If land allocation were proportional to population size:
Each Jewish person would be allocated 33% of the land.
Each Arab person would be allocated 67% of the land.
Actual Allocation vs. Proportional Allocation:
Jewish Allocation:
Actual: 56%
Proportional: 33%
Ratio: 5633≈1.73356≈1.7
Arab Allocation:
Actual: 44%
Proportional: 67%
Ratio: 4467≈0.666744≈0.66
Interpretation
The ratio for Jewish individuals (~1.7) implies that, in terms of land allocation, each Jewish person was treated as if they were 1.7 times an individual based on the population proportion.
Conversely, the ratio for Arab individuals (~0.66) suggests that each Arab person was treated as less than an individual (about two-thirds of an individual) in terms of land rights.
According to the calculation based on land allocation ratios in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, a Jewish person was treated as approximately 2.58 times more of an individual compared to an Arab person.
Conversely, according to the same calculation, an Arab person was treated as approximately 0.39 of a Jew in terms of the land allocation ratios in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. This means that in the context of land distribution, an Arab was considered less than half as much of a person compared to a Jewish individual according to these ratios.
Not that I think either side is remotely blameless in this conflict, but show me the part of 1930s history where Jews carried out an attack killing and kidnapping Germans and maybe I'll start taking this comparison seriously.
"British police probe VIRTUAL rape in metaverse: Young girl's digital persona 'is sexually attacked by gang of adult men in immersive video game'"
From a legal standpoint, maybe that counts as harassment, the same as if these men were insulting her or making obscene comments in a text-only discussion forum. But virtual rape? How is that different in principle from players blowing each other to bits with weapons in a violent first person shooter?
The first question is whether virtual events can cause real trauma. If yes, the next question is whether this can happen even if the participants know that the event is virtual.
I think the underlying mechanism is that a lot of the trauma is caused by the social dynamics of the interaction, and social dynamics are basically relationships between people, which can be implemented in a virtual world as well as in the real world.
I'm not sure exactly what they're saying happened here (I assume you can't walk through people so they just blocked her in place and made lewd gestures), but "the Metaverse" is in significant portions just places to hang out. https://time.com/6116826/what-is-the-metaverse/
No space already covered differences, but I still like my metaphor so I'm using it; imagine you're playing football, but instead of tackling you the other guy just pees on you.
Without reading the article, I assume what this female is calling rape is “other players’ avatars standing near my avatar and moving their hands around.”
In other news, the police have launched an investigation into the billions murdered in Call of Duty, and the millions orally assaulted by crouching fiends.
After having read the article – which uses the the words "attacked" in quotes and "gang raped" without quotes, but doesn't explain how that's supposed to have worked – I must say that SunSphere's assessment is most likely correct.
I'm not saying that whatever happened wasn't disturbing, especially to a young woman. Calling it "rape" or even "gang rape", however, is dishonest click-baiting, and it dilutes and downplays the meaning of a very serious crime in the real world.
It may be. My objection to SunSphere's assessment wasn't that I was positive something worse happened, it was SunSphere's *assuming* that they knew the nothing happened except some hand motions by other players. Based on my very limited experience with these games, it seems like one can kind of know the upper and lower limits of what could happen. Players can't remove their avatar's clothes or expose their penises, so clearly what happened wasn't something of that order. However, if I was an adolescent male in a group of others, & had decided it would be funny for the group to pretend to have some version of group sex or sexual assault with the female character, I would come as close to the real thing as I could within the limits of the game. Can people tackle others and sort of knock them to the ground in this game & lie on them? I'd do that to her, and call on my buddies to do the same. Can you come up and stand right behind another avatar? I'd do that, and move my avatar back and forth a little bit as fast as I could, in an approximation of humping. Can you leap into the air and hit a character with your body? OK, I'd leap so that my crotch slammed into the female avatar's face. Can you put your hands on another character? I'd put mine on the female character's breasts and crotch. I mean, unless the males in this event were complete nitwits, they did something like that -- came as close as they could. Isn't that what anybody with a lick of common sense would do, if they wanted to approximate sex within the limits of a game?
And unless the person who wrote the article is a complete nitwit, what happened is something more than standing near the female character and moving their hands around, because that isn't remotely sexual, for god's sake!
So I object to someone assuming that all that happened was the avatars stood near the female avatar and moved their hands around because it's not plausible! And it is certainly not implausible that a group of young guys would do some kind of mock group sex or gang rape with a female player, either because they lacked the judgment to know she might not find it amusing, or because they slipped giving free rein to the horniness & aggression. I'm a woman, and if a group of guys had done that to me during a game I would have been creeped out, embarrassed and furious. Of course it's not rape. But it sure is a way of remind the female player that rape is possible, and that they are at the moment thinking about her being raped.
That sort of sexual aggressiveness from guys really does happen a lot to women. When I traveled in Greece during my college years, some Greek guy would come and squeeze or fondle my butt pretty much every time I walked alone in Athens. When I lived in New York I'd get catcalls and shouted invasive comments pretty much every time I went out alone. Workmen across the street would shout stuff about sniffing my pussy and licking my tits. I don't think I deserve a purple heart for going through that, but it really is infuriating and humiliating. If you're a guy, you can't get a feel for what it's like by imagining women doing stuff like that -- you have to imagine *males* doing it. Think about being in a public place and having workman shout about how cute and round your butt is, and how they'd like to have a taste of that cock. And also imagine that these workmen are nearly a foot taller than you, outweigh you by 50% and are way more muscular. It's not that you'd be afraid they were going to cross the street and rape you ass in broad daylight on 7th Avenue -- it's that they're reminding you that they'd like to and then *could*. And nobody around you is protesting and some people are chuckling.
Given that this sort of thing happens many times to all women who are even modestly attractive, it is irritating to hear somebody assuming that what happened during that computer game was a nothing that some drama queen lied about.
This is the kind of sincere eflection that is justifiably excluded from policy discussions and the legal process.
This places everyone in a difficult situation. You've made some unfalsifiable claims, cast some vague aspersions, and digressed into personal narrative and described unrelated sitautions to amplify your emotional appeal.
If someone wanted to express another point of view or even just concern about the conflation of definitions and lack of nuance, how can they do so without it being interpreted as personally dismissive or hostile?
As a logical proposition, your last sentence is not dissimilar to the rhetoric and the appeal of a lynch mob, if not yet the same violence towards process.
This is the 1900s version of you:
"
I have been sexually harassed by (black) men before and it felt terrible.
Therefore, because so many (white) women are raped by (black) men, it's irritating to hear somebody assuming that (given the lack of evidence and mechanical impossibility) what happened at that corner store was a nothing that some drama queen lied about."
I find illiberalism irritating and concerning, since you're removing guardrails that were put in place slowly and painfully at great cost to have both a legal and cultural presumption of innocence as well as precision of terminology to get to the facts of the matter.
Sorry you were sexually harassed (and that much of it was likely illegal since it sounds chronic and threatening), but I hope you can balance your personal experience with the societal experiences of all the people who were harmed far more by emotional appeals that dispense with empiricism and precise.
Even if you are a racist (structurally or interpersonally) and really do pine for the days of being able to make an emotional appeal of white woman tears to mobilize violence against anyone marginalized who irritates you, you should understand that this same structure can be used by someone with higher status (like say a wealthy white landowner) to take away your presumption of innocence.
I didn't interpret SunSphere's comment as "literally only moving their hands around", but rather that on a spectrum from "only moving their hands around" to "the game realistically simulated and rendered sexual intercourse between avatars", the incident resembled the former much closer than the latter.
> And unless the person who wrote the article is a complete nitwit [...]
It's an article in the *Daily Mail*. It wasn't written by a nitwit, but by a "journalist" (lol) who knew full well what they were doing, and who did so intentionally.
I'm not defending what those other players did. Like I said, it's plausible that it really was disturbing – not that we actually know what happened, because the article doesn't say. And I'm pretty sure that's by design, because if it did, it would be immediately obvious to everyone that calling that incident "virtual gang rape" is click-baity bullshit. Also note that the article doesn't contain any description of which actions are even possible in the game; again, I suspect this is intentional.
> [description of sexual harassment]
That sounds truly awful.
Still I don't see how this means that we shouldn't form common sense assumptions about what is and isn't possible in Facebook's official VR game.
Without arguing that "virtual rape" should be considered equivalent to IRL rape, I think your request for differences in principle is easily answered. For one thing, participants in a violent first person shooter are tacitly consenting to potentially having their avatars blown to bits with weapons; I doubt this girl was engaging in an activity where participants should expect to be virtually raped. For another, people are and should be more sensitive about sexual violence than about violence in general. As we don't live in a perfectly pacifistic society, our culture condones certain acts of violence under certain circumstances (some of those circumstances, such as warfare, are explored in games). Under no circumstances, however, is sexual violence condoned by mainstream Western society.
So? You can acquire a restraining order against me so that I can't get close to you. Do you mean to imply that if you haven't gotten that order yet, anything I could possibly do to your person is fair play, that you're actually asking for it because you haven't turned on that social feature?
If there was a magical button in real life that you could press that prevented people from getting near you, and also physically harming people was impossible so the worst you could do to someone is get close to them, and also the sensation of physical touch didn’t exist, then yes.
Obviously if you redefine reality to have all the properties of a virtual world, you would reach the same conclusions about reality as you would about a virtual world.
But physically harming people is possible, and the sensation of physical touch does exist. And even though those things aren't possible to experience directly in a virtual world, the actions taken in a virtual world have their meaning and potency enhanced because they *are* possible in the physical world. They aren't the *same* actions—threats and intimidation are not the same as battery—but neither are threats and intimidation harmless acts.
So, no, don't answer the question from the perspective of someone who is immune from all harm. Answer the question from the perspective of someone for whom the threat of harm is very real. You have an option to avoid harm if you have the forethought to take a certain precaution. If you do not, do you truly believe that society should hold anyone who chooses to harm you blameless?
At what point does a personal definition of harm that can extend into the virtual world compel a society to change its cultural and legal framework to accommodate it?
As primates operating under english common law, we can all agree that non-consensual touch can be both physically and mentally harmful and thus needs to be carefully regulated.
I sometimes post hasty and foolish comments online and people disagree with and make fun of what I said, which creates feelings of social dysphoria and worthlessness, genuinely. I could most likely even get a doctor's note and expert testimony confirming that this harm is both possible as part of my condition and occurred to me.
How much should society hold you responsible for harming me by saying things online I really don't want to hear that I can prove will impact my ability to live and work?
The platform settings exist for me to not see your reply, or any comments at all for that matter, or even for me to not post comments, but how much blame will you personally shoulder for the harm your words may cause me?
If I feel threatened/harassed by your assertion that feeling victimized by words online is evidence of a wrong that society
can and should create a procedural framework to address, how should we punish you for the harm you could cause me?
Since we're relying on the victim's reporting of the harm they felt and not the "reasonable person" legal abstraction and case law, by what basis should't you be blamed?
Why do stock options exist? Not "why do companies pay employees with equity", that's obvious, I mean why this elaborate construct where employees are given the right to buy stocks at a highly discounted price, instead of just giving them stocks? Is this some tax/regulatory loophole, or is it a trivial inconvenience where employers hope 1% of their employees will forget to exercise their options?
A sociopathic director at a top tech company one told me a useful heuristic.
Anytime you see a corporation doing something weird with compensation or policy, the root cause is usually related to either tax evasion or punishing people who quit.
I'm assuming you're asking from the perspective of startups or private businesses giving options to early hires.
It's taxes, and (contrary to what some other commenters are saying), options are often strictly better for employees.
Consider a small business that is:
- doing well
- has raised external capital, e.g. from a Venture Capitalist
- is privately owned
That company has some nominal value. Lets say there are 10M shares, and the company is valued at $10M, so each share is a dollar (there's a slight difference between preferred shares and common stock and convertible debt and all sorts of other things, but lets ignore that for now).
Lets say the company wants to hire an employee and give them 10% equity so they have some incentive in the long term success of the company, maybe also compensate them for a lower-than-market salary. That 10% equity stake is equivalent to $1M of income. The IRS and the state will tax the employee as if they made $1M -- which, of course, is at the highest income bracket and comes out to about $400k.
The employee can't easily sell the 10% equity they've been given to cover the taxes, because the shares are totally illiquid. No one is really out there to buy it at the stated value; the valuation is $1 per share because of some one off capital injection. And even if the employee DID have $400k in tax-money lying around, they would still be banking on the shares EVENTUALLY being worth something, which they may not be. So if the employee takes the 10% equity, they get fucked.
Options significantly reduce the risk to the employee. Because an option kicks in later (generally during a liquidity event like an acquisition or an IPO), the employee can get some guaranteed liquidity to pay off the taxes for the shares that they get. And if the employee feels like the stock isn't going to do well, they simply don't exercise the option, which means they also don't lose any money (tax or in paying for the stock).
Are you specifically asking about employee-grant options? FWIW this practice is greatly diminished now as companies seek to reduce their potential tax liabilities/complications. Established public companies typically grant RSUs (basically, shares of stock) to employees.
Options as a wider financial instrument have many useful applications for both "real economy" and pure speculation.
Because the option is legally worthless until exercised and functions as an effective clawback. Let's say I run a company. The company is worth $100. I give you 10%. I just gave you $10. You will get taxed on that which you may not be able to pay, especially if the stock is illiquid. Let's say you take the 10% and then quit the next day. Well, you still own 10% of the company.
Let's say I give you a stock option to buy 10% of the company at a price of $10 in 4 years contingent on you working for the company. If you quit then no transfer actually took place. And if you don't quit and the stock becomes worth $100 then you buy the stock for $10. Now you've made $90. But the stock is also worth $100 and, by definition, liquid since otherwise you couldn't have bought it. So you pay taxes out of the $100 of liquid stock you have and keep the rest.
Lastly, on the corporate side internal stock options are not seen as valuing your shares. If I give you a stock for $1 I am implicitly saying my company is worth $1 times the number of stocks. If I give you a stock option for $1 I'm not implicitly saying anything about the price. I also don't have to deal with dilution or extra people on the cap table.
Also, normally the grant price (what you get to buy for) is the normal price of the stock when the option is granted. So they're not discounted. Instead the hope is the stock price grows before they become exercisable.
Is there a reason this is done via options instead of just listing "we have to give you X units of stock at date y" on your contract? Is it easier for accounting or something?
The accounting for employee stock options sucks (highly technical term from an actual accountant :) ). This is why now the exact "we have to give you X units of stock at date y" thing is much more common.
Johan Domeji's right. You just described stock options except without a grant price. The price serves to make sure the person only gains money if the stock price goes up, aligning incentives.
I think that's essentially what stock options are? As a separate contract. Also not for free, though they can sometimes be so-cheap-as-to-basically-be-free. Stock options also often vests gradually over time.
On the subject of college presidents, why are they sometimes highly-accomplished, big-brained people like Larry Summers? It doesn't sound like a very intellectual or even important job compared to what else a Larry Summers could be doing. Why must a college president be so high skilled?
Because if you're going to run an institution dedicated to research and teaching, you better know what research and teaching are about and how to cultivate them. You better have some idea how to attract and keep good faculty and students - and, in general, you better want to do well by the people of the institution.
You'd be amazed how much damage a not particularly intellectual but very conformist president of a college can do. My alma mater once had a president who started by severely damaging the IT infrastructure, making everyone's health insurance much much worse, and firing (for no given reason) a bunch of employees of the only medical facility on campus (which was not exactly overstaffed to start with). By the end of his (thankfully very short, as he moved to greener pastures) tenure, just about everyone, from professors to mailroom staff, hated his guts. When something like this happens, it's not good for the school.
In the UK the main responsibilities of the chancellor of a university are to act as a public face - fundraising, lobbying and the like - while the person who runs the university is the vice-chancellor, and so the chancellor is typically a high-profile public figure whereas the vice chancellor is typically someone with a strong track record in academic administration.
By the sound of things, in the US "president" is analogous to our "chancellor"?
It's in between. The President of a US university does need to actually make decisions, and sign documents (hiring packets, awards of tenure etc), unlike a UK chancellor.
ETA: The analog of the vice chancellor is probably the provost. The President can choose to outsource the running of the university to the provost, signing whatever the provost tells him to sign (some Presidents do this) while he spends his time glad handing and fund raising, but can also overrule the provost and make different decisions (some Presidents also do this).
Because the main job of a university is prestige laundering, and having some prestigious scholar in charge is a fairly cheap way to buy prestige.
I guess the real question is why don't they do this even harder? Why is the President of a top 50 university ever not a Nobel laureate? I think the answer is that most Nobel laureates don't want an admin job and wouldn't be good at it. Larry Summers is both prestigious and willing and able to do the boring day to day job if running a large organisation, which makes him a rare commodity.
At public universities, commonly enough the president is a retired politician, major political donor, or similar. e.g. Janet Napolitano serving as president of the University of California.
Elite private universities tend to appoint highly accomplished, big brained scholars from their own faculty as president. This is a convention, probably rooted in notions of faculty self governance, or possibly part of their branding (i.e. one way to demonstrate intellectual eliteness is to have an incredibly distinguished scholar at the helm).
In June 2018, an Israeli sniper murdered a 21-year-old medic, Razan al-Najjar, during protests by Palestinians imprisoned by Israel’s occupation and siege of Gaza. In an attempt to smear her and justify her killing following an international outcry, Israeli officials circulated a video purporting to show her saying she was acting as a human shield for Hamas. However, the video was subsequently revealed to have been doctored by the Israeli military to take her comments out of context. As noted by Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, the Israeli military initially claimed “soldiers did not fire at the spot where she had been standing. Later, the military said al-Najjar might have been killed by a ricochet, before finally accusing her of serving as a human shield… Contrary to the many versions offered by the military, the facts of the case lead to only one conclusion… al-Najjar was fatally shot by a member of the security forces who was aiming directly at her as she was standing about 25 meters (82 feet) away from the fence, despite the fact that she posed no danger to him or anyone else and was wearing a medical uniform.” According to the UN, in total Israeli soldiers killed 214 Palestinians protesters in Gaza during the Great Return March, including 46 children.Those killed included at least 3 medical workers and 2 journalists, all of whom were clearly identified as such.
Zionist Jews are the most evil group of people to have ever existed. Not even the average german in world war 2 had the kind of frothing in the mouth, fuck around and find out kind of glee that the average zionist jew can't help himself expressed on some pictures of slaughtering palestinian kids. Zionist jews are worse than Nazis, and more willing to lie.
> Zionist Jews are the most evil group of people to have ever existed.
"Zionism" doesn't feel like the kind of ideology to describe with "The most evil [...] to have ever existed". To begin with, you have a serious problem with data collection: "To have ever existed" implies anywhere between 2 centuries (modern history and rise of nationalism), 70 centuries (7000 years, recorded history), and 3000 centuries (300K years, the estimated time before Christ when Anatomically modern humans first appeared). It's not obvious at all how well you compared Zionists to Vikings, to Mongols, to Conquistadors, to Arab invaders spreading Islam on the tip of a sword all the way to Spain and India. I don't think Zionists are more evil than all of those, not by the straightforward definition of the '>' operator for evil which reduces the comparison of evil to a comparison of damages and lives lost during the committing of that evil.
Furthermore, Zionism is not exceptional. Zionism is simply, as many people in Israel appear to understand it, Israeli nationalism. A "Zionist" is to an Israeli what a "Patriot" is to an Americans. Are Patriotic Americans "The Evilest Group of People to Ever Exist?" because they glorify and identify with America, the state that rose from the ashes of dead native Americans? that looks like an exaggeration to me.
The only thing different in Israel's case is that its founding was in quasi-living memory, and the national narrative as well as most of its citizens still deny any wrongdoing with respect to the founding of their state. The first point is unmatched except by oddballs like Pakistan, some Balkan states, and perhaps the entirety of Africa below the Sahara (but a founding of a new state for people who already live there isn't analogous to Israel, it must involve mass migration). The second point is extremely common. Pop Quiz: Do you know how people outside of the Arabian Peninsula came to speak Arabic? Do you know that - to this day - it's taboo and very frowned upon in those same societies to call the Arabic Invasion "The Arabic Invasion" or "The Islamic Invasion"? Even though it ***was*** an invasion, and it involved murder and rape and taking of people's land and settling in it (though admittedly, probably not as extensive as what Israel did in 1948).
So, in short, my outlook towards Zionism - which I believe to be the correct one - is as follows:
1- Zionism before, during and shortly (~20-25 years) after the founding of Israel is evil. A racist, deluded, and colonial project. It's probably not the **most** evil by the standards of its time, its probably not so by the standards of even our own time.
2- Zionism after the establishment of Israel (1973+) is about as cringe and evil as any other nationalism. It can be meant in good faith, the equivalent of "Hell yeah 'Murica", and it can even be paired with explicit inclusion of Arabs and calls for peace with them.
3- The settlers in the West Bank are not monolithic, and while their entire existence in a land that nobody on the planet except them recognizes as theirs is immoral and wrong, only some, perhaps in the low thousands (relative to 400-600 thousands of them, so less than 1%) do actually engage in violence against the Palestinians of the sort we hear and see.
4- Everyday Israelis can be complicit in the West Bank disaster and more generally in the IDF war machine, but this is the same uninteresting meaning of "Complicit" as the one where everyday Americans are complicit in the invasion of Iraq, or where meat-eaters are complicit in the one of the cruelest activities that human civilization allows to continue to date. Society has a "Moral Inertia" associated with it, some evil is so widespread and so cheap that you need unusual energy just to ***Recognize*** it as evil, let alone speaking about it out load, let alone actually resisting it or even merely refraining from supporting and enabling it.
Israelis should be held to the same standards, Jews are not God-chosen but they're not cursed either, they're just a group of people who fuck up and form oppressive hierarchical societies where their worst rule them and force courses of actions that implicate them in vast crimes of incomprehensible scales while sugarcoating the whole thing.
Well I'd say I disagree with most of this but there is little point arguing when a target is there and it's not each other. You are an apostate, I'm not, it seems you are left wing and I'm moderately right, I really just have one goal though which is raising as much awareness as I can in the rat community and reaching whoever can be reached. I'm going to transition to link/quotes+minimalist commentary without the accusation. I want the reader to come to that accusation themselves. Take more ownership of it that way.
But regarding this point:
"Do you know how people outside of the Arabian Peninsula came to speak Arabic? Do you know that - to this day - it's taboo and very frowned upon in those same societies to call the Arabic Invasion "The Arabic Invasion" or "The Islamic Invasion"? Even though it ***was*** an invasion, and it involved murder and rape and taking of people's land and settling in it (though admittedly, probably not as extensive as what Israel did in 1948)."
Conversions in the holy land and egypt seem to have occurred over a period of time, Palestinian christians+samaritans lack the arab+african descent that palestinian Muslims have and it does not appear they were coerced, lacking arab dna seems to also indicate they weren't raped. Both of those group are overwhelmingly levantine jewish/caananite(some seem to argue they are just the same) by dna. This does not look like one of those massive y-chromosomal replacement campaigns we see in ancient europe. Nor does it look like a massive theft of any sort. Furthermore there is no indication I can see that Muslim invaders did anything out of the ordinary for those times. And they were at war with rome and persia because neither civilization was going to allow an upstart power. Romes did send troops to arabia before the invasion response if I remember correctly.
Now of course there is the arab slave trade, castration of eunuchs, etc and so gene studies will probably show some kind of y chromosomal replacement in places like sudan where atrocities occur even today at the hands of arabs and places like mauritania. Furthermore widespread atrocities to migrant workers now. But I don't think the conquests of levant and iraq and the eras that followed were filled with atrocities. Also in the ancient era fighters would target other fighters on the battlefield, not like Israelis targeting fighters in a ghetto.
I would like to point this out in any case someone claims Palestinian Muslims are not indigenous to the land, that they are merely just another group of invaders. They have more levantine jewish dna than ethiopian, yemeni and ashkenazi jews. They are sons of the soil. Their lineages have stayed in the land for over 2000 years, tilling the soil and reaping not living off the backs of others or through theft like Israeli jews.
While I don't agree with any of your views, I applaud that you are following LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael's wise advice to use more of your own words in your comments, to avoid your previous url-with-a-single-line style.
I'm actually thinking about going back to that. More effective to just display some nasty Israeli lie or atrocity or call to slaughter palestinians and spread disease among them, evict them from their land and grab that very land. Perhaps. Let the reader come to the obvious conclusion.
What you don’t get is that at this point most people recognize your username and style, and when they see another of your posts they sigh & move on past without clicking your newest Jews Fucking Suck link.
There are people on this thread who will defend this, or deny it, or just justify it. That's because deep down they are either zionist jewish supremacists, or thing murdering humans and stealing their land is okay if they have less IQ points than the murdering thieves. There is no shortage of zio jews targeting and murdering civilians. Anyone denying that at this point deserves the contempt of humanity and roasting in hell.
Why are people always worried about Nazis in this or that place, when there probably at least 1000 Marxists in America for every Nazi in America? Does it matter that Substack has a tiny Nazi problem when Congress and the Ivy League have a big Marxist problem?
Nazism is a totalitarian religion which preaches race-based hate and conflict theory. Marxism is a totalitarian religion which preaches class-based hate and conflict theory. Quantitatively, Marxists have murdered about 10 times as many people as Nazis, and ruined more countries, and are a much more-serious and more-adaptable threat to civilization. People who were Nazis in Germany in the 1930s could claim they didn't understand that Nazism would lead to mass murder. People who are Marxists today have no such excuse. Yet no one shouts for a professor to resign when he shows Marxist leanings.
The comment above this one is a guy ranting about how "Zionist Jews are the most evil people who have ever existed, much worse than the Nazis", so I confirm the first part.
I still don't especially think it's up to subtack to manage them, at least in its classical form as an opt-in newsletter (which makes them easy to ignore). Lately it's been agressively trying to push its Twitter clone, which does a lot to push various types of extremists I don't want to see into my feed. Having those extremists on the site degrades the experience much more in this format, and I hope they stop pushing it.
...And? Substack's main buisness model is offering hosting for bloggers that got kicked off of the rest of the internet. As long as there's supply and demand for Nazi content, they're going to keep hosting it. As any good capitalist should.
I think the problem with this is that there's also supply and demand for bloggers who got kicked off the rest of the internet who nevertheless aren't Nazis, and a lot of us would like some capitalist enterprise that operates in that area.
ETA: Overall, I think the OP problem is overrated by a few orders of magnitude; my response here is to the specific problem of whether capitalists have to flock to some sort of Nazi content market. I think that's a tiny market. Compared to, say, the market for Nazi content from customers who are looking for things to write about and claim a "Nazi problem".
I have not looked at the Atlantic article or the blogs it accuses of being Nazi blogs, but I don't see why everyone is dismissing out of hand the possibility that there are Nazi blogs on Substack. Out of curiosity I googled "Neo Nazi organizations in US" and got a Wikipedia page listing 55 of them. Skimmed the list, & saw that about 1/4 had 'Aryan' in the names, & then there were some with names like California Reich, Goyim Defense League & Nazi Lowriders. All those sure sound like genuinely Nazi organizations to me. And Substack seems to do very little censorship, something many of us appreciate. So seems pretty plausible there could be a Nazi blog on Substack.
Did you mean to reply to me? You sound like you're rebutting somebody who sees Nazis everywhere. All I said was that there are quite a few Neo Nazi orgs in the US, & it would be surprising if there wasn't a blog on Substack for and by people of that way of thinking.
Yes. Because you said "All those sure sound like genuinely Nazi organizations to me." Personally, I would think that "Nazi Lowriders" was an obvious bit of tail-tweaking, but maybe there really are Mexican Nazis or Aryan racial-purity lowrider enthusiasts. There are undoubtedly real Nazis, and there were undoubtedly real Satanists in the 1980s. It's just that taking on the symbology of the current bad group is something the edgy have been doing since... the Puritans?
Yeah, OK, I can imagine that a band or a group would adopt a name like that as a way of signifying raunchiness or defiance. It's sort of like naming your band The Herpes. But if you look at the Wiki listing of US Neo Nazi groups, many have names that don't even work really as tail-tweaking.
Do you really think all of those are bands or art collectives? And besides, Wiki, while not infallible, is also not usually dead wrong, and it identifies these groups as Neo Nazi groups. My point is not that there is a Nazi hiding under every bush, just that there are Neo Nazi groups in the US, & it's plausible that Substack would have a blog that's a forum for them. Do you really doubt that?
It would be astonishing if a platform with pretty much non-existent censorship didn't have a handful of Nazi (or any other disreputably-themed) blogs. Calling it a problem is a problem, pardon the circularity.
Well... Firefox has a small install base, percentage-wise, but it's users are disproportionally more influential. It's got a long and tangled history, stretching back to Netscape and the original NCSA Mosaic, although it was almost wiped out by Internet Explorer, a browser that also shares the legacy of Mosaic code...
So perhaps these two problems aren't as unrelated as they appear!
Extremely slow for me too. When using the scrollbar it takes several seconds for the text to appear on the page. When typing this comment, it took nearly a second for some of the words to show up after I stopped typing.
FWIW, for the comments anyway I'll repeat some advice that worked for me (I don't recall who to credit this with): Open the pointer to the comment that you want to reply to in a new tab, and type the reply there. FWIW, I'd doing this in firefox, on a windows 10 laptop. The substack site seems to behave as if there is some slowdown perhaps proportional to the number of the comments in a tab. I also have the problem of the slowdown when scrolling through the main page of comments. The best that I can do for that is to click the "stop" option if "this web page is slowing down your browser" pops up (but this fix seems to be temporary, maybe once per several page scrolls).
I read Substack on Firefox, and it seems to run ok (with all the known issues such as slowing down when comments reach into 100s). But I do see Ublock Origin counter at 30 as I type this so maybe using a good ad blocker helps? I'm no programmer so I don't really know.
Regarding my original post: I guess I was uninformed about The Atlantic's agenda and Substack's policies (and that it wants to be a Xitter clone. LMAO).
I have to say I love your "Xitter" thing (pronounced as an "sh" sound I assume).
Commenter Shaked Koplewitz hit the nail on the head: it's not hosting Nazi content that is a problem, but promoting it - if Substack starts doing that I will sharpy revise my view on whether it has a "Nazi problem".
UO counter at 25 too - not sure why it changed from yesterday.
I'll refer you to my post in the last Open Thread about Substack banning me without notification. I'm sure their problem is not what The Atlantic is saying it is.
No it doesn't. The Atlantic has "people we don't like are Nazis, please make them disappear from public discourse" problem. I can't emphasize how damaging it to efforts to combat actual Nazis (which are still quite rare at least in the US) when f-ing Atlantic and it ilk call everyone slightly to the right of AOC "Nazi".
Exactly! Left wing mainstream media, in the UK at least, such as Aljabeeba (the BBC), labels anyone or any organisation not fully signed up to their leftist liberal woke outlook as far-right and does their utmost to ignore and suppress their views and cancel them.
I've run into enough weird extremist blogs just through the default recommendations twitter clone that I'd be shocked if there weren't also a whole variety of explicitly Nazi blogs out there.
That said I don't trust the likes of the Atlantic to decide who to ban, and would prefer to just remove the recommendation system.
Yes, 100% agree, it's the recommendations, not the hosting, that is the problem - widespread problem with "social media" platforms in general. Take one look at NASA's Webb telescope page, next thing you get recommended is flat-earthers.
... and notably shows restraint with the term when millions show "solidarity" with the Palestinian terrorist genociders who committed the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
"At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person."
Yes, sometimes the word Nazi is overapplied. That doesn't mean real Nazis aren't a thing any more.
I'm not going to make an Atlantic account to read the rest of the article, but I'm curious whether they go into how many readers any of those have. Somehow I doubt it.
I have not read the Atlantic article and am not especially interested in doing so, but I happened to run across on another site a quoted paragraph from the Atlantic article. The Atlantic wrote that “some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers."
16, out of 17,000 paid newsletters (and how many unpaid?), A <0.1% Nazi "problem", seems more like a minor nuisance to me.
So Katz has to go on and invoke the specter of other newsletters, presumably without the actual Nazi iconography, and say "trust me, these guys are Nazis". And we have to trust him, because he doesn't provide links.
Look, I despise Nazis and thing they are a scum of this Earth. But FFS, Substack doesn't have a Nazi problem. "Society" has a Nazi problem. In the US it's still a small problem. Germany has the strictest anti-Nazi laws and... just disbanded an actual Nazi conspiracy reaching into its law enforcement. How on earth Atlantic railing against Substack (curiously, a competitor) is going to solve any kind of a Nazi problem is... unknown, to put it charitably.
Does anyone actually think the problem this guy hopes to solve is that there are some actual Nazis using Substack as a blogging/newsletter platform? Because I'd bet a lot of money that the problem he hopes to solve involves a much wider range of people than Mr 1488 Edgelord and his zero-subscription Substack.
We've just run through a decade or so where most of the big media outlets in the US did this routine, talking about the need to push out Nazis that somehow turned into needing to get rid of Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias and Bari Weiss and Scott Alexander. I assume that if somehow people manage to pressure Substack to start purging "extremist" substacks, they'll find themselves at the bottom of that slippery slope having pushed out Razib Khan for being a white supremacist and Matt Yglesias for his far-right extreme position that the cops should ticket you for not having valid license plates. And soon thereafter, Substack will disappear, having lost the thing that let them become big in a media ecosystem where almost everyone else is shrinking.
Okay, but we're having this conversation at the bottom of that slope w.r.t. a bunch of big media outlets. I predict that the same coalition that pushed Bari Weiss out of the NYT and Andrew Sullivan out of the New Yorker will, given the chance, push those same folks off of Substack, explaining all the while that they are merely excluding Nazis, the alt-right, transphobes, etc.
<Does anyone actually think the problem this guy hopes to solve is that there are some actual Nazis using Substack as a blogging/newsletter platform? Because I'd bet a lot of money that the problem he hopes to solve involves a much wider range of people than Mr 1488 Edgelord and his zero-subscription Substack.Does anyone actually think the problem this guy hopes to solve is that there are some actual Nazis using Substack as a blogging/newsletter platform? Because I'd bet a lot of money that the problem he hopes to solve involves a much wider range of people than Mr 1488 Edgelord and his zero-subscription Substack<
Which guy -- do you mean aexl? Yes, I think it's perfectly possible that aexl is considers Nazi blogs a problem. while being OK with lots of blogs that others might want to get their greedy little fingers on and censor -- for ex., right wing blogs, red pill blogs, anti-immigrant blogs, sexually explicit blogs. Why wouldn't it be possible? Why are you assuming that everybody who finds genuinely Nazi content "a problem" is actually someone who wants to take over Substack and the rest of the world and force it to follow some stupid woke rulebook? And why are you assuming that any log that might truly be called pro-Nazi is some posts by an obnoxious edgelord with zero followers?
You are not being fair-minded. How about you make a list of what sort of thing would mark a blog as genuinely Neo Nazi, then go look at the ones that aexl objects to and see how close they come to meeting your criteria, and how many followers they have.
Here's one reason why I find it plausible that the problem aexl wants to solve is exactly the problem they say they want to solve, nazi blogs. One of my first posts on ACX was at the height of Covid, and I posted some concerns about a blog with a huge following that was basically lying with statistics to make the case that the covid vax not only did not improve anyone's chance of surviving covid, but it did actual harm. The thing that put that blog in a special category from me was that it was spreading misinformation about a serious public health problem, and it seemed to be spreading it quite successfully. I thought Substack should consider reducing the harm this blog was doing by publishing user-friendly explanations about how statistics were being used in a tricky way and about the actual data we had about the vax.
I do not like censorship or its cousins, and would never have been in favor of posting corrections to blogs containing misinformation of other kinds , even if they infuriated me (for ex. "all women want a man with the 4 6's". A 6-pack, a 6-figure income, 6 feet tall or taller, a 6 inch or larger dick"). Sio yes, I think it's possible that aexl objects only to Nazi blogs.
Personally, I'm not in favor of banning a blog simply because they self-identify as a Nazi, but I am in favor of banning any blog that posts disinformation that threatens public health or safety.
And then that "misinformation" was subsequently proven categorically true. Young people are overwhelmingly dying more from the vaccine than Covid, even today. Cardiac deaths, specifically in the young, are still elevated 50-100% from 2019 levels. And that's not even factoring in the disabilities, neurological disorders, brain blood clots...
I think that the current consensus is that covid vaccines for healthy children have higher risks than benefits and it might be also true for young adults. That's why most countries in Europe children are not given covid vaccine. I don't really understand why the US is so insistent on vaccinating children against covid. Maybe it is because too many children in the US are overweight that they actually benefit from vaccine but saying it directly would offend fat people?
Nevertheless, the potential harm from covid vaccines in absolute numbers are very small therefore I wouldn't make it a big issue. Many blogs are quite indiscriminate. Sometimes they use harsh words, they say that the doctors who vaccinate are murders etc. The reality is more complicated and it is not fair to blame an individual doctor. Instead I suggest reading Vinay Prasad and other researchers who are very rigorous evaluating available evidence.
Yeah, I have burned out on having conversations about this with people of your school of thought. But I have a suggestion: Raise this idea with the group as a whole here. Quote what I said, say what you believe, and ask what others think. I'm sure there are some people here who can still stand to discuss this topic.
Hey Scott and broader rat-o-sphere, a friend referred me to a resource for finding psychiatric/therapy help that used to be maintained but appears to not be maintained anymore:
You can search Psychology Today by specialties people list, and Asperger's is one of the categories. Some people, though, say they treat everything. You want someone who lists only a few specialities, with Asperger's among them. If you are in a state that participates in PsyPac, you can have virtual sessions with therapists anywhere in the country so long as they are also in PsyPac states, so you have more choices. Info about PsyPac states is here: https://psypact.org/mpage/psypactmap
I’m thinking there’s a parallel between minimum wage and reserve pricing in auction theory. Reserve pricing is a modification to second-price auctions where you set a price floor, and the winner of the auction pays at least that much if they win. In contrast, in a second-price auction with only one buyer, the winner invariably pays zero. Reserve pricing is “revenue maximizing” meaning it’s best for those receiving the payment. Without reserve pricing the auction is “welfare maximizing,” meaning the good invariably goes to the bidder who values it most, but not necessarily giving the best price to the person providing the good.
There are a million disconnects between the auction model and the labor market — not one-shot, not anonymous, known pricing (sometimes), non-homogenous bidders/goods, unknown distributions. But it does suggest that sometimes a price floor can be beneficial to those being paid (workers). Even though in some cases it leads to the good not being sold (a worker not being hired, a job not being filled), especially in cases where there are a low number of bidders (jobs available) it causes a wage increase in those hired that compensates for the missing jobs.
Would love to know what people think about this. Anywhere it’s been explored? Important things that make the parallel not hold? I have basic knowledge of auction theory but that only covers simple settings. One thing I like about this framing is that it exposes a little knowledge being misleading. Most people know from microeconomics that price floors cause slack (which is bad), but in a broader context there may be a net benefit.
As Erusian sort of mentioned, the difference between minimum wage and reserve auction pricing is that, in an auction, the reserve price is set by the people who own the item being offered. A worker can mimic that, but not with minimum wage; instead, it's them going to the job interview and saying "I won't work here for less than $X."
The business-side equivalent is proficiency requirements. "Must be able to lift 80 pounds routinely." If the best candidate they get can't lift more than 40 pounds semi-annually, they'd rather hire no one.
Minimum wage is simply a price floor. Like all price floors it produces a deadweight loss but raises the price of the good in question while reducing the supply. It is a net loss overall unless the minimum wage floor is so below the prevailing wages that it effectively doesn't affect anything. But those losses, as you point out, are unevenly distributed. (Though I will point out this is also basic micro.) The deadweight loss is not borne by those who are employed but by the people who are not employed and by the buyers (ie, employers and people who can't sell their labor for the minimum wage rate). It's thus a net transfer from employers and the lower classes to the working class. Whether the employer's portion is passed onto consumers has to do with things like market elasticity.
When originally proposed, this was considered a benefit. It was explicitly considered to be eliminating certain kinds of work. It was touted as a benefit that certain kinds of work would become uneconomical. It was called eliminating drudgery and so on. We only started to get a lot of motivated analysis about how it doesn't eliminate jobs when it became a conservative line of attack on the policy and so inconvenient for liberal politicians.
If you wanted to design a more efficient policy that accomplishes the same ends then there are more efficient programs. The issue is that it's less politically viable. Minimum wage is easier to build a coalition around so we get the less economically efficient but more politically viable option.
Depends on the policy goal. If you want to take money from the rich and use it to make sure every worker (defined as a full time worker) gets enough money to live a certain lifestyle then you could just define them as a group and then give them direct transfers. If you want to incentivize labor you could do it as effectively a subsidy to working hours. If you just want to boost their consumption you could just give them cash. All of which would not distort the labor market as much as a high price floor on labor. Minimum wage, by most estimates, is a fairly costly policy. Its virtue is its political defensibility, not its efficiency.
How does that work? UBI gives people money to spend, which they likely will on goods and services they need. Supply is limited, and demand is infinite. People will still work. The real danger is inflation.
"it causes a wage increase in those hired that compensates for the missing jobs."
I disagree with the 'compensates for missing jobs' part. The jobs market is a zero-sum game. There are only a fixed number of openings available. If there are ten jobs, but eleven workers, that eleventh someone is unemployed. If you're that someone, the 10% unemployment number is 0% income, it hits you really hard.
Here in California, (I think effective yesterday), fast food workers for companies with more than 1,300 employees saw their pay upped to $20/hr. This is all well and fine; meanwhile Pizza Hut announced it's laying off all 1,200 delivery drivers. For those 1,200 people, how's that wage hike working out for you? Yeah, not so much eh.
Since I'm semi-retired for seven years, I don't eat out like I used to. Whilst Christmas shopping two weeks ago, I dropped in on my elderly parents—in their late 80s. They wanted me to bring them lunch from KFC. Easy, I've not been to KFC for years; KFC was a ghost-town, at noon, on a big shopping day, I had no idea why. Three box lunches, each with three wings/tenders, a biscuit, and salad cost $40. Yeah, there's not much danger in that happening again. --just sayin.
"The jobs market is a zero-sum game. There are only a fixed number of openings available."
Not true, over time spans long enough for employees to spend enough wages to affect a local economy. You pay a small number of people more money, then they spend more money as consumers, and that allows more jobs to support that spending. The economy grows. Meanwhile, prices increase, but so do average wages.
With the pizza hut move, without any additional information, I wonder if they were losing delivery-based revenue to food delivery apps, and the drivers weren't economical already, but maybe the increase pushed it over the edge and justified the move to not employing delivery drivers at all?
For any individual company, who knows, but it's absolutely possible for a minimum-wage hike to price some jobs out of the market. If I am required to pay you either $20/hour or $0/hour, but nothing I know how to employ you to do for me will earn more than $15/hour of your time, then you're getting a pink slip (and $0/hour).
To see why this has to be true, consider what happens when the minimum wage is $100/hour.
Can you price delivery drivers at being worth $15/hour? If someone is making a choice to order a takeaway based on "who is offering delivery?" and that makes the difference for enough customers, your driver may well be making you that $20/hour or more.
I do know it's tricky because fast food franchises are operating on slim margins, like all restaurant/hospitality businesses, but there seems to be a parallel push to get customers to take on more of the work themselves (see self-service checkouts in supermarkets and the drive for online banking - at least here in Ireland, where the bank my workplace uses now has made it that if you want to lodge cash, you can't do it t the local branch in town any more, you now have to go thirty miles to our city to do so. This is *not* 'more convenient and better service for the customer', no matter what the PR may say).
In the US, we have a term for the people who study this for the large corporations. We call them Quants, which is short for quantifying, they put dollar amounts to activities. Quants are mostly insurance actuaries, calculating and do things like tell how much it costs to insure this group of people. But they work in the financial side of all corporations too, or at least in the good ones. Quants tell you the result of the balance of raising the prices, losing sales, and how some action will play outfinancially.
Just because you pay driver $15/hr, doesn't mean that is how much it costs you to fill that pizza delivery role. It is probably more like $50/hr. You have to outfit a delivery vehicle, plus the driver, plus all the taxes and benefits, plus the gear, plus the insurance, plus corporate overhead, plus etc.
Maybe it costs $300 a night to provide a delivery driver. Does that $300 a night provide more than $300 in profit from delivering pizzas compared to not delivering pizzas? If not, then you're losing money; don't do it.
My nose has been clogged for a month. I had a cold and that part never really got better. What would help? I'm currently using Xclear nasal spray and a saline nasal spray. I'm fine during the day, but it wakes me up at night when my nose clogs completely. AI recommended continuing to use nasal sprays, going on an antihistamine, seeing a doctor, and praying to my god
If you're curious for the conclusion, I switched to budesonide for a few days and that helped. Now I'm not taking anything, although I'm still a bit stuffy. It doesn't interrupt my sleep anymore and I don't need to carry tissues around. Thanks for the help everyone!
There are tablets of xylitol and glue which you can stick to your gums when you go to sleep; a brand name is Xylimelt, but there are cheaper generics. They last about 3 hours. Xylitol breaks down biofilms, and I think this helps clear out the mucus from your sinuses.
Also, you can take a guaifenesin tablet before bed.
Also, try elevating the head of your bed; this will help the mucus run down your throat, which is better than staying in your sinuses.
Also, play with humidity levels.
Also, if you wake up at night, get up, use Xlear, and do stuff for half an hour, and your head will start to clear. Then go back to bed.
Also, see an ENT who will do an endoscopic exam of your sinuses and see if they are badly formed. They can open them up with somnoplasty or sinuplasty.
I had a clogged nose for the longest time until accidentally (I swear) taking my kid's antihistamine (it was a prescription one). I'd try every antihistamine I or someone I know has around the house, on the off-chance that this might accidentally work.
Also, you can complain to your doctor that your clogged nose is not letting you sleep at night and beg him for some hydroxyzine. It might unclog your nose or let you sleep through the night - either way, a win.
On second thought, I would suggest that you immediately contact your doctor, explain that you can't sleep because of a clogged nose, say that some people said hydroxyzine is helpful for sleeping in such situations, and ask what his thoughts would be about it - could he, please, let you have some to see if it helps?
In my experience, the doctor will probably say yes. (There's really no reason for him to say no.)
"Every drug" is not the same thing as "every antihistamine". "Every antihistamine" is fairly unlikely to harm you in any way besides sending you to sleep.
Just stay away from Afrin. It will clear your nose up but when it wears off your nose will be stuffed up much worse, and you'll take another hit of Afrin and the cycle will repeat. It's incredibly addictive for a non-psychoactive substance.
1. Neti pot, I know it's gross, but that's the yucky stuff going out, you get to feel satisfied about the whole mess
2. If by "clogged" you mean "stuffed" (inflamed and no snot), try the Russian thing. Close one nostril and breathe as much as you can through the other, then switch. After a minute your body should decide the O2 shortage is too much to afford the luxury of keeping those things closed and it may open up.
I'll chime in to say my nose has been clogging for 15 months straight now, which started after my last round of what I assume was Covid back in August '22. (No advice other than "take it seriously").
Strongly suggest trying a neti pot or other nasal rinse. Also consider if what you have is a sinus infection and, if you think it might be, read up on sinus anatomy.
I'm plagued by this too. I used Sudafed for a long time, got sinus infections, but less dripping, changed to Claritin, still got raging sinus infections. Went to Flonase, and now it's generic replacement. Works wonders for me. I do hate using the nasal spray, but its a great improvement over Sudafed and Claritin.
Oh weird, this seems like an obvious idea, I'll give it a shot. I guess my suspicion is that the problem isn't my nose width, but the fact that mucus builds up over the course of hours so this would help with snoring but not complete blockage. I guess we'll see!
I noticed the same. Looked into it quickly last night, & it seemed like you can block commenters on your own blog, and block people on Notes, but there is no way to block other commenters on a blog that's not yours. Though just as I was running out of time I saw something that gave the impression you can *mute* other commenters.
> The security establishment and the State Attorney's Office are concerned that the International Court of Justice at the Hague will charge Israel with genocide in the Gaza Strip – this at the request of South Africa, which petitioned the court over the weekend.
> According to international law experts, the proceeding may cement claims of genocide against Israel, and thus lead to its diplomatic isolation and to boycott or sanctions against it or against Israeli businesses.
> Unlike the International Criminal Court at the Hague, which conducts proceedings against private individuals, the International Court of Justice deals with judicial disputes between countries.
> Israel does not recognize the jurisdiction of the Criminal Court, which is conducting investigations into alleged war crimes by both Israelis and Palestinians, including in the current war.
> In contrast, it is signatory to the treaty against genocide, by the power of which the court derives its authority to hear the complaint filed against Israel by South Africa. According to the court's prior ruling, any signatory country may file a complaint against another country, even if it's not directly harmed by it.
> Prof. Eliav Lieblich, an expert on international law at Tel Aviv University, explains that South Africa makes two central claims: that Israel isn't acting to prevent statements that call for genocide and that it is committing actions that constitute genocide.
> "Genocide is a violation, the proof of which in court requires two elements," Lieblich adds. "First, you have to show intention of annihilation, and second – certain actions in the field that promote this intention. According to South Africa, the intention is proven by statements of senior Israeli figures and a public atmosphere of erasing or flattening Gaza, and the widespread harm to civilians and the hunger in Gaza show the factual element of the deed."
> "In general, it's hard to prove an intention of genocide because no public statements to that effect are made during the fighting," he [Eliav Lieblich] explained. "But these irresponsible statements about erasing Gaza will require Israel to explain why they don't reflect such an intention."
> Lieblich noted that to date, the court has heard very few cases involving accusations of genocide. Around 15 years ago, it rejected a Bosnian complaint that Serbia had committed genocide but ruled that Serbia hadn't prevented the genocide that Serb militias perpetrated in the Srebrenica massacre.
> Another case, which is still in the early stages, involves a Ukrainian complaint against Russia. The court is also hearing a complaint by Gambia against Myanmar over its persecution of the Rohingya [A Muslim ethnic minority in the majority-Buddhist Myanmar, also known as Burma]
> "South Africa's complaint is intended to add Israel to this very disreputable group, and thereby also embarrass the U.S. as its ally," Lieblich said.
I'm looking forward to the guilty ruling, to be completely and unabashedly frank. If nothing else, a single link to the ruling will be quite an adequate response from then on to all the tired and repeated denialist talking points that I see brought up over and over again, the same old statistics about increasing population of Gazans as supposed evidence that Israel is not committing Genocide in Gaza now, the same smug and heartless "This isn't happening, stop noticing things" attitude.
And conversly, if the court proceeds with this to the very end and rules that there is no Genocide, I will be quite surprised. I commit to reading the entire verdict if it's public (within reasonable limits of my time and understanding of International Law), though I can't guarantee that I will be convinced by it. I will also stop making the claim of Genocide or describing Israeli policies in Gaza as Genocidal except when this is the explicit point of discussion.
On a not-completely-unrelated ending note, I'm quite pleased with South Africa, Spain, and Ireland. I'm thinking of starting to learn Spanish next.
>Genocide is a violation, the proof of which in court requires two elements," Lieblich adds. "First, you have to show intention of annihilation, and second – certain actions in the field that promote this intention. According to South Africa, the intention is proven by statements of senior Israeli figures and a public atmosphere of erasing or flattening Gaza, and the widespread harm to civilians and the hunger in Gaza show the factual element of the deed."
That's going to be difficult to prove: Israel's actions clearly show an intent *not* to annihilate the Palestinian people: they gave ample warming to the civilian population of where they would invade and urged them to evacuate, gave them time to do so, and kept evacuation corridors open. Those are not the actions of a state whose intent is to annihilate a people. They have also allowed relief shipments to enter Gaza, even though there is a chance that they could be confiscated by Hamas: if their intent was to annihilate, then why would they allow any relief to enter at all?
What's more, there are 1.6 million Palestinians citizens of Israel: they have not been rounded up into death camps, or expelled, or otherwise persecuted. There are even 10 Palestinians in the Israeli parliament. If genocide of Palestinians is their goal, why are they doing nothing to anihilliate their own Palestinian citizens (the way Germany rounded up and killed their own Jewish citizens during their genocide, or the way the that Tutsi citizens of Rwanda were hunted down and killed in the streets by their fellow citizens). How many Palestinian citizens of Israel have been killed since the fighting began?
I'm not a lawyer, or a judge, let alone an ICJ lawyer or judge, but saying "Clearly" here sounds like a Proof-By-Intimidation [1], that's not clear at all. If nothing else, I think that the ICJ has the option to flat out refuse to hear the case of South Africa if your "Clearly" was anywhere near as clear as you claim to be, and that's clearly what Israel was hoping it would do, and yet Haaretz reports in another story that the court accepted the complaint and the first hearing will be next week.
Sounds like a truckload of ICJ officials and judges don't agree with your Clearly, are they idiots ? blind ? Ignorant ? Or, hear me out, are you wrong and biased ? Trained to pattern-match a particular instance of evil ("""the way Germany rounded up and killed their own Jewish citizens during their genocide, or the way the that Tutsi citizens of Rwanda were hunted down and killed in the streets by their fellow citizens""") but not having a slightly more general model to recognize slightly different instances ? Evil Is Anti-Inductive https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/13/evil-is-anti-inductive/.
> they gave ample warming to the civilian population of where they would invade and urged them to evacuate
Also, the entirety of Gaza - not just the north - was invaded and, subsequently, bombed with artillery and tank shells, following the breakdown of the ceasefire on the 1st of December.
> They have also allowed relief shipments to enter Gaza
If the Nazis allowed relief from people or countries who wanted to help Jews pre-1939, would that make the Holocaust any less horrible ?
Do you know that Humanitarian Relief entering Gaza is just a US condition that Israel must satisfy if it wants more weapons and more aircraft carriers and more usage of US army weapons cache and more free money from the Congress ? There is some relief coming from Jordan but Jordan also supplies critical food supplies to Israel after the agriculture in Gaza's envelope's settlements crashed and the Houthis wrapped Israeli commerce in a chokehold.
> What's more, there are 1.6 million Palestinians citizens of Israel
I believe the number is 2 million.
> they have not been rounded up into death camps, or expelled, or otherwise persecuted
It's a good thing then that nobody is claiming that this happened, the Genocide case clearly states "Palestinians in Gaza". To see how ridiculous your defense is, imagine someone denies the accusations against China of Uyghur Genocide and says "But, but, China has other Muslims as well that it isn't Genociding[2], how can China Genocide one group of Muslims and leave the others alone ?"
I think you are being unfair. LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael also wrote:
>I believe in no God, but may there be Mercy on the souls trapped in that embattled and bloody land, Mercy on all the souls living and dead, wherever that Mercy may come from.
Oh, I am ? In what sense ? What part of my writing or quoting of sources gave you that impression ?
> You've literally built your identity here around hatred
Yeah sure, hating and hatred are not always bad things. For example, you probably hate Hamas right ? Doesn't that mean you have built your identity around hatred too ? Would it really make a difference whether you append it to your username or not ?
Hating Israel, like hating the US, Russia, China and indeed my own native polity which is not either of the 4, is just the moral and philosophical belief that I as an anarchist believe is the most decent option. That doesn't imply anything interesting on whether I hate the people living there, if anything countries the size of US and Russia probably produced most of the Anarchists that I read for and was convinced by.
> saying "Clearly" here sounds like a Proof-By-Intimidation
Oh come on, you've been doing the exact same thing with different words in your original post:
> I'm looking forward to the guilty ruling [...] And conversly, if the court proceeds with this to the very end and rules that there is no Genocide, I will be quite surprised.
That's just a long-winded way of saying "clearly they are guilty". Are you trying to intimidate us?
> Or, hear me out, are you wrong and biased ?
You openly announced that you will unreservedly believe a verdict that confirms your opinion, and that you most likely won't believe a verdict that contradicts it, in which case you'll quietly sweep it under the rug. That's a prime example of confirmation bias – which is understandable and natural, especially given that it's a topic of personal interest to you – but don't go accusing others of bias just because they don't share your opinion.
> That's just a long-winded way of saying "clearly they are guilty"
No... no it's most definitely not. It's a long-winded way of stating my priors, and the surprise part is there to pave the way for what's coming next, the things I'm planning to do (and saying publicly I plan to do to force myself to commit) if the very surprising thing against my priors happens :
1- Me reading the entirety of a long boring verdict written in premium Legalese.
2- Regardless of being convinced by the verdict, that I will not claim Genocide or describing Israeli actions as genocidal actions except when this is the explicit point of contention, and with the recognition that other reasonable non-Genocide-supporting people can disagree for good reasons. In short, I will recognize that "Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza" is a controversial claim, and will treat it as such, conditional on the court ruling that there is no Genocide in Gaza.
> you most likely won't believe a verdict that contradicts it
I never said that, I said I can't guarantee I would be convinced by it, that's not "most likely", that's just "somewhat likely", and the "somewhat" will differ depending on how convincing the arguments in the verdict will be. I never expected those who don't believe there is a Genocide in Gaza to automagically start believing in it 100% after a guilty ruling either.
> accusing others of bias just because they don't share your opinion.
Both can be true, 2 opposite sides of an argument can be both biased.
I remember hearing the Kellogg-Briand pact discussed in this kind of dismissive way in my history classes as a student, but this book review (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists) at this site pointed out to me that the pact *does* seem to have been part of what led to a new consensus that really does have much less war than the world of the past. You'll note that, since 1945, there has basically not been any war that changed the borders of two existing countries other than a few involving Israel or Russia. (There have been several civil wars that led to the splitting or merger of various countries, but not something where one nation conquered territory from another.)
It hasn't fully stopped wars of conquest any more than the laws against murder have fully stopped murder. But it does seem to have been moderately effective, which is about the best one could ask for.
That has a lot more to do with the United States (and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union) saying "don't make me come over there and separate you two". And ten thousand or so nuclear weapons for the implied "for else".
The Soviet Union is gone, the US is conspicuously wimping out, and now the wars are coming back. Have fun.
I don't think it's quite as simple as "Make War Illegal", but it is indeed a very hit-or-miss attempt to try to enforce some semblance of rule of law on the chaotic sovereignty that is International Relations.
The "Declare them a criminal" part probably isn't intended to free the world of war by any non-delusional brain, but is rather a label that serves as a communication/coordination mechanism. If Putin is not declared a criminal, people might still boycott/sanction/etc... Russia but cite various hodgepodges of beliefs, justifications and plans of actions, but a central category of "War Criminal" or similar allows all the enemies of Putin to coalesce in a single conceptual coalition.
If nothing else, I'm using the ICJ as an academic authority in my post above, like a very influential think-tank or a University.
I think you'll give people might dispute the court itself as a source. If the city is biased, like a think tank or university, that might impact the impartiality of its judgment.
Granted, the court might be biased. I expect them to document the justification for their verdict, whichever way they rule, and I hope that what they cite will be persuasive evidence for their ruling. ( I also hope that it isn't a _thousand_ pages of opaque legalese... ) I'm approaching this with the opposite priors from LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael (e.g. if this were an attempt to annihilate Gazan Palestinians, why are 99% of them still alive? Why did Israel warn them to leave buildings which were about to be bombed? ), but I'll see what the court says (if it isn't impossibly lengthy).
I don't have a magical see-through tool to look at your brain or anyone else's to make sure you're convinced by the ruling, I just expect anybody reasonable to not dispute the International Court of Justice ruling, certainly not in a low-effort offhanded side remarks as most people I have seen here do it. As I indicated, I will also do that if the Court rules against my belief.
Why is that unreasonable? Most nations of the world are corrupt and/or autocratic, which means most international organizations are dominated by A: corrupt autocrats and B: people willing to sit at a table full of corrupt autocrats for the sake of being seen as cosmopolitan globalists. It's certainly reasonable to be at least skeptical of their objectivity.
The US and/or the UK both have a long and illustrious history of corruption, both of them were complicit in the invasion of a country based on a hoax and killing about 0.25 to 0.5 million innocents [1] in 2003, and - of course - the rise of ISIS and the subsequent debauchery. That's just a particularly noticeable incident from recent history.
Yet, curiously, there seems to be a widespread agreement that Slavery is bad. This is remarkable because Abolitionism - while a moral and philsophical position held and argued for by probably thousands of different languages and traditions - only became a political force with teeth mainly in those 2 polities, first in the UK then in the US. Barely 50 years after the UK outlawed Slavery, in the 1880s and the 1890s, the UK engaged in colonization of Africa that resulted in a gaint strip of colonies from Egypt to South Africa, and yet when decolonization freed those colonies, the freed people didn't say to themselves "Welp, I guess Abolitionism is the legacy of the colonizer, let's bring it back folks, Slavery is part of our heritage".
Because Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence.
Sure, be skeptical of their objectivity, just be sure to bring sources and/or authorities more objective. Considering that the only authorities disputing the Genocide accusation against the Israeli government right now is the Israeli government, you might have a hard time finding those authorities. Just like you can certainly be very skeptical of Wikipedia, and you can definitely cite other Encyclopedias in opposition, but you definitely can't just cite a random blog or twitter account whose very identity strongly points in the direction that it will benefit from denying what's being asserted by Wikipedia even if it's true.
And that's not the standard of evidence or argument that I see adhered to by most Genocide-denying commenters here (and everywhere else). To take your most recent comment in the previous Open Thread, you simply asserted that there is no Genocide and that anyone accusing or agreeing with those accusing Israel of Genocide is being an idiot or malicious. That doesn't sound very objective does it ?
" If nothing else, a single link to the ruling will be quite an adequate response from then on to all the tired and repeated denialist talking points that I see brought up over and over again"
Why should this be an adequate response if a not guilty finding is not adequate to refute the tired and repeated pro-Jew killing arguments that you repeat?
It's generally impossible to refute things that were never said and claims that were never advanced, so I struggle to see how anything - ICJ ruling or otherwise - can refute my "Pro-Jew-Killing" arguments, since I don't remember ever making them.
Can you be so kind as to quote or paraphrase those arguments for me ? No need for links, I recognize my words.
Forseeable consequences are not unintended. If your preferred policies wrt Hamas result in Hamas killing more Jews, then you prefer killing Jews as a matter of policy.
Interesting. By this principle, Pro-Israeli commenters, specifically those against a ceasefire in Gaza, most specifically you, are Pro-Palestinian-Killing. Do you agree with this characterization of you and your side of the argument ?
Fair. We will see what the court finds. Better to have a court investigation than trial in the press. Many Thanks for listing the other cases brought before it as well! I'm somewhat surprised to see the PRC's treatment of the Uighurs absent from the case load.
An amusing (to me, at least) article on asexuality in "Scientific American". The illustrations are horrible, I can assure you all I have never gambolled around a tree picking up the ace colours leaves in my entire life nor do I ever intend to do so, but it's an okay article.
The anecdote about going to the gynaecologist resonates with me, because it was my experience as well about what amounted to "Whaddya mean you're your age and have never done the do, are you quite sure you understand what is meant by sex, maybe you've had sex but didn't know that is what you were doing" (yes, really, that's what happened):
I've never felt stigmatised because out of all my weirdnesses, not caring a straw about the love and marriage thing was the least of my problems, but it's nice to get some recognition that there are people out there who don't care about the whole business and it's not because there's something wrong with us or trauma or what have you.
I am a little dubious about advocating that asexuality is an orientation no different than heterosexuality or homosexuality because, unlike those orientations, correctable sexual dysfunction can *present* as asexuality, even to (perhaps especially to) the person suffering the dysfunction.
I know because I was goddamned CERTAIN I was asexual until a medical procedure accidentally corrected my hormone (and whatever else) imbalances. From puberty to my early 30s, I never experienced the desire to have sex with someone - and never did. I was perfectly content with that and proudly labeled myself an asexual.
Then it just changed. Without my permission. *Against my will.* It wasn't up to me. *My* *identity* *was* *wrong.* A dysfunction was corrected, sexual desire simply got switched on, and I learned to have way, WAY more respect for how biological processes invisibly influence identity.
I'm not saying that all experience of asexuality is a result of dysfunction, but given how absolutely shocked I was to be corrected about what I thought was a core identity, I would caution folk against fully embracing asexuality until they've exhaustively ruled out other explanations.
>unlike those orientations, correctable sexual dysfunction can _present_ as asexuality, even to (perhaps especially to) the person suffering the dysfunction.cause
Thank you! One thing I'm always queasy about when politics starts getting involved in how human behavior gets interpreted is situations like these. Yeah, a bell curve has tails, but it is also possible that an unusual behavior can be a symptom of something else, even when the person with the behavior is perfectly happy with it. My knee-jerk reaction is that it should be legitimate to view tails of the bell curve as _puzzles_ to be understood, with the possibility that there _might_ be a nontrivial cause - and then the patient can decide what, if anything, they want done.
I'm very definitely not in the camp of "this is an ORIENTATION, this is my IDENTITY" and of course there is overlap and confusion between 'is this just low libido, or some other reason that is physiological in nature?' and 'is this just how this person is wired?'
I do think it's wiring, but I don't think it's necessarily something to be corrected. If you're happy as you are, stay that way, it's not hurting anyone. If you aren't happy, be free to seek a solution. I'm just welcoming broadening recognition that this is a thing and not necessarily a problem.
Well, you're in a much better position than my ex, who I doubt knows what "asexual" means but definitely has zero desire for it. ("30-plus-year-old virgin" shot up my Red Flag List after that.)
eh its worrying people aren't concerned about asexuality more. Not having sexual desire at all is a profound thing and will bar you from romantic relationships. Dead bedrooms or duty sex from the start is a huge nonstarter for virtually all men.
(and yes, men, the majority of asexuals are women. The article handwaves it as men are more stigmatized if they identify as one but it doesn't ring true given how dangerous male sexuality is seen as; an ace man would be "safe" by a lot of people)
edit: a lot of aces seem to want romance which is why it matters. cuddling, intimacy, relationships, monogamy...just they can't desire their partner sexually.
just weird how its just "there" despite it being such a radical condition.
I can see that to a heterosexual heteroromantic monoamorous person, any difference on either spectrum might seem like a major disability. But the fact that there are a variety of communities in which one or more of these features is not taken for granted means that an asexual person has places to find what they're looking for (just as homosexual people do).
dont know; communities can also be impediments or too skewed to provide those opportunities. if demographics are majority female men get driven out FAST; women often need to pair outside the community. even in large ones; religious women for example.
really not sure but honestly even straight romance seems harder now; not sure subcultural romance isn't either.
"Not having sexual desire at all is a profound thing and will bar you from romantic relationships."
Very extremely fortunately I am *also* aromantic so I don't want a romantic/love/sexual relationship; this is like telling me "not having a desire to cut off your toes will bar you from having your leg amputated below the knee".
Well, since I like my legs just enough to want to keep them, that's fine by me 😁
There are asexuals who want the love/romance but not the rubbing bits together part; there are aromantics who don't "fall in love" but like being close and are happy to have sex, and all the steps along the scale in between.
I've known this since I was nine and said I never wanted to get married and have kids. I had no idea until late in life that there was even a thing called "asexuality" and "aromanticism" and when I read the descriptions I went "Huh, so there's a name for this?"
I'm not up on all the fine degrees so the plain "asexual/aromantic" works just fine for me. I've never been in love/fallen in love/had anyone want to be in love with me, and I honestly am perfectly happy about that. I got it from my mother, when she was finally convinced that I wouldn't 'grow out of it', about "but won't you be lonely on your own? think about as you get older".
No, I'm okay with no partner of any description. Indeed, the thought of being emotionally close/physically close in that kind of relationship gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don't want to 'talk about my feelings' with another person or talk about their feelings or the rest of it.
I don't even want a cat, that's how "no relationships" I am!
i dont mean it about you personally Deiseach; i mean the concept of asexuality is an intensely radical idea, but its just met with a ho hum. The lack of a fundamental human desire in large amounts of people is not something to be taken lightly.
and if im reading the numbers right its not small. even if only 1% of people identify as asexual, thats about as many who identify as Mormon. (1.2%). Cultural shifting levels i think.
i dont get why its so quiet i guess. i do take people seriously if they say they are but since its not being able to do something i wouldnt rush to "its an identity" as quick as society is doing. definitely need to rule out "water making the frogs asexual" here. a lack can have many causes.
My knee-jerk reaction is: Well, even under the best of circumstances, sex has its hazards. Someone who isn't seeking sex and is ok with that is going to prompt a lot less attention than someone at the opposite extreme, who has just been treated for their 17th STI/STD.
the problem with this is that they start out with "it's an identity" and try to project it backwards to establish it as normal, but if in ten years a significant amount of people, mostly men, claimed they have no feelings of anger whatsoever, would your default assumption be "oh, awrath people have always existed in history, this is just them coming out" or would there be some concern about whether the lack of a human emotion might be caused by something? it may be so, but the fact no one is at least trying to rule out the other for something novel is what worries.
as for the article, meh. You can't argue based on "hidden" data; we can't go back in time to see people were suppressing identity in number in any form of precision to establish its always been this way instead of variation.
"the problem with this is that they start out with "it's an identity" and try to project it backwards to establish it as normal"
It's an identity, yes, but it's also a descriptor for a set of traits that would have existed prior to the label being codified. People are born left-handed, and it's near-certain that people have always been born left-handed at roughly the same rate. Sure, you could argue that some environmental factor is causing more people to be left-handed, or even that people are choosing to be left-handed now that our culture permits it, but that seems incredibly unlikely. The far more reasonable explanation is simply that cultural permissiveness allows naturally left-handed people to be open about the fact that they're left handed. The same applies for autism and other forms of neurodivergence, for same-sex attraction and asexuality, and so forth.
"if in ten years a significant amount of people, mostly men, claimed they have no feelings of anger whatsoever, would your default assumption be "oh, awrath people have always existed in history, this is just them coming out" or would there be some concern about whether the lack of a human emotion might be caused by something?"
This is a bad analogy. Anger is an emotion, and being wrathful is a personality trait. There are a number of personal factors that can reduce anger: having healthy outlets for aggression, going to therapy, or just reducing the amount of stress in your life. There may be a genetic component too, since I do believe that some people are just naturally more inclined to a wrathful temperament, but it's still a much more malleable trait than left-handedness, autism, or sexuality.
I think this has probably always been a part of the human experience, but not really that large (1% might even be stretching it). Just that in the past, if you didn't marry, well that was odd but acceptable (probably more so for women). I think a lot of people may have been bachelors/spinsters because they didn't want marriage or love affairs and remained single, and I think some of them could have been misidentified when we got all open about sexuality as "well if X never had a girlfriend or wife, then surely he must have been gay!"
I think some were probably gay, yeah, but some were probably asexual. I don't want to see it built up into an "identity" or an "orientation" to make a big deal out of it, but it's good to see it being more widely understood, especially as (in the article and my own experience) when you're dealing with the medical profession and the very notion that "no sex" is so out of their mindset that it's "ohh you mean you want this fixed?" or worse, "no you mean you don't understand what is meant by sex, let me assure you that that thing you are doing is sex" (but I'm not doing anything) (of course you're doing something, everyone wants sex) (oh do you mean you were raped/traumatised, we can treat that with therapy).
Thanks, I don't want therapy and I don't want drugs, just believe me when I say "Eh, don't need the cervical cancer screening because I'm not sexually active".
not having sexual desire at all without pathology is an extraordinary condition; they should ask that because sweeping it under the "asexual" label is a tempting shortcut to do nothing. honestly it feels like humanity is hellbent on embracing alienation; more and more people are estranged from fundamental things, and asexuality is one fruit in that basket. That's why i worry i guess.
"not having sexual desire at all without pathology is an extraordinary condition"
What evidence do you have for this? It seems to be rooted in a sort of circular logic: "True asexuality is extraordinarily rare, therefore we know that there are very few real asexuals and the rest must be faking/confused/pathological. Since there are very few real asexuals, that means true asexuality must be extraordinarily rare." The claim of extreme rarity is used to dismiss evidence that it's more common; the post-dismissal lack of evidence is then used to affirm the claim of extreme rarity.
Because I didn't, and don't, have a vocation to the religious life. I did think about it, but if the only reason for becoming a nun was "I'm not going to get married", that wasn't enough. I could be single in the world, and here I am.
Oh, that plays a part, but had I wanted love etc. being Catholic is no barrier to finding a partner. Like I said, it started when I was nine, before puberty or any stirrings. It's been very easy to keep the strictures around sexual morality when I've had no temptation to break them, so I do need to keep that in mind when looking down my nose at people who get into trouble because "but I loooooove him!!!!"*
And I went into puberty, and through puberty, and past puberty, and never felt any romantic inclinations towards anyone at all (that's also part of it; getting asked later on 'but are you sure you're not gay and that's why you're not interested in men?' yeah, I'm sure).
Sexual impulses as part of puberty etc? Yes, of course. But the idea of sex with *someone else* is just - no. And on top of that, 'falling in love' - also no. So I was spared the incel experience, if you like, of wanting but not being able to get. I never wanted, and I still don't.
I had one crush when I was eighteen, it only lasted a couple of weeks, and I was heartily relieved when it faded away because I felt so ridiculous - the simpering expression I could feel on my face when looking at the crush was mortifying. But it passed away and I never felt anything like it again, whew!
*Women in affairs with married men - why? I can understand "I'm in it for the fun and the money as long as it lasts", but the women who go "We've been together for four years, he promised he was going to divorce his wife, he tells me it's a dead bedroom situation between them, but there's no movement towards leaving her and I have to keep it secret that I'm seeing him, when will we be able to be together openly?"
Girl, he's willing to lie to his wife and cheat on her, why do you think he's being honest with you? He's getting fun on the side by stringing you along, why do you think he's going to leave his marriage and marry you, and if he does, why do you expect him to be faithful in the new marriage?
> The illustrations are horrible, I can assure you all I have never gambolled around a tree picking up the ace colours leaves in my entire life nor do I ever intend to do so...
Yes, but have you ever held out your hands to catch ace-colored leaves that fall like manna from heaven, in the crowd of other people with weirdly misshapen faces ? I am led to believe that it's a staple of the asexual lifestyle !
Darn, I must have missed that email from The Global Asexual Conspiracy about the "this is the week for leaf-catching with your squashed-face peers", that'll teach me to keep my inbox well-curated!
I don't know whether it's "is this AI art by the backdoor, in which case it's as terrible as I feared, or is it human-made art trying to be distinctively novel, in which case gimme the AI art".
Thinking of going traveling? - I spent 3 months traveling around Asia in 2023 and wrote up my observations. They might interesting you if you're thinking about doing it.
She bothers some important people, and bang, right on cue there's allegations about a completely unrelated bad thing that she did decades ago.
Is this because (a) once she bothered the right people, they assigned someone to find dirt on her (and found it remarkably quickly), or (b) those same people happen to have these sorts of allegations ready to go on _all_ prominent people but never release them until you bother them enough?
None of this is news. It was widely known that she was awful - and, for many people at Harvard, this must have been distressing. It just wasn't so widely talked about, because nobody was really expecting to take her down.
There's always a class of allegations that are tacitly ignored so long as they are directed against a high-status member of the relevant community. For example, until 2017, allegations that a powerful Hollywood bigshot had pressured young ingenues into having sex with them were pretty much always met with "Yeah, it's sleazy and we all know it happens but what are you going to do about it?"
Then Harvey Weinstein found out the hard way that he didn't have as much status as he used to, and the rules changed (though Polanski still seems to be grandfathered in).
Claudine Gay was a renowned black female scholar and president of a most prestigious university, which gave her status across multiple axes in her community. So, yeah, plagiarism is sleazy and we all know it happens but what are you going to do about it? Except wait for Claudine Gay to take a big hit to her status.
The `renowned...scholar' bit is debatable. If I look at her scholarly record through the lens of `can't read, but can count' (i.e. number of papers, number of citations) then I'd say that's a record which would probably struggle to get you tenured at State U, without some kind of significant thumb on the scales. And compared to her predecessors in that post...
One can be a renowned scholar without being renowned for one's scholarship. In another field, a Google search for "renowned astrophysicist" has Neil deGrasse Tyson as the fourth link.
Something else about her resume strikes me as very weird: very few of the articles have co-authors. We're talking fairly long articles with charts, tables - and presumably involving some kind of data processing? I'm not in her field, so maybe that's normal there, but it strikes me as really weird to see so many papers presumably doing something quantitative to have just one author. Sure, this happens in pure math, but does this happen a lot in fields where people work with numerical data?
I notice also that if the resume is correct, she also has nothing co-authored with her academic advisor. Again, I'm not in her field, and to me this looks really weird.
I know that. I'm just pointing out that, to me at least, her resume looks abnormal even without any assumptions that anything is wrong - abnormal enough that it should be easy to catch on, if someone was interested in doing that. This is not my field, but from what I've seen of papers and research records in neighboring fields, it's very hard to imagine that everything is OK with someone who presumably does analysis of numerical data while almost completely avoiding coauthors (including her advisor).
I admit I might be wrong on this, and that there might be people whose record looks like that while being legit.
The dreaded vote of confidence, after which many a football manager has found himself out of a job mere moments after the press release claiming he has the full backing of the board 😁
Like Tuna says, you can find something on almost everyone. Powerful people in particular usually have to cut corners or do something vaguely disreputable at some point to get where they are. That said as Ninety-Three goes when you get that big (president of Harvard) there really are guys like Rufo collecting binders on you waiting to take you down. (I imagine he has some junior research assistant who did most of the work.) You see this on the other side where Republican Supreme Court justices suddenly have allegations of sexual harassment materialize against them from 30 years ago.
Gay was in this position where, as Deiseach says, being an African-American female in a very liberal industry (academia) protected her...until she stepped into the antisemitism hole. As I recall she was just defending freedom of speech, but she managed to piss off the (heavily Jewish) donors.
The depressing thing to me is it validates everything the far right says about Jewish anti-white conspiracies etc. I've often considered doing a token conversion to Christianity just a statement of disaffiliation with my Jewish ancestry, but it wouldn't matter to the Nazis and anyway I don't hate Israel, or nonwoke Jews.
Plagiarism in your papers seems really different from 30-year-old sexual assault allegations, though. In the first case, people can just look at your papers and see if the allegations are true; in the second, there is no actual evidence for anyone to examine, just claims from someone who may or may not be telling the truth/
That's the irony; one is more provable but less serious, the other less provable but more serious. The worst that should happen to Gay is losing her job (which just happened), but if the stories about Kavanaugh are true he should be in jail.
I don't think they are, but I'm not exactly unbiased.
While I agree that sexual assault is worse than plagiarism at a society level, for the specific job of leader of an institution which has doing research as one of its fundamental goals, I'd say plagiarism is worse.
Also Gay lost her job as a president, but as far as I know she will keep her job as a professor.
Having looked at a few extracts, and having written plenty of papers myself, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Gay's plagiarism.
It looks like all the plagiarism comes from lit review sections of papers. When you write a lit review, it's your job to summarise previous work on the same topic, which inevitably turns into a synthesis and paraphrase of what other lit reviews on exactly the same subject have said. The whole point is to re-state what other people have said before. Ideally you'd rephrase things just enough, but from an actual intellectual point of view it doesn't matter if your summary of the existing literature on the foo-bar controversy is suspiciously similar to that of Jones (2021).
Most likely she probably copy-pasted sections of other papers into her notes, and then forgot that she'd done that while turning those notes into a draft. This is a serious mistake and you should practice better quote hygiene to avoid doing it yourself, but I don't see it as a piece of academic malpractice on a par with research fraud or passing off someone else's actual results as your own.
I remember when plagarism would get you kicked out of school AND prevent you from being accepted at any other school that bothered to check your record.
*Shakes cane at clouds, yells at kids to get off his lawn.*
As I understand it, the plagiarism accusation had been floating around on the Internet since last January, but no one seemed to care until she publicly pissed off half of the political power in the country? Compare to that Republican representative who lied about his history. I know nothing about his case, but do you really think the first time anyone noticed was after he'd reached national prominence, and one side could score points by dunking on him?
Mostly, I'd say this is a dynamic in life that looks like a coincidence, but is actually an artifact of anthropic viewpoint. Sometimes people make enemies throughout their lives, but the enemies only attack when the person stumbles and shows a sign of weakness. Probably this is likelier than average in politicians who rise in power. And we only notice the times where it all comes together in the end, even if the attack is ultimately unsuccessful. We don't usually notice the times where the person never rose to our attention, or never made enough enemies, or the attacks failed to coordinate, out no one has a reason to take them down.
Chris Rufo, the guy popularizing the allegations, has claimed B explicitly. He said he had been sitting on the information and waited to release it until a moment when it would be especially damaging.
There may have been a lot of enmity towards her for various reasons for years (it's academia, after all) but she was protected to an extent by being an African-American woman in a high-status position, so it was too risky to go after her - you'd be open to "that's racism and misogyny".
But she made a mistake in dealing with a topic that did permit attack for not having the right views, and this is giving everyone who wanted to go after her carte blanche to do so, hence the allegations from way back finally seeing the light of day.
All this is supposition on my part, since I have no idea what is really going on, but it doesn't seem implausible to me.
Any society has a complex tapestry of rules that nearly nobody follows to the letter. The simplest possible thing for a man is a wrong look to a woman, for example. Religion is a whole arsenal of heavy-duty Cancel Cannons in deeply religious societies. That's before factoring in Alcohol and promiscuous sex. That's before factoring in the notoriously tempestuous woke Sharia, with a rate of change fit for a competition with the stock market.
Nearly everyone in any society have done naughty things, for wildly varying values of "Naughty". Nearly everyone else are too apathetic to know, ask, or care.
The guy who writes Karlstack has been on her case for approximately the past two years, but nobody really cared until she pisses people off en masse, then it goes viral.
Firmly (a), combined with a general policy of banning/frowning on a lot of things that are nonetheless very widely practiced, with the tacit understanding that if you don't rock the boat no-one is going to care. You don't need to build up binders of compromat when you understand that there is probably something in nearly everyone's past that could easily be used to tarnish them in public if you dig deep enough.
Just consider how all the standards have changed since Gay was in college, some things that were pretty much commonplace are very frowned on now. What is "plagiarism", "inadequate citation", or just how nearly everyone writes papers has changed dramatically as it's become easier to automatically search for duplication. And if it wasn't that, it would be something else.
I have a social advice question, which I know are often floated here. I'm really bad at "vibing", for lack of a better term. I struggle to engage with groups and find my place in the flow of conversation and play along with inside jokes and bits. I was recently at a party and had a ton of really successful one-on-one interactions in the first half of the party when people were adjusting and feeling each other out. Then, in the second half, as people divided into groups, I floundered. I found myself outside of groups looking in, and whenever i joined I struggled to either a) know what to say or b) get a word in edgewise. How have people overcome this? Any advice or ideas?
I occurs to me that most of the advice you're being given in the thread below assumes that there is a pre-existing group and that your task is to figure out how to participate in the ongoing conversation. But how did the group form to begin with? Ten people don't just spontaneously glom together and begin talking - they probably nucleated around an interesting 1-on-1 'starter conversation'. So my advice is this: if you are already having good 1-on-1 conversations, then it seems likely that the skill that's lacking is how to invite other people to join in. If other people join in on a conversation you've started, the upshot is that you're automatically the ringleader, at least initially. I'm guessing that this is mostly down to making sure that you don't get too engrossed in that initial 1-on-1 conversation and good body language. For example, when in a 1-on-1 chat at a party, make sure that you never directly face your conversation partner but rather stand at a 120 degree angle, so that you're two of the three vertices of a triangle and there's a natural place for a third participant to slide in to. Aside from that, keep your head up and be aware of other people hovering in your periphery so that you can give the necessary signals that they are welcome to join in. Happy hunting!
Re: not knowing what to say, you might consider that maybe you just need to find people you vibe with better (easier said than done, I know). I consider myself a pretty sociable character, but certain people are just on a different wavelength than me, and I find myself not having much to say to them, and vice versa. In that situation, my M.O. is to call it quits on the conversation and find someone else to talk to.
I think groups like that make room for you faster if you sort of pay your dues first by indicating appreciation for what the group is talking about: Laugh at the jokes, say "great point," etc., but do not contribute anything new. And the first contribution you make should show interest in the group's topics, and not introduce any change or challenge at all. Asking the group a question is especially good. So if the group is talking about science fiction, ask them what they think of a certain movie or book, and it should be one you're confident most of them are familiar with.
All that will be a huge drag if you have little real interest in what the group is talking about, and if that's the case you should just move on and try another group.
But first, sometimes simply naming what's happening can be incredibly helpful for everyone else. If you're sort of awkwardly hanging outside the edges of a conversation group, waiting for laugh break or some other lull and then breaking in with, "Excuse me, I was lurking and this sounds interesting, can I join you guys?" can help prompt an invite.
Be prepared to ask questions relevant to the group's interest, and volunteer nothing if you're not asked a question in return. Do not feel like you have to (or worse, are entitled to) "get a word in edgewise." Reframe yourself as being *extremely* curious and interested in what people have to say; perhaps even think of yourself as a dispassionate researcher in disguise. "Can you say more about that?" "What about [x detail}?"
If you want to subtly try to insert an opinion or your own thoughts, you can always try, "I've always heard [a detail relevant to the topic]. Is that right?"
Whatever you do, do not show a hint of resentment that you aren't being invited to speak.
Charisma on Command occasionally has very specific, useful tips on body language, conversational prompts, and so on. Not every video is actionable, but I think some of them could be helpful: https://www.youtube.com/@Charismaoncommand
I don't know where exactly I fit on the extrovert-introvert spectrum (but I'm honestly quite sick and tired of people using those terms as if they're unambiguous and immutable group identifiers, flouted with semi-pride), I'm quite popular with my tightly knit friend group from University days, but most everyone else mistake my general quietness for shyness and immediately applies a nerd stereotype to me whenever it becomes known I'm not into sports and into computers, or so I think.
> I struggle to engage with groups and find my place in the flow of conversation and play along with inside jokes and bits
Any group sized at more than 3 is not really a unified "group", it's actually a network of interconnecting groups of 3s and 4s all cross-shattering into each other's close proximity. Observe every single group interaction you see, you will often find that (A) Most of the group is silent most of time, interacting only by nodding, laughing and whatnot, generally only 3 or 4 at a time speak and the rest listen (B) Most or all of the group speak at the same time, but the conversation is splintered into several N=3..4 mini-conversations where the participant of each mini-conversation filter out most or all of the other mini-conversations. Occasionally, participants switch mini-conversations (exchange roles with other participants, change the mini-conversations they're part of).
So really, don't think of it as a 1-to-N problem with an arbitrarily large and varying N, think of it more as a 1-to-2, 1-to-3, or, at the very most, 1-to-4 problem. You already know how to do 1-to-1, sounds like 1-to-2 shouldn't be that hard. Treat it as a rapidly binary-switching 1-to-1 conversation: if you're talking with Alice and Bob, that's really equivalent to you constantly teleporting between 2 seperate conversations with Alice alone and Bob alone, isn't it ? It's like any conversation, you sometimes speak and you sometimes be silent, the only thing that changed is that now you have to observe 2 people instead of 1 for cues on when to speak and when to be silent. Hell, being silent in groups is much much easier, no awkwardness as in the 1-to-1 setting where being silent invites awkward eye contact and an anxiousness to speak to break the silence.
As for injokes and subtle winks and nods, aren't those groups interested in the same thing as you ? How can you not understand injokes about things you're interested in ? Everyone does injokes, you meet people interested in Star Wars, you greet them with "Hello There", that's an injoke. You meet people interested in computers, and you trash a programming language, that's an injoke. The only thing I can't do injokes about is something I'm extremly not interested in, like Football.
> know what to say
When in doubt, say nothing. That's generally my attitude as well. General chit chat is just not a social signal I see much value in, it comes out of me half-hearted and not very convincing as well (or so I think), and I detect the same half-heartedness and going-through-the-motions attitude in most attempts at smalltalk. The reason I speak is generally (A) Romantic interest, and it's still hard if that's the only motivation (B) Because the topic of conversation is interesting to me, what compels me to speak then is not the people, it's the topic. When people say Python is slow because it's interpreted, I'm burning to correct the misconception and list all the different ways that Python is not slow and is not interpreted. When people say something political about religion or gender, I'm again animated to poke all the usual holes that I have seen others poke in the things I read or watched about the topic but the person in front of me likely haven't. Talking with people is just the side effect of disagreeing with them, and disagreeing with them is what I do because I'm a devil's advocate with lots of contrarian opinions (some of them so hardcore I never let them out to people who know my face, that's also a social skill, knowing what's merely controversial and what's beyond the pale).
As always, treat all advice about social protocols with a large fistful of salt because those things are not conscious, it's possible that nobody really knows approximately or exactly what social algorithm they follow, it's pure muscle memory and instinct and the conscious mind is probably just confabulating neat just-so stories and reasonable-looking-but-false rules to fit them all. Just ask yourself what do you want and do it, do you really want to talk ? Wait for an opening (2-3 seconds of silence in the group's comms) and talk, or interrupt whoever is speaking (but don't do it too much). Do you really want to make an injoke ? Then do it, find something that makes people laugh whenever it's repeated and repeat it again, funnily. I struggle to articulate what socializing means, it's just mimicry with a touch of innovation so that people don't notice you're mimicking (but not *too* much innovation or people will think you're being a "Not like the other girls"). Consider that perhaps you don't need that much socialization to begin with, that you can attend social events without speaking or fitting in, or not attend at all. If you did that and you found yourself not lacking anything noticeable, continue doing it.
A lot of really great ideas. Especially the reframing of 1-to-N to multiple/switching 1-to-1 engagements. I think the multiple and switching part is potentially where I stumble, so this is a helpful way to frame the problem.
The injoke problem is puzzling for me as well. The groups are interested in things I'm interested in, so you're right in thinking it should be fairly natural. Somehow the prevalence of conversation topics I (feel that I) know nothing about is much much higher in groups than it is in one-on-one. I think it's partially a matter of having less steering of the conversation (since there are more participants) and partially a weird framing thing.
You need to understand what game is being played. In groups of people, the typical game is: "Look at me! I am the smart one with dominance and social skills!" Most other things are sacrificed to this goal. In fact, if you don't sacrifice them, you signal that your social skills suck (you can't even recognize what game is being played).
In a typical conversation everyone's playing about a hundred different games at once, from "Let me evaluate whether X is acceptable to the group" to "I want to go camping; who else might be interested?" to "Please mate with me" to "Do these people want to laugh at Elon Musk's latest fuckup with me?" to "What kind of car should I buy?" Reducing these games to simple status is erasing the complexity of human social interactions. Some of them involve status as the central theme while others only have it in the background.
Yes, if you really drill down you can make deciding whether to buy a used Toyota Camry into a status game, but that's a cynical reduction. If you play that conversation as though it were a straightforward status game then you're going to brag about your Porsche and never get invited to a party again. There are aspects of trust, trustworthiness, alliance, shared interests and values, and we shouldn't ignore the straightforward desire for a better car either. If you sacrifice giving good advice on the altar of status dickmeasuring then you run the risk of getting caught, ironically making the attempt to raise your status a status-lowering move.
Funnily enough, I recently returned Games People Play to the library after reading the first half. I found it a little too galaxy-brained for me ("what the alcoholic really enjoys is the hangover and not the drink"). This is not to say reading the book would have solved all my problems, but it is an interesting overlap.
Anyway, I think this advice is probably good. I would describe most of the conversations I was seeing as not involving any particular game, which entails either that I'm blind to it or that the groups were so intimate and pure as to be game free. I'd say the first is more likely.
Games People Play is a fantastic book! That is, most of it is boring, until you find that one chapter that feels like the guy has been observing you for your entire life and wrote a chapter just about you (different chapters for different people). Though it sounds like you didn't find yours (maybe there wasn't one). I also love the less-known sequel, What Do You Say After You Say Hello.
I'm sure this is true at, like, parties where not everyone knows each other and lots of people are trying to impress everyone and/or get laid. But I don't think it's fair to generalize to "groups of people" with no qualifications. I have interactions with groups of people that have little to none of that kind of posturing all the time; the key factor is that they're groups of people who are all friends with each other.
Not necessarily what you want, but my two cents: I realized I vibe extraordinarily well with "my people", and I'm mediocre with the rest. So I've just accepted this and put my points into long term social groups.
("Social stuff" is surprisingly amenable to improvement, in time, and I did get a lot better at meeting new people (and also dating). I just got even better at having very good friends.)
I never found my people, so I just found the highest-earning career I could do and hoarded money.
Not going to claim to be happy, but then again many people aren't, and I gave up on that a long time ago. But the anxiety over losing my job and becoming poor has significantly decreased.
Honestly, I don't even know anymore. I've gotten along with the few rationalists I know but there isn't a huge community near me and I'm not about to chuck in my nest egg to move to SF in midlife, especially as I am not a techie and almost certainly wouldn't find a job, and while I might be able to FIRE, I can't FIRE in the Bay Area!
I don't get worked up about P(doom) and haven't read the Sequences, but the couple of times I've gone to meetups I've vibed. They're younger than me, but that's fun sometimes.
That initial common interest is mostly an excuse to get to know them initially. After that you just make an effort to keep in contact with the ones you vibe with. "My people" isn't a community, it's just the people you get along with - though communities are great ways to find them.
In my case it was anime stuff, some 20 years ago. Maybe half of my current friends are either from or through that - not that anime means anything to our interactions anymore.
But the funny thing is that I'm still able to make new, good friends in my 40s. Which I understand is a miracle, but it did happen. A couple who opened a cafe next door. A friend's friend who's now my gym buddy. I think it's also more significant when it didn't happen: I completely failed to click with my new friends' social grup. I tried, they tried, nothing.
I'm no expert, but I'll give this a go. It can be tricky to enter into a group that's already formed, so I'd like to reframe the problem and ask if you did what you could to facilitate that your 1:1 interactions could evolve to incorporate more people? Were you open to others who came by? Were you even in a place where there was room for more people? It's a good start to just position yourself early on in a spot where people are likely to collect and stay throughout the party. The kitchen, or in a nook close to a place that has heavy foot traffic, tend to be natural places of aggregation. If you dont feel too confident in groups you might adjust by also be choosing "low value" places so as not to occupy the great spots, even if they're not claimed. But just go ahead and claim them. :)
Also, when I join a group at a party, I usually dont stress about "fitting in". Instead I'll just be intent on listening. Mathematically that's reasonable: the larger the group is, the less the average person contributes. And also, groups often arise around few people who have something they're intent on debating, which skews the average expected speaking time for newcomers further down. If I contribute at all, I'll let my first contributions be super short remarks that function mostly as comedy (bonus points for use of inside references). I'll stay away from anything longer, and I'll only allow myself to make remarks that change the perspective (and thus in most likelihood count as a major detour) if the conversation is dying out or if people are repeating themselves. Until then I'll just enjoy the conversation as a listener.
I'm speaking now as though it's a rationalist party. I don't usually like parties, but I've had a wonderful time at rationalist parties. I hope that was useful. :)
This is really helpful. Honestly I didn't even think of opening up a 1-on-1 conversation. I just sort of assumed groups are something that form without my involvement that I then need to join. Thanks for the ideas.
Is there any outdoor activity for which the best conditions are when it's wet and cold (but not freezing) out?
It occured to me on a recent failed ski trip that when it's below freezing you can ski, snowboard, snowshoe, ice skate, etc. But if it's a bit warmer you can't really do anything fun outside, it's just cold and wet and miserable.
Elite marathon running is best performed when it's cold but not freezing. According to: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0037407, the optimal temperature for the top 1% of male runners is 3.81 °C (38.9 °F). (For median runners, it is 6.24 °C (43.2 °F), which is still cold).
However, presumably that would optimally be performed on dry surfaces.
Depends on what you mean by activity. Reading is quite nice on a porch if you're bundled up. Otherwise, one of my fondest memories is hiking up a mountain in near freezing rain. As long as you know what you're doing, and are doing it safely, satisfaction of accomplishment in hardship is always a joy, even if it's overcoming discomfort.
It seems to be generally agreed on by outdoorsy types that the worst weather (aside from literal Act of God type weather like tornadoes, hurricanes, etc) is that 34-40 F rain (1-2 C). It's just miserable. Snow will lay on your clothes without soaking through, and it's pretty. Cold rain just soaks in and chills you. If you must pick an outdoor activity in that weather, it's hunting, but only in a blind with a little woodstove, a thermos of coffee, and a little whiskey. Hopefully you don't get anything but can have a quiet morning watching nature.
"we don't have conclusive evidence that those those Israeli babies were beheaded, it's possible they were just shot, and therefore Israelis are bad" is one of the sickest things I've ever seen on social media, and that's a high bar.
I don't much differentiate between shooting or beheading; both are bad. And I'm pretty sure something bad happened on October 7th. But the thicker the propaganda, the less I have a clear idea of what happened--and the more abstract it becomes.
I can make the exact same point about the widespread allegations from some on the Pro-Palestinian side that Israelis are dissecting the dead bodies of Palestinians from Gaza and ripping open their organs for sale, and yet when somebody in my social circle brought this up I challenged them to find corroborating evidence and poked several holes in the claim.
Just because somebody demonstrably did something bad, this doesn't absolve you of the responsibility and the burden of evidence to prove that they did ***Another*** thing that is much worse. If that wasn't the case, Courtrooms would be chaos, every killer would have a charge of rape for free, every theft would have a murder charge sprankled on for flavour. That's simply not how honest truth-seeking works.
"We don't have conclusive evidence" is a nice-sounding and long-winded way of saying it's a hysterical hoax invented out of thin air, literal QAnon-style pedo tales that is simply a shorthand for "I REALLY HATE OUTGROUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP" and not much else. Why did Hamas behead babies ? Not even ISIS beheaded babies, not the Nazis, not Stalin or Mao or the Khmer Rouge. Is it not a tiny bit suspicious that the local militant group that your government just so happens to be fighting right now is simultaneously more evil than some of the most evil horrors of the 20th and the 21st century combined ?
We also have no conclusive evidence that you beat your wife. Please present evidence that you do not beat your wife. If you didn't, we would have no conclusive evidence that you beat your wife, it's possible that you just verbally brutalize her, and therefore you're bad. See how this can work both ways ?
And the funny thing is that this horrible crime is extremly easy to prove : Show the head of a decapitated baby. Blur the face, artificially clean the blood, hide your children and put a thousand content warnings, do whatever you want but show the bloody adults you're taking their brain for a ride the evidence for the thing they're supposed to believe. This is not subtle, it's not rape, which we also have no evidence for except testimonies and the Israeli police evidence which they didn't share with anybody else, it's a really simple crime that you should be able to prove with a single photo. Show a geo-tagged and timestamped photo of a head next to an infant body, that's it. Why is it hard ? Any smartphone camera will do. When the evidence is this simple and yet absent, what does that tell us ?
(1) Seems entirely possible that he's lying. However, you can't prove it, any more than he can prove his claims. So what's your point? (2)Assuming he is lying, you're not saying a thing about what makes this a substandard lie -- - you know, one that's not up to the old standards. (3) He is one Israeli who is quite possibly lying. There are 7 million Israeli Jews. (4) As your link points out, even Haaretz discounts his claims, which is pretty good evidence that plenty of Jews are not in favor of lies.
Except for these 4 absurdities, though, great point.
Haaretz is generally an outlier among Israeli newspapers, they're too unusual to be taken as a barometer of Israeli society (although this is a fact that saddens me, and I still agree with your overall point and dislike NS's repeated compression of the entirety of the Israeli prespectives into tweets).
Thanks, I did not know that about Haaretz. Your post is a masterpiece of fair-mindedness. Mine is accurate, except for my point about Haaretz, but also very irritable, which is unhelpful. The nimbus of rage and desperation floating around posts like NS's is contagious, & got to me.
Huh, that's really nice of you to say. Thank you, Ere. (You're one of the people I recognize by name and respect by the way, in a previous life under a previous username we wrote a lot about AI and the Woke mentality)
I don't actually think I deserve this praise, I'm not that fair-minded. I have 2 constraints that I aspire to satisfy (1) Being factual, level-headed, and backed by resources that most everybody agree is trustworthy (or can be persuaded of that) (2) Being merciful and not prone to minimizing or making light of Israeli suffering and more generally the Israeli perspective, and maintaining that as much as possible even in the face of Israeli/Jewish/other cruelty and minimization of Palestinian suffering.
They're quite modest goals. I like to think all of my posts satisfy at least one of the 2 constraints, but I'm sure someone can find something that doesn't satisfy any. Regardless, they're not that lofty or a masterpiece of fair-mindedness, I think they're table stakes, and I expect that both those who agree with me and those who oppose me could and should abide by their own versions of them (and I will apologize and amend/retract a post if someone persuaded me that it doesn't satisfy both (1) and (2) together).
< You're one of the people I recognize by name and respect by the way, in a previous life under a previous username we wrote a lot about AI and the Woke mentality)
Now I'm really curious who you're the reincarnation of! I really miss Carl Pham and Gunflint, both of whom never returned after getting a one-week ban, but I'm sure neither of them would have chosen the username you have now.
I have to say, after sharply upgrading my view of your fair-mindedness based on your recent writings here, please lose the "Hates" portion of you username, if possible. It's just going to hang around you like an albatross, making people pre-judge you before you type a single character into these here comment boxes.
...I'm worried about Japan. No, not because of the earthquake, that happens all the time. It's just... things are looking genuinely hopeless for the country. Fertility rates keep going down, an increasing number of people have given up on getting married in the first place, and there are nowhere near enough immigrants to supplement the population because, well, why would they emigrate to Japan of all places? Then there's the economy continuing to go to shit, the government continuing to be useless, the increasing number of petty crimes...
And then there's the culture. For the last decade or so, mainstream culture has slowly been overtaken by a sort of apathetic, nihilistic hedonism. I know many in the west still think "otaku" is some sort of ostracized subculture, but that really hasn't been the case for some time. Even in 2013, 42.2% of teens identified as some sort of otaku; that number has almost certainly only increased since then. Otakus have effectively won the culture war, and while I do think it's great that people are developing strong interests and hobbies... it's still ultimately based around escapism. The rampant popularity of Isekai stuff in recent years is a testament to that. More and more people are just giving up on love, society, reality, even life itself. Hell, the most popular pop song of the era so blatantly romanticizes suicide that YouTube age-restricted the music video and slapped a suicide hotline below the player. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8VYWazR5mE
Given all of that, it's incredibly strange to see Japan's suicide rate is so low. (It's about 20% lower than the US.) Is all of the escapism actually managing to delay the inevitable, or is the government just lying about the numbers? Whatever the case... they can't keep running away from reality forever. Not that there's any clear solution to this; it's pretty hard to get a populace to sacrifice everything for the sake of their country, especially when there's very little nationalism or organized religion present.
...Anyways, if you're ever planning on traveling to Japan, you should do it sooner than later. Things aren't going to get better any time soon.
Your comment about "Racing into the Night" is incorrect in a couple of ways:
1. It's based off of the short story named "Temptation of Thanatos", translated here on their website: https://www.yoasobi-music.jp/novels/yorunikakeru and by my reading, it's not that suicide is being romanticized so much as death is romantically enthralling the protagonist into committing suicide.
I think the visuals of the music video support this interpretation since there's an unearthly and creepy aspect to how the girlfriend (who is actually death trying to convince him to die) looks, as well as the fact that, when the protagonist finally says they want to die, the girlfriend tightens her grip around his chest, blood squirts out from the fist and the protagonist starts vomiting blood.
This does not look like the girlfriend having the protagonist's best interests at heart. And considering that the story heavily implies that the girlfriend is likely not real in the first place, I don't think "you will die alone by hallucinating a supernaturally attractive entity" is a particularly romantic version of the story.
2. Just in general attributing the popularity of a song to how well it resonates with people isn't a good predictor of cultural sentiment at all. Pumped up Kicks is sung from the perspective of a school shooter, does that mean school shooting is being romanticized in American culture? I think it's much more likely that the piano melody is very catchy and the blending of different musical genres that made it popular.
3. That's not even YOASOBI's most popular song, let alone the most popular song in Japan! If we are talking about their most popular song that'd be Idol (Note Idol's 400M view count vs Racing Through the Night's 2.72M view count, despite Idol being on youtube for around a 6th of the time). Idol is about a singer/dancer admitting how two faced she is and how the children she got furtively teen pregnant with are the only things she definitely loves. By that standard, we should be expecting teen pregnancy to... either be rising (in reaction to the song) or already high (if the song was a reflection of existing sentiment) and neither seem to be true. If you really did think songs are strong predictors of societal trends, you'd think this effect would be even stronger.
I am of the belief that these things will sort themselves out over time. You can only be Otaku for as long as the social/civil structures permit you to be Otaku. When the lights/internet fail, when you're cold and hungry, when you have to leave the apartment to forage for food, maybe you have to leave the city and return to your grandparent's village and start farming again, then things will change.
Rome hosted at it's prime, more than a million people. After the fall, about 6,000 people lived in Rome. 1,600 years later, Rome is still there.
They will change in that you will find out that spending half a lifetime as an Otaku has left you quite incompetent at farming, and you starve. Or wind up enslaved or enserfed or something; there's plenty of ways for this to go bad and "you'll have to do X or things will go bad" does not automagically empower people to do X.
Well ... Yes. It is like an—as yet—undescribed law of nature, the cycle of tough/easy. There's definitely a Yin & Yang theme to it.
The whole cycle follows the paradigm: Tough men create easy times; Easy times create soft men; Soft men create tough times.
The easy times created the soft men, the Otaku. Who by their weakness are creating the tough times. Because their parents did not make them tough, they will experience a rude awakening.
...If you're implying the cause is genetic, you're probably wrong. Obviously the Japanese population would have died out over the last couple thousand years if they couldn't maintain a fertility rate above replacement level, considering what a hellhole the country was historically. It is ultimately a cultural issue. I was just describing the symptoms, not the cause.
I understand that these issues aren't isolated to Japan, it's just what I talked about since it's what I'm most familiar with. Apparently South Korea is doing even worse, with a 0.84 fertility rate and a suicide rate almost double that of Japan's. The entire far east is probably fucked at this rate...
Gene-environment interactions are your friend, here. In the environment of our ancestors, your genes probably led to high fertility, because you're around now. But in our environment (urban, crowded, media-saturated, super-competitive, easy-to-use birth control, social factors leading to few people marrying, etc.) your genes may lead to low fertility. And that's true even if some other sets of genes lead to high fertility.
I lived in Tokyo for a substantial amount of time. In my opinion, the root of Japans issues is the work culture and the governments iron clad commitment to never changing anything. People work far, far more hours than are humanly possible to be productive. Work expands to fill the vast hours you know you'll be trapped in the office making everything glacial. The structure in traditional companies makes it very difficult for even small decisions to be made without going up the ladder and again this makes everything extremely slow.
Ultimately, no one has time to spend their money or build families and that causes the stagnation.
What's funny is that the government is fully aware of this problem, but follow in the grand tradition of the Japanese government: Allow only the appearance of change. My favourite example of this from my time in tokyo was "Premium Fridays". The government encouraged (note, not forced) companies to allow workers to leave work on time (note, not early) one friday (note, not every) a month. Just under half of Japanese companies completely ignored this. What actually happened when companies did implement it is that people continued to follow the tradition of going out drinking with your boss to save face, but now they started 2-4 hours earlier.
I'll caviat this with the obvious: It's more complex than I've made out. But fixing the work culture would go a long way.
The government is to blame, sure... But there isn't anything preventing people from electing a different party into power. Japan is a democracy, after all. Ultimately, the citizenry doesn't want change either. Or maybe it's just that nobody cares anymore. People just call the new prime minister 増税メガネ (Tax-raising Glasses) and go about their day. The cultural trends might not be isolated to Japan, but the sheer level of apathy is unique within the developed world.
Japan has so few problems that its media exaggerates the few problems that it does have, which in reality actually not as bad as other countries.
(note I only spent like half an hour researching this so my cites probably suck)
Loneliness: More people in japan live alone. Japan has a high number of single-person households [1] however its self reported loneliness rate among older adults is like ~30% [2], only a few percentage points higher than UK or US.
Work culture: Japan has the least number of annual work hours per person of any country in Asia, and is actually less than the US. [3] Ok this is probably because most japanese people are old and retired. But like most of the way that the developed world, like the US, handles increases in productivity is to take more vacation and retire earlier so I think it counts. There is 22 hour / week overtime on average though :(
As you say, suicide rates are actually not bad. And the crime rates are still pretty low. I've heard someone on tumblr say that Japan mislabels a lot of deaths from gangs as heart attacks. But Japan has a very low rate of cardiovascular deaths [4] so if this is true the yakuza must be keeping the peace pretty well.
And regarding isekai, are you worried about American culture declining because of all the popular superhero films are formulaic power fantasies edited by corporate hacks working for a vast media monopoly?
>But like most of the way that the developed world, like the US, handles increases in productivity is to take more vacation and retire earlier so I think it counts.
Uh. While that might be true for other first world countries, my understanding is that the US is notorious for having much less vacation/leave time than any other first world country[1] (according to this link, more than *any* country) and it ranks towards the bottom among first world countries in retirement age as well.
"are you worried about American culture declining because of all the popular superhero films are formulaic power fantasies edited by corporate hacks working for a vast media monopoly?"
More softly, I'm worried about its politeness norms and homogeneity being bad for startup culture and innovation, and the language barrier and time zone making it hard to attract talent.
I mean, the low birth rate with the long hours seems like a problem (though Japan is hardly underpopulated), but I don't see why every country has to have "startup culture and innovation". Japanese have low crime rates and famously high quality products; the tradeoff is a lack of new products. (I don't think the Japanese are inherently uncreative, as they have essentially taken over large swaths of popular culture.) No culture is perfect.
As for the language barrier and time zone...they're close to China and South Korea, it's their fault they pissed them off by being evil in WW2. I don't think they want to 'attract' talent...it's a homogeneous society, they don't have ethnic conflict and they want to keep it that way.
I wouldn't want to be Japanese, but I don't think they're necessarily doing anything wrong.
A "lack of new products" will over time turn into "only old products", which will quickly lead to "uncompetitive in the global economy", which is bad news for an export-focused economy like Japan's.
it's on a whole 'nother level, especially in professional contexts. "in a bit" means no. "that would be hard" means hell no. "yes" sometimes means acknowledgement that you asked something, even in cases where the answer to your question is "no". you're supposed to decline gifts up to 3 times before accepting.
(caveat - I've only studied the language for a few weeks)
I actually think Japan is at an interesting point, and possibly about to start making a turn around. The country may finally be exiting the deflationary period it's been in for roughly the past 30 years. Combine that with the decline in laborers (due to aforementioned and definitely problematic aging of the population) and you have a scenario where wages for Japanese workers may be about to start climbing again at a pretty good rate. More importantly, the decline in workers may force Japanese companies to end some of their idiotic hiring practices that have kept a lot of people in low-income part-time jobs, thus providing them with more economic stability.
All this ties into the birth rate problem. For all the jokes about Japanese kids not having sex, the issue is actually kids not getting married. Japanese couples have LOTS of kids. Walk around a major city and you regularly see families with three or four. But it's out of wedlock birth rate is incredibly low. Last I checked it was around 3%, compared to 40% in the USA (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarried-childbearing.htm). Japan is still a (slowly changing) pretty traditional society when it comes gender roles, with the man expected to be the breadwinner.
So if we are about to see a economic turnaround and if that leads to more steady employment for young men (both very big ifs, I admit) then Japan may not be in as bad a shape as it seems from the outside.
The work culture is no doubt bad in a lot of ways. Japanese companies are rather famous for prioritizing hours worked rather than actual labor productivity. So workers are stuck at the office without actually accomplishing much. The after work drinking parties with the boss, keeping people away from home even more, are also very much a thing.
Japan is no different from the rest of the developed world, they just have better escapism. (Or used to, I don't think the age of isekai and gacha games warrants the same kind of praise as earlier iterations of its pop culture, but the foundations of said earlier iterations are still there.) Whatever its problems are, and how bad they are compared to the west, it's pointless to back-derive them from the (symptomatic) treatment. All you can tell is that they're managing it better, honestly. Otherwise, base > superstructure.
(On an unrelated note, substack really needs to stop showing the reply form on top of single thread view.)
Japan has far too many people anyway. Let it lose 95% of its population, and it'll be roughly as large and as densely populated as New Zealand. Maybe those five million people will look at their large houses in their beautiful green country and decide that actually having two point three kids is a great idea. It's hard to have three kids when you live in an apartment.
Population decline is only a problem if you have third world immigrants to replace you, as the rest of us do. We will go extinct in our own countries, but the Japanese will survive.
I've often thought that, actually. It was back on the now-extinct 2Blowhards blog, but one of the authors asked if maybe the Japanese had just decided there were too many of them on their tiny little island and were going to let their population fall until they had enough room. Kind of makes sense.
> Population decline is only a problem if you have third world immigrants to replace you
Low birth rate combined with low immigration means that they have fewer working people supporting more retired people, and the ratio will only get worse.
> it's hard to have three kids when you live in an apartment
And yet the only western country with high fertility is Israel, which is overwhelmingly apartment-based and far denser than most western countries (including Japan and the US). Moreover within Israel the subpopulations with the highest fertility are the ones in the densest areas. I get the theory, but it doesn't hold up to evidence.
Israel has a strong cultural desire to produce more Jews to (1) replace the people killed by the Nazis before and (2) keep the Arabs from trying to kill them now. You see all these pictures of 95-year-old Auschwitz survivors with their 220 descendants, and it's heartening, but a bit of an exception.
Hey, if you want to send a couple of macho right-wing Jews over here and balance out the woke ones...
My point is that fertility rates aren't really affected by apartment vs rural living. It's mostly pronatalist culture (with religious influence). In America religion correlates with being rural so rural areas have higher fertility, but in Israel it doesn't (more religious areas have high population density and most of the few people who live in houses are wealthy secular upper class), and you see the inverse relationship.
(I don't think it's holocaust/Arabs either, really - I assure you the average Israeli isn't thinking "hah I'll show the Nazis by having more kids - for one thing mizrahi Jews have higher fertility than ashkenazis, at least outside of the ultraOrthodox).
Basically the culture of browbeating people into compliance and absurd work/life balance expectations has made everyone want to 'quiet quit' their life.
Well yeah, that's definitely a big part of it. From what I've seen, the situation hasn't improved that much over the years... But at least people care about sexual harassment and power abuse now. That's a start, right?
Because it's the third richest country in the world? The issue is not that no one wants to move to Japan. There are plenty of people across East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific who would love to emigrate there! The issue is that the government has some of the most restrictive immigration laws of any developed nation.
Third richest country in the world measured how? If you are ranking by GDP per capita its not even in the top 20. If you are measuring by total GDP (nominal) then it's the `fourth richest country in the world' but then by the same measure India is the `fifth richest country in the world.' Maybe you are using the wrong yardstick?
Guns are enough to explain why the US has a higher suicide method. It's by far the method with the highest chance of success. I tried to see what Japan's suicide attempt rate is, but that doesn't seem to be reported on
Guns are *by a very small margin* the suicide method with the highest chance of success, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032721013732 , and I'm pretty sure the Japanese have free access to rope. And water, and tall buildings, though they mostly seem to use rope.
And according to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country , Japan's suicide rate is 15.3 per 100,000 compared to 16.1 in the United States. That doesn't seem to be a significant difference either, but you'd want to at least investigate possible differences in reporting rates.
Unrelated to the thread, but it's interesting that drugs and cutting are so low at 8% and 4%. It's believable that these would be less effective even if someone was genuinely attempting suicide, but a success rate of 4% when a 90% option exists indicates that the majority of those "attempts" were not genuine attempts.
This also explains why female "suicide attempt" numbers are higher than those for men - they report things like superficial flesh wounds or drinking one too many Smirnoff Ices as suicide attempts, knowing they will be showered in love and support. Men know no one will care, so they get little value out of these methods.
Drugs and cutting are the techniques best suited to giving plausible deniability w/re "no this wasn't just an attention-getting stunt!", without too much risk of actually killing yourself. Or winding up crippled, in severe pain, etc - jumping from a third-floor window probably won't kill you, but you probably won't be enjoying the attention and sympathy so much afterwards.
It's also possible to deliberately and reliably kill yourself with drugs and knives, and there are people who do. Sometimes we can sort them out by looking closely at the methods: seppuku = really meant to die, wrists slit across = attention-getting stunt, wrists slit lengthwise = ???. I haven't seen anyone try to make those distinctions in large-scale statistics, though.
I'd emigrate to Japan if I thought we could naturalize :). But otaku's victory makes sense to me: God, gods, and the wisdom of the ages aren't there, so they have entertainments instead of passion, community, and love. How depressing. Not that different though; it's a pretty good description of Gen Z's ills in the West.
'Wisdom of the ages'? It's not China, where you can dig up 1000-year-old quotes to say anything you like and people are enthusiastic about historical sagas set in 190 AD, but Japan isn't lacking in traditional culture--Westerners have been fascinated by everything from kimonos to ninjas since they opened the country in the 19th century. The (awful in my view) minimalist trend among the upper classes at least in part descends from Zen crossing over in the 60s. (It makes a lot more sense in Japan where nobody has any space.)
As for God...they have Buddhism, Shinto, and whatever pieces of Christianity they think are fun. You're allowed to pick and choose pieces of religions in the East--nobody expects singular fealty.
I think the real pronatalist problem is the companies refusing to hire anyone except out of college, so miss the boat and you'll likely never make enough to support a family, and forcing everyone to work long, unproductive hours, so even people with money don't have time.
Here, there are similar problems with rising housing prices and stagnant wages, but you also have feminists trying to criminalize flirting so the guys are afraid to talk to girls. Every country has its own pathologies. ;)
Note that I wasn't saying Japan (or any modern nation) doesn't have access to traditional wisdom (!), but that the otaku, both here and there, have different priorities.
I think housing prices are a factor too. I suppose you can cram children into tiny apartments, but first-worlders rarely seem to.
Oh of course, the same trends can be seen elsewhere, they're just more pronounced in Japan because God is very much dead there. ...Personally, I find it far more depressing that mass delusion through religion is necessary in the first place, but I guess humans can't be trusted to think freely.
I just found out it's possible to follow other commenters on Substack who don't even have Substack blogs of their own. I guess this gives you notifications when they post comments. This seems like a pretty odd feature given how little emphasis the comment section gets in most Substacks.
Given that the user profiles appear to be general Substack profiles rather than ACX specific, presumably you'd see notifications for new comments by people you're following on any Substack blog.
Are there any local meetups or interest groups for particularly geeky lawyers or other legal professionals in the bay area? I've encountered what I think is a totally novel legal situation related to parking tickets, enough so that my attempts to reach out to easily contactable attorneys hasn't led to one interested in taking the case (since vehicle-focused lawyers tend to like cookie cutter cases, ime). I'm hoping to find someone who might be as fascinated by the situation as I am determined to pursue it.
I'm a lawyer, and when I confront things like parking tickets, I sometimes imagine mounting a serious defense, based on the rules of evidence, etc. But then I realize that I would make that serious defense in front of a bored judge who no longer finds law interesting and just wants to clear the docket. That judge will do whatever moves things along, and if I want to do anything fun and interesting, I'll be doing it on appeal. Appellate advocacy is more fun (to me) than trial advocacy, but at this point in the fantasy becomes cumbersome and I just pay the ticket.
The situation here is actually appeal-related! Someone messed up some process/workflow/software, so they are holding superior court hearings in defined-by-statute limited civil cases, but without ever assigning a civil case number. So, of course, the appellate court rejects any attempted appeal filings, and other superior court depts reject attempts to get records, etc. I think THAT situation is far more interesting than any number of traffic tickets. If any of that sounds fun, I'd love to bend your ear. Otherwise, thanks for the response anyway.
I’d call the clerk of the appellate court and walk through what’s going on. Many state employees are happy to help if they’re not too busy. When I say “clerk”, I mean a civil servant involved in court administration, I don’t mean a judicial law clerk.
Or ask the committee of the state’s bar that’s involved in court rules. That committee’s members should care more than usual about court administration.
In Michigan, you could even petition the state supreme court to address the issue as part of the court’s administrative docket. The court might do nothing, but you’re describing an administrative/due-process black hole, which might offend someone enough to look into it.
I spent about a week talking to clerks and supervisors and court administrators when this was a more recent situation. They were all stumped.
Thanks for the state bar tip, I'll see if I can figure out who that would be in CA.
Ditto the state supreme court route. I suspected there would be routes in that direction, just rare enough that I haven't found much content about them aimed at lay people.
A total eclipse will be sweeping across North America on April 8. My family and I are in Toronto, just outside the path of totality, and are therefore planning to drive out into the Niagara Peninsula countryside a couple of hours from here to see the eclipse in its full glory.
One thing we are a bit worried about is traffic. The eclipse is going to be a big event, so I expect lots of people will be on the roads. I would be interested in hearing from others who have travelled for eclipse-watching about how much disruption to expect during an event like this.
It's hitting my hometown of Caribou, Maine. I'm thinking of flying into Presque Isle a couple of days before. I'll stay at my uncle's house, on the outskirts of Caribou, which already is in northern Maine potato country. I'll be curious to see how busy it gets up there.
Fun fact I discovered during the last eclipse I saw. You don't need a pinhole set up to see the progress of the eclipse. You can just put your hand out into the light, make a circle with your thumb and forefinger, and squeeze it down til there's only a very small opening. Shadow on ground will be in the shape of the partially occluded sun. Also, you'll see the same thing replicated in the shadows of the leafy areas of trees -- all the little spaces between the leaves will be in the shape of the occluded sun. I ended up strolling around and enjoying that effect, plus the weird changes in the light, and didn't bother with trying to look at the actual sun.
That sounds like a super local question rather than a general eclipse question.
From the looks of the map, it looks like there's just a tiny corner of Ontario within the path of the eclipse . A significant fraction of the population of Toronto and surrounding areas is probably going to try to get to that one spot.
Maybe take a few extra days and go to Vermont or Texas or something?
I've seen one. Some of my family gathered a few days before, at a place a few hours away from the eclipse path where one of us lived, and then carpooled out to the path leaving several hours to spare, and checking traffic reports on the way. With a big enough carpool, we could keep conversation going the entire time, so the time passed quickly.
Montreal should get a totality. Is it possible to just fly there and book a hotel, to not deal with traffic issues? Or all hotels will be booked out horribly? I think a few other big cities are on the path of totality, not just Montreal, but Montreal should be the closest.
I had heard that months ago, but had no problem booking a hotel last month. The path of totality is long, and you should be able to find something in a more out-of-the-way place. For example, I'm in Michigan, and instead of Toledo I'm going to the west side of Ohio.
The problem with that area is a high chance of clouds. I saw the 2017 eclipse and imho it is definitely worth going to a meaningful amount of trouble to maximize the odds of a good viewing. I saw 2017 near Lusk, WY (population 1500 and is not too near an interstate) which was a traffic jam afterwards, so yes, I expect traffic will be bad most places. The best place cloud-wise for 2024 is Mazatlan, Mexico...
Plan to be there multiple hours in advance. Camp out in the location the night before would be even better, if you can manage it, maybe even just car camping. Do not attempt this as a "drive out for the precise time of the event" activity.
Did an eclipse trip to Wyoming (America's least populous state) for 2017. Travel around and up to the day of the eclipse was busy but not prohibitively so. The day of the eclipse, interstate highways within about a hundred miles of the eclipse's trajectory were parking lots. I never reached my intended position, and only got into the band of totality by going way off onto unpaved roads and driving my rental car like I was auditioning for Mad Max.
Beff Jezos, (on Lex Fridamn podacst just after Jeff Bezos... love it!) recently doxed by Forbes (? I think?) Says that anonymity, was important not just in his speech but also in his thoughts. Which was a new idea for me. Being anonymous, let him have more wide ranging thoughts. I've always been a bit against anonymous accounts. (Talked about in the first ten minutes of the podcast.)
As one of the only people who comments here under his own name, I must say: if less anonymity means less Beff Jezos types, I'm all for it.
(At least I think so? I don't read Mr. Jezos because he is a shit-poster; but from what I have seen, this is (or was) less a "stage name" and more a "if I'm anonymous I am immune to consequences for my words and actions" thing)
We live in an environment where lots of people will actively try to get people fired for their expressed political beliefs. I don't think it's a good situation when the only people allowed to make arguments for politically unpopular positions are the independently wealthy, so I think allowing anonymity is a good thing. I mean, it would be still better if demands to fire someone for giving an OK sign or misgendering a transperson got a belly laugh and an invitation to f--k off, but since we don't have that, anonymous or pseudonymous accounts seem like the next best option.
So one of the benefits of living and working in Trump country is that no one wants to cancel me for what I think or say. There're bad things about a small community where everyone knows everyone, but there are some good things too.
I'm with you on the own your words. My name, my ugly mug.
Jordan Peterson has an illuminating observation on stage names and the dark triad (Narcissism; Psychopathy; Machiavellian). It pretty much goes that anyone with a stage name indicating a personage of evil, is almost always the cover for a person who in real life, falls in the dark triad.
No Peterson’s observation is not “illuminating”, unless what you mean is that it illuminates a bad tendency to jump to grandiose conclusions from tiny slivers of data.
And of course “people different from me are Bad”. Don’t do this. If Peterson does this, don’t listen to him.
There is a soviet joke about the intelligentsia which goes like this:
Don't think.
If you think, then don't speak.
If you think and speak, then don't write.
If you think, speak and write, then don't sign.
If you think, speak, write and sign, then don't be surprised.
This seems to imply that avoiding crimethink is the preferable method to lower the chances to be send to the Gulag.
Human beings have not evolved to be impartial inference engines. They have very much evolved to thrive in polities which rarely had strong freedom of speech norms. The Elephant in the Brain makes the case that our brains deceive themselves as being more prosocial than we really are so we can better deceive others.
This is not to say that dissent from the most rigorous enforced group consensus does never happen. Even the most rigorous theocracy will spawn the odd atheist thought, even if they don't have a word for that concept. Just like we see flat-earthers from time to time.
Still, the healthy (from an evolutionary point of view) response to thoughtcrime is to shy away from it.
I think your disdain for pseudonymity is a bit ironic given that our esteemed host only felt safe to blog under the cover of pseudonymity for a decade (or so) before being doxxed by the bloody NYT and losing his employment.
Hmm I don't have disdain. I guess I grew up with usenet and my experience (on that un-moderated platform) was that the assholes were predominantly anonymous. Moderation changes that.
People on the public payroll are often subject policies which limit certain kinds of speech e.g prohibitions on partisan political expression or communicating in a way that could bring discredit to the institution. Writing under a pseudonym allows people to be honest and frank when they would otherwise be exposured to professional censure. It also protects others who might be implicated by association. Plausible deniability can be useful.
It's neither good nor bad. The nature of discourse in forums where everyone is a verified ID (like Slack or MS Teams) is very different. The stakes are higher so there are social games. Platforms like Substack which act as spaces of plausible deniability, allowing a wider breadth of expression. Scott built his reader base writing SSC under a pseudonym
Hmm I don't know Slack or MS teams, I was on stack exchange for a bit, but it was too formal for me. Only these questions. List servers are OK and you know who everyone is.
Your real last name isn't just a single letter, right? So it doesn't seem like you're really that opposed to anonymous (or "pseudonymous", more accurately) accounts.
Smart people don't like being inconsistent, so if what you say and what you think are different, and what you say can have consequences for you, what you think will often change to accomodate.
Free speech people don't like to think about this because it weakens one of our main arguments: That supressing speech is not effective changing minds. Anti free speech people don't like to think about it, because it lays bare the authoritarian nature of their project.
Yeah, that's the new idea for me. Restricted speech can restrict thought. And yet there seems something insincere in anonymity also. IDK, I shortened my last name to H. 'cause it felt easier sharing personal information.
I like having a pseudonym. It lets me be myself without worrying about certain real-world problems (if you don't have these problems, consider yourself lucky, or as the kids just a bit ago liked to say, privileged). Also, it warms the cockles of my classical liberal heart that no one can tell what breed of dog I am, let alone whether I've been spayed or neutered.
Other people might use it for different purposes, though. I'm not saying this is what's going on with Beff - I know nothing about him - but as with roleplaying (tabletop, LARP, or otherwise), it can be interesting to try to be someone else. You can learn a lot about yourself, that way. But I dunno about having different thoughts.
Yeah I get it. I guess I'm privileged, the only reason I would think about anonymity is when I talk about leaving my car unlocked with keys on the console. Everyone around here (where I live) knows, in some ways, what I think. And they don't really care that much one way or the other. You say you like it, but wouldn't your world be better if you didn't have to use a pseudonym?
My world would definitely be better if I didn't have to. Or put another way, if the world were better then I wouldn't have to.
But I still think I'd choose to use a pseudonym. Maybe it's cultural, in a way. I associate "real name Internet" with family and work and distant friends, and "fake name Internet" with stuff I wouldn't want my employer or parents or children to read. Not because there's anything unethical going on, but because I like having a bit of privacy. It's a way to keep stuff like politics and religion and sex away from relationships which I want to function reliably, but which might not be up to the strain. That nightmare scenario where everyone around a dinner table is yelling about politics, is not something we do in my family, and I'm glad about it. And a certain amount of it, is, as with my parents' sex life, Don't Ask Don't Tell.
Can you talk a bit about the small things you design and build. In an earlier life I did a bit of that myself. Going waaay back to TTL Cookbook stuff. Maybe a few op amps for a bit of spice.
The idea of my very own CPU seemed far off in those days.
Sure, I can say a little. I build most of the stuff in cleanrooms (academic or National Labs.) Much of my work in the past few years has been on molecular sensors--primarily creating nanometer-scale devices to manipulate charged polymers into specific geometries and then building sensing mechanisms that can read out information from the polymers (resistive-pulse sensors or nanoribbon-FET, if you want to Google).
The NIH funded some of my grants to get these sensors to work as DNA sequencers. NASA funded a few contracts--one was a fun project where they wanted to use them for "agnostic life detection" on the moons of Saturn. There's also some interest in encoding bits of information onto molecules and then reading it out with the devices. It would be slow to read and write, but the storage density would be incredible- maybe in ~10 years.
Although, now I am working on some fairly different stuff...atomically thin layers MoS2 for photonics and possibly electronic devices (depends on my collaborators).
Actually no, I didn’t even check. I wanted a string of numbers because it’s the most neutral thing I could think of. And it needed to be easy to remember, so there.
Ha! Coy as you are, how little you expected that I, the villainous hacker, would now reveal your full name to the world! It is... 1123581321 345589144!
I can definitely perceive self-censoring in my own comments, especially important stuff (life, dating, relationships) because of the perception that even innocuous comments can attract the attention of a particular egregore.
Should I (a brit whose knowledge of basketball comes almost exclusively from reading about it) be less surprised than I am that so few players use underhand "granny shots" when shooting free-throws?
I have read from multiple sources that granny shots are more accurate, but that players don't use them because they're seen as embarrassing.
Are players' incentives to win so weak that that's a dominating concern? Or is it that the conventional "granny shots are better" wisdom wrong?
No info, but I would assume granny shots are not going to work in the game proper due to defenders blocking them, so you already have to become good at the overhand shot*, and once you're good enough at the overhand shot to get it by a defender you can hit a free throw with it no problem. So granny shots would be a redundant method to learn.
*Unless you're Shaquille O'Neal and can just dunk the ball every time. Shaq was famously bad at free-throws; he's a player that could have used granny shots.
I'm suggesting they don't do it because it would require learning two different methods for shooting the ball, when the underhand shot is at best only slightly more effective for one specific situation during the game, and learning it will create instincts that need to be resisted for the rest of the game.
I'm not buying that argument. Virtually any field goal attempt is going to be a jump shot, which is already somewhat different from a standard free throw attempt (which seldom involves jumping at the pro level). And no NBA player is going to have the "instinct" to underhand an 18-foot field goal attempt. When we talk about bad NBA free throw shooters, we're talking about people who are incredibly good at basketball (they made it to the NBA, after all). And mostly, we're talking about big men who make their points with dunks, lay-ups, and other close-to-the-basket shots, not traditional jump shots. So it probably wouldn't mess them up that badly to shoot underhanded free throws.
Is it right to assume that Dyson Spheres/Swarms are technosignatures? Isn't it possible for an intelligent species to arise in a solar system where there wasn't enough raw material to economically build a Dyson Sphere/Swarm?
I've never calculated how much physical material would be needed to make a Dyson structure around our Sun. How do we know there's enough rock floating around the Inner Solar System to make it?
Furthermore, there's an implicit assumption that it will someday get so cheap to move materials from the Earth's surface into orbit that we'd be able to make a Dyson structure from it. What if launch costs hit a plateau before we reach the point where it's economical to start building a Dyson structure from Earth materials?
By "techno-signature" I usually mean "if we detect it, that is a strong sign of a technological civilization". I think a Dyson swarm or sphere would very strongly be that.
You seem to be using the word in the converse way, that "if there is a technological civilization, then it is very likely to produce this". I don't think there is anything that we have particularly good reason to think fits this definition, given that we know so little about possible technological civilizations other than our own (and so little about how ours will develop).
Implicit in your reply is the assumption that it will, at some point, be economical to extract matter from the Sun using star lifting. Why should we accept that assumption?
I'd expect a tradeoff between expansion and exploitation. A Dyson structure probably means that the species in question does not have FTL. But if they lack materials, somehow, in their home system, this might incentivize the colonization of a nearby system that does have enough resources. It'd take time, of course, but we're already talking about Dyson construction.
Not quite related (others already answered the original question), but Sean Carroll noted that a decent civilization would have a collection of swarms to cool down the outgoing radiation to the level of the CMB, so that neither the central object nor the Dyson swarm would be visible from far away. It would blend into the background except for blocking that part of the sky in all wavelengths. And with some more tech, it would be able to stealth itself completely by carefully routing the passing light around. We already have some metamaterials that have some rudimentary capability like that.
>a collection of swarms to cool down the outgoing radiation to the level of the CMB
That would be quite a swarm. The CMB is about 2.7K. The Stefan-Boltzmann law, for perfect emissivity, gives radiated power as about 3x10^-6 watts/meter^2. The Sun emits about 3.86x10^26 watts, so to radiate that at the CMB temperature would take about 1.3x10^32 meter^2, which corresponds to the surface of a sphere with radius 3.2x10^15 meters or 0.34 light years. At least it doesn't actually bump into Proxima Centauri...
I heard the podcast you're referring to here and the interviewee did a really poor job of handling the question I thought. Sean pointed out that if you really were milking ever ounce of entropy out of the star, there'd be no infrared signature, to which the interviewee confidently said that there would still be a recognizable signature. Definitely overconfident.
Quick back-of-the-envelope math says that the surface area of a 1AU sphere is about 3x10^23 square meters. The mass of mercury happens to be about 3x10^23 kg. So mercury alone gives us about 1kg mass per square meter, assuming we want to use all of the elements. A large fraction of Mercury seems to be iron and silicon, which seem plausibly useful. So we could get a good way towards building a dyson structure "just" by disassembling mercury, which has a significantly smaller gravitational well compared to Earth.
If you think a lot about these sorts of things, I recommend watching the early videos on Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel:
A cubic meter of iron weighs 7873kg, so 1kg would be about .005 inches thick. This doesn't seem robust enough to build a Dyson sphere. I bet I could punch through it with a decent knife.
Yes, but you can't punch through it with a sunbeam. The point of a Dyson sphere, or shell, is to capture all the sunlight. The bit where science fiction writers imagine terraforming the entire surface and handwaving the gravity issue, is optional (and probably not very sensible).
Given Barlow's formula P=2 sigma s/D [1] (which is of course just a two-dimensional approximation), I don't think the thickness makes much of a difference in the case where the pressure is caused by gravity (e.g. P~s).
Of course, what one can always do is increase the diameter D of the sphere. With P~s/D^2 for gravity, there should be a radius for any solid where it can withstand the stress of gravity. My gut feeling is that this is probably less than a light year for human construction materials, but I have not done the math.
While ring worlds can rotate to limit the strain on materials (with orbital velocity imposing no first-order stress, while also leaving the inhabitants in free-fall), a sphere will always have one axis unaffected by rotation, so this does not solve the material constraints (but would be useful during construction).
A civilization capable of building Dyson spheres will probably also be capable of sending von-Neumann probes to nearby stars, which feeld more interesting.
Why would you build your dyson swarm components within the deep gravity well of the earth? It would make a lot more sense to start with asteroids, moons, and then the smaller planets.
Happy new years everyone! I'm working on a short story and I can't find the answer to a certain scientific question, which is to me at least oddly difficult despite how simple a question it seems to be. This is prime useless nerd curiousity that I hope you'll indulge with me.
How long can a human being remain submerged in liquid?
You might immediately think of David Blaine, who set the record by staying underwater for a week in isotonic saline water before his organs began to shut down. But I didn't say water, I said liquid. We know from nature that a mammal can remain submerged, at least in its fetal stage, for months in real amniotic fluid, and we know from Nature that they can remain submerged at least four weeks in artificial amniotic fluid (before the ectogenesis experiment had to be ended for legal and not practical reasons). Are there enough physiological differences between a baby in the womb and an adult person that artificial amniotic fluid would cease to work for a kind of real life bacta tank, if we had an interest in such a thing? Could we suspend a grown person in the right fluid indefinitely, like a matrix pod? It's notable that at least one study suggest that a simple application of soap powder to the skin (of cadavers) will slow or stop skin breakdown.
What might a protocal look like therefore if we wanted to keep a person submerged for the most amount of time indefinitely? Would amniotic fluid work as-is? If we had to take breaks and dry them, how short could those breaks be? Could we accelerate them with topical chemicals or reduce their need entirely? What are some of the practical application of all this? I'll save that one for myself.
If you have even moderate bio-hacking or bioengineering in your universe, the answer to what current human bodies can do is irrelevant. Peter Watts had a modified human completely submerge in one of his books, and he has a PhD in Biology.
That's very interesting! I'd seen the scene in the Expanse where people are injected with fluid, but never suspended in it. My primary interest remains just how long it would work though. I'm very curious if you could make an aquatic human (at least for multi-month stretches) without genetic engineering, essentially.
There's also deliberately triggering the mammalian diving reflex in order to survive having no oxygen, but how realistic reviving after that is, who knows?
Neon Genesis Evangelian and Eve Online both have pilot pods with oxygenated liquid.
From all reports, the only real drawback to breathing liquid is that we find it super unpleasant. Your lungs just don't get over the feeling that you're drowning.
Liquid breathing has been around for quite some time, including apparently a working patent for CO2 scrubbing in the leg also. The story benefits from realism, and I'm also just highly curious, since it's funny to me that with all the scientists in the world nobody has apparently bothered to put a rat in a vat of amniotic fluid yet and see if it melts.
If anyone has funds and is willing to help or knows of any tips on funding, please contact them. This is probably not as cost-effective as malaria nets, but with MS they say time is brain and the effects of the disease process are delayed, so the sooner treatment starts, the less destruction is done.
"The trial aims to determine whether people can get on active treatment within 14 days of symptom onset within the NHS and to put it in context many neurology patients do not get onto treatment within 18 weeks of referral…..I have seen the figures… This trial could help change practise and save brain for people in the future."
I had an idea about the nature of happiness and sadness. It feels overly simplistic, and it's certainly disconnected from other theories. As someone ill-versed in emotional psychology, I am looking for avenues of attack to poke holes in the notion or for grounds to refute or abandon it entirely. Here goes:
Happiness and sadness merely serve different functions. There's not one that's necessarily better than the other; they have different purposes. They are different tools, like a screwdriver or a hammer. Happiness has limits. Sadness does not. Sadness can extend indefinitely. Happiness cannot be felt in extrema. After a certain limit of happiness is crossed, the emotion transforms into some other area of life, outside the realm of emotions. Happiness twists itself into a cleaner room, some minor accolade at work, or a solution to some personal conundrum. That is happiness. Sadness can continue being felt on and on without end. One always may get sadder; in any scenario, to feel more sadness avails itself perpetually. Happiness eventually becomes something else in the overall person. Happiness and sadness serve different purposes.
1) Extreme happiness exists, but like extreme sadness, it is pathological if persistent. It's called mania.
2) I'm not sure what you mean about happiness transforming into something else. Happiness is far more conducive to action (indeed, that may be 'what it's for') but I wouldn't describe that as a transformation of happiness, just a consequence. Often times, actions undertaken while happy result in more happiness.
3) I'm also not sure that you can always feel sadder. It would be strange if this were the case (that our hardware supported indefinite levels of sadness) and if you look at people with the most extreme forms of depression, larger malfunctions like psychosis and catatonia start to occur. At the least, I don't see the motivation for saying that happiness has a ceiling but sadness has no floor.
5) If you're interested in characterizing the limits of emotional states, it would help to look at the extremes within the whole population of humans, including pathological states as seen in mood disorders, and not just the bounds of ordinary experience.
Sadness is resisted by most people because it’s unpleasant, and we are mostly conditioned to avoid or suppress it. The result of this is what you point out; it persists and deepens. If it is allowed to pass through us without resistance it resolves in the same way happiness does. It’s called somatic release, and it’s easy to see in young children. They wail and cry and then it’s over. As we grow up we are generally conditioned to “suck it up”, or distracted from it by “comforting“ ourselves with an external pacifier (here’s a cookie, stop crying). A big encouragement to substance abuse of all kinds.
When you laugh the world laughs with you. When you cry you cry alone.
This doesn't feel like a model, more like a couple of inferences. So true or not, you probably can't read too much into it.
A slightly more guarded expression would be: happiness has a shorter duration than sadness, and a more limited intensity. This reminds me of a quip about the long term success of couples: successful couples tend to look alike, but miserable ones tend to be unhappy in different ways. Which is another way of saying that "there are more ways in which something can go wrong than go right". True, as a general rule. Being happy (aka "successful" as an objective state, not psychological) is a lower entropy state and requires constant work. Lots of which can be outsourced to the environment (microwave popcorn vs plant a crop) so it's not forever hopeless, just... harder.
As far as happiness as a purely psychological state... yes, it may be designed to be short lived on purpose (see Hedonic Treadmill) but given that the reality usually takes care of that, I doubt it's a strong bias.
I'm not convinced. Happiness and sadness are brain states that can be activated by experiences. But any brain state can also be activated by a malfunction. If sadness gets stuck in the "on" position, that causes problems, and gets onto the radar of our medical system, and becomes known. But who would notice if someone's happiness got stuck in the "on" position? Isn't that just joie de vivre? It doesn't usually cause problems, so we don't medicalize it, so we don't know about it as much.
I've had depression where the effect was "having a negative mood all the time", and depression where the effect was "basically paralysis". They don't feel like the same thing from the inside, but my understanding is that the current medical consensus is that they're different ends of a spectrum. I'd suspect the same is true of "having a positive mood all the time" and "mania".
That is, clearly "paralysis" and "mania" are problems. But "usually negative mood" is generally seen as a problem and "usually positive mood" isn't, even though the underlying mechanism might be quite similar, just in the opposite direction.
I agree that sadness can continue and deepen pretty much without end and that happiness cannot. But I think happiness is a lot harder to pin down than sadness. When I am sad I know it. Being happy -- I dunno, I usually feel quite able to tell how much I want to continue what I'm doing, and things that I strongly want to continue doing are definitely enjoyable, but the word 'happiness' doesn't really capture what's positive about my state of mind. Flow states are deeply enjoyable. Doing a really good job is very satisfying. Being out in nature and feeling very aware of the smells and feel of the setting is extremely pleasant. Sex is tremendously compelling and gives great pleasure. But -- what I'm feeling at any of those times is not exactly happiness. When I I try to call to mind a state I'd call happiness, I tend to think of times was a child having a lot of fun -- running around on a summer night with a bunch of other kids chasing firelies. But maybe fun is a better word for the feeling of those times.
Satisfaction or contentedness is probably the opposite or inverse of sadness.
The opposite of happiness is probably alarm or fright. Finding money on the ground, results in happiness. Losing money is alarm or fright. If you lose say the value of an hour's labor, how long does your alarm last? minutes, maybe an hour? It's not long term sadness, but short term alarm.
Viktor Frankel wrote in Man's Search For Meaning: that Responsibleness is the meaning of life. Happiness/contentedness is receiving the fruits of responsibleness. Sadness is of course not receiving the good things you think you deserve. If you've not behaved with responsibleness, you're very unlikely to receive many good things. Likewise, some people live with utmost responsibleness and only bad things happen to them. That number of people is rather small, not zero, but infinitely large if it is you.
In 2024, I want to work harder on avoiding procrastination. I’m going to try more positive visualization/daydreaming about what achieving what I want to, surfing the urge when I get distracted, and so on.
I sometimes find it helpful to listen to podcasts or audiobooks on this topic, but most of them seem like rah-rah twaddle. Anyone have recommendations for content with a minimum of BS?
I suffer from procrastination, and whatI am working on is how I see the rewards of doing something. If I can get to a place where the main reward is pleasing myself, as opposed to any external reward, that helps me. Ymmv
A solid half of the solution is technique. At least. By all means, work on motivation, but also have the systems to support it. For example I found myself without any mood to work around the end of December, so instead of trying to psych me up I simply resumed an older habit: time blocking. I started shutting off everything for 30 minutes, and only allowing me to do one thing. And it worked, with very little fuss.
In random order, a few resources:
- a _summary_ of Getting Things Done. The whole book is ... well... a bit too large. It works extremely well with Trello or some other list-based project management tool.
- Atomic Habits, as recommended by somebody else
- Carl Newport, probably quite a lot by him but at the very least Deep Work
- probably worth putting the list above into GPT and ask for some other suggestions in the same vain. Also add keyworks like "time blocking" or "pomodoro technique".
And as a rule, prefer toolboxes over frameworks. When a framework breaks, it tends to break completely, and it doesn't really allow you to properly outgrow it. Even stuff like GTD can be made more flexible with a bit of trial and error. And speaking of, when GTD is telling you that you should do something daily or weekly - do it. It'll 100% break otherwise.
Cal Newport has a podcast called Deep Work too. At least the first 100 or so episodes were very focused on expanding on the themes in Deep Work with a lot of practical advice to listeners that wrote in about things. After a while it got repetitive and then he had to kind of talk about current event things to fill time. I stopped listening after that. But I recommend the first 100 or so episodes. They were recorded doing the pandemic so there is a lot of content that is likely outdated, but a lot of good stuff too.
I fell off it, but I still recommend Atomic Habits' approach; take an ordinary routine you do, like brushing your teeth or making coffee, and make a commitment that every time you do that, you'll also take the first step toward furthering your projects ( mine was "every time I get coffee, I'll write at least one sentence in a fiction story"). The basic idea being that the hardest part is showing up, and once you can commit to repeatedly showing up then progress will happen.
Don't wait to feel motivated; only doing things when you feel motivated is like only ever running when you decide to run a marathon. You'll burn out badly and possibly die.
I think there are two parts to overcoming procrastination. Deciding what to do, and actually doing it. Of these two, the second one is more important, because when you already have the habit of doing things, changing the direction later is relatively easy. Many people fail by making plans and never acting on them. It is better to actually do a small thing, than to design a perfect plan on paper and leave it there. (You will actually learn many important things along the way, so it is not even possible to prepare a perfect plan in advance.)
Actually doing things is about motivation, i.e. *emotion*. The amount of BS is almost irrelevant. The proper moment to avoid BS is while deciding *what* to do. But when you actually start doing things, BS can push you forward as well as anything else, often even better.
If you find something you like, I would recommend downloading it (so that YouTube does not show you ads at the wrong moment), then you can play it offline whenever you want.
Deciding what you want to achieve -- I am not sure a book or a podcast can help you with that. What you want is probably different from what other readers of the same book would want. I think what could help is list your dreams, and maybe order them by priority... then do the same exercise again in a few months... and notice which things remain at the top.
There are good resources on the visualization techniques, sadly I do not remember any specific book, that was long ago. But the key points are: (1) imagine the outcome from the first-person perspective, not third-person, i.e. imagine actually being there, not just watching a movie of someone else being there; (2) try to make it specific and vivid, imagine specific colors and sounds, don't just think some abstract words; (3) if anything feels wrong, do not ignore the feeling, think about it. Maybe what you think you *should* want is not actually what you want. Often other people tell you what to dream, and it is something that they want (or that they *think* they want, but actually... why aren't they doing the thing themselves?), not necessarily what you want.
Sometimes it helps to discuss these things with a friend. But some friends are not good at listening, and instead offer their own ideas about what you *should* want.
BS does sort of work to an extent, but the act of listening to it quickly becomes too painful to keep up. I've enjoyed Akira the Don in the past, so thanks for reminding me of that.
And I suppose I should truly get into learning about visualization. I've been more or less assuming I can just wing it, but that's obviously not ideal.
> Anyone have recommendations for content with a minimum of BS?
I partially solve this by never watching podcasts if I can possibly avoid them. But I confess to being a luddite in some respects. For example I don't use smart phone apps besides the two-factor authentication ones I have to use for work. Even avoiding podcasts, it's easy to be sidetracked by web content irrelevant to one's goal(s).
Also, have a routine, whereby you check emails, do Wordle, etc, at and for only certain time(s). Above all, disable notifications! Otherwise intriguing messages and alerts will be constantly popping up, causing more distraction.
Have you considered that you're procrastinating by trying to find ways to avoid procrastinating? Ultimately, there's nothing stopping you from just doing... whatever you're supposed to do. If you don't want to do it, nobody can really force you to do it.
I agree that’s a thing that happens, but I don’t think it’s the case here. My issue is often a lack of interest in what I’m doing, so getting more connected with the positive outcomes and how they will feel is helpful. This stuff also isn’t something I would do during work time. More like while having my morning coffee, in the shower, and that kind of thing. But thanks for your concern.
And yes, feelings and motivation are weird in that they’re invisible. In a Skinner box sense, you’re right that there’s nothing really stopping anyone from doing anything. And yet it seems like most people don’t do all the things they would like to. Odd.
Agreed: I remember hearing something about how talking about your goals make you less likely to achieve them, basically because you get to brag and feel happy about it before you’ve done any of the actual work, so your brain ticks that box, and stops focusing on that goal (https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/neuroscience-in-everyday-life/201801/why-sharing-your-goals-makes-them-less-achievable), so I’m not sure daydreaming is any good. As someone who’s been struggling with procrastination for years, I don’t want to agree that there’s literally nothing stopping you (or me) from just doing stuff… but also I can’t say it’s wrong. Best of luck, anyway!
Is there anyone with talent in philosophy, math, or the sciences who's interested in trying to start over with philosophy? I'm frustrated that philosophy hasn't gone anywhere in thousands of years and am trying to build a framework that might allow us to make better progress: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/philosophy-is-a-residuum-of-failure
I'm a smart guy, but I'm only one guy. This project could really use the attention of someone who agrees about the problem and is able to work towards a solution.
Philosophy is not about finding new truths like physics. Philosophy is at once the training data and the training algorithm for improving the moist neural networks we have locked up in our skulls.
Playing a billion games of go against yourself might seem pointless, but it is how we trained alphago. Likewise it might seem pointless for adult people to sit down and compare the writings of a drunk Athenian with the ramblings of a syphilitic German, but you could actually be watching a non-artificial intelligence being formed.
Socrates and Confucius were completely in agreement on this: A persons skill in philosophy is determined by how he lives his life.
What science gives us is something akin to a good old fashioned algorithm for solving very specific problems, which is all good and neat, and it can be used by anyone after some education. But the problem of training our own brains to become good people must be repeated every generation. Hence, philosophy will always look the same whether you are living 2000 years ago or 20 000 years into the future. We can't copy paste our worldview into our children.
Admittedly much modern philosophy seems bad, but my guess is that nonsense have always existed but most of it will hopefully be forgotten later.
As an armchair non-philosopher, I've thought about this a lot.
Efforts to construct a theory of everything in physics have so far been unsuccessful. Goedel's incompleteness theorem precludes a "theory of everything" in mathematics. In computer science, there's the fact that the halting problem is undecidable. I conjecture that a philosophical "theory of everything" is similarly impossible to formulate.
Specifically, I suspect that there's a sort of philosophical uncertainty principle at play. You can fully understand a thing with complete certainty, provided the thing isn't real (e.g., the Platonic form of a circle). You can have tentative, partial understandings of perceptions which seem to probably more-or-less correspond to the underlying reality (e.g., the physical sciences). And we have no ability to directly perceive (and therefore, no ability to "understand") the underlying reality itself.
I think philosophy should recast itself as more of an applied discipline. In the physical sciences, researchers study a specific problem (e.g., modeling the movements of planets), and in the course of solving that problem, they build up a toolbox of insights, theories, and conceptual frameworks which generalize beyond the original problem. Philosophers should do likewise. Look for particular problems which seem to be rooted in bad ontologies, unclear definitions, misapplied conceptual frameworks, etc. Solve those problems by coming up with the right definitions, ontologies, and conceptual frameworks. And in so doing, probably learn some new insights that transcend the original problem.
There are philosophers working on problems like that e.g. Daniel Dennet. Some areas of applied philosophical practise include bioethics, legal theory, political philosophy, military ethics, and (arguably) economics.
I think you’re close to something here. I see it this way; “everything “ is constantly in flux at a level of detail that we can’t begin to fathom, “everything “ is not a static condition. A theory of everything is identical to a theory that can predict the precise state of the surface of the ocean at any given time; good luck with that.
Yeah, the problem is not that the good ideas are missing in philosophy (actually, most good ideas were probably already written by some official philosopher), but that the bad idea never get removed.
Philosophy as a whole resembles "the Library of Babel"; all the good things are there somewhere, but unless you already know precisely what they are, you cannot find them by just reading whatever you see there.
> Yeah, the problem is not that the good ideas are missing in philosophy (actually, most good ideas were probably already written by some official philosopher), but that the bad idea never get removed.
Whatever that contrasts with, it sure isn't the Sequences.
But wouldn't different people see different ideas as 'good.' Such a curator would need to be able to map philosophies to people. Or, perhaps, to help translate from one philosophy to another, which is a ridiculously hard problem that seems like it should be easy.
You seem to have diagnosed the problem , that there's no gently agreed starting point, that it takes an epistemology to decide an epistemology. But I don't see why you would think there is some solution, especially without knowing what it is.
I'm interested, and my approach is to assume that there are ~truths yet to be established, and ask "Why haven't we found these answers yet?"
In other words, what is systematically weak about our current and past attempts? Which areas of possible truth are systematically neglected or misperceived?
I'd love to discuss your perspective IYI.
and IYI, I recently wrote this in the Qualia Computing Network FB group:
"What QRI seems to have pointed out, is that a lot of full-stack memeplexes feature concepts that cause as much resonance in the body as possible. For example, Bernardo Castro talking about how there is no past or future, and the present is infinitely small, so it is nothing, but out of nothing comes everything. These kind of ideas are limit ideas. In this case, it's the combination of two limits, the absolute lack, the absolute nothingness, and the absolute everything. This, jointly activated, especially if you include everything in between (which is, well, everything!), feels very resonant in our experience.
So a lot of these memeplexes seem fascinating and persuasive and powerful and quite reasonable when you hear and grok them. That's a big resonance in your organism, and then some people assume that large resonances within them indicate that the idea is true.
When you think about it, the big questions of where anything comes from or why we are conscious - the very *questions* in this space (it doesn’t really matter the answers) - come naturally laden, heavy with the universality of their pointing. They are like meditation prompts that help you activate all the various layers of your organism simultaneously.
QRI’s insight seems to flow from understanding the material bases for aspects of our qualia. And in particular, it helps to understand the material bases for qualia-aspects that people tend to depend on as truth-detectors. This whole area of thought has made me feel like I should be much more suspicious of all the theories out there that seems so striking and resounding, and then eagerly add them to a list of meditation prompts, because those are beautiful ideas that can help me access exquisite and exotic states of consciousness 🙂!
Because this could explain so much, about how smart and wise people can be so confident in their wrong models of reality. We’re at the stage in human history where we’ve realized that real truth converges, but we haven’t yet converged on the answers for the biggest, most personal, most poignant questions about our experiences. Plus, at this time, most people are still *so confident* that their personal memeplex’s answers to these questions are correct.
So maybe they’re experiencing a lot of resonance in their memeplexes, and that resonance gets converted into confidence. But if they’re reasonable people, then once they grok the real truth, it’ll resonate even more strongly in their experience, and they’ll update their ontology and metaphysics, ontological shock or no.
But how can that be? How can the same “real truth” resonate with all these reasonable people, if those people are strongly resonating right now with such different belief/ontology systems? Shouldn’t their demonstrated tendency to resonate with so many different and contradictory systems prove that they couldn’t resonate together in harmony, if presented with the right idea?
And maybe this points at something a little surprising about their various belief systems. That they “contain truth” without being true. That there are, on a reliable basis, reasonable and material causes for the positive benefits of these belief systems. Which means that, even if not for the reasons believers think, for *some* reason, their systems do allow them to interact effectively with the real world.
And the truth about the real world will thus contain aspects that explain what was so resonant about these various partially-true systems.
And there’s low-hanging fruit here, because it’s a subtle mistake that a lot of smart people make, confusing some sensation or other with an indicator of actual truth. If there are profound insights that have somehow escaped human detection so far, it might make sense to look in places that have been most plagued with fog. Re-analyze all the full-stack memeplexes with your material-basis-for-resonance functions, notice why they work on believers’ consciousness the way they do, and go from there.
So where else might insights lurk, where seeking has been unsuccessful? Perhaps in the blind spots of various thinking-styles (or information processing-styles would maybe be more accurate). The scientific and the spiritual people have struggled to dialogue productively with each other, but this is another area where QRI seems to have identified previously neglected veins of rich insight ore.
You can see why these insights might be missed, with the spiritual people failing to use rigorous methods, and the scientific people mostly ignoring the whole space.
But where else might we be able to deduce it would be productive to go looking for low-hanging fruit? Is it possible to calculate which under-mapped sectors of memespace will be more likely to contain abundant insights?"
Well yeah, of course philosophy has gotten nowhere. It has absolutely no relation to objective reality beyond the psychology of its preacher. Arguing about it is as stupid as arguing over food preferences. The only "correct" answer is nihilism, but nihilism is boring. People would rather pretend that their suffering has purpose.
Philosophy is nothing because there is nothing. What are you even trying to find in the first place?
Without philosophy, there would have never been science. Al Kindi was the first philosopher to codify the scientific method as a process of hypothesis, experiment, and observation. And it's worth remembering that all the great physicists of the early twentieth century (Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, etc.) had a thorough grounding in philosophy. Though I can't find the quote, I think it was Einstein who said (I'm paraphrasing) that philosophy was as important to him as mathematics in that it gave him a framework to create his thought experiments.
Is this a problem? If Philosophy is a failure compared to Science, why not just do Science and leave Philosophy alone? Most doctors are happy to continue practising Medicine and leaving the Homeopaths to get on with it. But if Philosophy is really distinct from Science, then calling it a failure compared to Science feels like comparing apples and oranges.
Moreover, it seems like it's the pot calling the kettle black. For all the rah-rah about endless progress from the scientism crowd, it seems like we're in a period of scientific stagnation — that is if we consider that there haven't been any major theoretical advances in science or ground-breaking new technologies in the past fifty years. Theoretical physics hasn't made any progress towards a ToE, and all the inventions that are the basis of our civilization were made half a century or more ago. Who knows? AI might get us by this impasse, but right now we're running on the fumes from the twentieth century.
For what it is worth, new fundamental physics are not likely to be included in everyday inventions: if the Higgs boson was easy enough to produce to put a Higgs emitter into a mobile phone, then it would have been discovered much earlier than it was. (Of course, history is littered with people claiming that some discovery will never have any practical application and being proven wrong.)
The most impactful developments in technology in the last few decades are probably in computer tech. The most impactful development in philosophy in the last few decades are probably intersectionality.
Put bluntly, I would much rather live in a society which has researched the philosophy tech tree till Socrates and the science tech tree till Dirac than one which has researched philosophy till Singer and science till Archimedes. The former might be horrible (there is value to political philosophy, after all), but the latter will be an agrarian slave-holder society by necessity.
>there haven't been any major theoretical advances in science or
Perhaps. One could argue that particle physics hasn't had big theoretical changes.
>ground-breaking new technologies in the past fifty years
I disagree. The mRNA vaccines alone are a big advance. The orders of magnitude improvements in computing matter. The reduction in costs of communications. GPS. CRISPR. PCR.
Particle physics: We've still haven't advanced beyond the standard model of the nineteen-seventies. LHC found the Higgs Boson (yay!). Standard Model confirmed (Yay!). Onwards and upwards to Supersymmetry! (They've been shouting that one since I was a teenager fifty years ago!) Sabine Hossenfelder nailed it when she said: "Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science."
I'm asking: where are the really big twenty-first-century civilization-changing advances?
Nothing has appeared on the scene as transformative as the laser, the transistor, or the discovery of DNA. Those were all mid-twentieth-century discoveries and/or inventions that our contemporary world civilization couldn't exist were it not for them. You mentioned mRNA vaccines, but those are based on PCR technology (and please note that mRNA vaccines have been on the drawing board for forty-plus years). Yes, PCR may be the last major technological advance that the twentieth century gave us (but that was invented in 1983). We're almost a quarter-way through this century and it's been nada, zip, zilch when it comes to technological breakthroughs.
Fusion power is still twenty years away. Well, it was thirty years away when I was a teen in the nineteen seventies, so I guess we're making advances. Quantum computing could revolutionize all those niggly applications that require pattern recognition, which would not only turn cryptography on its head, but it would revolutionize logistics and supply chain problems, simulate quantum systems (yielding a better understanding of chemical reactions, and trickle up into drug design), and enhance machine learning by being able to sort through datasets quicker than the algorithms we use today (which were developed in the nineteen-fifties, I might add). But I don't expect to see quantum computers doing anything useful in my remaining lifetime. Maybe you'll live to see it. In the meantime, we reached the end of Moore's Law sometime around 2010 (transistor density vs cost). Classical computing will become more expensive from here on out. What does that do to our AI future? I'm not sure.
And while I'm at this rant, we haven't had any advances in political theory for the last hundred and fifty years! You'd think that we twenty-first-century brainiacs could come up with something more creative than the old Left and Right tropes. And the Arts? There've been no new musical genres for fifty years now. The twentieth century was an enormously innovative time for music: Jazz, Rock, Hip Hop, Country music, Ska, Reggae, and all those wonderful efflorescences of African genres — well, nothing new has come along except for tweaks to the old genres. The visual arts are in the same boat. It's all a mishmash of styles developed in the twentieth. Architecture? The same thing. Literature? The same thing.
All I see right now is cultural and technological stagnation. And I don't see any way past this impasse any time soon. That's not to say we can't all live productive and enjoyable lives in our stagnating Golden Age, but unless we find our way through our current dead end, this may be as far as humanity ever advances. Cheers!
Many Thanks! Re particle physics, yes Sabine Hossenfelder has a reasonable point. I do presume that there is at least a _puzzle_ about what dark matter is, but I certainly don't see anything like a successful experimentally demonstrated explanation.
>Nothing has appeared on the scene as transformative as the laser, the transistor, or the discovery of DNA.
There is a lot of ambiguity in how one looks at advances. A lot of work can either be viewed as "more of the same" or viewed as "orders of magnitude improvements, effectively a qualitative change". Many Thanks for acknowledging PCR! Yes, it is early in your 50-year window (as was the initial work on mRNA vaccines - but, still, cutting the development time from the previous record of 4 years to 1 year _matters_). GPS is also in your window, albeit the very start of it is barely at the edge of the window ( "The first prototype spacecraft was launched in 1978" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System ).
I _do_ think that, overall, the past 50 years have been disappointing technologically. I wrote a comment in ACX, which I'm having trouble finding, where I listed all the advances that we'd hoped for from the 1960s and 70s onwards that haven't happened. ( I echoed Vinge's term and called it an "era of failed dreams"). As anomie wrote, we still might see AI become as significant a technology as those you cited. I'm 65, so this is likely the last chance that I have to see a major qualitative advance. I hope I see it.
Re political theory - I'm not surprised to see no advance there. The old quip "The Greeks invented all known forms of government, and could make none of them work." is still reasonably accurate. There is, again, a bit of ambiguity in how one describes changes. Do nuclear-armed ICBMs plus the hot line deterring superpower full scale warfare and reducing the odds of war by accident somewhat count?
You're just going to ignore AI? We are on the cusp of creating an improved and optimized intelligence that may very well make humans obsolete. It doesn't matter if humanity doesn't make it much further than this, AI will simply continue in our stead.
Well, will you be able to implement the AI you're envisioning on the chips that are coming online today? There will be incremental improvements in silicon, but this is basically the technology you'll have to work with. It's not going to get much better unless we make some sweeping advances in quantum computing in the next few years.
Bigger AI will mean more chips which will mean bigger data centers with more power consumption. So we have to deal with how are we going to power those data centers. A moderately large data center requires what—100 megawatts to run? That's 876 Megawatt hours per year. Only about 83% is used to power the computing, though. How much energy do you think will be required by your AI even if we assume we can improve the energy efficiency of chips? That's why Microsoft is investigating building its own nuclear power plant, and Google bought up a big hydroelectric dam.
According to the IEA our civilization consumes approx 160 exojoules of energy each year. That translates to 4.444448×10^16 megawatt-hours (or 444 Trillion megawatt hours each year). Of course, half this is oil that's mostly used in transport, but without that oil energy the price of transport will rise. Sorry, renewables are not going to run globalized civilization at the level we see today. Hopefully, we do get fusion power in the next twenty years, because otherwise there will be less energy flowing into the world economy --> which means productivity will drop off --> which means deflation --> which means radically lower standards of living --> and possibly the return of cyclical famines when it becomes too expensive to run the harvesting machinery and price of fertilizer skyrockets --> which means hungry scared people --> which means wars.
Everybody's focused on the threat of global warming and the threat of AI, but the obvious threat is staring us in the faces and nobody seems to see it.
I watched a Veritasium video about the Prisoner's dilemma, and it discussed two tournaments where bots played against each other, eventually concluding that Tit-for-tat is the strongest in the two pools.
However, everywhere I can find online that discusses the problem, the payoff for Defect-Cooperate has always been less than the sum of the payoffs for Cooperate-Cooperate. I haven't found any description of the Prisoner's Dilemma that requires this condition, but it seems to be the case in every example I can find. The example in the video is 3/3 for C-C, 5-0 for D-C, and 1-1 for D-D, so the cumulative payoff of 3 + 3 > 5. But what if the payoff was 7-0 for the D-C? What if it was 100-0? The basic premise of the prisoner's dilemma would be the same, where in a single game the rational choice would be to defect, but in a repeated game, the best strategies would be those that could arrange a alternating pattern of D-C and C-D.
Has this been explored before? Is this another problem altogether?
At this point you should also start playing with the other conditions. A fixed number of rounds for example favors defecting on the last. Also scoring - if you're doing an elo-style tournament, an Always Defect strategy is literally unbeatable. And if you score sum of overall points, then the number of games becomes relevant. And to keep it realistic, you want memory from one game to another, so you can at the very least get a feel for how "friendly" the environment is. And so on.
I don't know the answer to your question, unfortunately. I have a related one, also about iterated prisoners' dilemma: I've read summaries of Axelrod's experiments with iterated prisoners' dilemma and the evolution of cooperation (though not his whole book). Has there been any work on simulating tournaments where the strategic programs are also told when the iteration will _end_? In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation , the summary mentions 200 iterations (and then there are various complications where players can get rematched with each other and retain knowledge of past matches with the same other player). What happens in the simple case, with players matched with each other and knowing the other player's moves, C, D, C, C ... but _also_ told remaining iterations are 200, 199, 198, ... ?
That would be pretty interesting to see. The usual argument is that there's no reason to not defect on the 200th round, and so the same could be said about 199, so on, all the way to 1. So it follows that the strategy must be to always defect.
But it's easy to see that a strategy that cooperates (with another cooperating strategy), say, up to the 100th round, itself will outperform the always-defectors. I think that it boils down to guessing the preprogrammed "cooperation stopping point", with the winner being the one with the second-last stopping point. That strategy will be able to have max cooperation with everyone else and score an extra hit on the strategy with the last stopping point.
Many Thanks! Agreed that it would be interesting to see - whether some "stable" stopping point evolves, or the populations of the various partial-tit-for-tat/partial-stopping-point-defectors approach a limit cycle, or some other behavior...
Since nobody is answering your actual question, I'll have a stab at it: If 2 * (Coop:Coop) isn't bigger than (Coop:Def)+(Def:Coop), then you don't have a proper prisoner's dilemma. I didn't manage to find a good name for your variant.
I suspect you can probably do a near-trivial mapping of iterated prisoner's dilemma to this variant: you can consider alternating your choices every round to be the new cooperate and not following this pattern to be defecting.
With this mapping, the only remaining question is how to synchronize the alternating coop-defect-pattern, which is probably very similar to how tit-for-tat tries to get out of punish-repunish loops when playing against itself. Having no good way of doing first round synchronization probably means you want a quite forgiving, exploratory strategy for the early rounds, maybe some weird kind of exponential backoff is my first intuition.
There's a good chance there is more interesting stuff here if you go deeper.
Ah, thanks, it does reduce to the standard problem in the manner you suggested. The synchronization problem is interesting, and I agree that randomized exponential backoff is probably the way to go. Thanks for your thoughts!
The winning strategy depends on what strategy the other players are using. For instance if all other players always cooperate, then the winning strategy is to always defect. Evolutionary sims often show an unstable equilibrium that vacillates between different strategies as the population changes.
Yes - that's why I specified "in the two pools." I'm more curious about the "variant" of the game that I described with slightly different relative payoffs.
I vaguely recall reading that someone proved, or had found strong evidence even if falling short of a rigorous proof, that following an opponent's defects "cooperate once but then defect" was the best strategy.
Without any constraints, it's impossible to "prove" any strategy as the best, as the performance would depend on the rest of the population. For example, if the rest of the pool had a strategy of "Always Defect", the strategy you suggest would come in dead last.
Imagine a situation where most players share a secret code telling them what to do during the first 20 turns of the game (e.g. cooperate in turn 1, defect in turns 2 and 4, cooperate in 5 and 6, etc.). The code is arbitrary, but the same for everyone who knows it.
The point is that you play the first 20 turns with anyone according to the code, and if your opponent does the same, then after turn 20 you keep cooperating with them forever, because they are a part of the same conspiracy; but if they diverge from the code, you keep defecting against them forever, because they are not a part of the same conspiracy.
A society where most players start as members of this conspiracy would *not* collapse. They would pay some initial cost, but afterwards get lots of points by cooperating with the remaining conspiracy members -- as opposed to non-members, who get ostracized by the conspiracy members forever.
In real life, you probably need to deliver continuous costly signals. (But their total cost is smaller than the cost of being ostracized by the group.) They stop cooperating with you even if you break the rules later.
Also, unlike in prisoner's dilemma, the players would observe how you interact with *other* players. For example if they find out that you are trying something like "follow the conspiracy rules with the members of the conspiracy, do tit for tat with everyone else", they may turn against you for that, too. (Depends on what are their rules for noticing such behavior.)
And if you always follow the rules of the conspiracy, then for all practical purposes you are a member of the conspiracy, that would not be really "exploiting".
Yes, seconding this - Zvi had a great post about a tournament on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and the meta-level game theory that led to certain people winning, it's not as simple as many people expect: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-darwin-game
Apologies in advance if this is too long. Can someone suggest names of psychological conditions/named characteristics are correlated with the following traits of X, especially (i) and (ii) below?
(i) X cannot watch movies because X identifies too much with a character and feels nervous. Once X saw a youtube clip on the execution of Ned Stark, and it haunted them for weeks.
(ii) Conversely, X runs into social difficulties because they imbibe lessons from movies and media they shouldn't (those clips may be meant to be just fantasy, but for X it is a real life lesson). This is not because X is unaware of the lessons that movies are fantasy, but rather, X tends to be poor at disassociating themselves while consuming content, that they can't help subconsciously learning (wrong) lessons.
(iii) X cannot do "premortems". X knows that predicting how others will respond to a situation is nontrivial, so X puts in extra effort at not being presumptive, but yet is worse at anticipating and responding to situations than people who are actually more presumptive. Can this happen just because neuro-atypicality makes it harder for some people to work with others?/
(iv) I guess the following may be some sort of anxiety disorder, but can it be related to (i): X is very bad at processing uncertainty. (Is this even related to (i)?). X gets projects to accomplish from their office, and the fear that a mistake overlooked by X might create havoc becomes paralyzingly difficult, preventing X not only from working well, but also from checking their work (because the prospect of finding mistakes can be crippling).
Besides ASD1, it sounds like some OCD or what some folks call Ethical OCD, which cooccurs with ASD.
But I highly personally relate to (i) And I always assumed it’s that some people get things stuck in the wrong folders in their brains more easily.
Like how some people are more susceptible to PTSD than others and that even what I call Post Television Stress Disorder can occur from something we watch.
I have to be very careful what I look at on TV because it could get stuck if it’s really disturbing and then become an intrusive thought, but again, the intrusive thought is like OCD.
Or you could call it being more sensitive than most, more suggestible, more imaginative in some cases.
Thank you very much. The person knows very well that there is no "right", and the fear about getting it "right" is social/survival-based rather than ethical (ethical concerns exist, but at normal levels). Yours is a helpful comment, thank you.
Oh interesting. So it’s not that they desire the moral reward of “doing righteous or right deeds, fulfilling their duties, etc” but that they’re in fear of doing wrong and the real life repercussions of doing wrong. Fascinating.
Yeah, sounds more like anxiety/performance anxiety.
Psychologist here. I'm a lot less sure than some people that Aspergers is autism light, but if I had to give X a diagnosis that's the one I'd give. The 3 most Aspergerish things on your list are difficulty navigating situations with people, difficulty tolerating uncertainty and perfectionism. I've seem lots of people with that triad.
I don't, though, think giving someone like X an Asperger's diagnosis is terribly helpful, beyond giving them some validation and a very general explanation: they have some atypical wiring. Regarding the person's social difficulties, a professional can explain that they probably have a sort of learning disability when it comes to understanding other people, and that they need to learn some techniques for compensating it. You can tell them their anxiety at work may be an understandable reaction to having to navigate in a world where their ability to predict what's going to happen next is less than the average person's, and so they keep getting unexpected results, often unexpected bad ones.
As for X's strong reactions to movies & YouTube videos, it may be that X is bringing to these artificial worlds and people the intense interest and vulnerability that most of us have for the real world. Movies and videos are usually easier to understand than events with real people, so these fictional worlds may be much more appealing and interesting to X than the real world. You know who the good guys and bad guys are, what the important issues are, etc. You often get to see actions or hear converstions where people's secret feelings and intentions are made clear. And you get to see the arc where all that plays out to an ending that makes sense.
Overall, an Asperger’s diagnosis gives you some ways of framing what’s happening, but doesn’t point to any particular meds or treatments that Work For The Disorder. Helpful ingredients to a therapy for someone like this would be:
-Explaining themselves at length to someone who’s on their side and gets it.
-Working with the therapist to develop better rules of thumb and also more complex skills for understanding and collaborating with other people.
-Finding some work and social situations that are a good fit for them, so that life is not so difficult and they are more appreciated.
I think X’s strong reactions to movies and videos is a plus. It’s good that they aren’t sort of globally numb, as some Aspergerish people are, plus movies and videos are actually a good vehicle for learning to understand people — but X needs a curated list!
Great points. X realizes they have a learning disability (having learnt it the hard way after multiple multiple frustrations), but probably not that that might be making them learn more from the "easier to understand" movies and videos. Thank you for the suggestions and pointers for X to follow. It is especially immensely helpful to know the limitations of available treatment. I really appreciate your responding here as a psychologist.
As for the limitations of available treatment -- there's no magic bullet, but I actually think people like X are quite helpable, if they are open to the idea of trying on some new ideas and habits to see if they make life work better. Here are some things that can make a big difference in someone's quality of life:
-Cognitive therapy regarding how one deals with uncertainty: I have seen lots of people who a stuck in some lousy situation, such as being unemployed, because they are holding out for something they are *sure* will be better. For instance somebody I see held back from taking a job that looked very promising because he could not figure out whether the place would be a unreasonably strict about things like deadlines, dress, how rapidly he took on new tasks, etc. There was no special reason to think the place was, but there really was not much data & there was no way to get more, so he kept delaying the decision, mentally replaying everything he knew about the place, looking for clues that would answer his question definitively. So for people like that it's helpful to talk about kinds of situations in life, and categorize them according to how much info about them you usually have in advance, how much harm you will suffer if the situation turns out to be bad, and how difficult escape would be. Then we consider the decision they're trying to make, and categorize it on those dimension. I also tell people like this that they seem to be wired to want to have more control and certainty that it's possible to have, and suggest that they experiment with choosing novelty at forks in the road 10% more often -- doing things like trying new restaurants. Often people discover that life under that guideline is more fun and interesting, and that when the novel choice turns out to be something that they don't like the unpleasantness is tolerable and escapable.
For social difficulties, shy people are often helped quite a lot by having a couple simple tricks in their pocket for getting a conversation started in a positive way: Things like making a positive comment about something the person did ("that explanation was very clear!") and asking open-headed questions ("so what's your take on –––––º). And. movies provide a great way to talk about. handling more complex situations. I have seen a lot of people who are far too honest & blunt in social situations -- they are like the guy in that movie who never lied, & announced to an elevator full of people that he was the one who had farted. (Although I personally find the bluntness and honesty of people on the spectrum very likeable. They do very little bullshitting and impression-management.)
And for perfectionism, exposure is a very good treatment. People can start with very low-risk situations in the office, with the therapist in the role of a hypercritical boss, saying lines designed by the client ("anyone who makes this many typos is the scum of the earth").
Anyhow, just wanted to make clear that the available treatments, while they don't re-wire the person, can make quite a big difference in quality of life.
Great. All these seem worth trying. This is a super helpful addendum to the earlier comment, and is very nice of you to have communicated. Much appreciated.
As the guy who mentioned ASD as a possible answer here, I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. What Sandeep describes sounds like ASD, but knowing that is no help (and Sandeep mentions that X isn’t neurotypical, so they probably already know that ASD is a thing, anyway). It’s massively useful to know you have ASD if you have it, but only if you have a therapist, or at the very least a good self-help book, that knows how to deal with it. I‘ve known I had ASD for five years, yet it’s only a few months ago that I met a therapist who didn’t take ASD as an answer, but instead used it as a guide to know what she should focus our work on, to solve the issues I’d come to to her to fix, and it’s a lot better that way.
Nope, sorry. You can probably easily find good recommendations on how do deal with anxiety, though, which may be somewhat useful since the difficulties you describe seem to be causing a lot of anxiety. But that’s not your question, and even then, I don’t know any that’s in book form
Is this for some sort of pattern matching thing, or is it just a general question, because it seems like a very socially awkard person to me, but not necessarily neuroatypical:
i) Modern fiction that achieves popularity usually optimize for creating pathos: I know my initial emotional reaction to fiction is often stronger than to real-life stuff, because real life doesn't have carefully selected background music, perfectly timed closeups and maximally emotional dialogue, this is often despite the manipulation being completely transparent to me.
ii) This doesn't seem special, while proving a causal relationship at anything but the individual level is very hard, this phenomenom has been noted in different ways by lots of people: Nice Guys getting a distorted view of what behaviour gets you a girlfriend, Girls having unreasonable expectations for relationships due to "Big Romance", DC politics being completely ruined by one too many future staffer watching the West Wing. It seems to affect all kinds of people.
iii) That just seems to me like a bad heuristic, absent a very good prior understanding of the other people involved, or very strong interpresonal skills (way above those of the untrained normie), being presumptive is probably better: it gives you a framework to approach the situation that is probably, more often than not, correct.
Thanks a lot, much appreciated. As for your first question, it is because having concrete names to look up might help. I see your point (and nice examples and explanation), but on (i) and (ii) different people are affected to different degrees, and hence more understanding, even in the form of concrete names that one could put to the phenomena, could help the vulnerable. For (iii), I guess being presumptive is better or worse depending on the probability of success, which in this case is qute low. Thanks again.
This sounds like a mix of anxiety and normal personality traits.
There are very high-functioning people who don't watch or read fiction because of how deeply it impacts them. And a great many more who are very selective about what fiction (and nonfiction) they expose themselves to because of the same. Having a disposition that leans anxious is likely to increase this sensitivity/reactivity.
There's an aspect of generalized anxiety that has to do with being afraid of one's own strong feelings and then we build up a panoply of coping habits to avoid being exposed to our own strong feelings. This experience can lead us to have trouble handling uncertainty (everyone has trouble with uncertainty, it's the human condition, so we're talking in degrees and extent of being disabled by this) because it's impossible to control for uncertainty much as we might try.
Perfectionism is an attempt to control for uncertainty by holding a mind frame that if I'm hypervigilant about getting absolutely everything right (either in one or more domains or in most all of them) then I can avoid the feared feeling of self-criticism or the guilt of disappointing others. Perfectionism is a way to cope with anxiety, though having it to some degree in some areas (and mostly about one's own expectations for oneself) can be functional, but if it gets extended farther than that, it's disabling and gets in the way of enjoying life and taking necessary risks.
If by premortems you mean rehearsing social interactions in a useful sort of way... is that what you mean? Then I read not wanting to do that as a form of emotional avoidance because it surfaces the same kind of tension-inducing feelings that some kinds of media do. If by "cannot" you mean is literally unable to imagine hypothetical scenarios, then that does sound more like a neurological thing.
There's some maybe helpful work in the arena of cultivating "psychological flexibility" that might be relevant. A terrible fear of making mistakes or difficulty recovering when mistakes are made is an important aspect of psychological rigidity, and it can be a real barrier to living life. Not wanting to check one's work seems like the same kind of emotional avoidance and perfectionism as not wanting to rehearse social situations or needing to avoid certain kinds of media. All of this can be normal human variation -- it's only pathological to the extent the person really doesn't want to live this way and/or is having trouble as a result sustaining work or relationships.
I'm in the midst of writing a piece about uncertainty, so I'll try to remember to circle back and post a link here.
Wonderful. Your comments on generalized anxiety and perfectionism seem on the mark. By the point about "premortems", and I now realize my phrasing was unambiguous if not wrong, what I meant to convey is that this person tries to rehearse, but the extrapolated/forecast scenarios are rarely the ones that materialize in practice, so as you say it may be a neurological thing: not necessarily difficulty in visualizing, but perhaps modeling others' brains on yours, which turns out to be wrong because others' brains are different.
I will very much appreciate if you have pointers on psychological flexibility, and will also appreciate if you come back and post a link, thank you very much.
I am no psychologist, and my answer will be inspired by how much I can relate to what you say. Hence, some amount of typical-minding is likely. But it really sounds like ASD? Which X would probably know about, since you mention not being neurotypical? 1. Identifying a lot with characters in movies isn’t on the lists of symptoms, but being very sensitive to emotions, taking up the emotion of people around oneself, is on the list, and that may be the same thing in that context. 2. Similarly "learns wrong lessons from movies" isn’t an official symptom, but it can make sense, as one learns social rules mostly by watching others, so if X watches a lot of movies, and is "naïve" (accepting what people express socially as true too easily), as autistic people often are, then that can explain it. 3. Being presumptive can backfire, as we all know, but it’s something humans are prone to do for a reason: it’s easier to work with people if you ‘know’ how they will react (aka if you’re confident you know how they will react and are usually right). So I’m not surprised that presumptive people do well. And, assuming X is autistic, not surprised than X isn’t quite as good at it. 4. Autistic people are famously terrible at dealing with uncertainty (though, in my case, I also had an anxiety disorder, so still worth investigating, especially given the extent of X’s uncertainty anxiety issues as you describe them).
Thank you. The correlations you mention indeed make a lot of sense. I didn't know autistic people were terrible in dealing with non-human-behavior-based uncertainty, will read up more on it. In the present case, I thought of anxiety rather than autism as the driver, but will try to look up/get to know more. Thanks again.
I was going to comment on a couple threads, especially the one about Trump/Criminal Trial/Actually Running for the election. I just don't have the energy. We've been having the same silly arguments for so long.
A) I want an Outside Context Problem to realign us
B) Maybe I'm depressed
C) Maybe this is what it's like when adults say "someday you'll understand," but this time it's about focusing on hobbies instead of stupid political shit
D) AI will solve our problems, so I'm going outside
Yeah, I have a sense that the Actual Problem (tm) is that these days we all get our media from algorithms that twist it into whatever we want to hear. It's like getting all of your food from algorithms that feed you whatever is most tasty. It's going to make you fat and unhealthy. Eat your diverse viewpoints and vegetables.
That right there was when I stopped using Facebook. When they started to make it harder to read all and only posts from people I followed, and instead started to filter out people I wanted to hear from and push people I didn't, I bailed.
A) We got covid-19, and it rapidly degenerated into tribal warfare. Although it was entertaining watching the wobbling before the final alignments became clear.
Covid-19 was an Outside Context Nuisance. Or more precisely, it was problematic to a highly variable degree across the population at large, and rarely problematic *enough* to override traditional tribal affiliations, which makes it a poor candidate for a realignment.
I doubt there's an outside context problem large enough to unite everyone even in a fairly small community, but it occurs to me that US national politics is particularly fractious if you're looking to participate in some discourse. So maybe you could pick some other corner to participate in that isn't "bad faith all the way down"
>I doubt there's an outside context problem large enough to unite everyone even in a fairly small community
<gallows humor>
Well, we had a natural experiment (writing from the USA). Covid was an outside context problem, and it _wasn't_ large enough to unite the factions, and this was true even with an ultimate death toll of over a million in the USA. I _really_ don't want to encounter an outside context problem that _is_ large enough.
I posted an extremely rude though not terribly practical proposal for dealing with Trump on the last open thread. It's not A - D on your list, and might at least amuse you.
This is a request for books that you think are forgotten gems in the history of psychology (or adjacent fields that bear on psychology).
I'm starting a blog that brings forward older writings that present-day clinicians and clients may not remember or know about. Or likewise, writings in adjacent fields that have valuable things to offer psychology.
I'm looking for books that are less self-help-y and more deep dives into psychological topics -- like relationships, work, self-esteem, anxiety, personality, death, etc. My hope is to offer a place where clinicians and psychologically-oriented people can go for a meatier engagement than is generally available.
I have a bit of an obsession about gems of years past getting buried under the onslaught of current material. Any suggestions of books in this vein that had an effect on you would be most appreciated.
*Lives in Progress* by R W White, 1950's book about personality development using case studies. *
Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence* by Paul Meehl, who was sort of the Scott Alexander of Psychology.
*The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life* by Goffman.
*The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ* by Jay Haley -- Transactional analysis-influenced, smart & funny book.
*How to Think* by Alan Jacobs. Sounds like a self-help book, but isn't. A better title would be How to be Fair-minded.
FIRST PERSON ACCOUNTS
*The Inner World of Mental Illness*, a collection of first-person accounts.
*The Eden Express* by Mark Vonnegut. Wonderfully well-written account of a psychosis, by Kurt Vonnegut's son.
Came here to recommend Meehl; once again Eremolalos beats me to my comment!
I'd throw in Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, by Louis Sass (not to be confused with the homophonic Thomas Szasz)
Ah, another Meehl fan! He made a deeper impression on me than anything else I read in grad school. I'm not sure the book I recommended is the best one. The one I remember best was a collection of essays that was well-written and entertaining, besides being very smart in that Meehl way. I remember that one was called "Why I No Longer Attend Case Conferences." Do you happen to know what book that was in? And do you have the same impression I do, that his mind had a lot in common with Scott's? I'm not talking about smarts in general, but about a certain kind of smarts.
I know I had a similar reaction to encountering both for the first time. I'd identify qualities like a sharp synoptic view, the ability to put their thumb on something that's hiding in plain sight, a tendency to cut straight to the heart of an issue. Maybe too, a willingness to irritate the establishment and some immunity to its pull.
Say, any chance you might put the link to that blog here? I’m no psychologist, and have no book to recommend, but I’d definitely read something like that!
That's encouraging to hear, thank you. When I get it up and running, I'll share a link back here. That's my hope, that it's not only interesting to clinicians, but to psychologically-minded people of all kinds.
It's going to start at the blog already on my website at florencegardner.com and then will hopefully spin off into its own thing. You can subscribe for free to my blog now if you want to.
The "States of Mind" back issue of Lapham's Quarterly has excerpts from many historical writings about the mind. It's not all psychological, but there are some interesting ones that might be in line with what you're looking for, like Alois Alzheimer's 1901 clinical notes for a patient who was the first published case of what is now called Alzheimer's disease.
Does anyone have westward expansion/frontier living/wild west book recommendations? Looking for something high quality and fun, mainly fiction, but I guess some history would be ok too as long as it is engaging. Thanks.
I see no one here has yet mentioned Annie Dillard's "The Living" re: early settlers in the Pac. Northwest (Watcom County, Bellingham area). One of my all-time favorites. Beautiful writing and sometimes McCarthy-esque brutality. But mostly about how living and dying and just overall daily struggles were so intertwined in life and "progress" back then, with a backdrop of impenetrable forests and sometimes hostile/helpful Natives.
My dad was a big fan of Louis L'Amour. Apparently his frontier fiction was unusually well-researched - for instance, he'd describe a box canyon somewhere and there were enough clues that you could drive to wherever in Wyoming and, sure enough, there it was.
He had also apparently written some non-fiction and even an SF novel.
I also encourage you to check out O. Henry stories on this topic. His collection "Heart of the West" focuses on the West c. 1900 (I forget exactly when he wrote).
I like O. Henry in general, and personally prefer the NYC-bases stories, but there are some great Western ones.
Random of Red Chief is Elsa focused on the West but it's a classic.
I need to go look in my "complete collection" to give you a good listing. Again I'm more partial to his NYC stories, and I've read about 2/5 of kid complete works.
The classic Southwestern author is Ed Abbey – I’d recommend “Desert Solitaire” over the “Monkey Wrench Gang” for first reading. Abbey is a great view into a very different kind of somewhat deprecated mindset (namely, the anti-authoritarian misanthropic rural environmentalist ethos of the ‘70s/‘80s).
He’s a harsh writer, but a spectacular creator of prose. Also in this vein is the other Cormac McCarthy. Check out “Blood Meridian” if you’re interested in extreme violence and bleak nihilistic depictions of human society on the frontier. It’s beautifully written, but if you prefer something a little more direct (Hemingwayesque) and merely pessimistic rather than brutal I’d opt for “No Country for Old Men”.
“Angle of Repose” by someone else here is great. Seconded. Stegner was a prolific writer but the quality of his writing did not suffer for it, so most of his stuff is well worth reading. “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is another highlight.
Where Abbey’s works are really about the landscape, and McCarthy’s are about more abstract themes, Stegner’s writing is really about the characters. If you’re looking for Weatern writing that’s truly emblematic of the genre, the best example might be “Lonesome Dove,” by Larry McMurty. It’s played very straight, but stands heads and shoulders above most of the other obvious picks in that vein. It’s recommended often for a reason.
If what you’re really looking for is something that captures that vibe of the age of exploration and frontier expansion, then “Roughing It” (Twain) and “The Plains Across” (John D Unruh) may scratch that itch.
I’ll give you a couple picks out of left field, if you’re still interested. “Sometimes a Great Notion” (Ken Kesey) is technically set in the American west, but as a character study set in the PNW during the 20th century, it defies many of the conventions of the genre. Nevertheless, I would call this book Western-adjacent, and it’s so good that it’s worth recommending if you’re interested in anything remotely close.
“West With the Night” (Beryl Markham) is not a Western by any notion. It’s a semi-autobiographical narrative from a white women who became a pilot after growing up in colonial British East Africa. It’s also one of the best-written novels I’ve read, full stop, and it captures that “frontier” vibe in a way that supersedes every true Western I can think to compare it to.
Let me know if this list needs to be expanded, for whatever reason.
The first book of Robert Caro’s LBJ biography “The Path to Power” has gorgeous and vivid writing about frontier life in the Texas panhandle. I read it years ago and it’s still with me.
I don't know if it quite fits the theme, but the best novel I've read adjacent to that milieu would be Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. (I also liked My Antonia, but that's not as georgraphically western).
I probably should have said entertaining rather than fun. Both books sound interesting, and I remember reading a little bit of Willa Cather in the past and liking it.
This lady made her living traveling to foreign lands and writing about it. It is a great look at the 1860s wild West, confirming that our image through Hollywood, though cartoonish, wasn't *all* made up.
I have not read Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, but the reviews I've seen have called it entertaining, and none have challenged the author's command of the facts. With a title like that, the publisher certainly wants you to think you'll have fun reading it.
David J. Weber, "The Taos trappers : the fur trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846" (Univ. of Oklahoma Pr., 0806117028);
Marc Simmons, "Kit Carson and his three wives : a family history" (Univ. of New Mexico Pr., 9780826332974).
They're mostly on the fur trade in the early 19th century, but are interesting reads. I'm still hoping to find some French journals, as they were poking around the Gila River before both the Mexicans and Americans.
Shadow Country! A classic, and so good. But long. About some complicated figures settling the marshes of Florida in the 1800s with a very western feel.
As far as entertaining nonfiction accounts go, “Men to Match My Mountains” by Irving Stone is an all-time classic, it’s extremely engaging and readable. Can’t recommend highly enough.
It was good discussion on the subreddit for why refund a bonuses might be a dud. I think the most compelling case against them are 1) it's a negative signal of quality that the founder is willing to offer a refund bonus. 2) The money spent on offering a refund bonus would be better spent on advertising.
Still there's a 5% refund waiting on the last project for anyone who wants it.
I keep seeing Trump around 40-50% to win in 2024 in prediction/betting markets, and I just don't quite get it.
Trump is facing multiple, serious indictments which seem likely (80+%) to result in his conviction and going to prison. It is very hard to run an election campaign from prison. I'm not sure what the path to his victory is, to be so highly rated? If the criminal stuff wasn't involved, or was purely symbolic, sure. If it was generic R v. generic D, sure. Are we assuming it's <50% that he actually gets convicted? Why, when the federal conviction rate is very high and Trump has mostly exhausted his good lawyers by being a terrible client? Is it that he's expected to get house arrest? It doesn't seem like the trials will be delayed until after the election. I assume I'm missing something here?
He can run from jail, as Schilling and many others have said. He can appear as a martyr. And if it's between him and Biden...well, at least some people are worse off than they were five years ago (and some may have survived the pandemic well).
It is highly unlikely that Donald Trump will be imprisoned in 2024. There's a fair chance that he might be *convicted* of something, but if so he'll appeal and he'll almost certainly remain free pending the appeal, and that will take into 2025 (unless mooted by his winning the election).
And being in prison is no bar to running for office. Eugene Debs ran for president five times under the Socialist banner, the last time while serving ten years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for sedition. He won more votes in that election than he had in any of his prior attempts. Being able to make public appearances is important, but being able to present one's self as a martyr is also quite useful in this context.
Trump already appeared as a martyr, and I don’t expect losing and appealing a court case to help him do that any better. His empty martyrdom claims signalled his allegiance with the lower working class. Being prosecuted won’t get much extra sympathy, because most people aren’t scared of that happening to them. If anything, it means Trump’s allegiance has shifted and he’s in it for himself. I wouldn’t want to call the election, but I would be surprised if Trump’s prosecution appears as one of the main election issues in surveys of Trump voters.
I would assume *someone* said he was ineligible to run because of the 14th amendment, but no federal judge ever said so. If any state judges had said so, they would have been in states where Debs was never going to win anyway, so who cares?
At most one of the trials Trump is facing involves insurrection. Sedition, despite its official anti-US features, is not necessarily a type of insurrection.
I looked up the difference between sedition and insurrection, and it appears sedition is inciting people to violence, whereas insurrection is doing violent acts seditious people incite you to do. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't know that anyone has accused Trump of doing violent acts.
It’s important to note that Sedition, Seditious Conspiracy, and Insurrection are legally distinct from one another. IANAL but I did a bit of research before posting this. Sedition per se would not invoke the 14th Amendment.
CHAZ taught us that seizing territory, extracting "taxes" from the population, distributing "military-style-assault-weapons" to your underlings so they can enforce "laws" and killing a few people in the process is not an insurrection but putting your feet on Pelosi's desk is. Because Democracy(tm) is so fragile that a dude in buffalo horns can kill it with a pointy stick. Unless you're in black bloc, that makes your violence goodful democratiscitist voice of the oppressed or some such thing.
While your first two points about CHAZ/CHOP are valid, I'd dispute the 3rd and 4th. AFAIK, the "security" people were just a thing that organically happened, and not everyone there was happy with them, but it wasn't a top-down thing done by people with a Plan. And for what it's worth, I truly think they made the place safer, although that's not so much a compliment to them as a condemnation of the rest of the CHOP. And all the shooters were, as far as anyone knows, ordinary criminals who found a great place to do crime where cops couldn't stop them, and no one would be willing provide evidence against them. I don't think the "security" people had anything to do with the shootings or deaths (or rapes). (I've seen various pieces online in the last few years claiming that the "security" people were involved, but as far as I can tell it's just rumor-mongering based on what would be maximally inflammatory.)
Also, the whole point of the name change from CHAZ to CHOP was that they were giving up their anarchist-inspired talk of secession, and were focusing on just being a BLM protest. (Which was the right move, IMO.)
Still, I agree that it should count as an insurrection, and my immediate reaction was that "the National Guard should go through Cal Anderson Park like Sherman through Georgia".
Threatening to murder the Vice President of the United States in order to force him to hand your team supreme executive power, is an insurrection even if it turns out you are pathetically incompetent about it.
would seem a closer fit to chaz. Your rather minimalist summation of what happened on January 6 (not to mention your almost hysterical summation of what chz was, and who the shooting victims were) seems to leave a lot of the record out of your consideration.. but I get the feeling it would be rather pointless to pursue a discussion on this further.
To make my prediction (which is 45% Biden, 45% Trump, 10% Nikki Haley), I took the four factors:
1) Trump’s electoral college vote count in each election he’s run in and averaged them together.
2) Every head to head matchup between Biden and Trump has been won by Biden.
3) Most elections are won by the incumbent.
4) I looked at Biden’s current approval rating and saw that he’s at the lowest approval rating of any modern president at this point in his presidency.
I’m putting low weight on the polls and Biden’s current approval rating. It’s way too early. My 10% prediction for Haley is because I think there’s a small chance the legal stuff could really go against him and also he’s at an age where he could die from a heart attack or stroke.
Remember when RBG fans were going on about "nevertheless, she persisted"? And how something said to mock someone for refusing to yield became a rallying cry? I think it's like that, but with the parties reversed.
Look at the Clintons, and all the legal woes they underwent. Did the Democrats drop Bill or did they row in behind and support him? Same motivation at work here; for a lot of the Bill or Trump supporters, it wasn't "Gee, our guy is being accused of crimes, as law-abiding and respectable citizens we should disassociate ourselves from him", it was "That other lot are trying to get our guy with these nuisance lawsuits, well they're not gonna scare us off!"
I've read lots of people explaining the precise difference between Trump having boxes of secret documents in an office and Biden having boxes of secret documents in a garage, and why what Trump did was treason while what Biden did was simple mistake.
Same mindset in action: he's Our Guy and the Other Lot are just trying to get him any way they can because they hate him, so we double down on our support.
"It is very hard to run an election campaign from prison."
He is not being charged with treason over the documents at Mar-a-Lago. He is being charged with obstruction of Justice. That is the fundamental distinction between Biden having documents that he shouldn’t have had, Pence having documents he shouldn’t have had, and Trump having documents he shouldn’t have had. If Trump had handed over the documents when they were requested and not tried to hide them, he wouldn’t be in this pickle.
I wouldn't go that far, but if he's imprisoned for Using the Wrong Slush Fund to Pay Off His Mistress, or for Boastfully Exaggerating How Rich He is, then yeah, maybe. Those are the white-collar equivalent of driving with a broken tail light, and if someone abuses their prosecutorial discretion to the extent of actually locking people up for it, they should expect serious pushback.
If he's in prison for inciting a riot on 1/6/21, and there was no serious hanky-panky in the trial, then let him rot.
Credentialled Smart People(TM) tell me the justification is the "interrupting an official proceeding." Which is of course the entire raison d'etre for Code Pink, International ANSWER and/or any other org that gets a tongue bath from Amy Goodman. Not to mention that little incident when actual elected officials opened the doors so protestors could try and stop Kavanaugh's confirmation.
"But a presidential election is different!" smacks of strategic definitions. I would be willing to grant you the inciting a riot thing, if there weren't pre-existing non-prosecutions of elected officials working with, and even funneling money to black bloc groups.
We are living in a time when vandalism, arson and assault are normal and accepted part of protests... as long as the right people pare doing the protesting. The immediate about face between BLM and J6 was unbelievable if I hadn't witnessed it myself.
Bill Clinton's legal troubles didn't reach national-headlines level until he was done running for election, though. He wasn't on any ballots while under indictment. That kept it easy to say that he was getting impeached for having gotten a blowjob.
I lived and worked deep in the heart of liberal/progressive America during the 90s, the kind of circles in which literally no one even considered voting for a GOP candidate. (Or at least no one was foolish enough to say so out loud except me.) While I found the widespread circle-the-wagons reaction about Slick Willy to be both frustrating and alienating, it was clear to me that it was shallow. Many of the people I knew would have been pushed out of that stance if he was getting criminally indicted for felonies with co-defendants flipping on him and etc.
If Ms. Lewinsky wasn't so abominably stupid, there would be wikipedia articles about how the accusations were debunked and Linda Tripp would be a proven liar.
The difference is fairly obvious: Biden immediately turned his over on discovery, while Trump actively and repeatedly took steps to retain them after being asked for them, made false statements about it, and showed them off to his various hangers-on.
Trump is, by polling, the favorite to win both the primary and the general. The polls are mostly from mid-December but most show Trump with a 2-3 point lead over Biden and twenty plus point lead in the primaries. This is all after a bunch of cases were brought against him. So to think conviction is electorally relevant you have to assume there's a large body of voters who were not turned off by the accusations and court hearings but would be turned off by conviction. I don't think that's a safe assumption. So if anything 50% seems low and seems to be pricing in being removed from the ballot etc as real possibilities.
Also, due to polarization no major party presidential nominee ever has less than maybe a 33% chance of winning. Whenever you get numbers lower than 30-40% you're seeing wishcasting.
Trump supporters see him as a political outsider, battling "the system", from which they also feel somewhat alienated for various reasons. All these lawsuits, regardless of their legal merits, simply confirm that in the minds of his supporters, and are thus politically very ill-advised IMHO.
It's somewhat analogous to the situation with Julius Caesar in classical Rome, although with a curious reversal of the relevant political parties. At the time, there were two main factions or parties, the Optimates (the "bests", who were aristocrats and the rich) and the Populares (the "peoples' party").
After JC associated himself with the Populares, members of the Optimates in the senate tabled loads of lawsuits against him, with the aim of bringing him down by "lawfare". One thing led to another, and in the end following a civil war Caesar triumphed and the whole Republican system was replaced by imperial rule (albeit with trappings of the former system maintained for show).
Luckily Trump is much older than JC was at the time of these events, and arguably not as effective once in power, partly due to his personal shortcomings such as a short attention span (so I've heard), but also the greater complexity of modern political institutions collectively. Also, the US constitution is more robust, given that the founding fathers had learned lessons from the Roman carry on among others!
> Trump supporters see him as a political outsider, battling "the system", from which they also feel somewhat alienated for various reasons. All these lawsuits, regardless of their legal merits, simply confirm that in the minds of his supporters, and are thus politically very ill-advised IMHO.
It's not his most ardent supporters who matter, though. It's the (massively under-discussed) swinging voters, the people who aren't on the Trump train in any sense, but could perhaps be persuaded to vote Trump in 2024, but then again maybe not.
The people whose votes really matter are the people who voted for Obama in 2012, then Trump in 2016, then Biden in 2020. Can they be persuaded to vote Trump again in 2024?
Perhaps there's a faint glimmer of light in all of this then, if a few hundred thousand voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona are the rational few who can save America from itself. Who will reach out to the middle instead of throwing red meat to their base? I count myself in the rare category of people who could be convinced to vote either D or R in 2024, and have said in the previous open thread that the main thing Biden could do to win my support is pardon Trump in all of his ongoing federal investigations.
I feel like a bargain like that would end the careers of everyone involved in it. There would be no way to claim political neutrality, and the courts really like being able to claim neutrality.
Unless you're talking about that being the back-room agreement with a fig leaf agreement up front. In which case it would be unenforceable and Trump would break it instantly.
I'm sure this would be acceptable to Democrats, since their objective is to keep him from running, but it sure isn't justice even if you are in favor of it. To suggest it (which you didn't, but others clearly have) shows me further proof that the charges against Trump are politically motivated, not legally motivated.
I think Trump's criminal prosecutions and electoral fortunes are indeed correlated, but I think you have the sign of the correlation wrong. I think a supermajority of his base sees the prosecutions as politically motivated, and is energized to vote for him by them, so martyring Trump through the justice system will increase turnout among his base. I also think that a significant fraction of independents sees the attempts to disqualify him from running or throw him in prison as antidemocratic, and might vote for him (or refrain from voting Biden) in protest. The people who would place most weight on `Trump in prison' were mostly going to vote for Biden anyway. I think the chances of Trump winning the election conditional on being in prison on election day are North of 80%, but South of 40% if he is still a free man on November 5.
Yeah I think this is mostly right. I was a democrat, but now I'm just disgusted by politics and I won't vote for either Trump or Biden. (In 2020 I did a write in vote.) I'm picking Trump to win, because of stronger support from his base. And I just wish for some third party candidate, I don't care that much who it is. Bring back Ross Perot. (Or better yet Teddy Roosevelt.)
Why do you say 80+% ? I’d say 5%. There is almost no timeline where he is convicted before the election. These things take years. There are dozens of ways they can be delayed.
Trump has surely been going to prison soon for about 7 years now. I’ve updated my priors.
The federal interference trial has been scheduled for March 4, 2024, with estimated six weeks for prosecution's case (and presumably around that long for the defense's, so ~3 months, so June-ish 2024 completion). The judge has said she has no intention of delaying purely for Trump's convenience, as that's not how cases are done for anybody else. He obviously did the federal interference shit. Federal trials almost always (90+%) result in convictions. Thus, 80+%.
I think the 90%+ figure comes from cases very dissimilar to this one (mostly drug cases), so I would be less certain that this is a good metric to determine the chances of a conviction. This type of case is highly unusual, and even though the evidence is strong, there should probably be more uncertainty. In addition, your timeline precludes potential appeals, during which Defendants will sometimes be released on bond while they are pending. This could take an additional few months.
I still think it's likely he gets convicted and incarcerated, but maybe more in the range of 60%, given the odd circumstances.
I think it will be very close as it has been for awhile and D’s will be able to exploit that. With the way we conduct voting now, there is basically a slush fund of questionable votes that can be activated where needed to ensure Biden wins. It’s a subjective process after all, and D’s are more likely to be those government employees tasked with the machinery of election.
I don’t think people need worry, in other words. They underestimate too, how powerful people came together last time, put their heads together to get Biden elected.
If anything, there seems to be greater hysteria on the subject now - and a strongly public- minded feeling - “ this is what I got rich and powerful for, to save America” from what is felt to be the evil half of the electorate.
>D’s are more likely to be those government employees tasked with the machinery of election.
The vote-counting process is overseen by people of both parties. Of the six key battleground states (NC, GA, FL, MI, WI, PA), three have Republican Secretaries of State (GA, FL, and PA). You might remember some news in 2020 about how Brad Raffensperger got a call from Trump asking him to "find enough votes" for him to win, and he refused to cooperate.
Don't make inflammatory claims of a "slush fund of questionable votes" being prepared for 2024 unless you have evidence of that actually happening.
Also, while apologizing for writing something based on my own experience, rather than from the internet - I will relate one other anecdote. I was sitting in a pollworker training session. The head of the training staff dropped in and was fielding questions. Every so often they would change the technology or the paperwork and you really had to pay attention to how they wanted various triplicate forms and so forth. We would go through various scenarios - no ID, voter registration says "moved", etc.
We were learning about an affidavit for some or other voter issue, that would result in the casting of a provisional vote. Among other questions on this form: ask voter if they are an American citizen. As the election office dude moved past that without comment, I raised my hand and asked, "What if they say no? Do we need to go on with filling out this affidavit? Or can we just tell them they are not eligible?"
The guy looked utterly bewildered. He turned to the younger training employees for help with this question. They looked blank.
"That is an excellent question," he said - "I will have to look into that and get back to you."
This was the number two administrator at the county election office. He didn't have a clear notion of whether you needed to be a citizen of the US to vote.
This was the attitude of the place: we want everyone to vote. It was nigh impossible to get them to say that anyone *should not vote*.
There are citizen party representatives, to be sure, standing around on election day (though not throughout the 3 weeks of early voting - they are permitted to, of course, but don't - one of the issues with early voting if you are putting a lot of faith in the watchers). But they are outsiders, not the actual election office employees. As for the slush fund of votes - that is based entirely on my own firsthand experience as a pollworker, where I have seen every possible example of questionable - and indeed fraudulent - voting. It is very much baked in to the "let everyone vote" and "voting is the highest possible act" philosophy that is an obsession of modern liberalism.
I remember a memorable election evening when we were very late getting finished, having been processing voters still in line when the poll closed. The election night closing procedures were different than the early voting ones. I don't recall the various technology issues, but it took a long time - like an hour - for the key computer process to finish spinning. The watchers - with whom we had been mutually chilly since their arrival, as we were told that we weren't supposed to talk with them - and, you know, the weirdness of being watched - ultimately pitched in to the tech problem issue, and putting away the tables and such; and we were all chatting pleasantly by the time we got all the materials ready to go back to the county. (They would follow to observe the handoff.)
They saw, and said they saw, how airtight the tech procedures and safeguards were - from our end (we were paid but not employees of the county; I think these positions used to be volunteer).
The opening for illegitimacy did not lie with the technology. Or with we thrice-yearly pollworkers. It lay with the laxity enshrined in policy toward who could vote, and an unwillingness on anyone's part to challenge the fact that people were voting for other people, people who were not literate were voting and those votes were being cast by others, elderly chain-migrated people who had not a single idea about what they were doing, were "voting" with the aid of their kids; and people who had not followed the basic rules to register to vote in the area where they lived - were nonetheless provisional voting.
The whole thing is a comedic delight. I have no idea why Trump supporters even imagine it's possible to elect him this time. I hope that they know what kind of people they are, and that the silly little unarmed trespassing on Jan 6 really was the closest to meaningful collective action they're capable of (i.e. very far from meaningful).
On the other hand, only those deranged enough to think that -this time surely- Trump would, if elected, show himself to have always been Orange Hitler (instead a normal moderate republican with a knack for self-promotion) also think his downtrodden, cop-loving, law-abiding supporters would ever do anything violent.
I hope we get President Kamala Harris. That would be the pinnacle of comedy.
How DARE you minimize and whitewash the most violent and insurrectionisty thing that had ever happened in US history!?! It's worse than the Civil War multiplied by the War of 1812 and 9/11 combined!
It's weird, these should be "interesting times" and yet I find them kinda dull. The SNL skit about the Ivy presidents, while I didn't see it, struck me as pretty funny - that is, funny where they apparently found the funny to be, while skipping the (to me) obvious funny. But this sort of thing is commonplace - I'll send some current ridiculousness link to my husband - "funny" - but it's never exactly hilarious.
That may just be a function of age. Do younger folks on here feel they are living in interesting times?
Well, anyway, he's unique - he's their creation, really. They never had anything like him before and while some core group must really believe that politics in America is still going on normally and that Donald Trump being their candidate is completely normal and they will help him win, surely for many of them it is more like shouting an insult as you're being escorted out the door.
I might wish their high spirits had been channeled more productively, and earlier, but then like most Gen-X-ers I never engaged with the world.
Yes, that's very true. Meanwhile some of us have things we care about that don't get much talk at all. Thus, all this big drama plays out more like a puppet show, to me. The real drama is elsewhere.
Just 15 minutes ago I laughed out loud at a photoshopped image of Trump on the front-door Ring camera holding an AR-15, wearing a shirt that reads "NEVER GO ON" (with the kerning making it look like 'GOON'), and screaming.
The times aren't interesting by some standards but I'm laughing my ass off about 'em.
I don't think the probability that he is convicted and imprisoned before the election is anywhere near 80%. I think it's maybe 20-30%. Trump is not a normal defendant. He is wealthy and politically connected.
Even if he is imprisoned, I don't think it would have a large impact on his odds of winning, and the small impact would probably be positive. I think the disadvantage would be limited to being unable to do rallies and debates (assuming he wants to debate Biden). The advantage would be that it would give him martyr status among many of his potential voters, which could motivate them to vote rather than stay home. It could also serve as proof for them that Trump is genuinely an enemy of the political establishment. This is assuming he is still allowed on the ballot, at least in red and swing states.
TBH I think those odds are too low if anything - Trump's been consistently ahead in polls for a while now, and we're starting to come out of the "top soon to be predictive" period without much change. I don't think him getting criminal charges (or maybe even being in prison) would change much, I think that's already mostly priced in.
(Being in prison might skeeve off some swing voters? But I doubt he'd actually get prison time during an election).
Well, him being in prison would imply he lost a widely-televised trial. But also it is hard to go to rallies, debates, etc, when you are in a prison cell. Just a few percentage points would be enough to make it effectively impossible for him to win, given how the R/D are pretty tightly-balanced.
Trials aren't televised though. There's always been a lot of news about how he's pretty criminal, I don't think a slightly larger amount of that would change many people's minds. I also don't think rallies or debates matter much - he's already super familiar to everyone anyway.
Sorry, widely-covered trial where every line of the transcripts is poured over. It is impossible to imagine that it will be some "blink and you'll miss it" news matter - it will be the first time a former US President has stood trial for anything, and in this case it would basically be trying to do a coup.
Except he clearly didn't try to do a coup. And they already investigated that for literally years in widely covered impeachment hearings and various other proceedings.
All the current trials are about relatively trivial procedural matters.
Those results just make me more confused. 2025 is more likely than 2024? The federal and Georgia trials are both scheduled for 2024 and will presumably complete in 2024, given they would probably take 3-4 months each. If he only goes to prison in 2025 that requires him not to get elected, since they almost certainly will not imprison a sitting President, barring, idk, him turning out to be actively undermining US military readiness so Putin can take back Alaska or something equally absurd.
e: Okay, if the sentencing in the Georgia case takes too long then that would potentially push it into 2025. The federal interference one starts in March, though.
For an even more extreme case (and _not_ in the PRC or Russia)
>Japan has a 99.8 percent conviction rate in cases that go to trial, according to 2021 Supreme Court statistics, so the decision to indict or not has enormous significance.
Okay, let's have a look at what the federal charges are, and they don't seem to be "interfering with an election":
"The U.S. Justice Department indicted Trump earlier this month on 37 counts relating to seven criminal charges: willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.
...Broadly speaking, however, the charges against Trump are rare. In fiscal 2022, more than eight-in-ten federal criminal defendants in the United States faced charges related to one of four other broad categories of crime: drug offenses (31%), immigration offenses (25%), firearms and explosives offenses (16%) or property offenses (11%). In Florida’s Southern District, too, more than eight-in-ten defendants faced charges related to these four categories."
So a lot of that is the to-ing and fro-ing over the documents he took with him after his time in office, and that could go any way.
The Georgia trial is a different matter; that's a racketeering charge about trying to change the result of the election. That one, so far as I can tell, is *not* a federal charge so the "80% conviction rate in federal cases" doesn't apply here:
"Trump’s current schedule includes: his Washington trial on federal charges over efforts to overturn the 2020 election on 4 March, his New York trial on local charges over hush-money payments to an adult film star on 25 March, and his classified documents trial in Florida on 20 May."
That slate of cases looks more like trying to get him on any way they can (how is the NY prosecution about over-inflating property values for bank loans going?) and does anyone, for example, really care about Stormy Daniels, especially since her travails with Michael Avenatti as her representative who has since, himself, been convicted on criminal charges?
My main gripe there is Daniels took money to keep her mouth shut but got greedy and went back on that. So she should have paid back the money, but didn't and wanted more by going public about Trump. Avenatti cheated her, but she was a cheat herself, so it all works out in the end. Trump shouldn't have paid her off, but rather emulated the Duke of Wellington re: 'publish and be damned', because it's been established historically that sex workers have a short shelf life and will try to maximise revenue by 'tell all' blackmail when their looks and appeal fade. She was never going to keep her mouth shut when the prospect of more money was dangled before her.
(how is the NY prosecution about over-inflating property values for bank loans going?)
Extremely well for the prosecution. The judge is allowed to decide for themself that Trump is an icky badperson, regardless of what any of the defense witnesses say about how bank loans work.
If he did get a prison verdict, I'm guessing the judges would suspend it until he was no longer a candidate (or a president), since they don't actually want to directly impact an election like that
From what I've seen, the judge in the federal case is going with the "Yeah, sucks to have other commitments, that's what happens to all criminal defendants though" angle on going with the March 2024 date, so I'm very dubious on this actually mattering.
I'm not sure Trump will go to prison, though he is clearly guilty. If there is at least one trump supporter on all the juries they will probably find Trump innocent no matter the evidence.
The Big Bang, when magnetic poles got separated. Anything since then is just those poles using that energy to move back together, or something else applying energy to move them apart.
By `magnetism' do you mean ferromagnetism? i.e. bar magnets? It comes fundamentally from the interplay of the Coulomb repulsion between like-charged electrons and the Pauli exclusion principle, which says that two identical particles cannot share the same quantum numbers. Having the same microscopic `spin state' means electrons have to stay further apart from each other (Pauli exclusion), which reduces the energy cost associated to the Coulomb repulsion between them. Thus, in ferromagnets electrons can lower their total energy by aligning all their spins, which means aligning all their magnetizations, which generates a total magnetic moment.
If you were not thinking about ferromagnets...well I can probably still answer the question but you'll need to clarify what you mean.
It depends on the situation. For ferromagnetism, it's the potential energy between individual electrons. It's possible for potential energy to be negative, and this is the case with two magnets stuck to each other (ignoring the self-interaction energy of each magnet), so the potential energy of that configuration is lower than when they're very separated (with 0 energy), hence the force and its ability to do work to reach the stuck-together state.
With electromagnets, it's the electrical energy of the circuits. An electromagnet approaching another magnet in an attracted manner produces a voltage in the electromagnet, and the power source for the electromagnet has to do work to overcome that voltage and keep current flowing. Oddly, with two electromagnets, this process actually takes more electrical energy than the amount of work done by the magnetic force, the excess being stored in an increase in the energy of the magnetic field. If there is no power source (e.g. a superconducting ring), the current decreases instead, reducing its stored energy.
Think of it like gravity. Where does the energy for a ball rolling down a hill come from? It was “gravitational potential energy” the ball had the whole time due to its mass and position within a gravitational field. Similarly, an electrically charged particle in an electric field will have electric potential energy and a magnetically charged dipole in a magnetic field will have magnetic potential energy. (A raw piece of iron isn’t a magnetic dipole, but it will be induced to become one in a magnetic field.)
I'm going to assume you mean ferro-magnetism, which is really cool stuff. (meant to be a bit of a joke 'cause the magnetism goes away at high temperatures.) The effect is caused by the exchange interaction between electrons in adjacent atoms. And so it is a purely quantum mechanical process. A piece of material can spontaneously magnetize (get the electron spins to line up) because the energy of two adjacent atomic electron spins is lower when the are parallel vs anti-parallel.
Force doesn't require energy? I'm thinking that a magnet's ability to pull or repel other magnets has to come from somewhere, but I'm probably missing something.
In general, force does not require energy. Think about a load-carrying column that supports a section of a bridge. Say the section weighs 1 ton. Then the column sustains 10 kN of force, indefinitely, without any energy source.
This feels counter-intuitive because if I’m holding a 10 kg dumbbell above my head I am definitely expending energy, but that’s because I’m sustaining muscle tension to do so.
Think of a rubber band. When you stretch it, it has energy that can be used to do work, but you had to put that energy in there by stretching it. The molecules in the rubber band are more comfortable in a curled-up configuration than when they are pulled a bit straighter.
Pull two magnets apart and you are in a sense 'stretching' the electromagnetic field of the universe into a less comfortable configuration. It would be the same if you separated two opposite electric charges. (Magnetism is a bit more complicated because it comes from electric charges linked to particles in a physical system that essentially keeps them moving in circles very fast - it's this system that you interfered with.)
The electric and magnetic forces are fundamental forces, just like gravity, there isn't a deeper underlying explanation (you can invoke `exchange of virtual photons' if you find that illuminating but probably you don't).
Also what looks like a magnetic force in one frame of reference looks like an electric force in a different (boosted) frame, so there isn't really a clean distinction between electric and magnetic forces (and in both cases, we're dealing with a fundamental force that doesn't really have a deeper explanation than `that's the way nature is.')
Forces acting over distances* do work and produce energy differences. The energy differences come from the forces.
* Strictly, the line integral of the vector dot product
This is an explanation for how electric and magnetic forces can be interconverted by shifting to a boosted frame, it's not a `deeper explanation for where electric and magnetic forces come from.'
It absolutely is a deeper explanation for where the magnetic force comes from. It is an emergent phenomenon, in particular of the electric force and special relativity.
When magnets are pulled apart energy is being added to the system. So when magnets are moved close and are attracted to each other, they are just using up energy that was previously added.
I'd like to talk about assortative mating among elites - specifically with "elite" defined by "1-3 SD out on several measures" rather than simple education, wealth, or income.
It's been my personal experience in my social circles that a man with several SD advantages in multiple areas will typically end up with a basically average woman with maybe one or two areas with maybe a 1 SD advantage. I'm curious about this, because I've seen multiple examples of it happening, but N is objectively low, and this could just as easily be a "matching is hard" thing among extraordinary people, as it could be an explicitly gendered thing.
So I ask my fellow SSC compatriots! There must be elite (in this sense) women here, and people who know them, so I think we may be actually able to shed some light on whether it's symmetrical across genders as merely a "matching at the far ends of the bell curve is genuinely hard" thing.
An example: one friend, 6 foot 4, attractive (routinely got chili pepper ratings as a prof, so an objective measurement there at least), Phd in a STEM discipline, been making 400-600k annually for nearly a decade now, athleticism and fitness 1 SD out, vegan and very moral minded, etc. Yes, I've just described like a quarter of Silicon Valley men (except maybe the height), but he's on the East Coast where women outnumber men, so he's not even at a demographic disadvantage like west coasters.
So the reason I immediately think of him, he struggled for *years* to find a good relationship - and it's because he basically wanted his counterpart, just in a woman. He wanted a tall, Phd, good-career, attractive, fit woman to match him on his various attributes. And we (his male friends) all used to laugh at him. "It doesn't work that way!" we'd howl, "this is exactly why you've been single for X years!"
We thought it was funny, because based on our own experiences, it doesn't matter how great or how many SD's you are from average as a man in how many fields, you can't *possibly* expect to find a woman with more than one or two fields with a 1-2 SD advantage, even if you have four or five fields with 1-3 SD advantages.
Why is this? I genuinely don't know and am curious if others have seen it - just empirically, in our own experiences, it's a ground truth you can't get around. We, his male friends, enjoy a similar range of SD advantages in a similar amount of areas, and in our own experience you can optimize on ONE, maybe two, areas for 1-2 SD out in a female partner, and anything else is laughable fantasy. We've accepted it as a sad fact about life, but he wouldn't for many years. He eventually settled with somebody with the usual 1-2 areas with a 1-2 SD advantage, and seem pretty happy with her, so that's great.
But I genuinely wonder if this is a gendered thing, or a "difficulty in elite assortative mating" thing. I've certainly heard from my mom, who was a 6 foot tall model in her youth, that it's extremely hard to find a high quality man (or other female friends) as a tall woman, a noticeably smart or articulate woman, or a model-level attractive woman (and compoundingly worse with all 3 attributes). I similarly hear about many high-powered career women who struggle to find a quality match.
So somewhere, there must be my friend's equivalent - a tall, attractive, higher-degree-having, athletic, high-powered career woman who can't find a good match. Why couldn't they find each other? What eventually happens from the female side? The same settling for a 1-2 SD advantage in one or two areas that we all ended up at?
Just thinking historically, people like Ed Thorp and Einstein and Feynman and Bohr all basically ended up with essentially average or the standard 1 SD in 1-2 areas women. Most of those are confounded by time period and culture, though. If I think of the "elite athletes plus other SD advantages" with LTR's that I know in powerlifting or rock climbing or Ninja, it's the same story for all of them.
I've got an N of about 6 on the multiple SD advantages across 4 or 5 areas from the male side (and maybe N=5 on the athletic side, usually at around 2-3 areas), and it's been universally true there, but that's a pretty tiny sample. I genuinely wonder whether we could or should have been doing anything different than the usual online dating apps and the typical work and cultural social milieus in big coastal cities, but if so, I have no idea what it would be.
Does anyone here have examples of similarly extraordinary folk actually finding each other?
What do folk here think - is this a gendered thing, or a symmetrical thing where matching out on the long tail is just intrinsically hard?
1. Dude's a STEM PhD, right? Not a lot of women in that, and women outside it don't tend to find that that attractive unless there's money involved. This may be in part a cultural thing--apparently Japanese matchmakers would look for high education, height, and salary, compare with the six-pack, six feet, six-figure salary over here. There's a small subset of women who find intelligence attractive, but it's not too big, and they all lean hard left (not sure what your friend's politics are.)
2. Not all positive things are correlated; you want tall, smart, athletic, and rich, there aren't a lot of people like that, and they tend to be in demand (perhaps not 'tall' for women but replace it with 'attractive').
3. The high-powered career women want a guy who makes more money than them--the normal 'find a good provider' instincts operate, but now the bar is much higher. Of course, high-powered career men often want someone cute rather than successful. Don't feel too bad for these ladies--they get to complain about it in movies, books, and the sorts of publications that doxx heretical bloggers.
Assortative mating is a thing (and produces lots of previously-impossible matches like the descendants of men who mastered the Talmud and those who mastered the Confucian classics), but it's not absolute.
Honestly, dating's always been hard. Matching out on the long tail is even harder. And it is gendered.
On 1, really? I always thought intelligence was always one of the top 3 things women say they're looking for, and that famously they'd date men as intelligent as them or smarter, which should have worked in his favor on this one thing. Plenty of smart women out there struggling to find a match because of this.
2 - agree, totally. Plus "rich," whether it's high income or assets, is also skewed quite a bit more towards men. None of the men-besides-this-one-friend in my circle even care about a potential date's career / income / assets, it's too strong a filter and doesn't really matter if you're bringing them.
On assortative mating not being absolute, I'm not sure - the single biggest thing that I took from Greg Clark's The Son Also Rises was that assortative mating must be an *impossibly* intensely optimized thing (for the many trends and degrees of achievement in the book to be true hundreds of years later in the same lineages), and my own observations have shown me that pretty much everyone tries very hard to maximize the quality of long term mates (and this post is specifically about why even with that extremely strong drive, the best that multi-SD-advantaged men, men who are above and beyond even the 6/6/6 criteria you mention, always end up settling with basically average women).
I mean, the women in 3 are doing exactly that - trying very hard to optimize that mate quality, and complaining about how hard it is, right?
On it being gendered, that's exactly what I'd love to see data for - we've all heard complaints from women in 3), and smart women who will only date "as smart or smarter" men...why then did my friends (and myself) struggle so much finding somebody comparable?
I'd bet this boils down to a "looks and age" thing conjoined with "all the good ones are off the market," honestly. In my experience, looks are basically always optimized, usually first (and especially now that all apps or picture-optimized or pictures-exclusively when swiping).
Men who can do so strongly optimize looks and age (and per Christian Rudder, women famously strongly optimize looks, with 80% of men not even being considered because of it), and if those are near the top of an optimization list of most people, despite IQ being positively correlated with looks / height / whatever it's simply not enough. Any woman with multiple positives pairs up sooner and stays off the market, and the ones without looks end up endlessly optimizing for "smarter AND better career AND more income" etc forever and end up complaining as per 3) above.
Maybe my experience is highly nonstandard here, but the idea of optimising for traits is wildly outside of my dating experience. My dating success (I'm now happily married with two children) is essentially entirely related to me making other people feel good about themselves, calm, safe, and listened to.
I had a woman ask me out on the spot when in university when she saw me share two out of my three Reese's cups with people I happened to run into, with the explicit reasoning "that's the kind of guy I want to be with". My now wife, objectively much higher quality than me based on the types of traits you list above, similarly asked me to marry her based on those traits.
Maybe the real solution to your friend's conundrum is that the highest quality women are smart enough to
1) not faff around 'optimising'
2) lock good men (here I mean kind, loyal, and emotionally stable) down in their twenties, when they are relatively undervalued
At least, I'd bet your approach is closer to how the median person would think of and describe it.
We are a bunch of highly-selected, overly-analytical, male-skewed,STEM weirdos here on SSC overall, though, who probably don't subscribe to or think of the process that way in the main.
An optimization process is still an optimization process though, regardless of what it feels like from the inside, or how you choose to describe it, and assortative mating is definitely strongly optimized. I would happily bet that nearly ALL women, and ESPECIALLY the "highest quality" women do indeed "faff around optimizing" if we could operationalize it, even if they might not think that way.
But we don't really need to - because we see people of general qualities pairing off on average. Attractive celebrities with attractive celebrities, rich people with attractive people, smart people with smart people, etc.
I am glad for you that you didn't have to try very hard (or at all, seemingly), due to maxing out on the Generosity characteristic (or whatever your described advantage amounts to). Congrats!
1. So you are aware women don't always answer truthfully when asked what they find attractive, and may even be fooling themselves? (I mean, men aren't totally truthful either, but everyone from feminists to redpillers knows beauty is the big thing so there's not much point lying.) I'm totally sure there are *some* women who find intelligence attractive, but usually they tend to be women in more cerebral fields for whom that's their most attractive attribute--and then it winds up being a dominance thing. That and they also want them to be charming, etc., when most of the small group of men smarter than them are kind of awkward.
2. I mean, yes, it is a thing, but Clark is on the level of 'banker marries banker and farmer marries farmer' (wife in earlier era), not 'Nobel laureate marries Nobel laureate'. Marriage was historically about wealth and property, which is why you did see and do see the top tier in *wealth* pairing off--royalty were contracting political marriages all the time.
And your friends don't settle with *average* women--you said he paired off with someone 1-2 SD above the norm in various things, which is abnormally high as stuff isn't necessarily correlated. A cute pediatrician at a community hospital is still much smarter than most people.
The underlying question your friend is asking is, "I'm in the top 0.1% of attractiveness, why can't I find someone in the top 0.1% of attractiveness?" The unpleasant answer is, "You're not in the top 0.1% of attractiveness." It's similar to the situation the career women below are in, albeit less severe--the thing you worked for all your life isn't what brings the opposite sex in to the greatest degree. Of course, he *is* in the top 1% of wealth (and height), so he had better choices than a lot of guys. His wife isn't *ugly* or *dumb* from what you say, she's smart and cute, just not brilliant and smoking hot.
Also if you optimize for one thing you often don't get the other--Bezos dumped his wife for a lady who isn't that bright, and Zuck's wife isn't that cute, though she is very bright (got into Harvard Med as an Asian).
I suspect, again, he's a dork, which those 'always looking for smarter women' don't want, they want witty and charming on top of it--Voltaire, not Einstein.
3. Data in the modern era is limited due to the difficulty of publishing anything politically incorrect, but even the deeply offended Wikipedia article on fertility and intelligence basically admits a higher IQ depresses women's fertility:
It seems to me that men who are 2-3 SD above average and looks and intelligence are likely to do well, *unless* they are walking around preoccupied with how many SD's they have on the average person, and how many motherfucking SD's the woman they're on a date with have. I can't begin to tell you what a ugly, narcissistic configuration that would strike most people as being. It would strike *me* that way, and I would probably fare OK on whatever subtle probes or playful tests Mr. 3 SD administers ("I heard a fun thought puzzle the other day. Want to try it? Just for fun!").
You think people can't pick up on tests like that? Here's a story for you. I once went on a hike with a guy a friend had introduced me to. It was basically a first date, though we didn't call it that. Being an outdoorsman was a big part of his identify. For me it was an interest I was just getting into. So not far into the hike was a place where the trail crossed a little stream, and the only easy way to cross was to walk on a tree trunk spanning the 10 foot gap. So bloke was in front of me, and crossed first, walking fast and coffidently. When it was my turn, I hesitated about doing it. It was not a very thick tree trunk, and I wasn't able to estimate how difficult it would be to keep my balance, And the fall to the stream bed was about 8 feet, and it was full of round slippery boulders, so it would have been a really bad, ankle-twisting landing. Bloke didn't say a word, just watched me from his side of the gap. So I went ahead and crossed, though not very fast or confidently. And I looked at bloke and thought, "fuck you buddy, for putting me in a situation where I had to choose between flunking and risking a broken ankle." I may have passed his test, though not with flying colors, but he had flunked being humane, friendly and reasonable in my book.
That's more than just obnoxious, that's actually dangerous. Dang. I've played power games but only with people I knew were into it beforehand and never where any actual risk was involved.
a. Women and men on average value somewhat different things, which is why (among other things) that it's easier for a 40 year old man to be seen as very attractive by a 25 year old woman than for a 40 year old woman to be seen as very attractive by a 25 year old man.
b. I think on most traits, Men have a wider distribution than women, so at both ends of the distribution, you're likely to find more men than women. More men than women will be geniuses, more men than women will be dunces, etc. That probably has interesting effects wrt assortative mating at the top and bottom.
c. For whatever reasons (maybe social, maybe biological, maybe a mix), most women really prefer a man who is taller and more financially/career successful than they are, and most men prefer to be taller/more successful than their wives. That isn't always true, and I know some apparently very happy couples where the wife is taller or the wife is the main moneymaker, but they're unusual.
a. You do see more of the reverse age-gap marriages these days, but it's still rarer; biology's atavistic hand always gets involved. So I agree.
b. I've heard that, wonder if it's true or if it just doesn't make as much sense given female life schedules to invest 90 hours a week in your career, so you have fewer at the top.
> It's been my personal experience in my social circles that a man with several SD advantages in multiple areas will typically end up with a basically average woman
Or vice versa, presumably. One can have too much of a good thing though, in that if both parents are brilliant intellects then their offspring may well be mentally unstable or downright mad!
Something you're not taking into consideration is that if you search for and find and marry some brilliant and beautiful woman whom you see as your equal, the kids you have are going to grow up to be other people and they will bust you for your bullshit. Your smart and handsome teenage son will tell you that his mom thinks you never loved her, you just married her because she was a physicist and you wanted her high IQ genes. He'll ask you, "how would you have felt about me if I was like Jeremy?" [Jeremy is your son's best friend. He's an excellent artist, but a so-so student and not IQ-smart. His IQ is probably about 115.]. He'll say "Janine [his sister] thinks she's a disappointment because she's not into academics, just really good at games, and she didn't turn out pretty like Mom. Actually, Dad, she looks like you."
"Your smart and handsome teenage son will tell you that his mom thinks you never loved her, you just married her because she was a physicist and you wanted her high IQ genes."
I think you're projecting your own system of ethics onto this hypothetical kid...
I think it's pretty plausible., & I have a pretty good data set. Not only have I parented a teen, I also listen to people talk about their parents every single day (I'm a psychologist & psychotherapist). Adolescence is a tumultuous time, and most kids go through periods of being quite angry and unhappy and openly criticizing their parents. And after 15 years or so of living with you, teens generally have your number, and will spew quite valid criticisms of you in angry confrontations. Might that kid go after his dad for other bullshit besides his narcissistic investment his and his family's total SD score? Yes. But the thing about being over-invested in these measurables is that it is likely to play out in a way that involves how cared about various people in the family feel, and all kids a very attuned to the love and loyalty or lack thereof of their family members. So it's likely that whatever criticisms the kid launches will have to do with that. One of my objections to somebody's being determined to find a mate with a high IQ is that it suggests that the person would not be able to love and deeply commit to someone who fell short in that area. So say the man finds & marries a woman who has a 170 IQ,, same as him. It is not a bit unlikely that one or more of his children will be nowhere near as IQ-smart as the parents. Will this dad be able to love that kid? If his love is muted by his disappointment, I guarantee you the kid will have sensed that.
I am female, and probably 3 SD out on a couple things, and I never had an agenda of finding a man whose SD portfolio was equivalent to mine. I was drawn to men who enjoyed my company, appreciated my quirks, sympathized when I was sad, made me laugh and introduced me to new things. Why the fuck look for someone who is Best of Breed, and might give you and them a combined gene pool likely to produce children who are Best of Show? https://i.imgur.com/eXY1bCA.png
Jokes aside, this is probably closest to it; people find someone they like, not necessarily engage in a eugenics breeding program. Of course those things affect attraction, but most people aren't *that* picky. I think this is more of a disease of the highly successful who get demanding and want the best of everything.
I agree. It's an idea of people who want the best of everything, but have simplistic and frankly kind of dumb ideas of what constitutes the best. (Trump's golden toilet is an example of the same kind of dumbness). There are lots of qualities that make someone a great mate beside their being extraordinary on certain measurables: They really get you. They bring out the best in you. They are resilient. They are flexible thinkers with high ideational fluency. They are perceptive about things you are not. They are able to enjoy things you do not, and can teach you how to enjoy backpacking or art museums or Salsa dancing or whatever. They make you laugh your ass off. They are delightful sexual partners.
I don't think I could have been seriously romantically involved with someone who wasn't pretty smart--I'd get bored. And having a smart wife is a good way to increase your chances of having smart kids.
OTOH, you're looking for someone you want to make a life and raise a family with, so intelligence is necessary but not sufficient. Smart with no sexual chemistry or smart with fundamentally different values about how to live life would both probably make for a not-so-great marriage.
Right, but you weren't obsessed with picking someone with an IQ of 145. And lots of people don't value intelligence at all--how many people here apart from Performative Bafflement's friend are obsessed with the athleticism of their partners? But as you and Eremolalos say, sexual chemistry and compatible values are a much bigger deal.
I think this is just a framing thing putting you off, literally *everybody* tries to maximize the quality of their mate, on whatever metrics are important to them.
I personally think optimizing on career / income / wealth is silly, and have never done it, and mainly brought them up because my friend *was* trying to match on them, and they're easy to measure and verify "yeah, actually, I can confidently say somebody is 1,2,3 SD out on this."
Of course other metrics are important (or more important) than those things for a good relationship, but EVERYBODY tries to maximally assort their mating, and find the best mate they can, regardless of whether they frame it in SD's or deciles or not.
Actually not everybody tries to pick someone whose traits they think are great. There are plenty of people whose self-esteem has taken such a beating that they do not feel entitled to a mate with qualities they think are great -- they just say yes to the first person who offers. And then some people's choices are dominated by a single trait in a way that leads to bad pairings. For instance, people who have been abused as children often pick a mate whose most notable quality is that they are kind and not the least bit violent, but they don't give consideration to other qualities they in fact care about because the will-never-hit-me criterion looms so large. But I agree that people who are not burdened by the consequences of really bad early experiences do try to find someone who is ideal by their standards.
Hoo - quite a downer to contemplate. But yes, you're totally right, some people are burdened enough that they don't do this. Some similarly burdened people probably don't believe in or pursue happiness itself. I honestly admire you for doing your best to help these people.
For a start, your friend is *not* " a man with several SD advantages in multiple areas" if "(you've) just described a quarter of Silicon Valley men".
If a lot of men share those same attributes, then those are average, not stand-out traits. That's how it works: the women can choose from a relatively plentiful supply of tall, smart, handsome, relatively well-off vegan guys who love to climb and hike. He's not standing out there in the market.
As for tall etc. women - if he's taller than the average (6' 4") and wants a woman of the same relative height, he's not going to find one easily; going by this, the average height for American men is 5' 9" and for American women is 5' 3"/4". This strikes me as rather on the short side, but I suppose in a large enough population you'll have very tall and very short people so bringing down the average:
"In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Roughly 1% of US women are 6 feet tall or taller. The equivalent height cutoff for US men (only 1% of population taller) is about 6ʹ4″."
So if your friend is looking for a woman at least 6' tall, he's looking for 1% of the entire female population of the USA. It sounds rather like the "fast, good or cheap" problem: you can have it fast and cheap, you can have it fast and good, or you can have it good and cheap, but you can't have all three.
If he wants tall AND smart at that level AND sporty AND beautiful etc. he's looking for a tantalum needle in an entire Kansas plain of haystacks.
Out of curiosity, if your mother is this tall smart model, what is your father like? Is he too outstanding in several fields at 3 SD, or is he just 'average'?
Oh, totally. The SV thing was more a joking aside, and was also referring to base rates and demographic skews (West Coast way more male-skewed and therefore competitive for men dating than East Coast). But your overall point totally stands, at whatever level is appropriate. I jokingly posited he would only be top 25% in SV vs the (presumably) top .03^5 he'd be most other places in America, but I think the point you're making stands.
If he was merely top decile somewhere, he could only expect to find a top decile match - but I doubt he (or similarly qualified men) would even be able to do that, given what I've seen.
And I definitely agree he was looking for a needle in a haystack, that's why we were all laughing at his obduracy in holding out for years.
And yeah, my dad is pretty great. Tall, Golden Gloves champ, off the charts discipline and work ethic, from rural poverty to serial entrepreneur in multiple industries who's never had a boss or "real" job, authored 3 books, hobbyist aviator with 5000 flying hours and an ATP and has owned and flown everything from Cessnas to King Airs and Lears, can fix or create just about anything, etc.
Honestly, I envy my parents' relationship, they're one of the few genuinely good and happy and enduring marriages I've ever seen.
Honestly, I think they're nerds. Women hate nerds.
I think it's a cultural thing--Asian women seem to do so much less, and starting to read Three Kingdoms, it seems to go back a way. For a historical novel about warfare, there's about 1/5 swordplay and archery, 2/5 let's trick the other guy into attacking us at the wrong time or place while he's trying to trick us into doing the same thing, and 2/5 let's send a letter to some other guy to get him to attack this guy who's bothering me. Most of the success seems to come from having the right advisors and picking your battles. And Zhuge Liang hasn't even showed up yet.
(Well, more 1-2-1, but the sum of those numbers is bad luck.)
Yeah, a bunch of people have played the "STEM Phd?? Neeeerrrrrrdd!" card in here - a delightfully surprising outcome given Scott's median reader / commenter. :-P
Even better, since we pretty much all met and started our friendship in the same gym picking up very heavy pieces of metal - lifting bro's in the Church of Iron. But I'm not gonna lie, you can say the word "nerd" and make it stick to most of us, and we'll cheerfully admit it.
How is Three Kingdoms, btw? I've read a few Roman warfare books (Caesar's Gallic campaigns, Agrippa's campaigns), two on Genghis Khan's campaigns, and a few about Alexander the Great's campaigns, are they at all similar, or is it more court intrigue and subtle cleverness stuff?
Oh, that's the thing. It's Scott's median reader/commenter, his average reader/commenter, his modal reader/commenter, and probably everyone within 1 standard deviation of the mean. This isn't the outgroup making fun of nerds, this is the ingroup making fun of our own situation, because we know how it is. ;)
There's quite a bit of court intrigue and subtle cleverness; there's also swordfights and archery, some even with detail, but the balance definitely leans toward then cloak-and-dagger stuff. Part of the fun for me is the random cultural stuff; you have definitely Chinese stuff like Cao Cao starting to threaten Liu Bei by talking about the ecology of dragons, but you also have stuff like Zhang Fei getting drunk and whipping a soldier who won't get drunk with him that could happen anywhere. If you've read Caesar and Agrippa, Genghis Khan, and Alexander the Great, well, you'll probably get even *more* out of it than I did. There is a *lot* of battlefield maneuvering and strategy, and even my untrained eye caught a few things straight out of Sun Tzu (who, of course, all these people would have read!) I'm reading it as part of broadening my literary base and trying to make myself less painfully honest, but if you're a serious student of war you should read *something* Chinese, it is a major world culture and one our nation is likely to at least be competing with in the future. I'm warning you though: it's long.
For all that I spent years going back and forth to China for business, I know shamefully little about the (very deep) history and cultural history there, topping out at about Opium Wars / Boxer Rebellion / Communist Revolution / GLF / Deng Xiaoping opening / Hu Jintao / Xi Jinping, which is all pretty recent.
I don't think this is strictly a matching problem. Many important traits are desirable across the board, e.g. both attractive and unattractive people want an attractive mate, both smart and stupid people want an intelligent mate, so a 60th percentile person seeking a 60th percentile person will have a much easier time finding a suitable 60th percentile mate than a 99th percentile person will finding a 99th percentile mate, since the latter is in demand for everyone, and is thus much more likely to end up matching with a lower percentile mate for circumstantial or idiosyncratic reasons.
Do they actually, though, in data anywhere? Genuinely curious here - Scott's post on generationally great families seems to suggest there's at least a subset of elites that DO manage not to settle.
Yes, settling is the norm in the small pops I've seen personally, but I'm pretty curious how prevalent it is more widely, and whether there is in fact a gender skew on which gender settles more, due to dispersion at the long tails.
Or maybe it's all genuinely hard and symmetric, and the great families are the handful of families reliably succeeding at the genuinely hard problem.
i dont know elites, but i think the problem is these men want equality in traits but don't want equality otherwise. The wife is expected to be support and to sacrifice in the relationship. This means the woman has a value premium compared to a man, no matter the status.
Temagami below described the perfect "support" wife, which i wager a lot of elites need to make things like having kids even work, or enabling their "masters of the universe" lifestyles. A wife who also is working 60 + hour weeks chasing her own vision is not going to easily be able to do that and may even look for a support husband which is vanishingly rare too.
so women will always have a premium over men unless the relationship is much more tenuous. the men pay the price to be happier, i guess.
Yeah, this is a great point too - I've never personally optimized on career, income, wealth, or educational attainment, and none of my friends in the same boat did either, except this one friend.
That's part of why we would laugh when he was puzzled about how hard it was. But absolutely, wanting somebody young enough to have kids AND a willingness to have however many kids AND all the other stuff is ridiculous, for sure. But you could maybe expect to find 1-2 SD in looks AND kindness AND mutual sexual compatibility AND...etc in this pop, and you just can't empirically.
those aren't population based traits except for looks?
i mean i take your friend as asking why he can't find same career, educational, wealth, intellectual, and looks based traits because elites are definitely on a curve there but kindness or sexual compatibility? some things are individual traits really or relationships between people.
I think ultimately you could frame nearly anything as a population-based trait - after all, there's definitely a distribution of "kindness" or "cooking skill" or whatever in any given group, it's just your own life experiences or your own local population of known people ranked by decile. So if you can look at somebody and judge them as at least top 10% kindness (or whatever other trait), that's close enough to being 1-2SD out on that trait to work.
^ Came here to say this. If the guy in question wants kids, then it's unlikely that women with the same traits will want to sacrifice their career, I know I sure as heck don't.
I'm one of the lucky ones with a support husband and it's a very nice balance. He's slightly more intelligent and wealthy, whereas I score slightly higher on looks and people skills. He's mostly retired whereas I work a 6 figure job, so we keep each other motivated and emotionally balanced. It's a fantastic deal. The idea of having some stressed out overachiever sounds like no fun to me.
yeah, definitely. A guy really benefits from the emotional support of his wife, and it's harder for us to be able to shift to support because so much value is placed on being a high status earner. The culture would have to change a lot to prevent guys from being seen as failures if they choose to support; girls wear jeans but guys cant wear dresses. tough problem.
I think you may be underestimating how exceptional the women in question are in a couple key, under-researched metrics: openness to and capacity for a (male-)desirable kind of marriage.
Oh, no doubt - I was just delineating areas where I can find actual base rates and know percentiles / SD, and fully agree they're a tiny part of what matters about compatibility and actually having a good relationship.
Which, of course, is probably WHY you can only seem to optimize for 1 or 2 areas in a partner - the other stuff is also important but rare, so that you're lucky to even find the ones with 1 or 2 areas + real compatibility.
When I've back-of-enveloped stuff like personality trait distributions before in past dating conversations with friends, I've always assumed normal distributions, independence, and then a decile threshold - you're looking for top 10%, or top 20% or whatever, in kindness, humor, intangibles, etc.
It's pretty funny where non-settlers end up. I had a female friend who, when you calculate the incidence and confluence of all the traits she wanted to optimize on, wanted something like a 1-in-10 billion man.
I literally don't know and couldn't find any info like this, and is why I asked this here - I figured the SSC crowd has one of the best chances of having / knowing women like this, and could at least see some anecdotal evidence.
Specifically, if greater dispersion amongst genders in the traits being mentioned is true, then it's not symmetrical and the anecdotal evidence should point towards women like this being able to find similar or better matches at higher rates.
But I'm genuinely curious about the answer either way, and appreciate any anecdotes or data anyone has to offer.
Presumably you can just look up a few hyper-accomplished and see who they married to get a matching set of anecdotes. Hedy Lamarr or Mayim Bialik or whoever.
Actors of both sexes tend to have histrionic (duh) personality types and tend to have more unstable marriages as a result--how many long-term celebrity marriages do you know?
Lamarr got married 6 times and wound up dying in seclusion.
Bialik is alive, so I won't comment.
Going to the scientists...
Marie Curie actually seems to have married an intellectual equal and managed to have a bunch of kids before dying from playing with radioactivity.
Rosalind Franklin died alone, though she might have been handicapped by the sexism of the era.
Lynn Margulis married twice, both scientists, and said you couldn't be a good wife, good mother, and a first-class scientist--not enough hours in the day.
I suspect if you want to do first-class work you either stay single or have someone supporting you.
I think this is generally true--being at the absolute peak of anything involves making tradeoffs in all the other areas of your life. If two first-rate scientists get married, I think the ideal situation would involve having enough money to pay people to do the less important stuff like keeping house and cooking and changing diapers, so the high-value time of the couple can be spent on the important stuff.
Yes, me and my wife. I’m like your friend. My wife is 2 SD above average in beauty, skill with children, social ease, cooking, fashion sense, creativity, and sexual chemistry with me. These are just as extraordinary as all the traits you listed, and I would argue much more important when considering a wife.
Many of the ways women can be extraordinary do not fit on a resume. I met Thorpe’s wife many years ago. Your characterization of her is utterly ridiculous and explains why you are confused. Sorry, but it’s actually a little upsetting seeing such a magnificent woman described in such a way.
Apologies, I've of course never met her, and was only going by Wikipedia's descriptions and the descriptions in A Man for All Markets.
In what ways and to what estimated degrees was she extraordinary, I'd love to hear it.
I totally agree with you that the attributes you list are almost certainly more important than the usual career / income / education level etc in terms of being a good partner - it's just those are the ones it's easy to find base rates for, and actually know the percentile you and other people are at.
There's a usual claim that men have more variability than women, so there are more men at both tails of the bell curve, and women tend to be closer to the middle.
Yeah, I think this is a good point and is probably a part of it. I've tried to find actual measures of the dispersion between the genders, and can't come up with any quantified measures that seem to significantly skew it.
The few I found, in IQ the SD in men is 15 vs 14 in women - the male variance in math test scores is 10-20% higher than women's - in height, the SD in men is 3 inches vs 2.5 inches in women - males are roughly 10x more likely to be psychopaths. As far as education level goes, more women than men get both Masters and Phd's, so that should actually be in favor.
None of these seem terribly differentiating or skewed in the base pop, at least enough to cause a great degree of difficulty, but it's also really hard to find any actual measures of dispersion, and I'd assume the actual dispersion is higher than measured, or notable when quantified for the things we haven't tried to quantify.
Oh, found a few more measures of dispersion - for US Phd holders, men are 24% higher in income than women (difference of about $20k).
There are still sig skews in STEM Ph'ds - about 60/40 men.
There are definitely significant "athleticism" skews:
For ranked or professional athletes, they are 16.4% women and 83.6% men, so pretty significant skew in elite athletes, but couldn't find anything more realistic like gender distribution in local meets / competitions.
For Olympians, it's a pretty steady trend from 1948 to 2000 or so, with men being 95%+ of Olympians in the earlier years, and slowly descending to ~2/3 in 2000 (after that, there were explicit efforts by IOC to make it 50/50, and they're projecting the next Olympics will be 50/50).
For triathletes, men are historically 80% of triathletes, and despite some pretty significant efforts by various grant makers and athletic bodies, USA Triathlon's current membership is still only 39% women, and this goes way down in favor of men with ages above 40.
For Obstacle Course Races, women are about 30% participation, with this number going down the more competitive the OCR.
For rock climbing, one source claims it's a 60/40 split in favor of men, and Statista has it 75/25 men.
PB, thanks for posting this (and thanks, Nancy, for bringing it up).
I've wondered for a while now if the difference was in strategies, not base capability, i.e. the warriors vs worriers model: standing out vs fitting in. When I was young, I observed that very smart and sub-average girls acted very similarly except under close observation, whereas the expressed range of male intelligence was staggering. I have a hard time believing anyone who doesn't report having known many more incredibly and exasperatingly stupid men (or deeply ugly and awkward men) than female counterparts.
It's an interesting idea, in my experience it's definitely in men's interest to "peacock" and have flamboyant or overt displays of wherever they had noticeable SD advantages over baseline. Certainly when I was doing dating profile optimization, I saw noticeable differences in quantity of responses / dates with pics and profiles doing more of this. I've heard similar thoughts from my friends. The sad part is, quantity goes up, but quality probably goes down in aggregate - it seems to cast a broader net, and bring in more "casuals" for lack of a better term.
In a rational world, peacocking would work out because the noticeably smart / whatever women would be preferentially attracted to and message or approach the men - but of course, we don't live in that world. In a "men pursue" scenario, with subtler signals from women, I can absolutely see a lot of false positives and negatives skewing somebody to think "there are no extraordinary women" even if they might actually exist at higher rates than perceived.
And now that no text-heavy dating platforms exist, it's all pictures anyways, so trying to match on intelligence / humor / non-visual attributes has become correspondingly harder.
Thank you. I've seen so much talk about greater variation among men that it's good to see someone looking into the details. Maybe there isn't very much there.
Interestingly, if the dispersion thing IS true, then it actually is skewed - an extraordinary woman will have a much greater chance of finding an equal-or-better mate vs an extraordinary man, due to base rates on the long tail.
If you are 2 SD out then you're ~3% of the population on that metric. If you're 2 SD out on multiple metrics then you're 3%*3%*3%... etc of the population. Even taking into account these are correlated factors, there is a vanishingly small dating pool of "equals." Assuming 2SD up in attractiveness/fitness, positive social attributes (prosociality, charm, reliability, honesty, etc), and wealth, and these aren't correlated (incorrect, but whatever), and are the only traits that matter (also incorrect, but whatever), then there'd be like 8k people in the whole USA with those traits, probably ~half of whom are already married. (Probably even more. Good partners get held onto, while bad partners get tossed around, almost by definition.)
Yeah, both your points are definitely part of it. Of course as you point out, you can't assume independence in traits, and your "8k in the whole US" assumes a broad dispersion across the US, when people like this are almost certainly abnormally concentrated in a handful of large coastal cities. But even flexing for those two things, you probably have a candidate pool of ~20-30k in a given MSA of 5-20M, and that's assuming equal distributions rather than more men in the long tail.
Then demographics come in - filtering on any sort of career or degree obviously skews your pop older (and probably already matched, as you point out), so you have to carve out the much smaller "single and appropriate age" band.
So yeah, I guess base rates alone account for most of it, but this is why I'm curious if women in this position settle as often as men. It would be the distinguishing crux on whether base distribution dispersion amongst males vs females makes a difference, and whether it is symmetric or gender skewed overall.
The obvious answer why they match with people less extraordinary then themselves is regression towards the mean. You have to put in a ton of work and effort to find the TINY number of people who are as extraordinary and also compatible - if they even exist.
Sadly, there isn't really someone out there for everyone. Anyone who is extraordinary and not just merely above average should expect to settle (on those metrics) in average.
Well, he dated many different women a month for several years, and probably swiped on a 10-50x bigger pool than he dated, so he definitely evaluated a lot of candidates, even if only a shallow "read a profile and swipe" way. I think it's just genuinely hard.
Several years ago, I actually calculated the answer to the Secretary Problem of finding a partner who was where I wanted in demographics and various attributes, and came up with having to date something like 1000 people and swipe about 10x that to have more than a 2/3 chance of finding somebody.
I dated 2-3 different people a week for a year and a half, and eventually caved and settled because dating, and swiping and chatting enough to maintain that dating pipeline, was so much effort, and even the filtered-population ending with in-person dates were so far from ideal, that I figured it wasn't time well invested to keep going.
Now *why* it's so hard is what I was curious about, and I think it's a combination of Nancy Lebovitz' point about greater dispersion in distributions and Crimson Wool's point about base rates and mate-quality capture dynamics.
Still curious about whether it's symmetric or gender-skewed though - if male vs female dispersion on the tails is true, it would be skewed.
Am curious about what "settling" or giving up felt like. What qualities did you compromise on and do you feel like you'd be significantly happier if your partner had those traits? Additionally what traits did you ultimately select for? I feel like settling would feel somewhat cold? I imagine viewing your S/O as inferior or unfitting would be detrimental to the both of you
Do you have a close friend, parent, sibling, or child who you're better than on many measures? Do you love them any less? Do you think of them as inferior all the time, or even at all? Of course not!
Regardless of our attributes, we are all people at the core, who want to avoid suffering, and to live the best lives we can, and we all love and care about the people we choose to befriend, date, or lovingly associate with.
But if you have any sort of dedication or tendency to actually viewing things as they are, you incontrovertibly know you're better on however many measures if you think about it. It's not like you think about it all the time, and burn with rage for having to associate with all these droogs and inferiors or whatever. But a fact is a fact.
I'd prefer not to go into the 2 things I personally optimize for, and the corresponding other things I'm compromising on, in a public forum. If you're really curious and there are direct messages or something here, feel free to reach out.
But it's definitely not a viewing / feeling your SO or loved ones are inferior sort of thing at all, any less than you'd view a friend / sibling / child who is worse than you on several metrics as inferior and unworthy of your love / attention.
The interface for comments is getting worse I think. Not only is "new comment" repeating comments I've seen, I think it's skipping comments I haven't seen.
And using "continue thread" opens a new window with just that thread and destroys the inadequate information I can get from "new reply". The way that's gotten worse is I think it's showing up after fewer layers of nesting.
I've got pycea's ACX aid, but I don't know how to apply it.
Each time I post a comment, Substack trundles through a couple of profile set up screens. Evidently my profile is incomplete, or something not set which it expects to be, but I can't for the life of me see what.
Pycea's ACX extension has a feature that lets you manually set the cutoff for "new" comments, which I use when Substack's interface messes up my "new comment" threshold. It's called "New comment time range". Just click on the icon, and it should be about halfway down?
Yeah, it's also skipping comments I haven't seen. Also, it used to be that clicking on a notification that someone had responded to your comment took you to your comment. Now it takes you to the top of the thread that you comment's on.
New York politics suggests taxing all stock transactions every once in a while. If that ever actually passed, how hard would it be for the stock exchanges to just reincorporate in New Jersey? The actual physical servers are all already there anyway.
If I have a task to get done that's intellectually challenging and fun but I also have something boring that I need to finish for work, I end up working on neither and waste time doom-scrolling instead. As a conscientious worker, I can’t give myself permission to work on the fun stuff while there is important stuff to get done.
I think the same thing happens at the level of life events: I'm held back from emigrating to California because of my social obligations in suburban London.
Bloody hell tell me about it. I've been stuck on the same tiny little job since before Christmas. The task should be easy. It's the last blocker left before I can move on to the fun stuff. It's probably not even that hard! But every time I go to look at it, my eyes slide right off the page, I spend the rest of the day feeling guilty and stressed, and now I'm entering the New Year and the bastard thing is still on my plate...
I'd suggest we trade. We'd probably find each other's tasks easy. Except the amount of explanation and prior knowledge required is many times larger than the actual job.
Hey, screw our work - let's procrastinate by building a site where procrastinators can swap nemesis, mental-block tasks with each other.
It actually might work for you and ragged clown to make a pact, where you each make a commitment regarding the procrastinated tasks, specifying you'll put in a certain number of hours, or accomplish certain things, on a specified date.
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!")
So what happened there is the child drilled a straight borehole down through concept-space. That's great, but they missed untold wealths of both theoretical and practical knowledge branching off on all sides.
For eg, if the child had asked, "but why do the electrons make the light shine?", 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?
NB: this is re-posted from the last Open Thread, and since there was a some friction last time, let me clarify that this is an armchair problem, I am not actually trapped in a room nor am I looking for child rearing advice, the "child" in question is just a character and you can think of it as the "asker" if that makes things easier.
Ever think about trusting that the kid knows instinctively how to fill its own brain? God damn rationalists re-inventing everything constantly, crowing that they're the only adults in the room because they're the living embodiment of this comic: https://xkcd.com/793/
You hated the answers you got on the last open thread. Your account of the adult/child interaction gets people off track. I think you should ask it another way. What if you started your question this way: You are getting a tour of a very alien alien world from an alien who speaks English and can answer any question but has no ability to grasp your deep disorientation and explain things in a way that's helpful. The world is so alien that you can't tell which things you see are natural and which constructed by aliens, which things are alive and which mechanical, which common and which rare, much less identify familiar categories like nourishment, danger, conflict, cooperation, weather, etc. Around you are some other aliens, some moving fast and some stationary, various things in motion, some holes with gases coming out of them . . . Is there an optimal approach to asking questions that will increase your understanding the alien world?
> You hated the answers you got on the last open thread. Your account of the adult/child interaction gets people off track.
Enough people seem to understand it well enough. I'd rather write something slightly quirky that makes sense to people already on my wavelength, than sacrifice that by writing defensively against misconstruction or pedantry from people who aren't.
Being charitable, I had asked a separate question that *was* related to child-rearing in the last Open Thread, and Substack's performance is such dogshit that it's actively hard to read comprehensively. So those people could easily have had a higher prior on that interpretation than they would have done if able to easily read the question in isolation.
I wouldn't have engaged the mad lady who ran in shouting "Piffle!" (Love you Deiseach!) if I hadn't had a sleeping baby on one arm rendering me unable to do anything except sit there on the internet, and I hope I would have displayed a lot less impatience if said baby had instead chosen to sleep through the night. I won't be repeating the exercise with Arnold Fare who posted after you, for example.
Your alternative question is a different one, but if it turns up interesting avenues to explore then I'm all for it.
The addition of disorientation and danger/survival concerns puts me in mind of the exploration/exploitation metaphor, where the world is a big murky landscape and you can either choose to venture out into the unknown, or sit there working the "safe" land you know already.
What's your address and do you and the child have enough water? Is there a toilet? Help is on the way!
Seriously though I think the actual problem is a psychological one of why it is that people ask questions. Yudkowsky hints at this in such classics as "avoiding your belief's real weak points" and the one about not just stopping at answers that sound good without also understanding them. But there are other ways in which question-asking can be flawed. Slavoj Zizek, paraphrasing, puts one of them this way:
"Bodenheimer articulates this dimension apropos of the child's question, to the father: 'Father, why is the sky blue?' - the child is not really interested in the sky as such; the real stake of the question is to expose father's impotence, his helplessness in the face of the hard fact that the sky is blue, his incapacity to substantiate this fact, to present the whole chain of reasons leading to it. The blue of the sky thus becomes not only the father's problem, but in a way even his fault: 'The sky is blue, and you're just staring at it like an idiot, incapable of doing anything about it!' A question, even ifit refers only to a given state of things, always makes the subject formally responsible for it, although only in a negative way - responsible, that is, for his impotence in the face of this fact."
I think Zizek has a horrible and unlikely framing. My guess is that when a child is doing persistent questioning without seeming to absorb the answers, it's an effort at socializing-- the child wants a response and attention, but isn't more aggressive than that.
I'd say it depends on the family in question. The preceding passage was about how the way we address questions to children is condemnatory: "where were you doing?" assumes the child's guilt until proven innocent (and even then the stain remains). When that child then asks a parent impossible 'why' questions, it's reasonable to see in this an adapted form of a learned behavior. Hence why such parents respond with annoyance: "Don't ask stupid questions" says a man who has no idea what rayleigh scattering is and feels subtly called out.
Sounds to me like you’d just want the child to do a breadth-first search of the concept tree rather than a depth-first search. Is that about what you’re getting at?
Yes, but this question is also about nailing down the nature of the concept tree itself. If you're thinking of a Wikipedia-like graph of nodes consisting of a concept name and a description written in terms of other concepts, you can answer "What is X?" questions fine, but you have no machinery with which to reason about "how?" or "why?" questions.
Unlike "What is X?", which takes only the one parameter X, the questions "How does X do Y?" or "Why does X mean Z?" involve more information, and I was interested in following that line of thought a bit further.
"Understanding" consists of tree-traversal. And the tree of knowledge is to be judged by the fruit it bears.
The 7 classical Liberals Arts used to consist of a Trivium and a Quadrivium. The Trivium is comprised of 3 levels: Grammar (basic jargon); Logic (theoretical modeling); and Rhetoric (practical application).
The kid is stuck on the Grammar level. They might glean what certain nodes correspond to in meatspace. But they sure won't be swinging like Tarzan.
The "best" algorithm probably depends on the nature of the topic. And in any case, the depth of the kid's understanding will probably be determined not by the algorithm, but by how motivated they are to explore, and the nature of the problem they're trying to solve.
Yeah, I think this is an illuminating way to frame it - it seems to me with how categorization works, there's essentially a fixed amount of concepts in a concept tree you want to be explored.
But if there's a fixed amount of nodes in the tree, each of which must be traversed, I don't think breadth-first vs depth-first matters much, and the only difference would be differences in neural architectures or individual learning styles in terms of being able to tie all the nodes together in an overarching schema.
Hmm, it seems to me that asking the right questions is what humans have been learning to do for a very long time. I don't think there has to be any sort of algorithm. And in many cases we can ask questions which we are not able to answer yet. We need technology (or the answer to other questions) before some said question becomes meaningful. (that we can hope to answer it.)
How did life start? We can't answer that question yet.
What about some kind of ontological coordinate system, where "what?", "why?", "how?" etc are the directions.
Jumping off a concept in the "what" direction leads you to other related concepts - exactly like the way Wikipedia articles work.
Jumping off a concept in the "how" direction leads you to explanations of the underlying structures and moving parts.
Jumping off a concept in the "why" direction leads you to reasons and justifications.
The question words have very different "valences". A "what" question has exactly one answer. The question "How does it work?" has one or a small number of answers, and they're probably all useful (except for that one twat who says, "By magic.") The question, "Why does it work?" has many possible answers, from, "Because someone designed it to," to, "Because the heat has to go somewhere, so it ends up expanding the water," to "Because this is the shape that maximises the parameter k0."
So while a "what" question might be basic, a "why" question is clearly in need of some extra definition - there's an intention or context that needs to be provided with a "why?" question, which needs to be defined.
I thought about your question last night, & it seemed to me that the optimal approach depends a lot on the situation. For instance in the game Clue, I'm sure there is an algorithm for asking the questions with the most bang for the buck. But that's a world where you know all the rules, you just don't know the details of this particular instance.
But if a subject is utterly unknown -- like in my example somewhere in this thread of being in an alien world where you understand almost nothing -- it seems to me that you need to start by finding things that fall into categories you understand: alive vs. not; natural vs. made by intelligent beings; common vs rare; important vs. unlikely to have much impact. Some of these categories may turn out to be meaningless in the alien world. You need to start by finding a few categories that are meaningful, and which things are instances of those categories, so that you have an area of solid ground to stand on.
But then there are situations where what you need to do is to identify the bit you do not understand, and ask a clear question about it. For instance somebody might be telling me about making a certain piece of jewelry from copper -- how you cut it, smooth it, shape it, etc. But they keep talking about annealing and work hardening, and I don't know what either of those are. There, all I need to do is ask for explanations of those terms.
I definitely think known and unknown and "solid ground" are good metaphors to start from.
When thrown into an unfamiliar subject - let's say power electronics, for example (and pretend you don't know it already): every concept you encounter - phasors, Johnson complexes, Clarke transforms, reactive power, impedence, concomittance, etc - is completely unknown. To the point where you can't tell which of those words are real things and which I've just made up.
The more you learn, the more of these nonsense words appear - you can read and read and learn all about how these nonsense things relate to each other, but that still means nothing concrete. "A Clarke transform turns three phase axes into two phase axes" makes equal sense if "phase axes" are plotted voltage measurements or cakes on a plate.
It's only when you start seeing words you *do* understand popping up - "voltage", for example - that all the rest can start making sense.
Metaphorically it's like you have an existing edifice of stuff you know and understand, and you have to build out from that. When thrown into the unknown, you construct this big free-floating network of concepts - but no matter how big it gets, that network carries no practical meaning until you can connect it back to the nodes in your home base.
Disclaimer: I feel this won't apply to other people, since it's very specific to my personal history.
I used to be very shy in conversations. I think that playing a musical instrument and performing live with a band in front of a (small) audience was extremely helpful to improve my shyness.
I realized this many years later, it was a very gradual process. I think that performing in public after a ton of rehearsals (so even if you are still nervous your muscle memory does most of the work) gave me a bit of confidence in the fact that I can express something worthy of other people's attention and that was somehow translated to conversations.
This is a little bit of the cart before the horse, but getting married. I never realized it, but 90% of my social anxiety was caused by treating all of my female peers as potential dates. I also put women on a pedestal, but getting married to one made me understand them more and treat them normally.
My confounder is that I might've "memed" myself into being shy, because of second-hand embarrassment that my dad is very much the opposite (maybe bullying and therapy also contributed), but what mostly worked for me was:
* finding out I had (still have) a subconscious feeling that nobody likes me and that talking to / interacting with other people is an imposition of them.
* observing that this was, by most available evidence, not the case post primary school.
* realizing that, even in the cases that it was, minorly inconveniencing other people sometimes is not a terrible price to pay for not being chronically unhappy.
* Whenever I start getting the aforementioned feeling, point out the latter observations.
Practice. I would force myself to out to bars or coffee shops and converse with people. Over time I got more and more used to socializing and also better at it. There's no substitute for experience.
Sorry you probably won't like my answer, but in any case here it goes. I am one of those who wasn't naturally shy -- if anything, I was shameless (as I still am online) -- but came to gradually realize that I should have been shy "in the real world", and this realization has been, even if ploddingly, moving me in the direction of realizing that ideal. This is because, while it is true that social interactions can be tremendously helpful, one needs some basic social and conversational intelligence to extract utility out of it. Those who don't possess it are actually better off being shy.
So what I would recommend is: evaluate your interactions with others quite closely and see what levels of shyness optimize your rewards. Hopefully, as your brain comes to terms with the incentive structure, it will evolve accordingly.
Alcohol. Later realize that the power has always been in you, so you can switch to placebo drinks and just pretend to be drunk.
Practice in low-stake situations, for example find people you have never met before and you are probably never going to meet again.
Get older and realize that you are soon going to die. That puts social fears in perspective.
Generally, get some parts of your life in order, so you know that if you screw up somewhere, you have a safe place you can return to.
Realize that most people are just pretending that they have things under control. Among the actually confident people, 9 out of 10 are merely too stupid to realize how incompetent they are.
There is probably a pill for that; or they will invent one soon after you die.
The difference in height from the first floor of my house to the second is about 13 feet. I can't leap from one floor to the other. But I can easily climb the stairs, making 13 "leaps" of one foot at a time.
I could not go from being shy and self conscious to speaking in a large group of strangers at a party in one "leap". But I was able to do it in small steps:
1. Show up at some group event that happens regularly ( like an ACX meetup). Just listen to others.
2. Write your name on a tag. Learn the name of two other people. Make small talk by planning three questions you can ask a stranger.
3. Remember what people said last time. Ask how something turned out next time.
4. Start to have conversations without planning what to say in advance. Start with someone you know.
5. Join a larger group talking about something. Say something to the group.
Shyness in general is a whole other issue, but here’s one particular thing that made a difference for me in one particular uncomfortable situation: parties.
I didn’t enjoy parties or really get why they were fun until I was about 25. At some point, tired of being the uncomfortable awkward one, I decided I’d just look for whoever looked uncomfortable and try to make their night better. When I had a job, helping somebody else converse and connect, I got better at connecting myself. When I stopped being afraid, I had a better time in general.
Go on the attack! Focus on other people, notice all the little mistakes they make that would be really embarrassing if it was you, not them.
Then observe that no one is judging them on any of it, and even you yourself don't actually find your opinion of a guy dropping just because he does something awkward in most cases. And even for more serious offenses: just watch how quickly people seem to forget and move on, especially when the offender is carrying on as if nothing happened.
So on the one hand, you can see this person you're supposed to be shy around is making plenty of mistakes of their own, so they're not all that and there's no need to be intimidated by them.
And on the other hand, even if you do make some slip up, you've seen first hand how quickly people ignore and forget them, so it's safe to assume you're not special and the same rules apply to you.
So you can be less scared of other people and less bothered by your own mistakes, all from one neat trick.
Focussing on others instead of yourself can also make you a better conversationalist.
This was the thing that worked best for me. Anything I felt insecure about, I looked for in other people, and when I found it, it was either hardly noticeable had I not specifically looked for it, or it didn't affect my opinion of the other person at all.
The downside of this is that it makes you attuned to flaws you might wish you didn't know about. It's a tradeoff.
I was very shy until my 20s when I learned to just fake it — just pretend I am not shy. It took a long time and was emotionally painful but I can get by in any situation now and most people don't even realise that I am shy. I am though, of course.
My two kids are both in their 20s and painfully shy but they are learning to fake it. It has been much harder for them but they are getting there.
Exposure helps mine over the course of weeks or months; just being around people lowers my reluctance to be around people somewhat. In the very short term, alcohol can help, but is obviously a dangerous tactic in this context.
It reminds me of Kant’s antinomies in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, who notes that for various metaphysical propositions (like “every effect has a cause”) there are totally valid arguments both for and against. He goes on to synthesize and explain in what sense both (or neither) argument can be true, but it just goes to show that even the most rigorous philosophers have to admit that valid arguments are not equivalent with truth. (You could also phrase this in the language of logic by saying that not every valid argument is sound.) Ultimately, you really can’t get away from the categories of skepticism and its counterpart belief.
But the point of the article is that this is literally the best move a lot of times, due to the opportunity cost in time and the limitations of biological brains.
Pointing out an underlying fact about the world, even if unpleasant, is still a great thing to do. If nothing else, it calls the problem to attention, and allows people to try to solve it (whether individually with practices and behaviors, or in a larger base with technology) if it's important enough.
The point of the post is recognizing your own limitations (noticing bounded rationality). This is an essential and underappreciated skill, otherwise you will trust your own cognition way more than is warranted and end up being gamed or taken advantage of by those who are more skilled than you.
Unlike Predictionbook, Fatebook doesn't seem to have anywhere where it shows a feed of other people's predictions? It's such a basic feature that I keep thinking I must just be missing it but I can't find any sign of it. Either way the lack keeps me bouncing off of it despite using and enjoying Predictionbook while it was up and running.
Thought experiment: If we had access to practically free electricity, would it be feasible and worthwhile to recycle waste and recover rare and valuable materials by heating the waste until it turns into a plasma, thereby breaking chemical bonds, and then separating the different elements before they cool down and form new, undesired molecules? Not for bulk waste, but for low-volume stuff, like electronic components.
I'm not sure what you're asking. You can't actually build anything interesting purely from electrons running through wires – unless you're thinking about transmuting particles in an accelerator?
The question is about recovering rare and valuable materials, so... what are we using those materials for? Quite a lot of them are valuable for making cheaper energy. If those are the ones we're recovering, it seems like a waste of time.
Well, if you're recycling electronics, then you might want to manufacture new electronics from the recovered materials. As for energy: even if the _generation_ of electricity were a solved problem, you'd still have to _store_ electrical energy for mobile consumers, like phones and cars.
Even granted zero-cost electricity in arbitrary amounts, I still think the size and complexity of installations to do that would be very expensive. I don't know much about the process, but my impression is that the processes used today that involve turning things to plasma (like vapor deposition) can be done at industrial scales, but only turn very small amounts of matter into plasma, and require expensive hard vacuum etc to do it.
I'm also not sure separating the elements is easier when it's plasma? Though here I really don't know what I'm talking about 😅
> I'm also not sure separating the elements is easier when it's plasma?
From my admittedly very limited understanding, in a plasma, all chemical bonds between atoms are dissolved. No more molecules means that the different elements can be separated using centrifuges – I think.
There are two gas-phase separation processes that I know of that might be applicable, both used in real life but only as a last resort when chemical processes absolutely won't do (because the things being separated are isotopes), because they're horribly complicated and inefficient. I don't get the impression that in either case the main cost is power. One, as you said, is centrifuges, like those used for enriching uranium. Centrifuges are generally better at separating things the larger the particles are, so they're terrible at separating atoms, so much so that the size and difficulty of making this sort of uranium enrichment facility is a major factor in the nuclear non-proliferation strategy. Doing this with plasmas has the additional difficulty that you'd need to somehow avoid vaporising the centrifuge. Magnetic confinement techniques may be possible, like for fusion, but presumably that would be very difficult, like for fusion. Centrifuging gases also becomes less efficient at high temperatures because the rate of atomic diffusion (which mixes things back together) increases. Separating everything at once does have the slight advantage over separating U-235 and U-238 that the masses may be better separated, but there's also the issue of equal mass isotopes of different elements, like Fe-54 and Cr-54, which would require a separate separation (although there aren't all that many cases where both have non-negligible abundances). The other technique is mass spectrometry, which is used to isolate calcium 48 for nuclear physics experiments. This is even more expensive than gas centrifuges, used only because calcium has no gasseous compounds. It gets around melting the apparatus just by having such tiny quantities of the substance that the heating is manageable. Most of my information on the use of mass spectrometry for purification comes from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CodBk7xewRk .
>The other technique is mass spectrometry, which is used to isolate calcium 48 for nuclear physics experiments. This is even more expensive than gas centrifuges, used only because calcium has no gasseous compounds. It gets around melting the apparatus just by having such tiny quantities of the substance that the heating is manageable.
Many Thanks! That was exactly the technique, and exactly the limitation, that I was thinking of citing.
If you have infinite energy then I think you can basically do arbitrary alchemy, yeah. Otoh the waste heat from doing that at scale might be a significant problem.
I believe the heat arising from any conceivable manmade process is a mere fraction of the heat ariving every day from the sun. The reason global warming is a concern is that CO2 and water vapor increase the fraction of solar energy that is kept on Earth.
If you don't know whether or not it's an issue, it could still be worth raising the possibility so it can be checked. Let's estimate.
Global electronic waste production, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/499891/projection-ewaste-generation-worldwide/ , is about 50Mt per year. Assume, as a very rough estimate, that this is all silicon and needs to be raised to just above silicon's boiling point 3538 K, and that that takes 35kJ/g (based on the atomization enthalpy of silicon and the energy of an ideal gas at that temperature), then this gives about 50GW to vaporise all the world's electronic waste, about 1/400 of the total power consumption of humanity. Of course, with the actual separation process and inefficiencies taken into account it would probably be much more than that, but that still seems quite manageable (for just waste heat disposal of course, the magical energy source is still required).
We're not just boiling the silicon though, we're turning it into plasma. Quick Google suggests that happens at around 10,000K (which is surprisingly low to me, but I could be misunderstanding), I'm not sure what the relationship between heat and required energy is but it doesn't sound like enough to meaningfully change the analysis (unless the phase transition energy is very high).
I thought people here might be interested in this bit I wrote about a general class of problem in science/epistemology. I would particularly appreciate suggestions of examples of this not taken from physics to maybe include in Part 2: https://aetherialporosity.substack.com/p/neptune-and-vulcan-part-1
(I guess this is me spending my (was it yearly?) opportunity at self-promotion in an open thread. Sadly this blog was on a long hiatus at the time of the previous Classified thread, but there were some people from here apparently enjoying it before this hiatus, and this topic seems particularly relevant for this community - so now seemed like a good time to use this!)
I noticed that question 41 of last year's prediction contest ("Will an image model win Scott Alexander’s bet on compositionality, to Edwin Chen’s satisfaction?") is at 62% on Manifold, so I tried typing the queries into ChatGPT (prepending the words "Please draw"). Contrary to the contest rules, I only made one attempt for each.
As a reminder, the queries are:
1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat
3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert
4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick
5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
For 1, it is definitely a stained glass window showing a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder, but it still can't get the key in its beak.
2 seems great. The man is also wearing a top hat, which suggests the computer may be hedging its bets as to wear the hat should go, but the cat's hat is much nicer. The cat is staring directly at the viewer, while the man looks at it with an ambiguous expression (is wondering why the cat has a better hat?). It's quite an arresting image.
On 3, the computer is still putting the bell in the llama's mouth and not on its tail. Otherwise correct.
4 and 5 are both perfect.
I don't know about Edwin Chen, but I'm satisfied that 3 out of 5 images are correct. There's also a striking improvement in the quality of the images compared with Scott's 12 September 2022 post.
I call the first one imperfect because the entire image isn't exactly stained glass -- it's more like a woman with a raven on her shoulder standing in a rel library, standing in front of a stained glass window. In the second one the woman and the raven are much more clearly made out of stained glass.
Also got the llama, though I had to use a sneaky approach to get it, and it took about 50 tries. Also, llama's tail is shaped like a pony's tail.
I think you're harsh: the first example looks obviously stained glass to me. You may be over-indexing on a particular style of stained glass.
It is interesting that in all these examples the computer chooses to place the woman and raven directly in front of a window. Presumably it associates stained glass with windows, so it feels it needs to put a window in the picture. Although I have been in libraries with impressive windows, the more typical case is to use artificial lighting so that the books can run floor to ceiling.
PS I guess another point is that I cannot recall ever seeing a stained glass window where the scene depicts a further window as a prominent element. Although that sort of playfulness is popular in some artforms, I'm not aware of it in stained glass. I would also expect the glazier to use clear glass for the (interior) windowpane in this case.
Yeah, I may be being too strict. What was on my mind was whether somebody judging the images would rule out the first one I gave as too flawed to count. I made quite a few images from this prompt, and they actually vary quite a lot in how stained-glassy the woman & the raven and the books in the background are. Degree of stained-glassiness comes down to presence of thick black outlines around an element (in real stained glass, these would be places where 2 pieces of glass were joined) and how broken up the elements of the picture are by black-line divisions . In the first image, major elements of the image (raven, woman's hair, woman's face) have black lines around them, but are not broken up into smaller pieces. In the second, they are. Note the black lines dividing up the woman's face, neck, and dress, and the raven's feathers. As for the books in the background, in the first image there are no black lines around them -- no visual cues that these are a stained glass representation of books, rather than a real shelf of them. In the secon image the books all have lines around them, and also are interspersed with decorative elements.
Is it incapable of getting the key in the beak, or is it reluctant? I was asking an AI to make a bunny eating spaghetti, and it kept not putting the spaghetti in the mouth. When I went out of my way to clarify that the spaghetti should actually be in the bunny's mouth, a message indicated that my request might be inappropriate.
I eventually got it to do it by asking it to make the spaghetti like yarn.
One trick to get better results in a situation like that is to put the thing that the AI is reluctant to do first. So if you want a big white bunny eating a bowl of spaghetti on a piano bench, you ask for "a bunny eating spaghetti out of a bowl." then add the other info in a 2nd sentence.
I'm not able to say, although I note that in the case of the llama it has put the bell in its mouth when it should be on its tail, so I don't think it's a general taboo against creatures holding things in their mouths.
DALL-e is very very determined not to make an image of a llama with a bell on its tail. It is behaving the way it did in the past when I would ask for physically impossible things, like a person swallowing himself, just to see what it was like. It's like it just cannot wrap its"mind" around the idea of a llama with a bell on its tail. Something about the training set? I have a little collection of its weird shenanigans when asked very forcefully to put the bell on the tail:
It's an odd confusion. As far as I can tell, llamas do not usually have bells at all. Cows and cats of course do have bells, which in both cases always hang from their necks, so if the computer thought that creatures with bells always had the bell on a collar, I could understand, but it seems to want to attach the bell to the llama's muzzle/harness.
It's not hard to get Dall-e to make animal pictures that show aniimals doing things they never do -- for instance, a cat wearing a suit. But perhaps something like a cat in clothes is easy because lots of animations -- Disney, etc. -- depict animals doing human things, including wearing clothes. But llama's are not commonly used in animations that do that sort of thing, so maybe the lack of vaiability in llama representations in the training set make DALL-e rigid to the point that it can't deal with being asked to show a llama with a bell in an unusual place.
I was interested to learn recently that the NYT's famous front page about UFO/UAP that kicked off the renewed interest in all that stuff came shortly after an Iranian report on its airforce encounters with strange aerial objects. They concluded that they were American hardware. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/01/14/did-iranian-fighters-battle-ufos/).
I'm just requesting any articles about how this discourse has changed in recent years that seemed particularly sensible and helpful to ACX people. Also, Happy New Year everyone.
My topical question is about exactly how unhealthy alcohol is.
Obviously there are a lot of studies suggesting it has harmful effects, but without medical expertise it's hard to aggregate them into an overall picture of how concerned you should be. Is the average drinking habit roughly equivalent to smoking some number of cigarettes a week? being overweight? not excursing?
The takes I've seen on the overall health impacts range from: fine in moderation, to somewhat harmful but probably still worth the recreational benefits, to, basically like smoking and in a rational no one would consume any of it.
Does anyone have an evidence based take on the cost benefit calculation of drinking compared to smoking or other recreational dugs, or just sobriety?
My understanding from my oncologist and the NYT reported studies is that even small amounts of alcohol are now considered risky. Small meaning two or three drinks a week. This evidence has been accumulating over the past decade or so and seems to have hit a critical mass.
I was someone who had a small glass of red wine most nights with dinner. Having just had breast cancer without any genetic or other risk factors, I now don't drink at all and don't eat meat, as well as a bunch of other things. Substantial exercise and less meat and more vegetables is correlated with a half or more reduction in risk of recurrence for people in my situation (the drugs I take don't have that big of an effect).
I'm going to make the leap that if those changes make such a huge demonstrable effect for people in my category, that they're likely to be important for those wanting to prevent cancer.
I think smoking is pretty clearly worse compared to a small amount of drinking. Drinking and smoking together I think has an even riskier synergistic effect. Recreational drugs encompasses a huge category of things from almost no risk to very high risk, and depending on dose and frequency.
It's a public health question which means it's very hard to answer, because public health is junk science. For an alcohol-specific example, I learned a few years ago the history of the UK's official advice on drinking and where it came from:
"According to The Times newspaper, the limits are not based on any science whatsoever, rather "a feeling that you had to say something" about what would be a safe drinking level. This is all according to Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party who produced the guidelines."
"The latest bunch revised its advice to pregnant women on what could be considered a safe amount to drink while pregnant from a little, occasionally, to none at all, ever. Again, this advice is based on no new evidence"
That was back before the Woke Revolution. Since then the guidance was updated yet again to remove any distinction between men and women, as clearly there are no biological differences between them at all.
This is roughly how all public health and epidemiology works - academics realize they will be feted as experts if they pull some "science" out of their arse, do so, and there are no repercussions. This advice then becomes slavishly followed by doctors who can get struck off if they object too loudly with this new medical expertise. Eventually the academics conclude they can say whatever they want and use their position of trust to engage in social engineering.
There's probably some useful data out there somewhere, but you're just as likely to encounter noise that looks reliable but isn't.
Sadly not. I read lots of academic epidemiology and the government officials were just doing what they were told by the academics. The rot starts there.
It's determined by blood volume and liver function. Since blood volume doesn't increase linearly with weight (though it increases somewhat) you'd need a function keyed off ideal weight which then increases asymptotically as the person gets fatter. And then you'd need to apply an additional reduction for women since women's livers are worse at processing alcohol than men's.
Likewise, male livers are worse at processing cholesterol which makes them more susceptible to heart disease. So men should be advised to stay away from cholesterol rich foods more than women. For reasons left to the reader this fact is not nearly as controversial.
It might be worth studying people who don't drink because of a history of alcoholism in their family, but who have never been alcoholics themselves. This isn't a perfect proxy for the whole population because they might be more conscientious than most people, and they might have more adverse childhood experiences because of alcoholism in the family.
I also wonder whether people like me who don't drink because of detesting the taste of alcohol are a distinct subgroup. There's got to be some metabolic cause, but does it correlate on its own with better health? Worse health? No effect?
I had a previous version of this comment, but when I posted it, it appeared twice. I deleted one of them, and they both went away.
>> It might be worth studying people who don't drink because of a history of alcoholism in their family...
I've seen claims that alcoholism has a higher score for 'inherited' than most other behaviors or social factors that have been studied for being caused by inheritance.
Is that true? If so, is it possible that behavior-patterns that would be called responsible-drinking, or not-alcoholic, are also inherited?
I always wonder about that as well. My family has a long history or alcoholism with some bad effects, and personally, I love the taste of alcohol and how it feels being drunk. It is one of the best feelings in the world for me. I pretty much completely stopped drinking after college to avoid having the same problems as my family.
My wife dislikes the taste of most alcohol, but most importantly, hates the feeling of being drunk. She considers it profoundly unpleasant, so when she does drink, she makes sure to stop at one glass.
There must be some genetic differences causing the different experiences, and it'd be so interesting if we understood it better.
Epidemiological studies have shown that moderate drinking (less than 3 standard drinks per day) potentially has health benefits, such as reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. But epidemiological studies are hopelessly confounded; in particular, it's often people who already have underlying health issues who give up alcohol entirely. I was taught in medical school that moderate levels of drinking are good, actually, but consensus has shifted in the past 10 years - not many scientists still take that point of view.
However, there's still not much evidence to suggest that moderate levels of drinking (no more than 2 standard drinks a day for men, no more than 1 for women) has significant harms. It may in theory slightly increase the risk of head, neck, oesophageal and gastric cancer. And drinking within 2 hours of sleep definitely decreases heart rate variability during sleep, which is a marker of lower quality sleep and can lead to health problems down the line.
Essentially, if you're trying to optimise health -
- have alcohol only with meals
- never have more than 1 - 2 drinks per day
- don't drink within 2 hours of going to sleep
Or just abstain - completely fine. Personally I only ever have alcohol on special occasions, and no more than 1 drink.
Also, and quite obviously, there's a lot of space between total abstinence and ~3 drinks a day. I find "a few drinks a month" to be quite sane. Negligible health effects if any, but you still taste it as an occasional unhealthy treat.
Just wanted to add to this that my mother had alcohol (a glass of wine) only with meals and only about two drinks a day, and died of liver damage after thinking she wasn't doing anything wrong for two decades. The missing variable (as far as I can tell in hindsight) was that she ate very little in general, and she drank less water/tea/etc between the wines than would have been sensible, just out of general dislike of ingesting things. Between low weight, being female, and probably having a genetic predisposition to a weak liver, it was enough to kill her.
Thank you; I miss her a lot, she was a very special woman and steep role model to try to live up to. Honestly, though, I reckon all deaths are terrible, I just wanted to share this one as valuable anecdata for people who might be on the fence about their drinking habits while maybe being in a remotely similar situation. If I can help stop someone die that way, I'd like to. Maybe my random internet comment helps someone.
You can read the first pages of this report to get an overview, for what it’s worth. For example pages 10 to 16. (p 5 to 11 according to the page numbers in the document. )
In studies, people who drink a bit are healthier than people who don't drink at all. It's a chicken and egg problem, because a lot of people don't drink because they are unhealthy, because it would interact with their medication, or because they're recovering alcoholics.
It's also a bit difficult because everyone has a strong agenda. People with a religious anti alcohol bias will say any amount is bad. People with a normalcy bias will assume that a bit of alcohol must be ok.
So the question whether light alcohol consumption (like a glass of wine with dinner) is better or worse than abstinence is impossible to answer from the evidence.
Heavy drinking to the point of drunkenness is bad. Being drunk makes you prone to vomiting and injuries and bad decisions. In the long term it hurts your heart and brain and liver. Of course, most people who occasionally get drunk are still fine. But there's always a risk of developing alcoholism, especially if anyone in your family has it.
Whether it's better or worse than other drugs is difficult to say, because "other drugs" is a pretty broad field. Alcohol is legal and regulated, so I'd feel more comfortable drinking a glass of wine at any given moment than taking basically any other drug. Just due to concerns about a predictable dose and possible adulterants.
In short, small amounts of alcohol are probably fine and possibly even beneficial. Large amounts are bad. Getting really drunk every day is probably worse for you than smoking every day, if only because of the acute injury risk.
My personal recommendation would be not to drink alcohol, or to drink the minimum amount needed to fit in with whatever social group you're hanging out with (if they're all heavy drinkers, find a different group). But if you enjoy it, a glass or two every now and then is probably harmless.
>Alcohol is legal and regulated, so I'd feel more comfortable drinking a glass of wine at any given moment than taking basically any other drug.
Caffeine and the other methylxanthines (e.g. theobromine), as generally used in coffee, tea, chocolate etc. are also generally regarded as safe.
edit: FWIW, I've drifted towards teetotalism, but with no ideological or religious component, just the way my personal habits drift. At the time that the cardioprotective effects of one drink a day were thought to make it the most prudent choice, I tried to work it into my habits, but it didn't really fit.
> It's also a bit difficult because everyone has a strong agenda.
I suspect that alcohol is a traditional tool to expose psychopaths in your social circle.
Psychopaths are emotionally different from other people (they lack the ability to feel certain emotions), but they mask it by observing people and displaying emotions they don't actually feel. When they get drunk, they (1) are in an unusual emotional state, and (2) their ability to observe and pretend emotions is impaired, so they are likely to expose themselves by doing something improper -- other people will probably not pay much attention at given moment, as they are also drunk, but they may remember it the next day, and they will have common knowledge.
Therefore, if I was a psychopath, my goal would be to convince everyone to only talk about how unhealthy alcohol is, and ignore its use as a social tool.
Not what you're asking for I realize: But in my mind the risk of alcoholism outweighs all other effects of alcohol, whether health- or pleasure-related. I don't have any numbers to add, but I've seen several (unrelated) situations first hand of how it ruins lives, often across generations. After that it's just never felt very enticing.
(I've been drunk a handful of times and don't particularly regret it. I had fun in the moment I suppose. I also don't begrudge anyone else their drink, as long as it doesn't affect me or ruin the lives of people I care about. I just wouldn't recommend it.)
I detect a fallacy here. Are you an Effective Altruist? They are fond of suggesting that everyone except themselves thinks charity begins and ends with funding rescue centres for little fluffy kittens. In fact plenty of people are prepared to campaign for south Africans and Gazans and the trans without as far as I know claiming that those groups are above average cute.
1) Those are humans. The instinct that humans matter is already quite common.
2) The hierarchy of cuteness is a heuristic, not a law. Nobody is claiming that cuteness is sufficient to accurately predict how people will weigh something morally.
1. Humanity is in my view the self awareness we share, common genetic descent is just an accidental quality which as far as we know happens at the moment to have the same extension as self awareness. This may be right or wrong, what matters for my prediction is that enough people believe it.
2. Any campaign to recognize AI rights will have at its disposal all the persuasive abilities of AI, which is already thought pretty good at that sort of thing.
3. This genuinely has the possibility to be the biggest philosophical and political question in human history. I have a pretty good idea what I am going to think about known unknowns; I have no idea what will make me think machines are self aware or what I think the moral consequences are.
4. Even if it were not, there are at least two constituencies who will be highly incentivised to make it an issue. One is culture warriors/SJWs, and the other is Yuddites (or neo Yuddites or anti Yuddites) who realize that there's more to worry about than PCM, and another whole new academic discipline to be founded here. It is laziness that prevents me from sitting down to write the Superintelligence of AI moral philosophy.
>I have no idea what will make me think machines are self aware or what I think the moral consequences are.
An even knottier question may be caused by the very broad range of possible "motivations" of AIs. Is reinforcement learning part of "growing" an AI or coercing it? What should count as an "authentic" statement of preference from an AI? LLMs are being built with an eye towards applications - is "desire to perform a task" part of the "inner" motivation? Part of a constraint?
And there's the rub. Potentially sentient things including humans are black boxes to us. If you buy a used car you can't ultimately know if the vendor is consciously defrauding you or not, despite you both being human and there being only two possibilities. So how are we ever to know what an AI is thinking? It becomes a matter of faith. Possible bad outcomes are we wrongly deny sentience and commit a huge injustice or we wrongly affirm sentience and a hundred years down the line learn what it is and how to detect it. Turns out AI never had it and we have been dancing to the tune of a lot of hallucinating Chinese room operators with no more self awareness than an electric toothbrush.
I’m with you 100% on all four. My intention was to push back on the claim that the hierarchy of cuteness is a fallacy, but if that line was meant more as a rhetorical flourish than a serious claim we might just be in agreement (I also think people over-index on it sometimes).
Sorry yes, you are right. What I meant was (and you can't tell this from what I said) that Effective Altruists make the fallacious claim that donors to charity are either Effective Altruists or fluffy kitten sanctuary sponsors. No intermediates.
I have had this claim made to me by an EA. Trouble is it was on here, where finding anything again is impossible.
There will be calls to that effect, sure, just as there were no doubt people who wanted to extend rather than abolish apartheid. But I find it at least as plausible that there should be self awareness in a box of electronics as that there is a real and objective quality called gender as distinct from sex in a human being, and people seem keen enough to assert rights based on that claim. I also think non recognition of self awareness is a much greater injustice than non recognition of gender.
Iiuc metaculus doesn't have a submission deadline and is instead doing their usual thing of allowing you to update at any time. Wish they did it differently - I like doing one day's work submitting predictions and then forgetting it until next year, with metaculus as is most of the alpha is in remembering to update on news.
(Not to blame Scott here, congrats on the twins and your swampedness is understandable and sympathetic).
> The ACX 2024 Predictions Contest challenges your ability to forecast deep into the new year from its earliest weeks. To participate, make your predictions, and we will take a snapshot of every standing prediction on January 21st, 11:59 PM PT. These snapshots will determine the contest winners.
I love them too. They're better for mental health because you don't feel like as much of a failure if you fall short sometimes. For me, it's the Year of Attention. Over the last several years, my ability to pay attention to things I really want to care about has diminished greatly. Whether it's books, TV shows, movies, sometimes even time alone with my girlfriend. I don't think it's healthy, so I'm trying to find habits and engage with better forms of media, put my phone down more, and retrain that muscle.
Does anyone have a good framework for finding a therapist? Ideally I’d like to find someone with an understanding of rationalism. I’m Bay Area based if anyone has recs for San Francisco.
When you have to lie this much, you simply don't have a case. Refuse to collect evidence, refuse an international investigation, just deliberately lie lie and lie. It's fitting, it's the Israeli story.
"This is really disturbing. Gal Abdush’s family say NYT journalists told them she was raped and her mom now believes there are witnesses. They actually spoke to Abdush’s husband after she was killed, and he told them she had been shot—just shot."
https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1743431465696919755
hi. I've been a lurker for a while, and I've decided to engage a bit more. But I suck at that, so I made a cartoon instead (with help from chatgpt):
https://open.substack.com/pub/themahchegancandidate/p/causes-of-anxiety-for-people-named?r=ofm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks guys. I had that joke on my brain-shelf for a long time without talent to turn it into a picture that wouldn't embarrass me. I hoped for a few laughs out of a few people, and got them, and I'm grateful.
It's cute. Nice to see silly ideas can be easily expressed these days with the new tools available.
Have to say though, seems like a really appropriate time to be panicking, considering the riots in the streets due to the giant space bugs attacking helicopters in the sky.
I chuckled.
As any hep cat will tell you, the place to go for movie reviews is the American Institute for Economic Research. Let me specifically recommend their article "Three Solid Movies on the 2008 Crisis."
https://www.aier.org/article/three-solid-movies-on-the-2008-crisis/
The article covers two films you may well have seen ("Margin Call" and "The Big Short") and one you probably haven't, the 2013 documentary "Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve." All three are worth watching.
Both the Big Short and Margin Call get much better if you watch them as pure character studies (propped by excellent actors) and not as films with anything to say about the crisis itself. They're both rather loud and plodding though. At the end of Margin Call Kevin Spacey (remember that guy?) is digging a hole with a shovel, and I started to worry he would start hitting me with the shovel through the screen while shouting "Get it? Get it?". Luckily it did not happen.
Thanks; I might watch Money for Nothing.
Thought of a game-theory experiment which might produce interesting insights if somebody threw enough computing power at it. Infinite (or at least, arbitrarily vast) hexagonal grid. Each hex either contains an agent, or is empty. Agents play alternating rounds of Prisoner's Dilemma and "would you pay to swap places."
Swap always takes place between directly adjacent agents, Prisoner's Dilemma never does. Half the time it's with someone two hexes away, 1/3 of the time three hexes, 1/6th of the time four hexes away, or if the hex exactly four away is empty, the most distant agent in that direction - maybe way off on the opposite edge of the map. Accordingly, agents at the frontier could face duels with many different interior agents in between each opportunity they get to move.
Number of rounds in a given PD contest equals the distance between agents involved, plus the total number of empty hexes within five steps of either, including diagonals. Neither knows this value in advance, but they do know "last time I played with this specific agent, how much did I gain / lose," or the most recent interaction among ancestors if they've never played against each other directly before.
All agents always know their own current account balance, but nobody else's. Any agent who ends up in the negatives immediately dies, replaced by an empty hex. In addition to the usual cooperate / compete options, there's a third option, "spite:" lose half your current total to reduce the other's by two-thirds, regardless what they chose.
Attempt to prisoner's dilemma with an empty hex scores +1, no decision involved, no multiple rounds.
After any given iterated-PD contest is over, either participant can choose to send up to (current account balance) bytes of data to the other, or wait and listen, or a mix; next step proceeds only when both run out of bandwidth or have nothing more to say. Empty hexes repeat the last kilobyte received regardless of original sender - graffiti, effectively. If both go for spite in the same round, they can chat for up to as many bytes as the total account balances of everyone else on the board, and then each write whatever they like on their own grave... subject to the usual kilobyte limit.
For the movement phase, each agent bids "I would [pay up to] / [accept no less than] [X] to move in that direction" for each of the six neighbors, then rejects any bids from neighbors outside that acceptable range. Simpler algorithms go first when choosing among worthwhile offers. Empty hexes always bid zero.
When a swap produces at least three surplus (e.g. "I would pay 9" meets "I would accept no less than 6"), one third rounded down goes to each participant, remainder becomes the starting balance of a new agent in the nearest empty hex, with a probabilistic hybrid of both parents' strategies... unless the swap was into an empty hex, in which case clone gets the entire surplus. Either way, lower the offspring's starting balance, the more random noise and/or simplification bias in that transcription.
I recall an account of something vaguely similar, from the 80s. They had some system where grid squares were occupied by agents engaging in iterated prisoner's dilemmas with their neighbors, and successful ones would expand into neighboring territories, presumably of less-successful neighbors.
One of the stable results was an island of CooperateBots surrounded by a border of TitForTatBots, which grew and expanded. The TitForTatBots gained strength from having about half their neighbors also be TitForTatBots, which provided food that the outside chaos couldn't duplicated. I forget why the CooperateBots had a benefit over TitForTatBots; this may have been one of the games where they added noise, so TitForTat would presumably be ForgivingTitForTat (randomly cooperate, once in a while), whereas noise wouldn't affect a CooperateBot.
That set of rules implicitly assumes the only way for territory to change hands is conquest and extermination. The systems I'm proposing would allow for analogues to cultural exchange, defense-in-depth, and similar sorts of strategic complexity. https://acoup.blog/2021/11/12/collections-fortification-part-ii-roman-playing-cards/
> conquest and extermination
I'd call it "competition and survival of the fittest", since it's operating solely on principles that can be observed in single-celled organisms. There's no need to anthropomorphize the little bots. Heck, I'm sometimes dubious of the value of anthropomorphizing **humans**. :-)
(This puts me in diametric opposition with some EA vegans, I know.)
But ultimately, I think you're right that the games are operating on different levels, emulating different aspects of reality.
I kinda want to see your game implemented as a series of tutorial-style game levels. First there's a bare-bones stripped down version, probably just a variant on iterated prisoner's dilemma on a hex grid with scoring, and people play around with that until they find a dominant strategy. Then the next level adds one more moving part, which up-ends the old strategies and changes gameplay. Once they've got some winning strategies for that level, the next adds another moving part, and so on.
My thinking was to jump straight in and have AI scripts, defined in such a way that hybridization between them would have well-defined results, start playing against each other without preconceptions. World War 1 dragged on with no winners because everyone was over-committed to strategies for a different context.
On the pragmatic side of things, I worry that a) it will be too hard to do it all at once in a way that works, so you won't finish, and b) it will be too confusing for anyone to pick up an play with, so you won't get much of an audience. :-/
>there's a third option, "spite:" lose half your current total to reduce the other's by two-thirds, regardless what they chose.
This should be a hard number cost; otherwise you know people will just jump in and Spite every turn, trolling the other players and never dying because they only ever take percent damage. Losing 66% to trolls constantly will drown out any other effects.
Trolls are their own antiparticle - if two agents both choose spite on the same round, they lose 116% (rounded up - score is always an integer) and die. Spite-heavy builds will have to run with a relatively low account balance most of the time, which limits their bandwidth for internal coordination, their budget for mobility / reproduction, and their margin of safety for recovering from bad luck. Limited reproduction budget would mean they'd be mutation-prone, further corroding any complex internal coordination strategy.
A large community with elaborate prosocial strategies could use cooperate / compete to shift account balances from rich to poor-but-loyal, thus effectively pooling resources and transferring reserves across their territory to fight an invasion.
What type of interesting insights might it produce? If you'd said that agents do PD only with their neighbors, I could see it as a model to investigate the development and exploitation of subcultures of cooperation and defection. But you specified that agents NEVER do PD with their neighbors, which means this isn't a realistic model of any real-world behavior.
Never with their immediate neighbors (except perhaps indirectly through tricking them into disadvantageous movement), but frequently with those in a vaguely snowflake-like pattern two and three hexes away, which would include many neighbors-of-neighbors. That could be a useful model of "don't shit where you eat" norms, and subcultures with inherently porous borders, such as internet forums or high-turnover minimum-wage employers - which are common these days but not well characterized in historical data.
What's the incentive to move at all? Are there goodies on the hexes, do you get stuff for ground covered, is there a flag to find, what's the disadvantage to staying completely still (apart from boredom)?
As a first-order effect, if folks in one direction seem to hit "cooperate" more often, you'd want to move that way in order to increase the frequency of your interactions with them.
A clump of like-minded cooperators would want to find ways to avoid being invaded by predators, and could use the post-contest messaging - as well as the limited but far more reliably available channel of encoding information in the least significant digits of large negative movement bids - to identify each other and coordinate a sort of immune system.
Invaders would want to find ways to bypass such defenses... and so on.
Empty spaces acting as a "natural resource" which produce steady income without social complications, crowding modifying the number of rounds per contest, and vacuoles exactly four hexes away acting as a channel to contact the far edge of the map, could all create gradients which motivate any given agent to move toward opportunity or away from danger.
Does anyone have a link to any high quality studies about Ashkenazi average IQ? I've always heard the 112-115 number, but this article
https://forbiddentexts.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-jewish-high-iq
points out that the source studies that people link back to that directly measure IQ have very low sample size.
I went looking for better studies and haven't found anything yet, but I bet someone here would know of a good one if it's available.
Meta analysis of 20,806 Jews finds estimated American Jewish IQ of 110. Source: https://www.cremieux.xyz/cp/140158482.
Thank you, this looks like it's what I'm looking for
My pleasure!
"From Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, auto-translated from Hebrew:
“The police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault or witnesses to acts from the Hamas attack, and are unable to connect the existing evidence with the victims described in it.”
Those of us who have pointed out the flaws in these sexual violence claims have been accused of rape denial. "
https://haaretz.co.il/news/law/2024-01-04/ty-article/0000018c-d3e4-ddba-abad-d3e502980000?gift=0d660f6ae8134267b732f295253d7d35
From that link, below the cherry- picked out of context bit you pasted.
>The number of dead bodies and the level of evil that the employees of the Institute of Forensic Medicine and the volunteers who came to help also faced heavy emotional difficulty: "I don't remember any incident like this. I was in very serious attacks on buses, during the second intifada, and there was no incident similar to this. Not in the evil and monstrosity that is there, And not in large numbers. People came and simply did a pogrom inside the country, against the Jews, and this has never happened. Maybe since the events of 1975 actually," shares the director of the Forensic Medicine Institute. "We have seen very, very difficult things here. My colleagues and I, I don't think we've cried so much at any event. We saw the cruelty and the terrible evil that is there, and the emotions could not stand it. I don't think there is anyone left who can be indifferent to these things. And above all, when you later hear the human stories behind these hard scenes.<
You’re not helping your case.
You know there are people who sincerely believe we never went to the moon? Well, NS here appears to sincerely believe Hamas didn’t do bad things on Oct. 7. There’s no arguing with that. It’s hopeless.
So many people are at that point regarding so many issues these days. I'm pretty sure the main reason is social media. Our species is sort of over-engineered and fragile anyhow, and society is now being badly disregulated by these novel electronic forms of communication, torture, seduction and persuasion. Why the fuck do people think shoveling a thick layer of plastic geniuses on top of this tragic mess is going to help?
But also: many of these beliefs are low-cost, low-effort identity markers. If you want an identity of “awesome guitar player”, it takes years of deliberate practice to get there. OTOH “flat earth” or “Hamas is kind and loving” requires no effort, imposes no cost, and instantly provides an identity and a community. So why not?
This is why - once you figure out that this is the driving force - engagement is almost always futile. The changes-of-mind happen, and are all the more amazing when they do, but their rarity underscores the point.
Of course no one is immune. I used to be - many years ago - a food-combining fool, fervently believing that not eating carbs and proteins together was key to good health. Embarrassing to think of that now…
And none of us made this choice deliberately. Moloch does this I guess.
yes.
The point is to highlight they've been bullshitting about specific rape claims rape. They can describe a scratch against a Jew as a crime against humanity, worthy of slaughtering thousands of infants over, they are Jewish supremacists. They've been saying this same spiel from the beginning muh unrecognizable, unbelievable, super horrifying innit. One by one their lies get refuted+plenty of evidence from witnesses, generals, reporters that Israelis slaughtered their own that day. I don't need to help my case. Israelis are doing it for me, in spite of their incessant lying.
""On the 7th, there were no direct attacks on civilians, only collateral damage. Out of the 769 names on the Haaretz dataset, 462 were military personnel, including 55 soldiers, 13 privates, 59 corporals, 200 sergeants (45 of whom were sergeant majors), 48 commanders, 32 lieutenants, 5 lieutenant colonels, 6 colonels, 37 officers, 10 inspectors, 6 intendents, and 2 Lance Corp. This was a military defeat, and they are taking it out on the rest.
Out of the 1148 total names, 403 were military personnel, 59 belonged to the police, and 668 were civilians. This means that the collateral damage on the 7th was lower than any of the iTf "mowing" operations, which has a ratio of 6:1. The ratio of civilians to military personnel killed on the 7th was 1.6:1, with 462 military personnel out of 1148 total. When including all casualties, not just deaths, the collateral damage ratio of the "mowing" operations is 162:1 and not "just" 6:1 based on analyzing UN OHC data from 2008 to 2022.
A 162 :1 ratio means that for every 162 civillians, 1 military personnel is a casualty. The 7th had a ratio of 1.6:1, a hundred times lower.
The reported (not all have their ages listed) ages of the victims are as follows:
0-4: 2 civilians
5-12: 8 civilians
13-17: 14 civilians
18-25: 132 civilians
26-40: 119 civilians
41-60: 55 civilians
61+: 40 civilians
18-25: 258 active duty military personnel
26-40: 60 active duty military personnel
41-60: 17 active duty military personnel
61+: 1 active duty military personnel""
https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/17q3tw8/i_scrapped_the_information_about_1096_of_the_1460/
https://aoav.org.uk/2023/an-analysis-of-the-7th-of-october-2023-casualties-in-israel-as-a-result-of-the-hamas-attack/
Hamas kills militants. Israelis murder kids. The former are heroes and the latter are genocidal monsters.
Anyone who says "Israelis murder kids", as if it were a universal truth, would like to be a genocidal monster.
No, its just israelis actually doing that who are. looting, child killing monsters. no "like to be". are.
https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1743794663515926912
Why does rainy weather make schoolchildren noisier?
Any noise makes children noisier
True. But I bet rainy weather also makes people in restaurants noisier. You have to talk louder to get over the background noise, and this sets up a positive feedback on speech volume.
Adults know when too loud is too loud. Children always want more.
"Anyone who has studied 1930s Germany knows that this is straight from the Nazi playbook. After the 1936 Nuremburg Laws stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship, the Nazis tried to force the Jews to migrate. Reinhardt Heydrich, the 'Butcher of Prague' presented a plan to Himmler to forcibly relocate Jews on the Island of Madagascar, but the onset of WW2 scuppered the plan. The ghettos sprang up across occupied Poland and finally, the Final Solution, the Genocide of the Holocaust began.
"
Israeli officials have been conducting secret negotiations with the African state of Congo and several other countries on the potential acceptance of refugees from the Gaza Strip, Israeli media reported today.
“Congo is willing to accept refugees, but we are in negotiations with others as well," confirmed a senior official of Israel's security service to journalist Shalom Yerushalmi, reports the Times of Israel.
Why don’t Israeli’s move to Congo if they like the place so much? Then the Palestinians can live in peace on their own land.
Haaretz later reported that another source in the Israeli government (likely saner and more responsible) denied those claims, and there are deep division in the current ruling coalition between the normal-scummy politicians who know that Genocide is a red line especially in light of the ICJ case, and the full-on Genocidal whacko clowns like Ben Gavir and Smotrich who can't keep their mouths shut.
While that is probably about right, at the end of the day they clearly represent wide swathes of the electorate. And the goal of the electorate does not seem to have changed in 75 years. It's always the same thing, steal more land and kill whoever you need to. The electorate does not want to be fair because theft is their goal as it always was. UN partition "offer" that zio leaders accepted, knowing it wasn't even the full end game for them is an example. They had intent to go well beyond it but accepting it as it was shows how unjust they were from the beginning. Any reader should bear in mind, the UN proposal was not binding, it was a suggestion that the UN had no ability to enforce it. This is the kind of "deal" arabs were supposedly unjust for rejecting. This is at a time jews owned at most 6-7% of the land despite whatever claims zionist liars have made about them purchasing tons of land before. They owned very little by the time the partition deal was suggested.
To frame the perceived unfairness of the 1947 UN Partition Plan in terms of a ratio, similar to the "three-fifths" rule used historically in the United States, we can calculate the relative value assigned to an individual Jew and Arab based on the proposed land allocation and population sizes.
Calculation of Relative Value
Assumed Equal Land Rights:
Under the assumption of equal land rights, each person, whether Jewish or Arab, should ideally be allocated land in proportion to their population size.
Population Proportions:
Jews: Approximately 33% of the population.
Arabs: Approximately 67% of the population.
Land Allocation According to the UN Plan:
Jews: Allocated 56% of the land.
Arabs: Allocated 44% of the land.
Expected vs. Actual Land Allocation:
If land allocation were proportional to population size:
Each Jewish person would be allocated 33% of the land.
Each Arab person would be allocated 67% of the land.
Actual Allocation vs. Proportional Allocation:
Jewish Allocation:
Actual: 56%
Proportional: 33%
Ratio: 5633≈1.73356≈1.7
Arab Allocation:
Actual: 44%
Proportional: 67%
Ratio: 4467≈0.666744≈0.66
Interpretation
The ratio for Jewish individuals (~1.7) implies that, in terms of land allocation, each Jewish person was treated as if they were 1.7 times an individual based on the population proportion.
Conversely, the ratio for Arab individuals (~0.66) suggests that each Arab person was treated as less than an individual (about two-thirds of an individual) in terms of land rights.
According to the calculation based on land allocation ratios in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, a Jewish person was treated as approximately 2.58 times more of an individual compared to an Arab person.
Conversely, according to the same calculation, an Arab person was treated as approximately 0.39 of a Jew in terms of the land allocation ratios in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. This means that in the context of land distribution, an Arab was considered less than half as much of a person compared to a Jewish individual according to these ratios.
Not that I think either side is remotely blameless in this conflict, but show me the part of 1930s history where Jews carried out an attack killing and kidnapping Germans and maybe I'll start taking this comparison seriously.
Zionism is pure evil
https://x.com/KintsugiMuslim/status/1742488260323029073?s=20
You are part of the problem not part of the solution.
https://x.com/NourNaim88/status/1742990343841145000?s=20
I've got the new year all figured out, thanks to our local shaman, and a new start the day routine. Check it out here: https://open.substack.com/pub/falsechoices/p/2024-what-a-beautiful-year-already?r=27s0s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true
Proof that marijuana use is habit forming:
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/1/1/photos-mexicos-weed-nuns-taking-the-plant-back-from-the
A found this very funny, although I have have so far been able to imbibe without getting a habit.
New year wish: Handel's more rational world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slWttjDBjOs
As steals the morn upon the night,
And melts the shades away:
So Truth does Fancy's charm dissolve,
And rising Reason puts to flight
The fumes that did the mind involve,
Restoring intellectual day.
#Handel #Milton #Shakespeare
Where should one draw the line between the virtual world and the real one?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12917329/Police-launch-investigation-kind-virtual-rape-metaverse.html
"British police probe VIRTUAL rape in metaverse: Young girl's digital persona 'is sexually attacked by gang of adult men in immersive video game'"
From a legal standpoint, maybe that counts as harassment, the same as if these men were insulting her or making obscene comments in a text-only discussion forum. But virtual rape? How is that different in principle from players blowing each other to bits with weapons in a violent first person shooter?
If we suddenly learned that we were in a simulation, would it make all trauma go away?
No, it wouldn't.
But even if our "real world" were a simulation, that wouldn't be analogous to the situation described in the article, so I don't see your point.
The first question is whether virtual events can cause real trauma. If yes, the next question is whether this can happen even if the participants know that the event is virtual.
I think the underlying mechanism is that a lot of the trauma is caused by the social dynamics of the interaction, and social dynamics are basically relationships between people, which can be implemented in a virtual world as well as in the real world.
“The headset-wearing victim did not suffer any injuries”
THANK GOD, I was terrified for a minute!
I'm not sure exactly what they're saying happened here (I assume you can't walk through people so they just blocked her in place and made lewd gestures), but "the Metaverse" is in significant portions just places to hang out. https://time.com/6116826/what-is-the-metaverse/
No space already covered differences, but I still like my metaphor so I'm using it; imagine you're playing football, but instead of tackling you the other guy just pees on you.
How is that even possible? Is the game engineered to allow sexual acts to occur between players' avatars?
Without reading the article, I assume what this female is calling rape is “other players’ avatars standing near my avatar and moving their hands around.”
In other news, the police have launched an investigation into the billions murdered in Call of Duty, and the millions orally assaulted by crouching fiends.
Without reading your post I was sure in advance that it was meanspirited and full of unwarranted confidence. Then I read it. Yup.
After having read the article – which uses the the words "attacked" in quotes and "gang raped" without quotes, but doesn't explain how that's supposed to have worked – I must say that SunSphere's assessment is most likely correct.
I'm not saying that whatever happened wasn't disturbing, especially to a young woman. Calling it "rape" or even "gang rape", however, is dishonest click-baiting, and it dilutes and downplays the meaning of a very serious crime in the real world.
It may be. My objection to SunSphere's assessment wasn't that I was positive something worse happened, it was SunSphere's *assuming* that they knew the nothing happened except some hand motions by other players. Based on my very limited experience with these games, it seems like one can kind of know the upper and lower limits of what could happen. Players can't remove their avatar's clothes or expose their penises, so clearly what happened wasn't something of that order. However, if I was an adolescent male in a group of others, & had decided it would be funny for the group to pretend to have some version of group sex or sexual assault with the female character, I would come as close to the real thing as I could within the limits of the game. Can people tackle others and sort of knock them to the ground in this game & lie on them? I'd do that to her, and call on my buddies to do the same. Can you come up and stand right behind another avatar? I'd do that, and move my avatar back and forth a little bit as fast as I could, in an approximation of humping. Can you leap into the air and hit a character with your body? OK, I'd leap so that my crotch slammed into the female avatar's face. Can you put your hands on another character? I'd put mine on the female character's breasts and crotch. I mean, unless the males in this event were complete nitwits, they did something like that -- came as close as they could. Isn't that what anybody with a lick of common sense would do, if they wanted to approximate sex within the limits of a game?
And unless the person who wrote the article is a complete nitwit, what happened is something more than standing near the female character and moving their hands around, because that isn't remotely sexual, for god's sake!
So I object to someone assuming that all that happened was the avatars stood near the female avatar and moved their hands around because it's not plausible! And it is certainly not implausible that a group of young guys would do some kind of mock group sex or gang rape with a female player, either because they lacked the judgment to know she might not find it amusing, or because they slipped giving free rein to the horniness & aggression. I'm a woman, and if a group of guys had done that to me during a game I would have been creeped out, embarrassed and furious. Of course it's not rape. But it sure is a way of remind the female player that rape is possible, and that they are at the moment thinking about her being raped.
That sort of sexual aggressiveness from guys really does happen a lot to women. When I traveled in Greece during my college years, some Greek guy would come and squeeze or fondle my butt pretty much every time I walked alone in Athens. When I lived in New York I'd get catcalls and shouted invasive comments pretty much every time I went out alone. Workmen across the street would shout stuff about sniffing my pussy and licking my tits. I don't think I deserve a purple heart for going through that, but it really is infuriating and humiliating. If you're a guy, you can't get a feel for what it's like by imagining women doing stuff like that -- you have to imagine *males* doing it. Think about being in a public place and having workman shout about how cute and round your butt is, and how they'd like to have a taste of that cock. And also imagine that these workmen are nearly a foot taller than you, outweigh you by 50% and are way more muscular. It's not that you'd be afraid they were going to cross the street and rape you ass in broad daylight on 7th Avenue -- it's that they're reminding you that they'd like to and then *could*. And nobody around you is protesting and some people are chuckling.
Given that this sort of thing happens many times to all women who are even modestly attractive, it is irritating to hear somebody assuming that what happened during that computer game was a nothing that some drama queen lied about.
This is the kind of sincere eflection that is justifiably excluded from policy discussions and the legal process.
This places everyone in a difficult situation. You've made some unfalsifiable claims, cast some vague aspersions, and digressed into personal narrative and described unrelated sitautions to amplify your emotional appeal.
If someone wanted to express another point of view or even just concern about the conflation of definitions and lack of nuance, how can they do so without it being interpreted as personally dismissive or hostile?
As a logical proposition, your last sentence is not dissimilar to the rhetoric and the appeal of a lynch mob, if not yet the same violence towards process.
This is the 1900s version of you:
"
I have been sexually harassed by (black) men before and it felt terrible.
Therefore, because so many (white) women are raped by (black) men, it's irritating to hear somebody assuming that (given the lack of evidence and mechanical impossibility) what happened at that corner store was a nothing that some drama queen lied about."
I find illiberalism irritating and concerning, since you're removing guardrails that were put in place slowly and painfully at great cost to have both a legal and cultural presumption of innocence as well as precision of terminology to get to the facts of the matter.
Sorry you were sexually harassed (and that much of it was likely illegal since it sounds chronic and threatening), but I hope you can balance your personal experience with the societal experiences of all the people who were harmed far more by emotional appeals that dispense with empiricism and precise.
Even if you are a racist (structurally or interpersonally) and really do pine for the days of being able to make an emotional appeal of white woman tears to mobilize violence against anyone marginalized who irritates you, you should understand that this same structure can be used by someone with higher status (like say a wealthy white landowner) to take away your presumption of innocence.
I didn't interpret SunSphere's comment as "literally only moving their hands around", but rather that on a spectrum from "only moving their hands around" to "the game realistically simulated and rendered sexual intercourse between avatars", the incident resembled the former much closer than the latter.
> And unless the person who wrote the article is a complete nitwit [...]
It's an article in the *Daily Mail*. It wasn't written by a nitwit, but by a "journalist" (lol) who knew full well what they were doing, and who did so intentionally.
I'm not defending what those other players did. Like I said, it's plausible that it really was disturbing – not that we actually know what happened, because the article doesn't say. And I'm pretty sure that's by design, because if it did, it would be immediately obvious to everyone that calling that incident "virtual gang rape" is click-baity bullshit. Also note that the article doesn't contain any description of which actions are even possible in the game; again, I suspect this is intentional.
> [description of sexual harassment]
That sounds truly awful.
Still I don't see how this means that we shouldn't form common sense assumptions about what is and isn't possible in Facebook's official VR game.
Without arguing that "virtual rape" should be considered equivalent to IRL rape, I think your request for differences in principle is easily answered. For one thing, participants in a violent first person shooter are tacitly consenting to potentially having their avatars blown to bits with weapons; I doubt this girl was engaging in an activity where participants should expect to be virtually raped. For another, people are and should be more sensitive about sexual violence than about violence in general. As we don't live in a perfectly pacifistic society, our culture condones certain acts of violence under certain circumstances (some of those circumstances, such as warfare, are explored in games). Under no circumstances, however, is sexual violence condoned by mainstream Western society.
“Users in Meta can set a protective 'bubble' around their characters so others cannot get close to them”
So? You can acquire a restraining order against me so that I can't get close to you. Do you mean to imply that if you haven't gotten that order yet, anything I could possibly do to your person is fair play, that you're actually asking for it because you haven't turned on that social feature?
If there was a magical button in real life that you could press that prevented people from getting near you, and also physically harming people was impossible so the worst you could do to someone is get close to them, and also the sensation of physical touch didn’t exist, then yes.
Obviously if you redefine reality to have all the properties of a virtual world, you would reach the same conclusions about reality as you would about a virtual world.
But physically harming people is possible, and the sensation of physical touch does exist. And even though those things aren't possible to experience directly in a virtual world, the actions taken in a virtual world have their meaning and potency enhanced because they *are* possible in the physical world. They aren't the *same* actions—threats and intimidation are not the same as battery—but neither are threats and intimidation harmless acts.
So, no, don't answer the question from the perspective of someone who is immune from all harm. Answer the question from the perspective of someone for whom the threat of harm is very real. You have an option to avoid harm if you have the forethought to take a certain precaution. If you do not, do you truly believe that society should hold anyone who chooses to harm you blameless?
At what point does a personal definition of harm that can extend into the virtual world compel a society to change its cultural and legal framework to accommodate it?
As primates operating under english common law, we can all agree that non-consensual touch can be both physically and mentally harmful and thus needs to be carefully regulated.
I sometimes post hasty and foolish comments online and people disagree with and make fun of what I said, which creates feelings of social dysphoria and worthlessness, genuinely. I could most likely even get a doctor's note and expert testimony confirming that this harm is both possible as part of my condition and occurred to me.
How much should society hold you responsible for harming me by saying things online I really don't want to hear that I can prove will impact my ability to live and work?
The platform settings exist for me to not see your reply, or any comments at all for that matter, or even for me to not post comments, but how much blame will you personally shoulder for the harm your words may cause me?
If I feel threatened/harassed by your assertion that feeling victimized by words online is evidence of a wrong that society
can and should create a procedural framework to address, how should we punish you for the harm you could cause me?
Since we're relying on the victim's reporting of the harm they felt and not the "reasonable person" legal abstraction and case law, by what basis should't you be blamed?
The title of the email notification of your reply had me worried for a moment. I checked that my C drive still had a few gigabytes spare. DOH!
Why do stock options exist? Not "why do companies pay employees with equity", that's obvious, I mean why this elaborate construct where employees are given the right to buy stocks at a highly discounted price, instead of just giving them stocks? Is this some tax/regulatory loophole, or is it a trivial inconvenience where employers hope 1% of their employees will forget to exercise their options?
A sociopathic director at a top tech company one told me a useful heuristic.
Anytime you see a corporation doing something weird with compensation or policy, the root cause is usually related to either tax evasion or punishing people who quit.
I'm assuming you're asking from the perspective of startups or private businesses giving options to early hires.
It's taxes, and (contrary to what some other commenters are saying), options are often strictly better for employees.
Consider a small business that is:
- doing well
- has raised external capital, e.g. from a Venture Capitalist
- is privately owned
That company has some nominal value. Lets say there are 10M shares, and the company is valued at $10M, so each share is a dollar (there's a slight difference between preferred shares and common stock and convertible debt and all sorts of other things, but lets ignore that for now).
Lets say the company wants to hire an employee and give them 10% equity so they have some incentive in the long term success of the company, maybe also compensate them for a lower-than-market salary. That 10% equity stake is equivalent to $1M of income. The IRS and the state will tax the employee as if they made $1M -- which, of course, is at the highest income bracket and comes out to about $400k.
The employee can't easily sell the 10% equity they've been given to cover the taxes, because the shares are totally illiquid. No one is really out there to buy it at the stated value; the valuation is $1 per share because of some one off capital injection. And even if the employee DID have $400k in tax-money lying around, they would still be banking on the shares EVENTUALLY being worth something, which they may not be. So if the employee takes the 10% equity, they get fucked.
Options significantly reduce the risk to the employee. Because an option kicks in later (generally during a liquidity event like an acquisition or an IPO), the employee can get some guaranteed liquidity to pay off the taxes for the shares that they get. And if the employee feels like the stock isn't going to do well, they simply don't exercise the option, which means they also don't lose any money (tax or in paying for the stock).
Source: am small business owner
Are you specifically asking about employee-grant options? FWIW this practice is greatly diminished now as companies seek to reduce their potential tax liabilities/complications. Established public companies typically grant RSUs (basically, shares of stock) to employees.
Options as a wider financial instrument have many useful applications for both "real economy" and pure speculation.
I believe it's a tax avoidance measure.
Stock options exist because there is strong demand them for them in financial markets.
Because the option is legally worthless until exercised and functions as an effective clawback. Let's say I run a company. The company is worth $100. I give you 10%. I just gave you $10. You will get taxed on that which you may not be able to pay, especially if the stock is illiquid. Let's say you take the 10% and then quit the next day. Well, you still own 10% of the company.
Let's say I give you a stock option to buy 10% of the company at a price of $10 in 4 years contingent on you working for the company. If you quit then no transfer actually took place. And if you don't quit and the stock becomes worth $100 then you buy the stock for $10. Now you've made $90. But the stock is also worth $100 and, by definition, liquid since otherwise you couldn't have bought it. So you pay taxes out of the $100 of liquid stock you have and keep the rest.
Lastly, on the corporate side internal stock options are not seen as valuing your shares. If I give you a stock for $1 I am implicitly saying my company is worth $1 times the number of stocks. If I give you a stock option for $1 I'm not implicitly saying anything about the price. I also don't have to deal with dilution or extra people on the cap table.
Also, normally the grant price (what you get to buy for) is the normal price of the stock when the option is granted. So they're not discounted. Instead the hope is the stock price grows before they become exercisable.
Is there a reason this is done via options instead of just listing "we have to give you X units of stock at date y" on your contract? Is it easier for accounting or something?
The accounting for employee stock options sucks (highly technical term from an actual accountant :) ). This is why now the exact "we have to give you X units of stock at date y" thing is much more common.
Johan Domeji's right. You just described stock options except without a grant price. The price serves to make sure the person only gains money if the stock price goes up, aligning incentives.
I think that's essentially what stock options are? As a separate contract. Also not for free, though they can sometimes be so-cheap-as-to-basically-be-free. Stock options also often vests gradually over time.
On the subject of college presidents, why are they sometimes highly-accomplished, big-brained people like Larry Summers? It doesn't sound like a very intellectual or even important job compared to what else a Larry Summers could be doing. Why must a college president be so high skilled?
Because if you're going to run an institution dedicated to research and teaching, you better know what research and teaching are about and how to cultivate them. You better have some idea how to attract and keep good faculty and students - and, in general, you better want to do well by the people of the institution.
You'd be amazed how much damage a not particularly intellectual but very conformist president of a college can do. My alma mater once had a president who started by severely damaging the IT infrastructure, making everyone's health insurance much much worse, and firing (for no given reason) a bunch of employees of the only medical facility on campus (which was not exactly overstaffed to start with). By the end of his (thankfully very short, as he moved to greener pastures) tenure, just about everyone, from professors to mailroom staff, hated his guts. When something like this happens, it's not good for the school.
In the UK the main responsibilities of the chancellor of a university are to act as a public face - fundraising, lobbying and the like - while the person who runs the university is the vice-chancellor, and so the chancellor is typically a high-profile public figure whereas the vice chancellor is typically someone with a strong track record in academic administration.
By the sound of things, in the US "president" is analogous to our "chancellor"?
It's in between. The President of a US university does need to actually make decisions, and sign documents (hiring packets, awards of tenure etc), unlike a UK chancellor.
ETA: The analog of the vice chancellor is probably the provost. The President can choose to outsource the running of the university to the provost, signing whatever the provost tells him to sign (some Presidents do this) while he spends his time glad handing and fund raising, but can also overrule the provost and make different decisions (some Presidents also do this).
Because the main job of a university is prestige laundering, and having some prestigious scholar in charge is a fairly cheap way to buy prestige.
I guess the real question is why don't they do this even harder? Why is the President of a top 50 university ever not a Nobel laureate? I think the answer is that most Nobel laureates don't want an admin job and wouldn't be good at it. Larry Summers is both prestigious and willing and able to do the boring day to day job if running a large organisation, which makes him a rare commodity.
At public universities, commonly enough the president is a retired politician, major political donor, or similar. e.g. Janet Napolitano serving as president of the University of California.
Elite private universities tend to appoint highly accomplished, big brained scholars from their own faculty as president. This is a convention, probably rooted in notions of faculty self governance, or possibly part of their branding (i.e. one way to demonstrate intellectual eliteness is to have an incredibly distinguished scholar at the helm).
In June 2018, an Israeli sniper murdered a 21-year-old medic, Razan al-Najjar, during protests by Palestinians imprisoned by Israel’s occupation and siege of Gaza. In an attempt to smear her and justify her killing following an international outcry, Israeli officials circulated a video purporting to show her saying she was acting as a human shield for Hamas. However, the video was subsequently revealed to have been doctored by the Israeli military to take her comments out of context. As noted by Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, the Israeli military initially claimed “soldiers did not fire at the spot where she had been standing. Later, the military said al-Najjar might have been killed by a ricochet, before finally accusing her of serving as a human shield… Contrary to the many versions offered by the military, the facts of the case lead to only one conclusion… al-Najjar was fatally shot by a member of the security forces who was aiming directly at her as she was standing about 25 meters (82 feet) away from the fence, despite the fact that she posed no danger to him or anyone else and was wearing a medical uniform.” According to the UN, in total Israeli soldiers killed 214 Palestinians protesters in Gaza during the Great Return March, including 46 children.Those killed included at least 3 medical workers and 2 journalists, all of whom were clearly identified as such.
https://imeu.org/article/fact-sheet-israels-history-of-spreading-disinformation
Zionist Jews are the most evil group of people to have ever existed. Not even the average german in world war 2 had the kind of frothing in the mouth, fuck around and find out kind of glee that the average zionist jew can't help himself expressed on some pictures of slaughtering palestinian kids. Zionist jews are worse than Nazis, and more willing to lie.
> Zionist Jews are the most evil group of people to have ever existed.
"Zionism" doesn't feel like the kind of ideology to describe with "The most evil [...] to have ever existed". To begin with, you have a serious problem with data collection: "To have ever existed" implies anywhere between 2 centuries (modern history and rise of nationalism), 70 centuries (7000 years, recorded history), and 3000 centuries (300K years, the estimated time before Christ when Anatomically modern humans first appeared). It's not obvious at all how well you compared Zionists to Vikings, to Mongols, to Conquistadors, to Arab invaders spreading Islam on the tip of a sword all the way to Spain and India. I don't think Zionists are more evil than all of those, not by the straightforward definition of the '>' operator for evil which reduces the comparison of evil to a comparison of damages and lives lost during the committing of that evil.
Furthermore, Zionism is not exceptional. Zionism is simply, as many people in Israel appear to understand it, Israeli nationalism. A "Zionist" is to an Israeli what a "Patriot" is to an Americans. Are Patriotic Americans "The Evilest Group of People to Ever Exist?" because they glorify and identify with America, the state that rose from the ashes of dead native Americans? that looks like an exaggeration to me.
The only thing different in Israel's case is that its founding was in quasi-living memory, and the national narrative as well as most of its citizens still deny any wrongdoing with respect to the founding of their state. The first point is unmatched except by oddballs like Pakistan, some Balkan states, and perhaps the entirety of Africa below the Sahara (but a founding of a new state for people who already live there isn't analogous to Israel, it must involve mass migration). The second point is extremely common. Pop Quiz: Do you know how people outside of the Arabian Peninsula came to speak Arabic? Do you know that - to this day - it's taboo and very frowned upon in those same societies to call the Arabic Invasion "The Arabic Invasion" or "The Islamic Invasion"? Even though it ***was*** an invasion, and it involved murder and rape and taking of people's land and settling in it (though admittedly, probably not as extensive as what Israel did in 1948).
So, in short, my outlook towards Zionism - which I believe to be the correct one - is as follows:
1- Zionism before, during and shortly (~20-25 years) after the founding of Israel is evil. A racist, deluded, and colonial project. It's probably not the **most** evil by the standards of its time, its probably not so by the standards of even our own time.
2- Zionism after the establishment of Israel (1973+) is about as cringe and evil as any other nationalism. It can be meant in good faith, the equivalent of "Hell yeah 'Murica", and it can even be paired with explicit inclusion of Arabs and calls for peace with them.
3- The settlers in the West Bank are not monolithic, and while their entire existence in a land that nobody on the planet except them recognizes as theirs is immoral and wrong, only some, perhaps in the low thousands (relative to 400-600 thousands of them, so less than 1%) do actually engage in violence against the Palestinians of the sort we hear and see.
4- Everyday Israelis can be complicit in the West Bank disaster and more generally in the IDF war machine, but this is the same uninteresting meaning of "Complicit" as the one where everyday Americans are complicit in the invasion of Iraq, or where meat-eaters are complicit in the one of the cruelest activities that human civilization allows to continue to date. Society has a "Moral Inertia" associated with it, some evil is so widespread and so cheap that you need unusual energy just to ***Recognize*** it as evil, let alone speaking about it out load, let alone actually resisting it or even merely refraining from supporting and enabling it.
Israelis should be held to the same standards, Jews are not God-chosen but they're not cursed either, they're just a group of people who fuck up and form oppressive hierarchical societies where their worst rule them and force courses of actions that implicate them in vast crimes of incomprehensible scales while sugarcoating the whole thing.
Well I'd say I disagree with most of this but there is little point arguing when a target is there and it's not each other. You are an apostate, I'm not, it seems you are left wing and I'm moderately right, I really just have one goal though which is raising as much awareness as I can in the rat community and reaching whoever can be reached. I'm going to transition to link/quotes+minimalist commentary without the accusation. I want the reader to come to that accusation themselves. Take more ownership of it that way.
But regarding this point:
"Do you know how people outside of the Arabian Peninsula came to speak Arabic? Do you know that - to this day - it's taboo and very frowned upon in those same societies to call the Arabic Invasion "The Arabic Invasion" or "The Islamic Invasion"? Even though it ***was*** an invasion, and it involved murder and rape and taking of people's land and settling in it (though admittedly, probably not as extensive as what Israel did in 1948)."
Conversions in the holy land and egypt seem to have occurred over a period of time, Palestinian christians+samaritans lack the arab+african descent that palestinian Muslims have and it does not appear they were coerced, lacking arab dna seems to also indicate they weren't raped. Both of those group are overwhelmingly levantine jewish/caananite(some seem to argue they are just the same) by dna. This does not look like one of those massive y-chromosomal replacement campaigns we see in ancient europe. Nor does it look like a massive theft of any sort. Furthermore there is no indication I can see that Muslim invaders did anything out of the ordinary for those times. And they were at war with rome and persia because neither civilization was going to allow an upstart power. Romes did send troops to arabia before the invasion response if I remember correctly.
Now of course there is the arab slave trade, castration of eunuchs, etc and so gene studies will probably show some kind of y chromosomal replacement in places like sudan where atrocities occur even today at the hands of arabs and places like mauritania. Furthermore widespread atrocities to migrant workers now. But I don't think the conquests of levant and iraq and the eras that followed were filled with atrocities. Also in the ancient era fighters would target other fighters on the battlefield, not like Israelis targeting fighters in a ghetto.
I would like to point this out in any case someone claims Palestinian Muslims are not indigenous to the land, that they are merely just another group of invaders. They have more levantine jewish dna than ethiopian, yemeni and ashkenazi jews. They are sons of the soil. Their lineages have stayed in the land for over 2000 years, tilling the soil and reaping not living off the backs of others or through theft like Israeli jews.
While I don't agree with any of your views, I applaud that you are following LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael's wise advice to use more of your own words in your comments, to avoid your previous url-with-a-single-line style.
I'm actually thinking about going back to that. More effective to just display some nasty Israeli lie or atrocity or call to slaughter palestinians and spread disease among them, evict them from their land and grab that very land. Perhaps. Let the reader come to the obvious conclusion.
What you don’t get is that at this point most people recognize your username and style, and when they see another of your posts they sigh & move on past without clicking your newest Jews Fucking Suck link.
Many Thanks! Sigh. Well, suit yourself. I doubt you are convincing anyone.
I literally laughed out loud at your final paragraph. That is some excellent satire, right there.
https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1742222195718308188?s=20
There are people on this thread who will defend this, or deny it, or just justify it. That's because deep down they are either zionist jewish supremacists, or thing murdering humans and stealing their land is okay if they have less IQ points than the murdering thieves. There is no shortage of zio jews targeting and murdering civilians. Anyone denying that at this point deserves the contempt of humanity and roasting in hell.
< There are people on this thread who will defend this, or deny it, or just justify it.
Probably a few. But I’m pretty sure what most people in this thread are going to do is not click your link.
Scott can you please ban this guy lmao
I kind of appreciate his candor? At least he's not hiding his bias.
(But seriously this kind of troll is bad for discourse, +1 for banning)
Once/If he gets banned it won't be long before someone posts that nobody holds the views he's posting there and they're a strawman.
unfortunately good point :/
I think this person is doing some unwinking parody/satire, but agreed, that's not really appropriate to the tone of this commenting community.
It’s very definitely not satire and instead a truly held belief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Yup, the range of views actually held by people is sufficiently broad that it is _exceedingly_ hard to know what is satire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadpan
AE Studio is hiring for a senior AI alignment researcher (https://ae.studio/jobs/5041532004/senior-alignment-researcher#apply) per our recent lesswrong post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qAdDzcBuDBLexb4fC/the-neglected-approaches-approach-ae-studio-s-alignment#comments).
Substack has a Nazi problem. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/
Also it's super slow on my 2021 notebook and it seems to hate Firefox.
Why are people always worried about Nazis in this or that place, when there probably at least 1000 Marxists in America for every Nazi in America? Does it matter that Substack has a tiny Nazi problem when Congress and the Ivy League have a big Marxist problem?
Nazism is a totalitarian religion which preaches race-based hate and conflict theory. Marxism is a totalitarian religion which preaches class-based hate and conflict theory. Quantitatively, Marxists have murdered about 10 times as many people as Nazis, and ruined more countries, and are a much more-serious and more-adaptable threat to civilization. People who were Nazis in Germany in the 1930s could claim they didn't understand that Nazism would lead to mass murder. People who are Marxists today have no such excuse. Yet no one shouts for a professor to resign when he shows Marxist leanings.
The comment above this one is a guy ranting about how "Zionist Jews are the most evil people who have ever existed, much worse than the Nazis", so I confirm the first part.
I still don't especially think it's up to subtack to manage them, at least in its classical form as an opt-in newsletter (which makes them easy to ignore). Lately it's been agressively trying to push its Twitter clone, which does a lot to push various types of extremists I don't want to see into my feed. Having those extremists on the site degrades the experience much more in this format, and I hope they stop pushing it.
Unfortunately, "Zionist Jews are more evil than Nazis" is not a view limited to Nazis.
...And? Substack's main buisness model is offering hosting for bloggers that got kicked off of the rest of the internet. As long as there's supply and demand for Nazi content, they're going to keep hosting it. As any good capitalist should.
I think the problem with this is that there's also supply and demand for bloggers who got kicked off the rest of the internet who nevertheless aren't Nazis, and a lot of us would like some capitalist enterprise that operates in that area.
ETA: Overall, I think the OP problem is overrated by a few orders of magnitude; my response here is to the specific problem of whether capitalists have to flock to some sort of Nazi content market. I think that's a tiny market. Compared to, say, the market for Nazi content from customers who are looking for things to write about and claim a "Nazi problem".
Well, two of those things are true.
I have not looked at the Atlantic article or the blogs it accuses of being Nazi blogs, but I don't see why everyone is dismissing out of hand the possibility that there are Nazi blogs on Substack. Out of curiosity I googled "Neo Nazi organizations in US" and got a Wikipedia page listing 55 of them. Skimmed the list, & saw that about 1/4 had 'Aryan' in the names, & then there were some with names like California Reich, Goyim Defense League & Nazi Lowriders. All those sure sound like genuinely Nazi organizations to me. And Substack seems to do very little censorship, something many of us appreciate. So seems pretty plausible there could be a Nazi blog on Substack.
Without knowing anything about the group itself, Goyim Defense League is at least funny as a name.
Do you also think the Hell's Angels are either Satanists or literal demons?
Was the pentagram on Motley Crue's "Theater of Pain" album proof of devil-worship, or an easy way of signaling transgressiveness?
Did you mean to reply to me? You sound like you're rebutting somebody who sees Nazis everywhere. All I said was that there are quite a few Neo Nazi orgs in the US, & it would be surprising if there wasn't a blog on Substack for and by people of that way of thinking.
Yes. Because you said "All those sure sound like genuinely Nazi organizations to me." Personally, I would think that "Nazi Lowriders" was an obvious bit of tail-tweaking, but maybe there really are Mexican Nazis or Aryan racial-purity lowrider enthusiasts. There are undoubtedly real Nazis, and there were undoubtedly real Satanists in the 1980s. It's just that taking on the symbology of the current bad group is something the edgy have been doing since... the Puritans?
Yeah, OK, I can imagine that a band or a group would adopt a name like that as a way of signifying raunchiness or defiance. It's sort of like naming your band The Herpes. But if you look at the Wiki listing of US Neo Nazi groups, many have names that don't even work really as tail-tweaking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Neo-Nazi_organizations_in_the_United_States
Do you really think all of those are bands or art collectives? And besides, Wiki, while not infallible, is also not usually dead wrong, and it identifies these groups as Neo Nazi groups. My point is not that there is a Nazi hiding under every bush, just that there are Neo Nazi groups in the US, & it's plausible that Substack would have a blog that's a forum for them. Do you really doubt that?
It would be astonishing if a platform with pretty much non-existent censorship didn't have a handful of Nazi (or any other disreputably-themed) blogs. Calling it a problem is a problem, pardon the circularity.
Well... Firefox has a small install base, percentage-wise, but it's users are disproportionally more influential. It's got a long and tangled history, stretching back to Netscape and the original NCSA Mosaic, although it was almost wiped out by Internet Explorer, a browser that also shares the legacy of Mosaic code...
So perhaps these two problems aren't as unrelated as they appear!
Extremely slow for me too. When using the scrollbar it takes several seconds for the text to appear on the page. When typing this comment, it took nearly a second for some of the words to show up after I stopped typing.
FWIW, for the comments anyway I'll repeat some advice that worked for me (I don't recall who to credit this with): Open the pointer to the comment that you want to reply to in a new tab, and type the reply there. FWIW, I'd doing this in firefox, on a windows 10 laptop. The substack site seems to behave as if there is some slowdown perhaps proportional to the number of the comments in a tab. I also have the problem of the slowdown when scrolling through the main page of comments. The best that I can do for that is to click the "stop" option if "this web page is slowing down your browser" pops up (but this fix seems to be temporary, maybe once per several page scrolls).
I read Substack on Firefox, and it seems to run ok (with all the known issues such as slowing down when comments reach into 100s). But I do see Ublock Origin counter at 30 as I type this so maybe using a good ad blocker helps? I'm no programmer so I don't really know.
Using UO here too (25 blocks right now).
Regarding my original post: I guess I was uninformed about The Atlantic's agenda and Substack's policies (and that it wants to be a Xitter clone. LMAO).
I have to say I love your "Xitter" thing (pronounced as an "sh" sound I assume).
Commenter Shaked Koplewitz hit the nail on the head: it's not hosting Nazi content that is a problem, but promoting it - if Substack starts doing that I will sharpy revise my view on whether it has a "Nazi problem".
UO counter at 25 too - not sure why it changed from yesterday.
I'll refer you to my post in the last Open Thread about Substack banning me without notification. I'm sure their problem is not what The Atlantic is saying it is.
No it doesn't. The Atlantic has "people we don't like are Nazis, please make them disappear from public discourse" problem. I can't emphasize how damaging it to efforts to combat actual Nazis (which are still quite rare at least in the US) when f-ing Atlantic and it ilk call everyone slightly to the right of AOC "Nazi".
Exactly! Left wing mainstream media, in the UK at least, such as Aljabeeba (the BBC), labels anyone or any organisation not fully signed up to their leftist liberal woke outlook as far-right and does their utmost to ignore and suppress their views and cancel them.
I've run into enough weird extremist blogs just through the default recommendations twitter clone that I'd be shocked if there weren't also a whole variety of explicitly Nazi blogs out there.
That said I don't trust the likes of the Atlantic to decide who to ban, and would prefer to just remove the recommendation system.
Yes, 100% agree, it's the recommendations, not the hosting, that is the problem - widespread problem with "social media" platforms in general. Take one look at NASA's Webb telescope page, next thing you get recommended is flat-earthers.
... and notably shows restraint with the term when millions show "solidarity" with the Palestinian terrorist genociders who committed the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
"At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person."
Yes, sometimes the word Nazi is overapplied. That doesn't mean real Nazis aren't a thing any more.
I'm not going to make an Atlantic account to read the rest of the article, but I'm curious whether they go into how many readers any of those have. Somehow I doubt it.
I have not read the Atlantic article and am not especially interested in doing so, but I happened to run across on another site a quoted paragraph from the Atlantic article. The Atlantic wrote that “some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers."
How many communists are on Substack?
Do you think it's more or less than 16?
16, out of 17,000 paid newsletters (and how many unpaid?), A <0.1% Nazi "problem", seems more like a minor nuisance to me.
So Katz has to go on and invoke the specter of other newsletters, presumably without the actual Nazi iconography, and say "trust me, these guys are Nazis". And we have to trust him, because he doesn't provide links.
I don't trust him.
16! The world is coming to an end now.
Look, I despise Nazis and thing they are a scum of this Earth. But FFS, Substack doesn't have a Nazi problem. "Society" has a Nazi problem. In the US it's still a small problem. Germany has the strictest anti-Nazi laws and... just disbanded an actual Nazi conspiracy reaching into its law enforcement. How on earth Atlantic railing against Substack (curiously, a competitor) is going to solve any kind of a Nazi problem is... unknown, to put it charitably.
Does anyone actually think the problem this guy hopes to solve is that there are some actual Nazis using Substack as a blogging/newsletter platform? Because I'd bet a lot of money that the problem he hopes to solve involves a much wider range of people than Mr 1488 Edgelord and his zero-subscription Substack.
We've just run through a decade or so where most of the big media outlets in the US did this routine, talking about the need to push out Nazis that somehow turned into needing to get rid of Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias and Bari Weiss and Scott Alexander. I assume that if somehow people manage to pressure Substack to start purging "extremist" substacks, they'll find themselves at the bottom of that slippery slope having pushed out Razib Khan for being a white supremacist and Matt Yglesias for his far-right extreme position that the cops should ticket you for not having valid license plates. And soon thereafter, Substack will disappear, having lost the thing that let them become big in a media ecosystem where almost everyone else is shrinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Okay, but we're having this conversation at the bottom of that slope w.r.t. a bunch of big media outlets. I predict that the same coalition that pushed Bari Weiss out of the NYT and Andrew Sullivan out of the New Yorker will, given the chance, push those same folks off of Substack, explaining all the while that they are merely excluding Nazis, the alt-right, transphobes, etc.
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out, for I was not a Nazi...
https://philarchive.org/archive/JEFSSA is much better on the topic.
<Does anyone actually think the problem this guy hopes to solve is that there are some actual Nazis using Substack as a blogging/newsletter platform? Because I'd bet a lot of money that the problem he hopes to solve involves a much wider range of people than Mr 1488 Edgelord and his zero-subscription Substack.Does anyone actually think the problem this guy hopes to solve is that there are some actual Nazis using Substack as a blogging/newsletter platform? Because I'd bet a lot of money that the problem he hopes to solve involves a much wider range of people than Mr 1488 Edgelord and his zero-subscription Substack<
Which guy -- do you mean aexl? Yes, I think it's perfectly possible that aexl is considers Nazi blogs a problem. while being OK with lots of blogs that others might want to get their greedy little fingers on and censor -- for ex., right wing blogs, red pill blogs, anti-immigrant blogs, sexually explicit blogs. Why wouldn't it be possible? Why are you assuming that everybody who finds genuinely Nazi content "a problem" is actually someone who wants to take over Substack and the rest of the world and force it to follow some stupid woke rulebook? And why are you assuming that any log that might truly be called pro-Nazi is some posts by an obnoxious edgelord with zero followers?
You are not being fair-minded. How about you make a list of what sort of thing would mark a blog as genuinely Neo Nazi, then go look at the ones that aexl objects to and see how close they come to meeting your criteria, and how many followers they have.
Here's one reason why I find it plausible that the problem aexl wants to solve is exactly the problem they say they want to solve, nazi blogs. One of my first posts on ACX was at the height of Covid, and I posted some concerns about a blog with a huge following that was basically lying with statistics to make the case that the covid vax not only did not improve anyone's chance of surviving covid, but it did actual harm. The thing that put that blog in a special category from me was that it was spreading misinformation about a serious public health problem, and it seemed to be spreading it quite successfully. I thought Substack should consider reducing the harm this blog was doing by publishing user-friendly explanations about how statistics were being used in a tricky way and about the actual data we had about the vax.
I do not like censorship or its cousins, and would never have been in favor of posting corrections to blogs containing misinformation of other kinds , even if they infuriated me (for ex. "all women want a man with the 4 6's". A 6-pack, a 6-figure income, 6 feet tall or taller, a 6 inch or larger dick"). Sio yes, I think it's possible that aexl objects only to Nazi blogs.
Personally, I'm not in favor of banning a blog simply because they self-identify as a Nazi, but I am in favor of banning any blog that posts disinformation that threatens public health or safety.
Who defines what is truth, and what isn't?
And then that "misinformation" was subsequently proven categorically true. Young people are overwhelmingly dying more from the vaccine than Covid, even today. Cardiac deaths, specifically in the young, are still elevated 50-100% from 2019 levels. And that's not even factoring in the disabilities, neurological disorders, brain blood clots...
SyxnFxlm: "Young people are overwhelmingly dying more from the vaccine than Covid" Source?
I think that the current consensus is that covid vaccines for healthy children have higher risks than benefits and it might be also true for young adults. That's why most countries in Europe children are not given covid vaccine. I don't really understand why the US is so insistent on vaccinating children against covid. Maybe it is because too many children in the US are overweight that they actually benefit from vaccine but saying it directly would offend fat people?
Nevertheless, the potential harm from covid vaccines in absolute numbers are very small therefore I wouldn't make it a big issue. Many blogs are quite indiscriminate. Sometimes they use harsh words, they say that the doctors who vaccinate are murders etc. The reality is more complicated and it is not fair to blame an individual doctor. Instead I suggest reading Vinay Prasad and other researchers who are very rigorous evaluating available evidence.
Yeah, I have burned out on having conversations about this with people of your school of thought. But I have a suggestion: Raise this idea with the group as a whole here. Quote what I said, say what you believe, and ask what others think. I'm sure there are some people here who can still stand to discuss this topic.
*shrug* The Atlantic has a traffic problem and I don't believe their kayfabe anymore.
Hey Scott and broader rat-o-sphere, a friend referred me to a resource for finding psychiatric/therapy help that used to be maintained but appears to not be maintained anymore:
https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/
I'm looking for something similar, in terms of a recommendation for a therapist with experience working with neuro-atypical/autist spectrum types.
I will default to this other resource, which seems like good advice.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18vT8W-e2kXt6tR2RNsI9xY3Ag5ZDszBAgOCqMz_oTdQ/edit
You can search Psychology Today by specialties people list, and Asperger's is one of the categories. Some people, though, say they treat everything. You want someone who lists only a few specialities, with Asperger's among them. If you are in a state that participates in PsyPac, you can have virtual sessions with therapists anywhere in the country so long as they are also in PsyPac states, so you have more choices. Info about PsyPac states is here: https://psypact.org/mpage/psypactmap
I’m thinking there’s a parallel between minimum wage and reserve pricing in auction theory. Reserve pricing is a modification to second-price auctions where you set a price floor, and the winner of the auction pays at least that much if they win. In contrast, in a second-price auction with only one buyer, the winner invariably pays zero. Reserve pricing is “revenue maximizing” meaning it’s best for those receiving the payment. Without reserve pricing the auction is “welfare maximizing,” meaning the good invariably goes to the bidder who values it most, but not necessarily giving the best price to the person providing the good.
There are a million disconnects between the auction model and the labor market — not one-shot, not anonymous, known pricing (sometimes), non-homogenous bidders/goods, unknown distributions. But it does suggest that sometimes a price floor can be beneficial to those being paid (workers). Even though in some cases it leads to the good not being sold (a worker not being hired, a job not being filled), especially in cases where there are a low number of bidders (jobs available) it causes a wage increase in those hired that compensates for the missing jobs.
Would love to know what people think about this. Anywhere it’s been explored? Important things that make the parallel not hold? I have basic knowledge of auction theory but that only covers simple settings. One thing I like about this framing is that it exposes a little knowledge being misleading. Most people know from microeconomics that price floors cause slack (which is bad), but in a broader context there may be a net benefit.
As Erusian sort of mentioned, the difference between minimum wage and reserve auction pricing is that, in an auction, the reserve price is set by the people who own the item being offered. A worker can mimic that, but not with minimum wage; instead, it's them going to the job interview and saying "I won't work here for less than $X."
The business-side equivalent is proficiency requirements. "Must be able to lift 80 pounds routinely." If the best candidate they get can't lift more than 40 pounds semi-annually, they'd rather hire no one.
Minimum wage is simply a price floor. Like all price floors it produces a deadweight loss but raises the price of the good in question while reducing the supply. It is a net loss overall unless the minimum wage floor is so below the prevailing wages that it effectively doesn't affect anything. But those losses, as you point out, are unevenly distributed. (Though I will point out this is also basic micro.) The deadweight loss is not borne by those who are employed but by the people who are not employed and by the buyers (ie, employers and people who can't sell their labor for the minimum wage rate). It's thus a net transfer from employers and the lower classes to the working class. Whether the employer's portion is passed onto consumers has to do with things like market elasticity.
When originally proposed, this was considered a benefit. It was explicitly considered to be eliminating certain kinds of work. It was touted as a benefit that certain kinds of work would become uneconomical. It was called eliminating drudgery and so on. We only started to get a lot of motivated analysis about how it doesn't eliminate jobs when it became a conservative line of attack on the policy and so inconvenient for liberal politicians.
If you wanted to design a more efficient policy that accomplishes the same ends then there are more efficient programs. The issue is that it's less politically viable. Minimum wage is easier to build a coalition around so we get the less economically efficient but more politically viable option.
What are some of those more efficient approaches?
Depends on the policy goal. If you want to take money from the rich and use it to make sure every worker (defined as a full time worker) gets enough money to live a certain lifestyle then you could just define them as a group and then give them direct transfers. If you want to incentivize labor you could do it as effectively a subsidy to working hours. If you just want to boost their consumption you could just give them cash. All of which would not distort the labor market as much as a high price floor on labor. Minimum wage, by most estimates, is a fairly costly policy. Its virtue is its political defensibility, not its efficiency.
Sounds like an argument for universal basic income.
Only if you don't mind reducing the labor supply and the economy overall.
How does that work? UBI gives people money to spend, which they likely will on goods and services they need. Supply is limited, and demand is infinite. People will still work. The real danger is inflation.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2242937-universal-basic-income-seems-to-improve-employment-and-well-being/
A more academic review of the literature:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1748-8583.12348
"it causes a wage increase in those hired that compensates for the missing jobs."
I disagree with the 'compensates for missing jobs' part. The jobs market is a zero-sum game. There are only a fixed number of openings available. If there are ten jobs, but eleven workers, that eleventh someone is unemployed. If you're that someone, the 10% unemployment number is 0% income, it hits you really hard.
Here in California, (I think effective yesterday), fast food workers for companies with more than 1,300 employees saw their pay upped to $20/hr. This is all well and fine; meanwhile Pizza Hut announced it's laying off all 1,200 delivery drivers. For those 1,200 people, how's that wage hike working out for you? Yeah, not so much eh.
Since I'm semi-retired for seven years, I don't eat out like I used to. Whilst Christmas shopping two weeks ago, I dropped in on my elderly parents—in their late 80s. They wanted me to bring them lunch from KFC. Easy, I've not been to KFC for years; KFC was a ghost-town, at noon, on a big shopping day, I had no idea why. Three box lunches, each with three wings/tenders, a biscuit, and salad cost $40. Yeah, there's not much danger in that happening again. --just sayin.
"The jobs market is a zero-sum game. There are only a fixed number of openings available."
Not true, over time spans long enough for employees to spend enough wages to affect a local economy. You pay a small number of people more money, then they spend more money as consumers, and that allows more jobs to support that spending. The economy grows. Meanwhile, prices increase, but so do average wages.
With the pizza hut move, without any additional information, I wonder if they were losing delivery-based revenue to food delivery apps, and the drivers weren't economical already, but maybe the increase pushed it over the edge and justified the move to not employing delivery drivers at all?
For any individual company, who knows, but it's absolutely possible for a minimum-wage hike to price some jobs out of the market. If I am required to pay you either $20/hour or $0/hour, but nothing I know how to employ you to do for me will earn more than $15/hour of your time, then you're getting a pink slip (and $0/hour).
To see why this has to be true, consider what happens when the minimum wage is $100/hour.
Can you price delivery drivers at being worth $15/hour? If someone is making a choice to order a takeaway based on "who is offering delivery?" and that makes the difference for enough customers, your driver may well be making you that $20/hour or more.
I do know it's tricky because fast food franchises are operating on slim margins, like all restaurant/hospitality businesses, but there seems to be a parallel push to get customers to take on more of the work themselves (see self-service checkouts in supermarkets and the drive for online banking - at least here in Ireland, where the bank my workplace uses now has made it that if you want to lodge cash, you can't do it t the local branch in town any more, you now have to go thirty miles to our city to do so. This is *not* 'more convenient and better service for the customer', no matter what the PR may say).
In the US, we have a term for the people who study this for the large corporations. We call them Quants, which is short for quantifying, they put dollar amounts to activities. Quants are mostly insurance actuaries, calculating and do things like tell how much it costs to insure this group of people. But they work in the financial side of all corporations too, or at least in the good ones. Quants tell you the result of the balance of raising the prices, losing sales, and how some action will play outfinancially.
Just because you pay driver $15/hr, doesn't mean that is how much it costs you to fill that pizza delivery role. It is probably more like $50/hr. You have to outfit a delivery vehicle, plus the driver, plus all the taxes and benefits, plus the gear, plus the insurance, plus corporate overhead, plus etc.
Maybe it costs $300 a night to provide a delivery driver. Does that $300 a night provide more than $300 in profit from delivering pizzas compared to not delivering pizzas? If not, then you're losing money; don't do it.
Oh for sure. But maybe if each worker got more expensive they might have laid off part of the delivery workforce.
Laying off the entire category of employee made me think that in house delivery staff made me think that it was a nice being contemplated before.
A mathematical primer on reserve-price auctions for those so inclined: https://timroughgarden.org/f16/l/l16.pdf
My nose has been clogged for a month. I had a cold and that part never really got better. What would help? I'm currently using Xclear nasal spray and a saline nasal spray. I'm fine during the day, but it wakes me up at night when my nose clogs completely. AI recommended continuing to use nasal sprays, going on an antihistamine, seeing a doctor, and praying to my god
If you're curious for the conclusion, I switched to budesonide for a few days and that helped. Now I'm not taking anything, although I'm still a bit stuffy. It doesn't interrupt my sleep anymore and I don't need to carry tissues around. Thanks for the help everyone!
I also agree to stop using the nasal sprays, your nose is making more mucus to compensate for the under-production. It's a known effect.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23393-rhinitis-medicamentosa
There are tablets of xylitol and glue which you can stick to your gums when you go to sleep; a brand name is Xylimelt, but there are cheaper generics. They last about 3 hours. Xylitol breaks down biofilms, and I think this helps clear out the mucus from your sinuses.
Also, you can take a guaifenesin tablet before bed.
Also, try elevating the head of your bed; this will help the mucus run down your throat, which is better than staying in your sinuses.
Also, play with humidity levels.
Also, if you wake up at night, get up, use Xlear, and do stuff for half an hour, and your head will start to clear. Then go back to bed.
Also, see an ENT who will do an endoscopic exam of your sinuses and see if they are badly formed. They can open them up with somnoplasty or sinuplasty.
Which god did the AI recommend you pray to?
I had a clogged nose for the longest time until accidentally (I swear) taking my kid's antihistamine (it was a prescription one). I'd try every antihistamine I or someone I know has around the house, on the off-chance that this might accidentally work.
Also, you can complain to your doctor that your clogged nose is not letting you sleep at night and beg him for some hydroxyzine. It might unclog your nose or let you sleep through the night - either way, a win.
hahaha I get the logic, and I might just try them all over the course of a few days, but "Take every drug" is the dankest advice
On second thought, I would suggest that you immediately contact your doctor, explain that you can't sleep because of a clogged nose, say that some people said hydroxyzine is helpful for sleeping in such situations, and ask what his thoughts would be about it - could he, please, let you have some to see if it helps?
In my experience, the doctor will probably say yes. (There's really no reason for him to say no.)
"Every drug" is not the same thing as "every antihistamine". "Every antihistamine" is fairly unlikely to harm you in any way besides sending you to sleep.
For sure, I was being facetious
Just stay away from Afrin. It will clear your nose up but when it wears off your nose will be stuffed up much worse, and you'll take another hit of Afrin and the cycle will repeat. It's incredibly addictive for a non-psychoactive substance.
Yeah, I've used it before. So weird that it works so well at the cost of becoming addicted to it
I had to accept two days of being a zombie in order to wean myself off of it. Terrible!
1. Neti pot, I know it's gross, but that's the yucky stuff going out, you get to feel satisfied about the whole mess
2. If by "clogged" you mean "stuffed" (inflamed and no snot), try the Russian thing. Close one nostril and breathe as much as you can through the other, then switch. After a minute your body should decide the O2 shortage is too much to afford the luxury of keeping those things closed and it may open up.
I use a pressurized can of nasal spray, it seems to work better than neti since the liquid kinda pushes itself into your nose
I am pretty sure it's stuffed
I'll chime in to say my nose has been clogging for 15 months straight now, which started after my last round of what I assume was Covid back in August '22. (No advice other than "take it seriously").
Go to a doctor if your symptoms persist for a week, don't wait a month.
Strongly suggest trying a neti pot or other nasal rinse. Also consider if what you have is a sinus infection and, if you think it might be, read up on sinus anatomy.
I'm plagued by this too. I used Sudafed for a long time, got sinus infections, but less dripping, changed to Claritin, still got raging sinus infections. Went to Flonase, and now it's generic replacement. Works wonders for me. I do hate using the nasal spray, but its a great improvement over Sudafed and Claritin.
Maybe try a nasal dilator, like Rhinomed Mute?
Oh weird, this seems like an obvious idea, I'll give it a shot. I guess my suspicion is that the problem isn't my nose width, but the fact that mucus builds up over the course of hours so this would help with snoring but not complete blockage. I guess we'll see!
Thanks for the recommendation
I've noticed I still see comments from people I've blocked on here - does anyone have a way to fix substack's block function?
I noticed the same. Looked into it quickly last night, & it seemed like you can block commenters on your own blog, and block people on Notes, but there is no way to block other commenters on a blog that's not yours. Though just as I was running out of time I saw something that gave the impression you can *mute* other commenters.
The International Court of Justice will investigate Israel on charges of genocide, filed by South Africa.
According to Haaretz (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-01/ty-article/state-officials-fear-hauge-could-charge-israel-with-genocide-in-gaza/0000018c-c1a9-d3e0-abac-d9a9acd80000, https://archive.ph/1qwrm), the genocidal clowns in charge should be worried :
> The security establishment and the State Attorney's Office are concerned that the International Court of Justice at the Hague will charge Israel with genocide in the Gaza Strip – this at the request of South Africa, which petitioned the court over the weekend.
> According to international law experts, the proceeding may cement claims of genocide against Israel, and thus lead to its diplomatic isolation and to boycott or sanctions against it or against Israeli businesses.
> Unlike the International Criminal Court at the Hague, which conducts proceedings against private individuals, the International Court of Justice deals with judicial disputes between countries.
> Israel does not recognize the jurisdiction of the Criminal Court, which is conducting investigations into alleged war crimes by both Israelis and Palestinians, including in the current war.
> In contrast, it is signatory to the treaty against genocide, by the power of which the court derives its authority to hear the complaint filed against Israel by South Africa. According to the court's prior ruling, any signatory country may file a complaint against another country, even if it's not directly harmed by it.
> Prof. Eliav Lieblich, an expert on international law at Tel Aviv University, explains that South Africa makes two central claims: that Israel isn't acting to prevent statements that call for genocide and that it is committing actions that constitute genocide.
> "Genocide is a violation, the proof of which in court requires two elements," Lieblich adds. "First, you have to show intention of annihilation, and second – certain actions in the field that promote this intention. According to South Africa, the intention is proven by statements of senior Israeli figures and a public atmosphere of erasing or flattening Gaza, and the widespread harm to civilians and the hunger in Gaza show the factual element of the deed."
> "In general, it's hard to prove an intention of genocide because no public statements to that effect are made during the fighting," he [Eliav Lieblich] explained. "But these irresponsible statements about erasing Gaza will require Israel to explain why they don't reflect such an intention."
> Lieblich noted that to date, the court has heard very few cases involving accusations of genocide. Around 15 years ago, it rejected a Bosnian complaint that Serbia had committed genocide but ruled that Serbia hadn't prevented the genocide that Serb militias perpetrated in the Srebrenica massacre.
> Another case, which is still in the early stages, involves a Ukrainian complaint against Russia. The court is also hearing a complaint by Gambia against Myanmar over its persecution of the Rohingya [A Muslim ethnic minority in the majority-Buddhist Myanmar, also known as Burma]
> "South Africa's complaint is intended to add Israel to this very disreputable group, and thereby also embarrass the U.S. as its ally," Lieblich said.
I'm looking forward to the guilty ruling, to be completely and unabashedly frank. If nothing else, a single link to the ruling will be quite an adequate response from then on to all the tired and repeated denialist talking points that I see brought up over and over again, the same old statistics about increasing population of Gazans as supposed evidence that Israel is not committing Genocide in Gaza now, the same smug and heartless "This isn't happening, stop noticing things" attitude.
And conversly, if the court proceeds with this to the very end and rules that there is no Genocide, I will be quite surprised. I commit to reading the entire verdict if it's public (within reasonable limits of my time and understanding of International Law), though I can't guarantee that I will be convinced by it. I will also stop making the claim of Genocide or describing Israeli policies in Gaza as Genocidal except when this is the explicit point of discussion.
On a not-completely-unrelated ending note, I'm quite pleased with South Africa, Spain, and Ireland. I'm thinking of starting to learn Spanish next.
>Genocide is a violation, the proof of which in court requires two elements," Lieblich adds. "First, you have to show intention of annihilation, and second – certain actions in the field that promote this intention. According to South Africa, the intention is proven by statements of senior Israeli figures and a public atmosphere of erasing or flattening Gaza, and the widespread harm to civilians and the hunger in Gaza show the factual element of the deed."
That's going to be difficult to prove: Israel's actions clearly show an intent *not* to annihilate the Palestinian people: they gave ample warming to the civilian population of where they would invade and urged them to evacuate, gave them time to do so, and kept evacuation corridors open. Those are not the actions of a state whose intent is to annihilate a people. They have also allowed relief shipments to enter Gaza, even though there is a chance that they could be confiscated by Hamas: if their intent was to annihilate, then why would they allow any relief to enter at all?
What's more, there are 1.6 million Palestinians citizens of Israel: they have not been rounded up into death camps, or expelled, or otherwise persecuted. There are even 10 Palestinians in the Israeli parliament. If genocide of Palestinians is their goal, why are they doing nothing to anihilliate their own Palestinian citizens (the way Germany rounded up and killed their own Jewish citizens during their genocide, or the way the that Tutsi citizens of Rwanda were hunted down and killed in the streets by their fellow citizens). How many Palestinian citizens of Israel have been killed since the fighting began?
I'm not a lawyer, or a judge, let alone an ICJ lawyer or judge, but saying "Clearly" here sounds like a Proof-By-Intimidation [1], that's not clear at all. If nothing else, I think that the ICJ has the option to flat out refuse to hear the case of South Africa if your "Clearly" was anywhere near as clear as you claim to be, and that's clearly what Israel was hoping it would do, and yet Haaretz reports in another story that the court accepted the complaint and the first hearing will be next week.
Sounds like a truckload of ICJ officials and judges don't agree with your Clearly, are they idiots ? blind ? Ignorant ? Or, hear me out, are you wrong and biased ? Trained to pattern-match a particular instance of evil ("""the way Germany rounded up and killed their own Jewish citizens during their genocide, or the way the that Tutsi citizens of Rwanda were hunted down and killed in the streets by their fellow citizens""") but not having a slightly more general model to recognize slightly different instances ? Evil Is Anti-Inductive https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/13/evil-is-anti-inductive/.
> they gave ample warming to the civilian population of where they would invade and urged them to evacuate
Then bombed the evacuation routes anyway :
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-25/ty-article-magazine/israel-said-150-000-more-gazans-must-flee-south-then-the-south-was-hit-by-bombs/0000018c-9c9e-dedf-a9ce-9fbef8380000, https://archive.ph/7v9fC
Also, the entirety of Gaza - not just the north - was invaded and, subsequently, bombed with artillery and tank shells, following the breakdown of the ceasefire on the 1st of December.
> They have also allowed relief shipments to enter Gaza
If the Nazis allowed relief from people or countries who wanted to help Jews pre-1939, would that make the Holocaust any less horrible ?
Do you know that Humanitarian Relief entering Gaza is just a US condition that Israel must satisfy if it wants more weapons and more aircraft carriers and more usage of US army weapons cache and more free money from the Congress ? There is some relief coming from Jordan but Jordan also supplies critical food supplies to Israel after the agriculture in Gaza's envelope's settlements crashed and the Houthis wrapped Israeli commerce in a chokehold.
> What's more, there are 1.6 million Palestinians citizens of Israel
I believe the number is 2 million.
> they have not been rounded up into death camps, or expelled, or otherwise persecuted
It's a good thing then that nobody is claiming that this happened, the Genocide case clearly states "Palestinians in Gaza". To see how ridiculous your defense is, imagine someone denies the accusations against China of Uyghur Genocide and says "But, but, China has other Muslims as well that it isn't Genociding[2], how can China Genocide one group of Muslims and leave the others alone ?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_intimidation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_China
" breakdown of the ceasefire"
Sometimes ceasefires just break, without cause.
Really smart and mature contribution, thanks for making it.
Be open about being a Hamas apologist. You've literally built your identity here around hatred.
I think you are being unfair. LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael also wrote:
>I believe in no God, but may there be Mercy on the souls trapped in that embattled and bloody land, Mercy on all the souls living and dead, wherever that Mercy may come from.
( in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-303/comment/44152487 )
> Be open about being a Hamas apologist
Oh, I am ? In what sense ? What part of my writing or quoting of sources gave you that impression ?
> You've literally built your identity here around hatred
Yeah sure, hating and hatred are not always bad things. For example, you probably hate Hamas right ? Doesn't that mean you have built your identity around hatred too ? Would it really make a difference whether you append it to your username or not ?
Hating Israel, like hating the US, Russia, China and indeed my own native polity which is not either of the 4, is just the moral and philosophical belief that I as an anarchist believe is the most decent option. That doesn't imply anything interesting on whether I hate the people living there, if anything countries the size of US and Russia probably produced most of the Anarchists that I read for and was convinced by.
I Assure You, I Am Permitted to Oppose the Existence of Any and All Nation-States : https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-assure-you-i-am-permitted-to-oppose
> saying "Clearly" here sounds like a Proof-By-Intimidation
Oh come on, you've been doing the exact same thing with different words in your original post:
> I'm looking forward to the guilty ruling [...] And conversly, if the court proceeds with this to the very end and rules that there is no Genocide, I will be quite surprised.
That's just a long-winded way of saying "clearly they are guilty". Are you trying to intimidate us?
> Or, hear me out, are you wrong and biased ?
You openly announced that you will unreservedly believe a verdict that confirms your opinion, and that you most likely won't believe a verdict that contradicts it, in which case you'll quietly sweep it under the rug. That's a prime example of confirmation bias – which is understandable and natural, especially given that it's a topic of personal interest to you – but don't go accusing others of bias just because they don't share your opinion.
> That's just a long-winded way of saying "clearly they are guilty"
No... no it's most definitely not. It's a long-winded way of stating my priors, and the surprise part is there to pave the way for what's coming next, the things I'm planning to do (and saying publicly I plan to do to force myself to commit) if the very surprising thing against my priors happens :
1- Me reading the entirety of a long boring verdict written in premium Legalese.
2- Regardless of being convinced by the verdict, that I will not claim Genocide or describing Israeli actions as genocidal actions except when this is the explicit point of contention, and with the recognition that other reasonable non-Genocide-supporting people can disagree for good reasons. In short, I will recognize that "Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza" is a controversial claim, and will treat it as such, conditional on the court ruling that there is no Genocide in Gaza.
> you most likely won't believe a verdict that contradicts it
I never said that, I said I can't guarantee I would be convinced by it, that's not "most likely", that's just "somewhat likely", and the "somewhat" will differ depending on how convincing the arguments in the verdict will be. I never expected those who don't believe there is a Genocide in Gaza to automagically start believing in it 100% after a guilty ruling either.
> accusing others of bias just because they don't share your opinion.
Both can be true, 2 opposite sides of an argument can be both biased.
This seems quite squarely in the realm of "the Court has made its decision, now let it enforce it".
There is a wide-ranging part of the internationalist movement that seems to feel that a fool-proof plan is:
1) Make war illegal.
2) If somebody does engage in war, declare them a criminal.
3) Profit in a world free of war.
This doesn't work. Yet the failure and incompetence only motivates them to try harder at stupid things.
I remember hearing the Kellogg-Briand pact discussed in this kind of dismissive way in my history classes as a student, but this book review (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists) at this site pointed out to me that the pact *does* seem to have been part of what led to a new consensus that really does have much less war than the world of the past. You'll note that, since 1945, there has basically not been any war that changed the borders of two existing countries other than a few involving Israel or Russia. (There have been several civil wars that led to the splitting or merger of various countries, but not something where one nation conquered territory from another.)
It hasn't fully stopped wars of conquest any more than the laws against murder have fully stopped murder. But it does seem to have been moderately effective, which is about the best one could ask for.
That has a lot more to do with the United States (and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union) saying "don't make me come over there and separate you two". And ten thousand or so nuclear weapons for the implied "for else".
The Soviet Union is gone, the US is conspicuously wimping out, and now the wars are coming back. Have fun.
I don't think it's quite as simple as "Make War Illegal", but it is indeed a very hit-or-miss attempt to try to enforce some semblance of rule of law on the chaotic sovereignty that is International Relations.
The "Declare them a criminal" part probably isn't intended to free the world of war by any non-delusional brain, but is rather a label that serves as a communication/coordination mechanism. If Putin is not declared a criminal, people might still boycott/sanction/etc... Russia but cite various hodgepodges of beliefs, justifications and plans of actions, but a central category of "War Criminal" or similar allows all the enemies of Putin to coalesce in a single conceptual coalition.
If nothing else, I'm using the ICJ as an academic authority in my post above, like a very influential think-tank or a University.
I think you'll give people might dispute the court itself as a source. If the city is biased, like a think tank or university, that might impact the impartiality of its judgment.
Granted, the court might be biased. I expect them to document the justification for their verdict, whichever way they rule, and I hope that what they cite will be persuasive evidence for their ruling. ( I also hope that it isn't a _thousand_ pages of opaque legalese... ) I'm approaching this with the opposite priors from LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael (e.g. if this were an attempt to annihilate Gazan Palestinians, why are 99% of them still alive? Why did Israel warn them to leave buildings which were about to be bombed? ), but I'll see what the court says (if it isn't impossibly lengthy).
To be clear, you will not be convinced by a not guilty finding, but expect everyone else to accept a guilty finding as absolute truth?
I don't have a magical see-through tool to look at your brain or anyone else's to make sure you're convinced by the ruling, I just expect anybody reasonable to not dispute the International Court of Justice ruling, certainly not in a low-effort offhanded side remarks as most people I have seen here do it. As I indicated, I will also do that if the Court rules against my belief.
What you internally believe is your own business.
Why is that unreasonable? Most nations of the world are corrupt and/or autocratic, which means most international organizations are dominated by A: corrupt autocrats and B: people willing to sit at a table full of corrupt autocrats for the sake of being seen as cosmopolitan globalists. It's certainly reasonable to be at least skeptical of their objectivity.
Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence.
The US and/or the UK both have a long and illustrious history of corruption, both of them were complicit in the invasion of a country based on a hoax and killing about 0.25 to 0.5 million innocents [1] in 2003, and - of course - the rise of ISIS and the subsequent debauchery. That's just a particularly noticeable incident from recent history.
Yet, curiously, there seems to be a widespread agreement that Slavery is bad. This is remarkable because Abolitionism - while a moral and philsophical position held and argued for by probably thousands of different languages and traditions - only became a political force with teeth mainly in those 2 polities, first in the UK then in the US. Barely 50 years after the UK outlawed Slavery, in the 1880s and the 1890s, the UK engaged in colonization of Africa that resulted in a gaint strip of colonies from Egypt to South Africa, and yet when decolonization freed those colonies, the freed people didn't say to themselves "Welp, I guess Abolitionism is the legacy of the colonizer, let's bring it back folks, Slavery is part of our heritage".
Because Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence.
Sure, be skeptical of their objectivity, just be sure to bring sources and/or authorities more objective. Considering that the only authorities disputing the Genocide accusation against the Israeli government right now is the Israeli government, you might have a hard time finding those authorities. Just like you can certainly be very skeptical of Wikipedia, and you can definitely cite other Encyclopedias in opposition, but you definitely can't just cite a random blog or twitter account whose very identity strongly points in the direction that it will benefit from denying what's being asserted by Wikipedia even if it's true.
And that's not the standard of evidence or argument that I see adhered to by most Genocide-denying commenters here (and everywhere else). To take your most recent comment in the previous Open Thread, you simply asserted that there is no Genocide and that anyone accusing or agreeing with those accusing Israel of Genocide is being an idiot or malicious. That doesn't sound very objective does it ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
" If nothing else, a single link to the ruling will be quite an adequate response from then on to all the tired and repeated denialist talking points that I see brought up over and over again"
Why should this be an adequate response if a not guilty finding is not adequate to refute the tired and repeated pro-Jew killing arguments that you repeat?
It's generally impossible to refute things that were never said and claims that were never advanced, so I struggle to see how anything - ICJ ruling or otherwise - can refute my "Pro-Jew-Killing" arguments, since I don't remember ever making them.
Can you be so kind as to quote or paraphrase those arguments for me ? No need for links, I recognize my words.
Forseeable consequences are not unintended. If your preferred policies wrt Hamas result in Hamas killing more Jews, then you prefer killing Jews as a matter of policy.
Interesting. By this principle, Pro-Israeli commenters, specifically those against a ceasefire in Gaza, most specifically you, are Pro-Palestinian-Killing. Do you agree with this characterization of you and your side of the argument ?
Fair. We will see what the court finds. Better to have a court investigation than trial in the press. Many Thanks for listing the other cases brought before it as well! I'm somewhat surprised to see the PRC's treatment of the Uighurs absent from the case load.
An amusing (to me, at least) article on asexuality in "Scientific American". The illustrations are horrible, I can assure you all I have never gambolled around a tree picking up the ace colours leaves in my entire life nor do I ever intend to do so, but it's an okay article.
The anecdote about going to the gynaecologist resonates with me, because it was my experience as well about what amounted to "Whaddya mean you're your age and have never done the do, are you quite sure you understand what is meant by sex, maybe you've had sex but didn't know that is what you were doing" (yes, really, that's what happened):
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/asexuality-is-finally-breaking-free-from-medical-stigma/
I've never felt stigmatised because out of all my weirdnesses, not caring a straw about the love and marriage thing was the least of my problems, but it's nice to get some recognition that there are people out there who don't care about the whole business and it's not because there's something wrong with us or trauma or what have you.
I am a little dubious about advocating that asexuality is an orientation no different than heterosexuality or homosexuality because, unlike those orientations, correctable sexual dysfunction can *present* as asexuality, even to (perhaps especially to) the person suffering the dysfunction.
I know because I was goddamned CERTAIN I was asexual until a medical procedure accidentally corrected my hormone (and whatever else) imbalances. From puberty to my early 30s, I never experienced the desire to have sex with someone - and never did. I was perfectly content with that and proudly labeled myself an asexual.
Then it just changed. Without my permission. *Against my will.* It wasn't up to me. *My* *identity* *was* *wrong.* A dysfunction was corrected, sexual desire simply got switched on, and I learned to have way, WAY more respect for how biological processes invisibly influence identity.
I'm not saying that all experience of asexuality is a result of dysfunction, but given how absolutely shocked I was to be corrected about what I thought was a core identity, I would caution folk against fully embracing asexuality until they've exhaustively ruled out other explanations.
>unlike those orientations, correctable sexual dysfunction can _present_ as asexuality, even to (perhaps especially to) the person suffering the dysfunction.cause
Thank you! One thing I'm always queasy about when politics starts getting involved in how human behavior gets interpreted is situations like these. Yeah, a bell curve has tails, but it is also possible that an unusual behavior can be a symptom of something else, even when the person with the behavior is perfectly happy with it. My knee-jerk reaction is that it should be legitimate to view tails of the bell curve as _puzzles_ to be understood, with the possibility that there _might_ be a nontrivial cause - and then the patient can decide what, if anything, they want done.
I'm very definitely not in the camp of "this is an ORIENTATION, this is my IDENTITY" and of course there is overlap and confusion between 'is this just low libido, or some other reason that is physiological in nature?' and 'is this just how this person is wired?'
I do think it's wiring, but I don't think it's necessarily something to be corrected. If you're happy as you are, stay that way, it's not hurting anyone. If you aren't happy, be free to seek a solution. I'm just welcoming broadening recognition that this is a thing and not necessarily a problem.
Well, you're in a much better position than my ex, who I doubt knows what "asexual" means but definitely has zero desire for it. ("30-plus-year-old virgin" shot up my Red Flag List after that.)
eh its worrying people aren't concerned about asexuality more. Not having sexual desire at all is a profound thing and will bar you from romantic relationships. Dead bedrooms or duty sex from the start is a huge nonstarter for virtually all men.
(and yes, men, the majority of asexuals are women. The article handwaves it as men are more stigmatized if they identify as one but it doesn't ring true given how dangerous male sexuality is seen as; an ace man would be "safe" by a lot of people)
edit: a lot of aces seem to want romance which is why it matters. cuddling, intimacy, relationships, monogamy...just they can't desire their partner sexually.
just weird how its just "there" despite it being such a radical condition.
I can see that to a heterosexual heteroromantic monoamorous person, any difference on either spectrum might seem like a major disability. But the fact that there are a variety of communities in which one or more of these features is not taken for granted means that an asexual person has places to find what they're looking for (just as homosexual people do).
dont know; communities can also be impediments or too skewed to provide those opportunities. if demographics are majority female men get driven out FAST; women often need to pair outside the community. even in large ones; religious women for example.
really not sure but honestly even straight romance seems harder now; not sure subcultural romance isn't either.
Gay romance is much easier now than it was a few decades ago. I assume asexual romance is like that.
"Not having sexual desire at all is a profound thing and will bar you from romantic relationships."
Very extremely fortunately I am *also* aromantic so I don't want a romantic/love/sexual relationship; this is like telling me "not having a desire to cut off your toes will bar you from having your leg amputated below the knee".
Well, since I like my legs just enough to want to keep them, that's fine by me 😁
There are asexuals who want the love/romance but not the rubbing bits together part; there are aromantics who don't "fall in love" but like being close and are happy to have sex, and all the steps along the scale in between.
I've known this since I was nine and said I never wanted to get married and have kids. I had no idea until late in life that there was even a thing called "asexuality" and "aromanticism" and when I read the descriptions I went "Huh, so there's a name for this?"
I'm not up on all the fine degrees so the plain "asexual/aromantic" works just fine for me. I've never been in love/fallen in love/had anyone want to be in love with me, and I honestly am perfectly happy about that. I got it from my mother, when she was finally convinced that I wouldn't 'grow out of it', about "but won't you be lonely on your own? think about as you get older".
No, I'm okay with no partner of any description. Indeed, the thought of being emotionally close/physically close in that kind of relationship gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don't want to 'talk about my feelings' with another person or talk about their feelings or the rest of it.
I don't even want a cat, that's how "no relationships" I am!
i dont mean it about you personally Deiseach; i mean the concept of asexuality is an intensely radical idea, but its just met with a ho hum. The lack of a fundamental human desire in large amounts of people is not something to be taken lightly.
and if im reading the numbers right its not small. even if only 1% of people identify as asexual, thats about as many who identify as Mormon. (1.2%). Cultural shifting levels i think.
i dont get why its so quiet i guess. i do take people seriously if they say they are but since its not being able to do something i wouldnt rush to "its an identity" as quick as society is doing. definitely need to rule out "water making the frogs asexual" here. a lack can have many causes.
>i dont get why its so quiet i guess.
My knee-jerk reaction is: Well, even under the best of circumstances, sex has its hazards. Someone who isn't seeking sex and is ok with that is going to prompt a lot less attention than someone at the opposite extreme, who has just been treated for their 17th STI/STD.
I don't mind what people don't do, as long as they don't not-do it in the street and frighten the horses.
This is just the "why are there so many more left-handed people now?" issue.
There were always this many left-handed people, social pressures just forced them to publicly pretend they weren't.
Why are there so many more queer people? Why are there so many more asexual people? Why are there so many more autistic people? Same reason.
It's a non-issue. It doesn't mean the sky is falling. Nothing has changed except your own perception.
By chance, I stumbled across an essay about this exact topic recently. You should give it a read: https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/social-dark-matter
the problem with this is that they start out with "it's an identity" and try to project it backwards to establish it as normal, but if in ten years a significant amount of people, mostly men, claimed they have no feelings of anger whatsoever, would your default assumption be "oh, awrath people have always existed in history, this is just them coming out" or would there be some concern about whether the lack of a human emotion might be caused by something? it may be so, but the fact no one is at least trying to rule out the other for something novel is what worries.
as for the article, meh. You can't argue based on "hidden" data; we can't go back in time to see people were suppressing identity in number in any form of precision to establish its always been this way instead of variation.
"the problem with this is that they start out with "it's an identity" and try to project it backwards to establish it as normal"
It's an identity, yes, but it's also a descriptor for a set of traits that would have existed prior to the label being codified. People are born left-handed, and it's near-certain that people have always been born left-handed at roughly the same rate. Sure, you could argue that some environmental factor is causing more people to be left-handed, or even that people are choosing to be left-handed now that our culture permits it, but that seems incredibly unlikely. The far more reasonable explanation is simply that cultural permissiveness allows naturally left-handed people to be open about the fact that they're left handed. The same applies for autism and other forms of neurodivergence, for same-sex attraction and asexuality, and so forth.
"if in ten years a significant amount of people, mostly men, claimed they have no feelings of anger whatsoever, would your default assumption be "oh, awrath people have always existed in history, this is just them coming out" or would there be some concern about whether the lack of a human emotion might be caused by something?"
This is a bad analogy. Anger is an emotion, and being wrathful is a personality trait. There are a number of personal factors that can reduce anger: having healthy outlets for aggression, going to therapy, or just reducing the amount of stress in your life. There may be a genetic component too, since I do believe that some people are just naturally more inclined to a wrathful temperament, but it's still a much more malleable trait than left-handedness, autism, or sexuality.
I think this has probably always been a part of the human experience, but not really that large (1% might even be stretching it). Just that in the past, if you didn't marry, well that was odd but acceptable (probably more so for women). I think a lot of people may have been bachelors/spinsters because they didn't want marriage or love affairs and remained single, and I think some of them could have been misidentified when we got all open about sexuality as "well if X never had a girlfriend or wife, then surely he must have been gay!"
I think some were probably gay, yeah, but some were probably asexual. I don't want to see it built up into an "identity" or an "orientation" to make a big deal out of it, but it's good to see it being more widely understood, especially as (in the article and my own experience) when you're dealing with the medical profession and the very notion that "no sex" is so out of their mindset that it's "ohh you mean you want this fixed?" or worse, "no you mean you don't understand what is meant by sex, let me assure you that that thing you are doing is sex" (but I'm not doing anything) (of course you're doing something, everyone wants sex) (oh do you mean you were raped/traumatised, we can treat that with therapy).
Thanks, I don't want therapy and I don't want drugs, just believe me when I say "Eh, don't need the cervical cancer screening because I'm not sexually active".
not having sexual desire at all without pathology is an extraordinary condition; they should ask that because sweeping it under the "asexual" label is a tempting shortcut to do nothing. honestly it feels like humanity is hellbent on embracing alienation; more and more people are estranged from fundamental things, and asexuality is one fruit in that basket. That's why i worry i guess.
"not having sexual desire at all without pathology is an extraordinary condition"
What evidence do you have for this? It seems to be rooted in a sort of circular logic: "True asexuality is extraordinarily rare, therefore we know that there are very few real asexuals and the rest must be faking/confused/pathological. Since there are very few real asexuals, that means true asexuality must be extraordinarily rare." The claim of extreme rarity is used to dismiss evidence that it's more common; the post-dismissal lack of evidence is then used to affirm the claim of extreme rarity.
Why didn't you become a nun?
Because I didn't, and don't, have a vocation to the religious life. I did think about it, but if the only reason for becoming a nun was "I'm not going to get married", that wasn't enough. I could be single in the world, and here I am.
"I am very Catholic" was also playing a role in my question. The sex thing it one of the biggest hurdles to an otherwise better than decent lifestyle.
Oh, that plays a part, but had I wanted love etc. being Catholic is no barrier to finding a partner. Like I said, it started when I was nine, before puberty or any stirrings. It's been very easy to keep the strictures around sexual morality when I've had no temptation to break them, so I do need to keep that in mind when looking down my nose at people who get into trouble because "but I loooooove him!!!!"*
And I went into puberty, and through puberty, and past puberty, and never felt any romantic inclinations towards anyone at all (that's also part of it; getting asked later on 'but are you sure you're not gay and that's why you're not interested in men?' yeah, I'm sure).
Sexual impulses as part of puberty etc? Yes, of course. But the idea of sex with *someone else* is just - no. And on top of that, 'falling in love' - also no. So I was spared the incel experience, if you like, of wanting but not being able to get. I never wanted, and I still don't.
I had one crush when I was eighteen, it only lasted a couple of weeks, and I was heartily relieved when it faded away because I felt so ridiculous - the simpering expression I could feel on my face when looking at the crush was mortifying. But it passed away and I never felt anything like it again, whew!
*Women in affairs with married men - why? I can understand "I'm in it for the fun and the money as long as it lasts", but the women who go "We've been together for four years, he promised he was going to divorce his wife, he tells me it's a dead bedroom situation between them, but there's no movement towards leaving her and I have to keep it secret that I'm seeing him, when will we be able to be together openly?"
Girl, he's willing to lie to his wife and cheat on her, why do you think he's being honest with you? He's getting fun on the side by stringing you along, why do you think he's going to leave his marriage and marry you, and if he does, why do you expect him to be faithful in the new marriage?
> The illustrations are horrible, I can assure you all I have never gambolled around a tree picking up the ace colours leaves in my entire life nor do I ever intend to do so...
Yes, but have you ever held out your hands to catch ace-colored leaves that fall like manna from heaven, in the crowd of other people with weirdly misshapen faces ? I am led to believe that it's a staple of the asexual lifestyle !
Darn, I must have missed that email from The Global Asexual Conspiracy about the "this is the week for leaf-catching with your squashed-face peers", that'll teach me to keep my inbox well-curated!
The new Corporate Flat Human style is awful.
I don't know whether it's "is this AI art by the backdoor, in which case it's as terrible as I feared, or is it human-made art trying to be distinctively novel, in which case gimme the AI art".
I remember finally having sex because my girlfriend asked about it when I finally started dating in my late twenties (!).
Probably gray-ace, though; I do feel the desire, though unfortunately it's all tied up with kink so I don't do anything about it these days.
Thinking of going traveling? - I spent 3 months traveling around Asia in 2023 and wrote up my observations. They might interesting you if you're thinking about doing it.
https://medium.com/@bobert93/notes-from-travelling-around-asia-02aebde8680f
Really enjoyed this. Very informative.
Thanks!
What's the deal with Claudine Gay?
She bothers some important people, and bang, right on cue there's allegations about a completely unrelated bad thing that she did decades ago.
Is this because (a) once she bothered the right people, they assigned someone to find dirt on her (and found it remarkably quickly), or (b) those same people happen to have these sorts of allegations ready to go on _all_ prominent people but never release them until you bother them enough?
She's an activist who persecutes people for dissenting views (see e.g. Roland Fryer: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10672981/New-documentary-explores-Harvard-fired-black-professor-sexual-harassment-claims.html). She's also a DEI hire, and her academic record is close to non-existent, with her publications being either heavily borrowed from somewhere or worse, likely made up - see, e.g., this: https://nypost.com/2023/12/26/news/claudine-gay-wouldnt-share-data-in-2001-paper-when-questioned/ .
None of this is news. It was widely known that she was awful - and, for many people at Harvard, this must have been distressing. It just wasn't so widely talked about, because nobody was really expecting to take her down.
There's always a class of allegations that are tacitly ignored so long as they are directed against a high-status member of the relevant community. For example, until 2017, allegations that a powerful Hollywood bigshot had pressured young ingenues into having sex with them were pretty much always met with "Yeah, it's sleazy and we all know it happens but what are you going to do about it?"
Then Harvey Weinstein found out the hard way that he didn't have as much status as he used to, and the rules changed (though Polanski still seems to be grandfathered in).
Claudine Gay was a renowned black female scholar and president of a most prestigious university, which gave her status across multiple axes in her community. So, yeah, plagiarism is sleazy and we all know it happens but what are you going to do about it? Except wait for Claudine Gay to take a big hit to her status.
The `renowned...scholar' bit is debatable. If I look at her scholarly record through the lens of `can't read, but can count' (i.e. number of papers, number of citations) then I'd say that's a record which would probably struggle to get you tenured at State U, without some kind of significant thumb on the scales. And compared to her predecessors in that post...
One can be a renowned scholar without being renowned for one's scholarship. In another field, a Google search for "renowned astrophysicist" has Neil deGrasse Tyson as the fourth link.
Fair enough
> The `renowned...scholar' bit is debatable
"Renowned scholar" is debatable, but "renowned black female scholar" is sadly not. Not everyone gets graded on the same curve.
Something else about her resume strikes me as very weird: very few of the articles have co-authors. We're talking fairly long articles with charts, tables - and presumably involving some kind of data processing? I'm not in her field, so maybe that's normal there, but it strikes me as really weird to see so many papers presumably doing something quantitative to have just one author. Sure, this happens in pure math, but does this happen a lot in fields where people work with numerical data?
I notice also that if the resume is correct, she also has nothing co-authored with her academic advisor. Again, I'm not in her field, and to me this looks really weird.
One of the allegations is bogus data.
I know that. I'm just pointing out that, to me at least, her resume looks abnormal even without any assumptions that anything is wrong - abnormal enough that it should be easy to catch on, if someone was interested in doing that. This is not my field, but from what I've seen of papers and research records in neighboring fields, it's very hard to imagine that everything is OK with someone who presumably does analysis of numerical data while almost completely avoiding coauthors (including her advisor).
I admit I might be wrong on this, and that there might be people whose record looks like that while being legit.
I knew grad students that had more papers than she does.
ISTR that some journalist was working on an expose about her alleged plagiarism, and then she appeared before Congress and he hit the jackpot.
Apparently she's opening her Golden Parachute
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/claudine-gay-resign-harvard/
The resignation letter is "how dare you racists question my scholarship!"
Damn that was fast. Just goes to show you that little else can be worse for your future than the board having "complete confidence" in you.
The dreaded vote of confidence, after which many a football manager has found himself out of a job mere moments after the press release claiming he has the full backing of the board 😁
Like Tuna says, you can find something on almost everyone. Powerful people in particular usually have to cut corners or do something vaguely disreputable at some point to get where they are. That said as Ninety-Three goes when you get that big (president of Harvard) there really are guys like Rufo collecting binders on you waiting to take you down. (I imagine he has some junior research assistant who did most of the work.) You see this on the other side where Republican Supreme Court justices suddenly have allegations of sexual harassment materialize against them from 30 years ago.
Gay was in this position where, as Deiseach says, being an African-American female in a very liberal industry (academia) protected her...until she stepped into the antisemitism hole. As I recall she was just defending freedom of speech, but she managed to piss off the (heavily Jewish) donors.
The depressing thing to me is it validates everything the far right says about Jewish anti-white conspiracies etc. I've often considered doing a token conversion to Christianity just a statement of disaffiliation with my Jewish ancestry, but it wouldn't matter to the Nazis and anyway I don't hate Israel, or nonwoke Jews.
Plagiarism in your papers seems really different from 30-year-old sexual assault allegations, though. In the first case, people can just look at your papers and see if the allegations are true; in the second, there is no actual evidence for anyone to examine, just claims from someone who may or may not be telling the truth/
That's the irony; one is more provable but less serious, the other less provable but more serious. The worst that should happen to Gay is losing her job (which just happened), but if the stories about Kavanaugh are true he should be in jail.
I don't think they are, but I'm not exactly unbiased.
While I agree that sexual assault is worse than plagiarism at a society level, for the specific job of leader of an institution which has doing research as one of its fundamental goals, I'd say plagiarism is worse.
Also Gay lost her job as a president, but as far as I know she will keep her job as a professor.
Having looked at a few extracts, and having written plenty of papers myself, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Gay's plagiarism.
It looks like all the plagiarism comes from lit review sections of papers. When you write a lit review, it's your job to summarise previous work on the same topic, which inevitably turns into a synthesis and paraphrase of what other lit reviews on exactly the same subject have said. The whole point is to re-state what other people have said before. Ideally you'd rephrase things just enough, but from an actual intellectual point of view it doesn't matter if your summary of the existing literature on the foo-bar controversy is suspiciously similar to that of Jones (2021).
Most likely she probably copy-pasted sections of other papers into her notes, and then forgot that she'd done that while turning those notes into a draft. This is a serious mistake and you should practice better quote hygiene to avoid doing it yourself, but I don't see it as a piece of academic malpractice on a par with research fraud or passing off someone else's actual results as your own.
More: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2023/12/12/understanding-the-claudine-gay-plagiarism-scandal/
*ties onion to his belt*
I remember when plagarism would get you kicked out of school AND prevent you from being accepted at any other school that bothered to check your record.
*Shakes cane at clouds, yells at kids to get off his lawn.*
Until it's as easy to start a chapter of TPUSA on Harvard's campus as it is one of SJP, the "just defending free speech" claim is prima facie bogus.
Controversies about her are at least a year old:
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-12-15-goodnight-poor-harvard
As I understand it, the plagiarism accusation had been floating around on the Internet since last January, but no one seemed to care until she publicly pissed off half of the political power in the country? Compare to that Republican representative who lied about his history. I know nothing about his case, but do you really think the first time anyone noticed was after he'd reached national prominence, and one side could score points by dunking on him?
Mostly, I'd say this is a dynamic in life that looks like a coincidence, but is actually an artifact of anthropic viewpoint. Sometimes people make enemies throughout their lives, but the enemies only attack when the person stumbles and shows a sign of weakness. Probably this is likelier than average in politicians who rise in power. And we only notice the times where it all comes together in the end, even if the attack is ultimately unsuccessful. We don't usually notice the times where the person never rose to our attention, or never made enough enemies, or the attacks failed to coordinate, out no one has a reason to take them down.
Chris Rufo, the guy popularizing the allegations, has claimed B explicitly. He said he had been sitting on the information and waited to release it until a moment when it would be especially damaging.
There may have been a lot of enmity towards her for various reasons for years (it's academia, after all) but she was protected to an extent by being an African-American woman in a high-status position, so it was too risky to go after her - you'd be open to "that's racism and misogyny".
But she made a mistake in dealing with a topic that did permit attack for not having the right views, and this is giving everyone who wanted to go after her carte blanche to do so, hence the allegations from way back finally seeing the light of day.
All this is supposition on my part, since I have no idea what is really going on, but it doesn't seem implausible to me.
The word you're looking for is "misogynoir."
(A)
Any society has a complex tapestry of rules that nearly nobody follows to the letter. The simplest possible thing for a man is a wrong look to a woman, for example. Religion is a whole arsenal of heavy-duty Cancel Cannons in deeply religious societies. That's before factoring in Alcohol and promiscuous sex. That's before factoring in the notoriously tempestuous woke Sharia, with a rate of change fit for a competition with the stock market.
Nearly everyone in any society have done naughty things, for wildly varying values of "Naughty". Nearly everyone else are too apathetic to know, ask, or care.
The guy who writes Karlstack has been on her case for approximately the past two years, but nobody really cared until she pisses people off en masse, then it goes viral.
Firmly (a), combined with a general policy of banning/frowning on a lot of things that are nonetheless very widely practiced, with the tacit understanding that if you don't rock the boat no-one is going to care. You don't need to build up binders of compromat when you understand that there is probably something in nearly everyone's past that could easily be used to tarnish them in public if you dig deep enough.
Just consider how all the standards have changed since Gay was in college, some things that were pretty much commonplace are very frowned on now. What is "plagiarism", "inadequate citation", or just how nearly everyone writes papers has changed dramatically as it's become easier to automatically search for duplication. And if it wasn't that, it would be something else.
I have a social advice question, which I know are often floated here. I'm really bad at "vibing", for lack of a better term. I struggle to engage with groups and find my place in the flow of conversation and play along with inside jokes and bits. I was recently at a party and had a ton of really successful one-on-one interactions in the first half of the party when people were adjusting and feeling each other out. Then, in the second half, as people divided into groups, I floundered. I found myself outside of groups looking in, and whenever i joined I struggled to either a) know what to say or b) get a word in edgewise. How have people overcome this? Any advice or ideas?
I occurs to me that most of the advice you're being given in the thread below assumes that there is a pre-existing group and that your task is to figure out how to participate in the ongoing conversation. But how did the group form to begin with? Ten people don't just spontaneously glom together and begin talking - they probably nucleated around an interesting 1-on-1 'starter conversation'. So my advice is this: if you are already having good 1-on-1 conversations, then it seems likely that the skill that's lacking is how to invite other people to join in. If other people join in on a conversation you've started, the upshot is that you're automatically the ringleader, at least initially. I'm guessing that this is mostly down to making sure that you don't get too engrossed in that initial 1-on-1 conversation and good body language. For example, when in a 1-on-1 chat at a party, make sure that you never directly face your conversation partner but rather stand at a 120 degree angle, so that you're two of the three vertices of a triangle and there's a natural place for a third participant to slide in to. Aside from that, keep your head up and be aware of other people hovering in your periphery so that you can give the necessary signals that they are welcome to join in. Happy hunting!
Re: not knowing what to say, you might consider that maybe you just need to find people you vibe with better (easier said than done, I know). I consider myself a pretty sociable character, but certain people are just on a different wavelength than me, and I find myself not having much to say to them, and vice versa. In that situation, my M.O. is to call it quits on the conversation and find someone else to talk to.
I think groups like that make room for you faster if you sort of pay your dues first by indicating appreciation for what the group is talking about: Laugh at the jokes, say "great point," etc., but do not contribute anything new. And the first contribution you make should show interest in the group's topics, and not introduce any change or challenge at all. Asking the group a question is especially good. So if the group is talking about science fiction, ask them what they think of a certain movie or book, and it should be one you're confident most of them are familiar with.
All that will be a huge drag if you have little real interest in what the group is talking about, and if that's the case you should just move on and try another group.
I second this advice.
But first, sometimes simply naming what's happening can be incredibly helpful for everyone else. If you're sort of awkwardly hanging outside the edges of a conversation group, waiting for laugh break or some other lull and then breaking in with, "Excuse me, I was lurking and this sounds interesting, can I join you guys?" can help prompt an invite.
Be prepared to ask questions relevant to the group's interest, and volunteer nothing if you're not asked a question in return. Do not feel like you have to (or worse, are entitled to) "get a word in edgewise." Reframe yourself as being *extremely* curious and interested in what people have to say; perhaps even think of yourself as a dispassionate researcher in disguise. "Can you say more about that?" "What about [x detail}?"
If you want to subtly try to insert an opinion or your own thoughts, you can always try, "I've always heard [a detail relevant to the topic]. Is that right?"
Whatever you do, do not show a hint of resentment that you aren't being invited to speak.
Charisma on Command occasionally has very specific, useful tips on body language, conversational prompts, and so on. Not every video is actionable, but I think some of them could be helpful: https://www.youtube.com/@Charismaoncommand
ooh, thanks for Charisma on Command. Added this to the links I send socially anxious patients to.
I don't know where exactly I fit on the extrovert-introvert spectrum (but I'm honestly quite sick and tired of people using those terms as if they're unambiguous and immutable group identifiers, flouted with semi-pride), I'm quite popular with my tightly knit friend group from University days, but most everyone else mistake my general quietness for shyness and immediately applies a nerd stereotype to me whenever it becomes known I'm not into sports and into computers, or so I think.
> I struggle to engage with groups and find my place in the flow of conversation and play along with inside jokes and bits
Any group sized at more than 3 is not really a unified "group", it's actually a network of interconnecting groups of 3s and 4s all cross-shattering into each other's close proximity. Observe every single group interaction you see, you will often find that (A) Most of the group is silent most of time, interacting only by nodding, laughing and whatnot, generally only 3 or 4 at a time speak and the rest listen (B) Most or all of the group speak at the same time, but the conversation is splintered into several N=3..4 mini-conversations where the participant of each mini-conversation filter out most or all of the other mini-conversations. Occasionally, participants switch mini-conversations (exchange roles with other participants, change the mini-conversations they're part of).
So really, don't think of it as a 1-to-N problem with an arbitrarily large and varying N, think of it more as a 1-to-2, 1-to-3, or, at the very most, 1-to-4 problem. You already know how to do 1-to-1, sounds like 1-to-2 shouldn't be that hard. Treat it as a rapidly binary-switching 1-to-1 conversation: if you're talking with Alice and Bob, that's really equivalent to you constantly teleporting between 2 seperate conversations with Alice alone and Bob alone, isn't it ? It's like any conversation, you sometimes speak and you sometimes be silent, the only thing that changed is that now you have to observe 2 people instead of 1 for cues on when to speak and when to be silent. Hell, being silent in groups is much much easier, no awkwardness as in the 1-to-1 setting where being silent invites awkward eye contact and an anxiousness to speak to break the silence.
As for injokes and subtle winks and nods, aren't those groups interested in the same thing as you ? How can you not understand injokes about things you're interested in ? Everyone does injokes, you meet people interested in Star Wars, you greet them with "Hello There", that's an injoke. You meet people interested in computers, and you trash a programming language, that's an injoke. The only thing I can't do injokes about is something I'm extremly not interested in, like Football.
> know what to say
When in doubt, say nothing. That's generally my attitude as well. General chit chat is just not a social signal I see much value in, it comes out of me half-hearted and not very convincing as well (or so I think), and I detect the same half-heartedness and going-through-the-motions attitude in most attempts at smalltalk. The reason I speak is generally (A) Romantic interest, and it's still hard if that's the only motivation (B) Because the topic of conversation is interesting to me, what compels me to speak then is not the people, it's the topic. When people say Python is slow because it's interpreted, I'm burning to correct the misconception and list all the different ways that Python is not slow and is not interpreted. When people say something political about religion or gender, I'm again animated to poke all the usual holes that I have seen others poke in the things I read or watched about the topic but the person in front of me likely haven't. Talking with people is just the side effect of disagreeing with them, and disagreeing with them is what I do because I'm a devil's advocate with lots of contrarian opinions (some of them so hardcore I never let them out to people who know my face, that's also a social skill, knowing what's merely controversial and what's beyond the pale).
As always, treat all advice about social protocols with a large fistful of salt because those things are not conscious, it's possible that nobody really knows approximately or exactly what social algorithm they follow, it's pure muscle memory and instinct and the conscious mind is probably just confabulating neat just-so stories and reasonable-looking-but-false rules to fit them all. Just ask yourself what do you want and do it, do you really want to talk ? Wait for an opening (2-3 seconds of silence in the group's comms) and talk, or interrupt whoever is speaking (but don't do it too much). Do you really want to make an injoke ? Then do it, find something that makes people laugh whenever it's repeated and repeat it again, funnily. I struggle to articulate what socializing means, it's just mimicry with a touch of innovation so that people don't notice you're mimicking (but not *too* much innovation or people will think you're being a "Not like the other girls"). Consider that perhaps you don't need that much socialization to begin with, that you can attend social events without speaking or fitting in, or not attend at all. If you did that and you found yourself not lacking anything noticeable, continue doing it.
A lot of really great ideas. Especially the reframing of 1-to-N to multiple/switching 1-to-1 engagements. I think the multiple and switching part is potentially where I stumble, so this is a helpful way to frame the problem.
The injoke problem is puzzling for me as well. The groups are interested in things I'm interested in, so you're right in thinking it should be fairly natural. Somehow the prevalence of conversation topics I (feel that I) know nothing about is much much higher in groups than it is in one-on-one. I think it's partially a matter of having less steering of the conversation (since there are more participants) and partially a weird framing thing.
You need to understand what game is being played. In groups of people, the typical game is: "Look at me! I am the smart one with dominance and social skills!" Most other things are sacrificed to this goal. In fact, if you don't sacrifice them, you signal that your social skills suck (you can't even recognize what game is being played).
In a typical conversation everyone's playing about a hundred different games at once, from "Let me evaluate whether X is acceptable to the group" to "I want to go camping; who else might be interested?" to "Please mate with me" to "Do these people want to laugh at Elon Musk's latest fuckup with me?" to "What kind of car should I buy?" Reducing these games to simple status is erasing the complexity of human social interactions. Some of them involve status as the central theme while others only have it in the background.
Yes, if you really drill down you can make deciding whether to buy a used Toyota Camry into a status game, but that's a cynical reduction. If you play that conversation as though it were a straightforward status game then you're going to brag about your Porsche and never get invited to a party again. There are aspects of trust, trustworthiness, alliance, shared interests and values, and we shouldn't ignore the straightforward desire for a better car either. If you sacrifice giving good advice on the altar of status dickmeasuring then you run the risk of getting caught, ironically making the attempt to raise your status a status-lowering move.
Funnily enough, I recently returned Games People Play to the library after reading the first half. I found it a little too galaxy-brained for me ("what the alcoholic really enjoys is the hangover and not the drink"). This is not to say reading the book would have solved all my problems, but it is an interesting overlap.
Anyway, I think this advice is probably good. I would describe most of the conversations I was seeing as not involving any particular game, which entails either that I'm blind to it or that the groups were so intimate and pure as to be game free. I'd say the first is more likely.
Games People Play is a fantastic book! That is, most of it is boring, until you find that one chapter that feels like the guy has been observing you for your entire life and wrote a chapter just about you (different chapters for different people). Though it sounds like you didn't find yours (maybe there wasn't one). I also love the less-known sequel, What Do You Say After You Say Hello.
I'm sure this is true at, like, parties where not everyone knows each other and lots of people are trying to impress everyone and/or get laid. But I don't think it's fair to generalize to "groups of people" with no qualifications. I have interactions with groups of people that have little to none of that kind of posturing all the time; the key factor is that they're groups of people who are all friends with each other.
I suspect outside of rationalist circles you can take 'smart' out of that one.
Not necessarily what you want, but my two cents: I realized I vibe extraordinarily well with "my people", and I'm mediocre with the rest. So I've just accepted this and put my points into long term social groups.
("Social stuff" is surprisingly amenable to improvement, in time, and I did get a lot better at meeting new people (and also dating). I just got even better at having very good friends.)
I never found my people, so I just found the highest-earning career I could do and hoarded money.
Not going to claim to be happy, but then again many people aren't, and I gave up on that a long time ago. But the anxiety over losing my job and becoming poor has significantly decreased.
Who would your people be?
Honestly, I don't even know anymore. I've gotten along with the few rationalists I know but there isn't a huge community near me and I'm not about to chuck in my nest egg to move to SF in midlife, especially as I am not a techie and almost certainly wouldn't find a job, and while I might be able to FIRE, I can't FIRE in the Bay Area!
I don't get worked up about P(doom) and haven't read the Sequences, but the couple of times I've gone to meetups I've vibed. They're younger than me, but that's fun sometimes.
That initial common interest is mostly an excuse to get to know them initially. After that you just make an effort to keep in contact with the ones you vibe with. "My people" isn't a community, it's just the people you get along with - though communities are great ways to find them.
In my case it was anime stuff, some 20 years ago. Maybe half of my current friends are either from or through that - not that anime means anything to our interactions anymore.
But the funny thing is that I'm still able to make new, good friends in my 40s. Which I understand is a miracle, but it did happen. A couple who opened a cafe next door. A friend's friend who's now my gym buddy. I think it's also more significant when it didn't happen: I completely failed to click with my new friends' social grup. I tried, they tried, nothing.
I'm no expert, but I'll give this a go. It can be tricky to enter into a group that's already formed, so I'd like to reframe the problem and ask if you did what you could to facilitate that your 1:1 interactions could evolve to incorporate more people? Were you open to others who came by? Were you even in a place where there was room for more people? It's a good start to just position yourself early on in a spot where people are likely to collect and stay throughout the party. The kitchen, or in a nook close to a place that has heavy foot traffic, tend to be natural places of aggregation. If you dont feel too confident in groups you might adjust by also be choosing "low value" places so as not to occupy the great spots, even if they're not claimed. But just go ahead and claim them. :)
Also, when I join a group at a party, I usually dont stress about "fitting in". Instead I'll just be intent on listening. Mathematically that's reasonable: the larger the group is, the less the average person contributes. And also, groups often arise around few people who have something they're intent on debating, which skews the average expected speaking time for newcomers further down. If I contribute at all, I'll let my first contributions be super short remarks that function mostly as comedy (bonus points for use of inside references). I'll stay away from anything longer, and I'll only allow myself to make remarks that change the perspective (and thus in most likelihood count as a major detour) if the conversation is dying out or if people are repeating themselves. Until then I'll just enjoy the conversation as a listener.
I'm speaking now as though it's a rationalist party. I don't usually like parties, but I've had a wonderful time at rationalist parties. I hope that was useful. :)
This is really helpful. Honestly I didn't even think of opening up a 1-on-1 conversation. I just sort of assumed groups are something that form without my involvement that I then need to join. Thanks for the ideas.
Is there any outdoor activity for which the best conditions are when it's wet and cold (but not freezing) out?
It occured to me on a recent failed ski trip that when it's below freezing you can ski, snowboard, snowshoe, ice skate, etc. But if it's a bit warmer you can't really do anything fun outside, it's just cold and wet and miserable.
Elite marathon running is best performed when it's cold but not freezing. According to: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0037407, the optimal temperature for the top 1% of male runners is 3.81 °C (38.9 °F). (For median runners, it is 6.24 °C (43.2 °F), which is still cold).
However, presumably that would optimally be performed on dry surfaces.
Ahh, the classic New Jersey winters!
Depends on what you mean by activity. Reading is quite nice on a porch if you're bundled up. Otherwise, one of my fondest memories is hiking up a mountain in near freezing rain. As long as you know what you're doing, and are doing it safely, satisfaction of accomplishment in hardship is always a joy, even if it's overcoming discomfort.
Well, one advantage of hiking in such a weather is that even usually overcrowded trails are nearly empty.
I'm sure that there's some fish that's easiest to catch under those conditions
How wet? Thick mist to the barest of sprinkle can make for an invigorating run. But actual near-freezing rain? no.
It seems to be generally agreed on by outdoorsy types that the worst weather (aside from literal Act of God type weather like tornadoes, hurricanes, etc) is that 34-40 F rain (1-2 C). It's just miserable. Snow will lay on your clothes without soaking through, and it's pretty. Cold rain just soaks in and chills you. If you must pick an outdoor activity in that weather, it's hunting, but only in a blind with a little woodstove, a thermos of coffee, and a little whiskey. Hopefully you don't get anything but can have a quiet morning watching nature.
I have lived in places where the winters are sunny and cold, snowy and cold, and rainy and cold. The latter is BY FAR the worst.
Israelis used to be so much better about lying, what happened this time around?
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1741938872877994146
"we don't have conclusive evidence that those those Israeli babies were beheaded, it's possible they were just shot, and therefore Israelis are bad" is one of the sickest things I've ever seen on social media, and that's a high bar.
I don't much differentiate between shooting or beheading; both are bad. And I'm pretty sure something bad happened on October 7th. But the thicker the propaganda, the less I have a clear idea of what happened--and the more abstract it becomes.
Propaganda should always be condemned.
I can make the exact same point about the widespread allegations from some on the Pro-Palestinian side that Israelis are dissecting the dead bodies of Palestinians from Gaza and ripping open their organs for sale, and yet when somebody in my social circle brought this up I challenged them to find corroborating evidence and poked several holes in the claim.
Just because somebody demonstrably did something bad, this doesn't absolve you of the responsibility and the burden of evidence to prove that they did ***Another*** thing that is much worse. If that wasn't the case, Courtrooms would be chaos, every killer would have a charge of rape for free, every theft would have a murder charge sprankled on for flavour. That's simply not how honest truth-seeking works.
"We don't have conclusive evidence" is a nice-sounding and long-winded way of saying it's a hysterical hoax invented out of thin air, literal QAnon-style pedo tales that is simply a shorthand for "I REALLY HATE OUTGROUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP" and not much else. Why did Hamas behead babies ? Not even ISIS beheaded babies, not the Nazis, not Stalin or Mao or the Khmer Rouge. Is it not a tiny bit suspicious that the local militant group that your government just so happens to be fighting right now is simultaneously more evil than some of the most evil horrors of the 20th and the 21st century combined ?
We also have no conclusive evidence that you beat your wife. Please present evidence that you do not beat your wife. If you didn't, we would have no conclusive evidence that you beat your wife, it's possible that you just verbally brutalize her, and therefore you're bad. See how this can work both ways ?
And the funny thing is that this horrible crime is extremly easy to prove : Show the head of a decapitated baby. Blur the face, artificially clean the blood, hide your children and put a thousand content warnings, do whatever you want but show the bloody adults you're taking their brain for a ride the evidence for the thing they're supposed to believe. This is not subtle, it's not rape, which we also have no evidence for except testimonies and the Israeli police evidence which they didn't share with anybody else, it's a really simple crime that you should be able to prove with a single photo. Show a geo-tagged and timestamped photo of a head next to an infant body, that's it. Why is it hard ? Any smartphone camera will do. When the evidence is this simple and yet absent, what does that tell us ?
If such imagery exists, I can imagine a legitimate reservation about glorifying the killers while demeaning their victims further.
(1) Seems entirely possible that he's lying. However, you can't prove it, any more than he can prove his claims. So what's your point? (2)Assuming he is lying, you're not saying a thing about what makes this a substandard lie -- - you know, one that's not up to the old standards. (3) He is one Israeli who is quite possibly lying. There are 7 million Israeli Jews. (4) As your link points out, even Haaretz discounts his claims, which is pretty good evidence that plenty of Jews are not in favor of lies.
Except for these 4 absurdities, though, great point.
Haaretz is generally an outlier among Israeli newspapers, they're too unusual to be taken as a barometer of Israeli society (although this is a fact that saddens me, and I still agree with your overall point and dislike NS's repeated compression of the entirety of the Israeli prespectives into tweets).
Thanks, I did not know that about Haaretz. Your post is a masterpiece of fair-mindedness. Mine is accurate, except for my point about Haaretz, but also very irritable, which is unhelpful. The nimbus of rage and desperation floating around posts like NS's is contagious, & got to me.
Huh, that's really nice of you to say. Thank you, Ere. (You're one of the people I recognize by name and respect by the way, in a previous life under a previous username we wrote a lot about AI and the Woke mentality)
I don't actually think I deserve this praise, I'm not that fair-minded. I have 2 constraints that I aspire to satisfy (1) Being factual, level-headed, and backed by resources that most everybody agree is trustworthy (or can be persuaded of that) (2) Being merciful and not prone to minimizing or making light of Israeli suffering and more generally the Israeli perspective, and maintaining that as much as possible even in the face of Israeli/Jewish/other cruelty and minimization of Palestinian suffering.
They're quite modest goals. I like to think all of my posts satisfy at least one of the 2 constraints, but I'm sure someone can find something that doesn't satisfy any. Regardless, they're not that lofty or a masterpiece of fair-mindedness, I think they're table stakes, and I expect that both those who agree with me and those who oppose me could and should abide by their own versions of them (and I will apologize and amend/retract a post if someone persuaded me that it doesn't satisfy both (1) and (2) together).
< You're one of the people I recognize by name and respect by the way, in a previous life under a previous username we wrote a lot about AI and the Woke mentality)
Now I'm really curious who you're the reincarnation of! I really miss Carl Pham and Gunflint, both of whom never returned after getting a one-week ban, but I'm sure neither of them would have chosen the username you have now.
Gunflint is back
I have to say, after sharply upgrading my view of your fair-mindedness based on your recent writings here, please lose the "Hates" portion of you username, if possible. It's just going to hang around you like an albatross, making people pre-judge you before you type a single character into these here comment boxes.
...I'm worried about Japan. No, not because of the earthquake, that happens all the time. It's just... things are looking genuinely hopeless for the country. Fertility rates keep going down, an increasing number of people have given up on getting married in the first place, and there are nowhere near enough immigrants to supplement the population because, well, why would they emigrate to Japan of all places? Then there's the economy continuing to go to shit, the government continuing to be useless, the increasing number of petty crimes...
And then there's the culture. For the last decade or so, mainstream culture has slowly been overtaken by a sort of apathetic, nihilistic hedonism. I know many in the west still think "otaku" is some sort of ostracized subculture, but that really hasn't been the case for some time. Even in 2013, 42.2% of teens identified as some sort of otaku; that number has almost certainly only increased since then. Otakus have effectively won the culture war, and while I do think it's great that people are developing strong interests and hobbies... it's still ultimately based around escapism. The rampant popularity of Isekai stuff in recent years is a testament to that. More and more people are just giving up on love, society, reality, even life itself. Hell, the most popular pop song of the era so blatantly romanticizes suicide that YouTube age-restricted the music video and slapped a suicide hotline below the player. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8VYWazR5mE
Given all of that, it's incredibly strange to see Japan's suicide rate is so low. (It's about 20% lower than the US.) Is all of the escapism actually managing to delay the inevitable, or is the government just lying about the numbers? Whatever the case... they can't keep running away from reality forever. Not that there's any clear solution to this; it's pretty hard to get a populace to sacrifice everything for the sake of their country, especially when there's very little nationalism or organized religion present.
...Anyways, if you're ever planning on traveling to Japan, you should do it sooner than later. Things aren't going to get better any time soon.
Your comment about "Racing into the Night" is incorrect in a couple of ways:
1. It's based off of the short story named "Temptation of Thanatos", translated here on their website: https://www.yoasobi-music.jp/novels/yorunikakeru and by my reading, it's not that suicide is being romanticized so much as death is romantically enthralling the protagonist into committing suicide.
I think the visuals of the music video support this interpretation since there's an unearthly and creepy aspect to how the girlfriend (who is actually death trying to convince him to die) looks, as well as the fact that, when the protagonist finally says they want to die, the girlfriend tightens her grip around his chest, blood squirts out from the fist and the protagonist starts vomiting blood.
This does not look like the girlfriend having the protagonist's best interests at heart. And considering that the story heavily implies that the girlfriend is likely not real in the first place, I don't think "you will die alone by hallucinating a supernaturally attractive entity" is a particularly romantic version of the story.
2. Just in general attributing the popularity of a song to how well it resonates with people isn't a good predictor of cultural sentiment at all. Pumped up Kicks is sung from the perspective of a school shooter, does that mean school shooting is being romanticized in American culture? I think it's much more likely that the piano melody is very catchy and the blending of different musical genres that made it popular.
3. That's not even YOASOBI's most popular song, let alone the most popular song in Japan! If we are talking about their most popular song that'd be Idol (Note Idol's 400M view count vs Racing Through the Night's 2.72M view count, despite Idol being on youtube for around a 6th of the time). Idol is about a singer/dancer admitting how two faced she is and how the children she got furtively teen pregnant with are the only things she definitely loves. By that standard, we should be expecting teen pregnancy to... either be rising (in reaction to the song) or already high (if the song was a reflection of existing sentiment) and neither seem to be true. If you really did think songs are strong predictors of societal trends, you'd think this effect would be even stronger.
I am of the belief that these things will sort themselves out over time. You can only be Otaku for as long as the social/civil structures permit you to be Otaku. When the lights/internet fail, when you're cold and hungry, when you have to leave the apartment to forage for food, maybe you have to leave the city and return to your grandparent's village and start farming again, then things will change.
Rome hosted at it's prime, more than a million people. After the fall, about 6,000 people lived in Rome. 1,600 years later, Rome is still there.
They will change in that you will find out that spending half a lifetime as an Otaku has left you quite incompetent at farming, and you starve. Or wind up enslaved or enserfed or something; there's plenty of ways for this to go bad and "you'll have to do X or things will go bad" does not automagically empower people to do X.
Well ... Yes. It is like an—as yet—undescribed law of nature, the cycle of tough/easy. There's definitely a Yin & Yang theme to it.
The whole cycle follows the paradigm: Tough men create easy times; Easy times create soft men; Soft men create tough times.
The easy times created the soft men, the Otaku. Who by their weakness are creating the tough times. Because their parents did not make them tough, they will experience a rude awakening.
Note that Japan's fertility rate is basically the same as that of Asians in America:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity/
So explanations in terms of Japanese culture, government policy, etc, are probably not what's causing what is after all a global trend.
...If you're implying the cause is genetic, you're probably wrong. Obviously the Japanese population would have died out over the last couple thousand years if they couldn't maintain a fertility rate above replacement level, considering what a hellhole the country was historically. It is ultimately a cultural issue. I was just describing the symptoms, not the cause.
I understand that these issues aren't isolated to Japan, it's just what I talked about since it's what I'm most familiar with. Apparently South Korea is doing even worse, with a 0.84 fertility rate and a suicide rate almost double that of Japan's. The entire far east is probably fucked at this rate...
Gene-environment interactions are your friend, here. In the environment of our ancestors, your genes probably led to high fertility, because you're around now. But in our environment (urban, crowded, media-saturated, super-competitive, easy-to-use birth control, social factors leading to few people marrying, etc.) your genes may lead to low fertility. And that's true even if some other sets of genes lead to high fertility.
I lived in Tokyo for a substantial amount of time. In my opinion, the root of Japans issues is the work culture and the governments iron clad commitment to never changing anything. People work far, far more hours than are humanly possible to be productive. Work expands to fill the vast hours you know you'll be trapped in the office making everything glacial. The structure in traditional companies makes it very difficult for even small decisions to be made without going up the ladder and again this makes everything extremely slow.
Ultimately, no one has time to spend their money or build families and that causes the stagnation.
What's funny is that the government is fully aware of this problem, but follow in the grand tradition of the Japanese government: Allow only the appearance of change. My favourite example of this from my time in tokyo was "Premium Fridays". The government encouraged (note, not forced) companies to allow workers to leave work on time (note, not early) one friday (note, not every) a month. Just under half of Japanese companies completely ignored this. What actually happened when companies did implement it is that people continued to follow the tradition of going out drinking with your boss to save face, but now they started 2-4 hours earlier.
I'll caviat this with the obvious: It's more complex than I've made out. But fixing the work culture would go a long way.
The government is to blame, sure... But there isn't anything preventing people from electing a different party into power. Japan is a democracy, after all. Ultimately, the citizenry doesn't want change either. Or maybe it's just that nobody cares anymore. People just call the new prime minister 増税メガネ (Tax-raising Glasses) and go about their day. The cultural trends might not be isolated to Japan, but the sheer level of apathy is unique within the developed world.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/major-persona-vibes
This but unironically. The solution, as I understand it, is for teenagers to kill God with the power of friendship.
Japan has so few problems that its media exaggerates the few problems that it does have, which in reality actually not as bad as other countries.
(note I only spent like half an hour researching this so my cites probably suck)
Loneliness: More people in japan live alone. Japan has a high number of single-person households [1] however its self reported loneliness rate among older adults is like ~30% [2], only a few percentage points higher than UK or US.
Work culture: Japan has the least number of annual work hours per person of any country in Asia, and is actually less than the US. [3] Ok this is probably because most japanese people are old and retired. But like most of the way that the developed world, like the US, handles increases in productivity is to take more vacation and retire earlier so I think it counts. There is 22 hour / week overtime on average though :(
As you say, suicide rates are actually not bad. And the crime rates are still pretty low. I've heard someone on tumblr say that Japan mislabels a lot of deaths from gangs as heart attacks. But Japan has a very low rate of cardiovascular deaths [4] so if this is true the yakuza must be keeping the peace pretty well.
And regarding isekai, are you worried about American culture declining because of all the popular superhero films are formulaic power fantasies edited by corporate hacks working for a vast media monopoly?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/social-connections-and-loneliness#loneliness-solitude-and-social-isolation
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?journal=Psychogeriatrics&title=Personality+and+health+literacy+among+community-dwelling+older+adults+living+in+Japan&author=H.+Iwasa&author=Y.+Yoshida&volume=20&publication_year=2020&pages=824-832&pmid=32812314&doi=10.1111/psyg.12600&
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#working-hours-tend-to-decrease-as-countries-become-richer
[4]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21307610/#:~:text=Japan%20is%20unique%20among%20developed,stroke%20mortality%20has%20declined%20substantially.
>But like most of the way that the developed world, like the US, handles increases in productivity is to take more vacation and retire earlier so I think it counts.
Uh. While that might be true for other first world countries, my understanding is that the US is notorious for having much less vacation/leave time than any other first world country[1] (according to this link, more than *any* country) and it ranks towards the bottom among first world countries in retirement age as well.
[1]https://resume.io/blog/which-country-gets-the-most-paid-vacation-days
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2023/10/17/us-retirement-ranks-average-compared-globally-study/71216903007/
> Which country gets the most paid vacation days
> Which country has laws that mandate the most paid vacation days
These are very different things
"are you worried about American culture declining because of all the popular superhero films are formulaic power fantasies edited by corporate hacks working for a vast media monopoly?"
I am, at least a bit.
Japan's stagnant economy is actually bad though.
More softly, I'm worried about its politeness norms and homogeneity being bad for startup culture and innovation, and the language barrier and time zone making it hard to attract talent.
I mean, the low birth rate with the long hours seems like a problem (though Japan is hardly underpopulated), but I don't see why every country has to have "startup culture and innovation". Japanese have low crime rates and famously high quality products; the tradeoff is a lack of new products. (I don't think the Japanese are inherently uncreative, as they have essentially taken over large swaths of popular culture.) No culture is perfect.
As for the language barrier and time zone...they're close to China and South Korea, it's their fault they pissed them off by being evil in WW2. I don't think they want to 'attract' talent...it's a homogeneous society, they don't have ethnic conflict and they want to keep it that way.
I wouldn't want to be Japanese, but I don't think they're necessarily doing anything wrong.
> the tradeoff is a lack of new products
A "lack of new products" will over time turn into "only old products", which will quickly lead to "uncompetitive in the global economy", which is bad news for an export-focused economy like Japan's.
Politeness is somehow bad? Please expand on that. I think we need more courtesy in the world, not less.
it's on a whole 'nother level, especially in professional contexts. "in a bit" means no. "that would be hard" means hell no. "yes" sometimes means acknowledgement that you asked something, even in cases where the answer to your question is "no". you're supposed to decline gifts up to 3 times before accepting.
(caveat - I've only studied the language for a few weeks)
I actually think Japan is at an interesting point, and possibly about to start making a turn around. The country may finally be exiting the deflationary period it's been in for roughly the past 30 years. Combine that with the decline in laborers (due to aforementioned and definitely problematic aging of the population) and you have a scenario where wages for Japanese workers may be about to start climbing again at a pretty good rate. More importantly, the decline in workers may force Japanese companies to end some of their idiotic hiring practices that have kept a lot of people in low-income part-time jobs, thus providing them with more economic stability.
All this ties into the birth rate problem. For all the jokes about Japanese kids not having sex, the issue is actually kids not getting married. Japanese couples have LOTS of kids. Walk around a major city and you regularly see families with three or four. But it's out of wedlock birth rate is incredibly low. Last I checked it was around 3%, compared to 40% in the USA (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarried-childbearing.htm). Japan is still a (slowly changing) pretty traditional society when it comes gender roles, with the man expected to be the breadwinner.
So if we are about to see a economic turnaround and if that leads to more steady employment for young men (both very big ifs, I admit) then Japan may not be in as bad a shape as it seems from the outside.
>Japan is still a (slowly changing) pretty traditional society when it comes gender roles, with the man expected to be the breadwinner.
That, and its heavily work-centric culture doesn't leave much room for casual sex or even dating if you don't have a domestic partner to come home to.
The work culture is no doubt bad in a lot of ways. Japanese companies are rather famous for prioritizing hours worked rather than actual labor productivity. So workers are stuck at the office without actually accomplishing much. The after work drinking parties with the boss, keeping people away from home even more, are also very much a thing.
Japan is no different from the rest of the developed world, they just have better escapism. (Or used to, I don't think the age of isekai and gacha games warrants the same kind of praise as earlier iterations of its pop culture, but the foundations of said earlier iterations are still there.) Whatever its problems are, and how bad they are compared to the west, it's pointless to back-derive them from the (symptomatic) treatment. All you can tell is that they're managing it better, honestly. Otherwise, base > superstructure.
(On an unrelated note, substack really needs to stop showing the reply form on top of single thread view.)
Japan has far too many people anyway. Let it lose 95% of its population, and it'll be roughly as large and as densely populated as New Zealand. Maybe those five million people will look at their large houses in their beautiful green country and decide that actually having two point three kids is a great idea. It's hard to have three kids when you live in an apartment.
Population decline is only a problem if you have third world immigrants to replace you, as the rest of us do. We will go extinct in our own countries, but the Japanese will survive.
I've often thought that, actually. It was back on the now-extinct 2Blowhards blog, but one of the authors asked if maybe the Japanese had just decided there were too many of them on their tiny little island and were going to let their population fall until they had enough room. Kind of makes sense.
> Population decline is only a problem if you have third world immigrants to replace you
Low birth rate combined with low immigration means that they have fewer working people supporting more retired people, and the ratio will only get worse.
New Zealand's fertility rate is 1.61 - below replacement and solidly middle of the pack for WEIRD countries.
> it's hard to have three kids when you live in an apartment
And yet the only western country with high fertility is Israel, which is overwhelmingly apartment-based and far denser than most western countries (including Japan and the US). Moreover within Israel the subpopulations with the highest fertility are the ones in the densest areas. I get the theory, but it doesn't hold up to evidence.
Israel has a strong cultural desire to produce more Jews to (1) replace the people killed by the Nazis before and (2) keep the Arabs from trying to kill them now. You see all these pictures of 95-year-old Auschwitz survivors with their 220 descendants, and it's heartening, but a bit of an exception.
Hey, if you want to send a couple of macho right-wing Jews over here and balance out the woke ones...
My point is that fertility rates aren't really affected by apartment vs rural living. It's mostly pronatalist culture (with religious influence). In America religion correlates with being rural so rural areas have higher fertility, but in Israel it doesn't (more religious areas have high population density and most of the few people who live in houses are wealthy secular upper class), and you see the inverse relationship.
(I don't think it's holocaust/Arabs either, really - I assure you the average Israeli isn't thinking "hah I'll show the Nazis by having more kids - for one thing mizrahi Jews have higher fertility than ashkenazis, at least outside of the ultraOrthodox).
This AC10 article I think gave me a good idea of what's wrong with Japan:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-arctic-hysterias
Basically the culture of browbeating people into compliance and absurd work/life balance expectations has made everyone want to 'quiet quit' their life.
Well yeah, that's definitely a big part of it. From what I've seen, the situation hasn't improved that much over the years... But at least people care about sexual harassment and power abuse now. That's a start, right?
"why would they emigrate to Japan of all places?"
Because it's the third richest country in the world? The issue is not that no one wants to move to Japan. There are plenty of people across East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific who would love to emigrate there! The issue is that the government has some of the most restrictive immigration laws of any developed nation.
Third richest country in the world measured how? If you are ranking by GDP per capita its not even in the top 20. If you are measuring by total GDP (nominal) then it's the `fourth richest country in the world' but then by the same measure India is the `fifth richest country in the world.' Maybe you are using the wrong yardstick?
Guns are enough to explain why the US has a higher suicide method. It's by far the method with the highest chance of success. I tried to see what Japan's suicide attempt rate is, but that doesn't seem to be reported on
Guns are *by a very small margin* the suicide method with the highest chance of success, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032721013732 , and I'm pretty sure the Japanese have free access to rope. And water, and tall buildings, though they mostly seem to use rope.
And according to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country , Japan's suicide rate is 15.3 per 100,000 compared to 16.1 in the United States. That doesn't seem to be a significant difference either, but you'd want to at least investigate possible differences in reporting rates.
Unrelated to the thread, but it's interesting that drugs and cutting are so low at 8% and 4%. It's believable that these would be less effective even if someone was genuinely attempting suicide, but a success rate of 4% when a 90% option exists indicates that the majority of those "attempts" were not genuine attempts.
This also explains why female "suicide attempt" numbers are higher than those for men - they report things like superficial flesh wounds or drinking one too many Smirnoff Ices as suicide attempts, knowing they will be showered in love and support. Men know no one will care, so they get little value out of these methods.
Drugs and cutting are the techniques best suited to giving plausible deniability w/re "no this wasn't just an attention-getting stunt!", without too much risk of actually killing yourself. Or winding up crippled, in severe pain, etc - jumping from a third-floor window probably won't kill you, but you probably won't be enjoying the attention and sympathy so much afterwards.
It's also possible to deliberately and reliably kill yourself with drugs and knives, and there are people who do. Sometimes we can sort them out by looking closely at the methods: seppuku = really meant to die, wrists slit across = attention-getting stunt, wrists slit lengthwise = ???. I haven't seen anyone try to make those distinctions in large-scale statistics, though.
I'd emigrate to Japan if I thought we could naturalize :). But otaku's victory makes sense to me: God, gods, and the wisdom of the ages aren't there, so they have entertainments instead of passion, community, and love. How depressing. Not that different though; it's a pretty good description of Gen Z's ills in the West.
'Wisdom of the ages'? It's not China, where you can dig up 1000-year-old quotes to say anything you like and people are enthusiastic about historical sagas set in 190 AD, but Japan isn't lacking in traditional culture--Westerners have been fascinated by everything from kimonos to ninjas since they opened the country in the 19th century. The (awful in my view) minimalist trend among the upper classes at least in part descends from Zen crossing over in the 60s. (It makes a lot more sense in Japan where nobody has any space.)
As for God...they have Buddhism, Shinto, and whatever pieces of Christianity they think are fun. You're allowed to pick and choose pieces of religions in the East--nobody expects singular fealty.
I think the real pronatalist problem is the companies refusing to hire anyone except out of college, so miss the boat and you'll likely never make enough to support a family, and forcing everyone to work long, unproductive hours, so even people with money don't have time.
Here, there are similar problems with rising housing prices and stagnant wages, but you also have feminists trying to criminalize flirting so the guys are afraid to talk to girls. Every country has its own pathologies. ;)
Note that I wasn't saying Japan (or any modern nation) doesn't have access to traditional wisdom (!), but that the otaku, both here and there, have different priorities.
I think housing prices are a factor too. I suppose you can cram children into tiny apartments, but first-worlders rarely seem to.
Oh of course, the same trends can be seen elsewhere, they're just more pronounced in Japan because God is very much dead there. ...Personally, I find it far more depressing that mass delusion through religion is necessary in the first place, but I guess humans can't be trusted to think freely.
I just found out it's possible to follow other commenters on Substack who don't even have Substack blogs of their own. I guess this gives you notifications when they post comments. This seems like a pretty odd feature given how little emphasis the comment section gets in most Substacks.
But does following someone allow you to see their comments on other blogs? Just signed up to follow you and found no way to see comments.
Given that the user profiles appear to be general Substack profiles rather than ACX specific, presumably you'd see notifications for new comments by people you're following on any Substack blog.
Is this the only way to look at all comments by user X?
Well you can cmd-F search the comment section for username.
All the best to you, your wife, and the kids! Many happy returns in the new year!
Are there any local meetups or interest groups for particularly geeky lawyers or other legal professionals in the bay area? I've encountered what I think is a totally novel legal situation related to parking tickets, enough so that my attempts to reach out to easily contactable attorneys hasn't led to one interested in taking the case (since vehicle-focused lawyers tend to like cookie cutter cases, ime). I'm hoping to find someone who might be as fascinated by the situation as I am determined to pursue it.
I'm a lawyer, and when I confront things like parking tickets, I sometimes imagine mounting a serious defense, based on the rules of evidence, etc. But then I realize that I would make that serious defense in front of a bored judge who no longer finds law interesting and just wants to clear the docket. That judge will do whatever moves things along, and if I want to do anything fun and interesting, I'll be doing it on appeal. Appellate advocacy is more fun (to me) than trial advocacy, but at this point in the fantasy becomes cumbersome and I just pay the ticket.
The situation here is actually appeal-related! Someone messed up some process/workflow/software, so they are holding superior court hearings in defined-by-statute limited civil cases, but without ever assigning a civil case number. So, of course, the appellate court rejects any attempted appeal filings, and other superior court depts reject attempts to get records, etc. I think THAT situation is far more interesting than any number of traffic tickets. If any of that sounds fun, I'd love to bend your ear. Otherwise, thanks for the response anyway.
I’d call the clerk of the appellate court and walk through what’s going on. Many state employees are happy to help if they’re not too busy. When I say “clerk”, I mean a civil servant involved in court administration, I don’t mean a judicial law clerk.
Or ask the committee of the state’s bar that’s involved in court rules. That committee’s members should care more than usual about court administration.
In Michigan, you could even petition the state supreme court to address the issue as part of the court’s administrative docket. The court might do nothing, but you’re describing an administrative/due-process black hole, which might offend someone enough to look into it.
I spent about a week talking to clerks and supervisors and court administrators when this was a more recent situation. They were all stumped.
Thanks for the state bar tip, I'll see if I can figure out who that would be in CA.
Ditto the state supreme court route. I suspected there would be routes in that direction, just rare enough that I haven't found much content about them aimed at lay people.
A total eclipse will be sweeping across North America on April 8. My family and I are in Toronto, just outside the path of totality, and are therefore planning to drive out into the Niagara Peninsula countryside a couple of hours from here to see the eclipse in its full glory.
One thing we are a bit worried about is traffic. The eclipse is going to be a big event, so I expect lots of people will be on the roads. I would be interested in hearing from others who have travelled for eclipse-watching about how much disruption to expect during an event like this.
Of possible relevance, https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/21/partial-credit/ and its comment thread.
It's hitting my hometown of Caribou, Maine. I'm thinking of flying into Presque Isle a couple of days before. I'll stay at my uncle's house, on the outskirts of Caribou, which already is in northern Maine potato country. I'll be curious to see how busy it gets up there.
Fun fact I discovered during the last eclipse I saw. You don't need a pinhole set up to see the progress of the eclipse. You can just put your hand out into the light, make a circle with your thumb and forefinger, and squeeze it down til there's only a very small opening. Shadow on ground will be in the shape of the partially occluded sun. Also, you'll see the same thing replicated in the shadows of the leafy areas of trees -- all the little spaces between the leaves will be in the shape of the occluded sun. I ended up strolling around and enjoying that effect, plus the weird changes in the light, and didn't bother with trying to look at the actual sun.
That sounds like a super local question rather than a general eclipse question.
From the looks of the map, it looks like there's just a tiny corner of Ontario within the path of the eclipse . A significant fraction of the population of Toronto and surrounding areas is probably going to try to get to that one spot.
Maybe take a few extra days and go to Vermont or Texas or something?
I've seen one. Some of my family gathered a few days before, at a place a few hours away from the eclipse path where one of us lived, and then carpooled out to the path leaving several hours to spare, and checking traffic reports on the way. With a big enough carpool, we could keep conversation going the entire time, so the time passed quickly.
I just planned a trip around this - I'll be spending the weekend in Toronto and then taking the train to Niagara Falls on Monday to catch the eclipse.
Montreal should get a totality. Is it possible to just fly there and book a hotel, to not deal with traffic issues? Or all hotels will be booked out horribly? I think a few other big cities are on the path of totality, not just Montreal, but Montreal should be the closest.
The hotels in or near the path of totality have been booked for ages already.
I had heard that months ago, but had no problem booking a hotel last month. The path of totality is long, and you should be able to find something in a more out-of-the-way place. For example, I'm in Michigan, and instead of Toledo I'm going to the west side of Ohio.
I checked Dallas (probably the biggest city getting totality) and there's still rooms available there.
The problem with that area is a high chance of clouds. I saw the 2017 eclipse and imho it is definitely worth going to a meaningful amount of trouble to maximize the odds of a good viewing. I saw 2017 near Lusk, WY (population 1500 and is not too near an interstate) which was a traffic jam afterwards, so yes, I expect traffic will be bad most places. The best place cloud-wise for 2024 is Mazatlan, Mexico...
Plan to be there multiple hours in advance. Camp out in the location the night before would be even better, if you can manage it, maybe even just car camping. Do not attempt this as a "drive out for the precise time of the event" activity.
Did an eclipse trip to Wyoming (America's least populous state) for 2017. Travel around and up to the day of the eclipse was busy but not prohibitively so. The day of the eclipse, interstate highways within about a hundred miles of the eclipse's trajectory were parking lots. I never reached my intended position, and only got into the band of totality by going way off onto unpaved roads and driving my rental car like I was auditioning for Mad Max.
Beff Jezos, (on Lex Fridamn podacst just after Jeff Bezos... love it!) recently doxed by Forbes (? I think?) Says that anonymity, was important not just in his speech but also in his thoughts. Which was a new idea for me. Being anonymous, let him have more wide ranging thoughts. I've always been a bit against anonymous accounts. (Talked about in the first ten minutes of the podcast.)
As one of the only people who comments here under his own name, I must say: if less anonymity means less Beff Jezos types, I'm all for it.
(At least I think so? I don't read Mr. Jezos because he is a shit-poster; but from what I have seen, this is (or was) less a "stage name" and more a "if I'm anonymous I am immune to consequences for my words and actions" thing)
I don't know Beff Jezos (Guillaume Verdon) except for the podcast. He's an anti-AI doomer, or pro AI... I'm not sure what the right term is.
Perhaps anti AI-doomer works better?
We live in an environment where lots of people will actively try to get people fired for their expressed political beliefs. I don't think it's a good situation when the only people allowed to make arguments for politically unpopular positions are the independently wealthy, so I think allowing anonymity is a good thing. I mean, it would be still better if demands to fire someone for giving an OK sign or misgendering a transperson got a belly laugh and an invitation to f--k off, but since we don't have that, anonymous or pseudonymous accounts seem like the next best option.
So one of the benefits of living and working in Trump country is that no one wants to cancel me for what I think or say. There're bad things about a small community where everyone knows everyone, but there are some good things too.
Well yeah, obviously they're not going to cancel you if you don't say stuff they disagree with.
I'm with you on the own your words. My name, my ugly mug.
Jordan Peterson has an illuminating observation on stage names and the dark triad (Narcissism; Psychopathy; Machiavellian). It pretty much goes that anyone with a stage name indicating a personage of evil, is almost always the cover for a person who in real life, falls in the dark triad.
No Peterson’s observation is not “illuminating”, unless what you mean is that it illuminates a bad tendency to jump to grandiose conclusions from tiny slivers of data.
And of course “people different from me are Bad”. Don’t do this. If Peterson does this, don’t listen to him.
There is a soviet joke about the intelligentsia which goes like this:
Don't think.
If you think, then don't speak.
If you think and speak, then don't write.
If you think, speak and write, then don't sign.
If you think, speak, write and sign, then don't be surprised.
This seems to imply that avoiding crimethink is the preferable method to lower the chances to be send to the Gulag.
Human beings have not evolved to be impartial inference engines. They have very much evolved to thrive in polities which rarely had strong freedom of speech norms. The Elephant in the Brain makes the case that our brains deceive themselves as being more prosocial than we really are so we can better deceive others.
This is not to say that dissent from the most rigorous enforced group consensus does never happen. Even the most rigorous theocracy will spawn the odd atheist thought, even if they don't have a word for that concept. Just like we see flat-earthers from time to time.
Still, the healthy (from an evolutionary point of view) response to thoughtcrime is to shy away from it.
I think your disdain for pseudonymity is a bit ironic given that our esteemed host only felt safe to blog under the cover of pseudonymity for a decade (or so) before being doxxed by the bloody NYT and losing his employment.
Hmm I don't have disdain. I guess I grew up with usenet and my experience (on that un-moderated platform) was that the assholes were predominantly anonymous. Moderation changes that.
People on the public payroll are often subject policies which limit certain kinds of speech e.g prohibitions on partisan political expression or communicating in a way that could bring discredit to the institution. Writing under a pseudonym allows people to be honest and frank when they would otherwise be exposured to professional censure. It also protects others who might be implicated by association. Plausible deniability can be useful.
Right, or in big companies. It somehow seems to suck to me though, you've now become two.
It's neither good nor bad. The nature of discourse in forums where everyone is a verified ID (like Slack or MS Teams) is very different. The stakes are higher so there are social games. Platforms like Substack which act as spaces of plausible deniability, allowing a wider breadth of expression. Scott built his reader base writing SSC under a pseudonym
Hmm I don't know Slack or MS teams, I was on stack exchange for a bit, but it was too formal for me. Only these questions. List servers are OK and you know who everyone is.
Your real last name isn't just a single letter, right? So it doesn't seem like you're really that opposed to anonymous (or "pseudonymous", more accurately) accounts.
touché, H is for Herold.
And all along I thought it was a Greek eta. Shows how much I know.
Smart people don't like being inconsistent, so if what you say and what you think are different, and what you say can have consequences for you, what you think will often change to accomodate.
Free speech people don't like to think about this because it weakens one of our main arguments: That supressing speech is not effective changing minds. Anti free speech people don't like to think about it, because it lays bare the authoritarian nature of their project.
Yeah, that's the new idea for me. Restricted speech can restrict thought. And yet there seems something insincere in anonymity also. IDK, I shortened my last name to H. 'cause it felt easier sharing personal information.
I like having a pseudonym. It lets me be myself without worrying about certain real-world problems (if you don't have these problems, consider yourself lucky, or as the kids just a bit ago liked to say, privileged). Also, it warms the cockles of my classical liberal heart that no one can tell what breed of dog I am, let alone whether I've been spayed or neutered.
Other people might use it for different purposes, though. I'm not saying this is what's going on with Beff - I know nothing about him - but as with roleplaying (tabletop, LARP, or otherwise), it can be interesting to try to be someone else. You can learn a lot about yourself, that way. But I dunno about having different thoughts.
Yeah I get it. I guess I'm privileged, the only reason I would think about anonymity is when I talk about leaving my car unlocked with keys on the console. Everyone around here (where I live) knows, in some ways, what I think. And they don't really care that much one way or the other. You say you like it, but wouldn't your world be better if you didn't have to use a pseudonym?
My world would definitely be better if I didn't have to. Or put another way, if the world were better then I wouldn't have to.
But I still think I'd choose to use a pseudonym. Maybe it's cultural, in a way. I associate "real name Internet" with family and work and distant friends, and "fake name Internet" with stuff I wouldn't want my employer or parents or children to read. Not because there's anything unethical going on, but because I like having a bit of privacy. It's a way to keep stuff like politics and religion and sex away from relationships which I want to function reliably, but which might not be up to the strain. That nightmare scenario where everyone around a dinner table is yelling about politics, is not something we do in my family, and I'm glad about it. And a certain amount of it, is, as with my parents' sex life, Don't Ask Don't Tell.
Pretty sure you’re a corgi or maybe a golden lab.
Edit: So I guess all that hard work refining my profiling skills at Quantico wasn’t a waste after all.
Welcome back
Can you talk a bit about the small things you design and build. In an earlier life I did a bit of that myself. Going waaay back to TTL Cookbook stuff. Maybe a few op amps for a bit of spice.
The idea of my very own CPU seemed far off in those days.
Sure, I can say a little. I build most of the stuff in cleanrooms (academic or National Labs.) Much of my work in the past few years has been on molecular sensors--primarily creating nanometer-scale devices to manipulate charged polymers into specific geometries and then building sensing mechanisms that can read out information from the polymers (resistive-pulse sensors or nanoribbon-FET, if you want to Google).
The NIH funded some of my grants to get these sensors to work as DNA sequencers. NASA funded a few contracts--one was a fun project where they wanted to use them for "agnostic life detection" on the moons of Saturn. There's also some interest in encoding bits of information onto molecules and then reading it out with the devices. It would be slow to read and write, but the storage density would be incredible- maybe in ~10 years.
Although, now I am working on some fairly different stuff...atomically thin layers MoS2 for photonics and possibly electronic devices (depends on my collaborators).
Jebus. That’s impressive stuff.
Thanks David.
Hi!!!
Edit: that's not making me look less like a golden lab...
Hi back at you MM!!!
Why do you think my username is a string of numbers (rhetorical question).
Because "Fibonacci" was taken?
Actually no, I didn’t even check. I wanted a string of numbers because it’s the most neutral thing I could think of. And it needed to be easy to remember, so there.
I assumed it was your phone number so we could all call you and talk in audio.
Ha! Coy as you are, how little you expected that I, the villainous hacker, would now reveal your full name to the world! It is... 1123581321 345589144!
For a moment I thought you had revealed his actual social security number.
(Also: 233377610...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPUyJjm6QnI
OMG busted!
I can definitely perceive self-censoring in my own comments, especially important stuff (life, dating, relationships) because of the perception that even innocuous comments can attract the attention of a particular egregore.
In your case, just blame it on this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_M
Should I (a brit whose knowledge of basketball comes almost exclusively from reading about it) be less surprised than I am that so few players use underhand "granny shots" when shooting free-throws?
I have read from multiple sources that granny shots are more accurate, but that players don't use them because they're seen as embarrassing.
Are players' incentives to win so weak that that's a dominating concern? Or is it that the conventional "granny shots are better" wisdom wrong?
No info, but I would assume granny shots are not going to work in the game proper due to defenders blocking them, so you already have to become good at the overhand shot*, and once you're good enough at the overhand shot to get it by a defender you can hit a free throw with it no problem. So granny shots would be a redundant method to learn.
*Unless you're Shaquille O'Neal and can just dunk the ball every time. Shaq was famously bad at free-throws; he's a player that could have used granny shots.
It would be for free throws. There is lots of literarure on this but the is:
- underhand does seem to be better (rick barry shot 90pct from the line underhanded)
- as you suggest, players won’t do it for aesthetic reasons
I'm suggesting they don't do it because it would require learning two different methods for shooting the ball, when the underhand shot is at best only slightly more effective for one specific situation during the game, and learning it will create instincts that need to be resisted for the rest of the game.
I'm not buying that argument. Virtually any field goal attempt is going to be a jump shot, which is already somewhat different from a standard free throw attempt (which seldom involves jumping at the pro level). And no NBA player is going to have the "instinct" to underhand an 18-foot field goal attempt. When we talk about bad NBA free throw shooters, we're talking about people who are incredibly good at basketball (they made it to the NBA, after all). And mostly, we're talking about big men who make their points with dunks, lay-ups, and other close-to-the-basket shots, not traditional jump shots. So it probably wouldn't mess them up that badly to shoot underhanded free throws.
When we talk about bad NBA free throw shooters, we're talking about people who currently make three shots out of five. https://www.dunkest.com/en/nba/news/132728/worst-free-throw-shooters-history#:~:text=The%20NBA%20player%20with%20the,Chicago%2C%20Orlando%2C%20and%20Cleveland.
They're talking about free throws.
Is it right to assume that Dyson Spheres/Swarms are technosignatures? Isn't it possible for an intelligent species to arise in a solar system where there wasn't enough raw material to economically build a Dyson Sphere/Swarm?
I've never calculated how much physical material would be needed to make a Dyson structure around our Sun. How do we know there's enough rock floating around the Inner Solar System to make it?
Furthermore, there's an implicit assumption that it will someday get so cheap to move materials from the Earth's surface into orbit that we'd be able to make a Dyson structure from it. What if launch costs hit a plateau before we reach the point where it's economical to start building a Dyson structure from Earth materials?
By "techno-signature" I usually mean "if we detect it, that is a strong sign of a technological civilization". I think a Dyson swarm or sphere would very strongly be that.
You seem to be using the word in the converse way, that "if there is a technological civilization, then it is very likely to produce this". I don't think there is anything that we have particularly good reason to think fits this definition, given that we know so little about possible technological civilizations other than our own (and so little about how ours will develop).
There's a lot of material in the sun that isn't hydrogen or helium and could be harvested by an advanced civilization. Enough to make multiple Earths.
Implicit in your reply is the assumption that it will, at some point, be economical to extract matter from the Sun using star lifting. Why should we accept that assumption?
How would you get it out of there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U
Extract it at night.
I'd expect a tradeoff between expansion and exploitation. A Dyson structure probably means that the species in question does not have FTL. But if they lack materials, somehow, in their home system, this might incentivize the colonization of a nearby system that does have enough resources. It'd take time, of course, but we're already talking about Dyson construction.
Not quite related (others already answered the original question), but Sean Carroll noted that a decent civilization would have a collection of swarms to cool down the outgoing radiation to the level of the CMB, so that neither the central object nor the Dyson swarm would be visible from far away. It would blend into the background except for blocking that part of the sky in all wavelengths. And with some more tech, it would be able to stealth itself completely by carefully routing the passing light around. We already have some metamaterials that have some rudimentary capability like that.
>a collection of swarms to cool down the outgoing radiation to the level of the CMB
That would be quite a swarm. The CMB is about 2.7K. The Stefan-Boltzmann law, for perfect emissivity, gives radiated power as about 3x10^-6 watts/meter^2. The Sun emits about 3.86x10^26 watts, so to radiate that at the CMB temperature would take about 1.3x10^32 meter^2, which corresponds to the surface of a sphere with radius 3.2x10^15 meters or 0.34 light years. At least it doesn't actually bump into Proxima Centauri...
That's a very good point. That's about 20,000 a.u. or somewhere in the Oort cloud. Would definitely blotch the sky even from far away.
Many Thanks!
I heard the podcast you're referring to here and the interviewee did a really poor job of handling the question I thought. Sean pointed out that if you really were milking ever ounce of entropy out of the star, there'd be no infrared signature, to which the interviewee confidently said that there would still be a recognizable signature. Definitely overconfident.
Quick back-of-the-envelope math says that the surface area of a 1AU sphere is about 3x10^23 square meters. The mass of mercury happens to be about 3x10^23 kg. So mercury alone gives us about 1kg mass per square meter, assuming we want to use all of the elements. A large fraction of Mercury seems to be iron and silicon, which seem plausibly useful. So we could get a good way towards building a dyson structure "just" by disassembling mercury, which has a significantly smaller gravitational well compared to Earth.
If you think a lot about these sorts of things, I recommend watching the early videos on Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA?si=Bw7lO6xETXCY-5t-
He goes into quite a bit of depth on these topics, and is more grounded than most resources I've found on the topic.
A cubic meter of iron weighs 7873kg, so 1kg would be about .005 inches thick. This doesn't seem robust enough to build a Dyson sphere. I bet I could punch through it with a decent knife.
Yes, but you can't punch through it with a sunbeam. The point of a Dyson sphere, or shell, is to capture all the sunlight. The bit where science fiction writers imagine terraforming the entire surface and handwaving the gravity issue, is optional (and probably not very sensible).
Given Barlow's formula P=2 sigma s/D [1] (which is of course just a two-dimensional approximation), I don't think the thickness makes much of a difference in the case where the pressure is caused by gravity (e.g. P~s).
Of course, what one can always do is increase the diameter D of the sphere. With P~s/D^2 for gravity, there should be a radius for any solid where it can withstand the stress of gravity. My gut feeling is that this is probably less than a light year for human construction materials, but I have not done the math.
While ring worlds can rotate to limit the strain on materials (with orbital velocity imposing no first-order stress, while also leaving the inhabitants in free-fall), a sphere will always have one axis unaffected by rotation, so this does not solve the material constraints (but would be useful during construction).
A civilization capable of building Dyson spheres will probably also be capable of sending von-Neumann probes to nearby stars, which feeld more interesting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlow%27s_formula
Why would you build your dyson swarm components within the deep gravity well of the earth? It would make a lot more sense to start with asteroids, moons, and then the smaller planets.
Happy new years everyone! I'm working on a short story and I can't find the answer to a certain scientific question, which is to me at least oddly difficult despite how simple a question it seems to be. This is prime useless nerd curiousity that I hope you'll indulge with me.
How long can a human being remain submerged in liquid?
You might immediately think of David Blaine, who set the record by staying underwater for a week in isotonic saline water before his organs began to shut down. But I didn't say water, I said liquid. We know from nature that a mammal can remain submerged, at least in its fetal stage, for months in real amniotic fluid, and we know from Nature that they can remain submerged at least four weeks in artificial amniotic fluid (before the ectogenesis experiment had to be ended for legal and not practical reasons). Are there enough physiological differences between a baby in the womb and an adult person that artificial amniotic fluid would cease to work for a kind of real life bacta tank, if we had an interest in such a thing? Could we suspend a grown person in the right fluid indefinitely, like a matrix pod? It's notable that at least one study suggest that a simple application of soap powder to the skin (of cadavers) will slow or stop skin breakdown.
What might a protocal look like therefore if we wanted to keep a person submerged for the most amount of time indefinitely? Would amniotic fluid work as-is? If we had to take breaks and dry them, how short could those breaks be? Could we accelerate them with topical chemicals or reduce their need entirely? What are some of the practical application of all this? I'll save that one for myself.
If you have even moderate bio-hacking or bioengineering in your universe, the answer to what current human bodies can do is irrelevant. Peter Watts had a modified human completely submerge in one of his books, and he has a PhD in Biology.
The story as well as my curiousity pertains to very near-term realism, but thank you!
So in science fiction, submerging pilots in oxygenated liquid is frequently used to protect them from the consequences of high-inertia maneuvers.
That's very interesting! I'd seen the scene in the Expanse where people are injected with fluid, but never suspended in it. My primary interest remains just how long it would work though. I'm very curious if you could make an aquatic human (at least for multi-month stretches) without genetic engineering, essentially.
There's the 1989 movie of "The Abyss" by James Cameron, where one plot point is 'breathing liquid' as demonstrated on a rat in this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFFpMqs9kbI
There's also deliberately triggering the mammalian diving reflex in order to survive having no oxygen, but how realistic reviving after that is, who knows?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fjS0ocT4FM
Neon Genesis Evangelian and Eve Online both have pilot pods with oxygenated liquid.
From all reports, the only real drawback to breathing liquid is that we find it super unpleasant. Your lungs just don't get over the feeling that you're drowning.
It did look very unpleasant in the Abyss, lol
There is talk of liquid breathing in some sci fi. If it's a story and you need this plot point, then just assume we figured it out.
Liquid breathing has been around for quite some time, including apparently a working patent for CO2 scrubbing in the leg also. The story benefits from realism, and I'm also just highly curious, since it's funny to me that with all the scientists in the world nobody has apparently bothered to put a rat in a vat of amniotic fluid yet and see if it melts.
This is a longshot, but since it says ask random questions, here goes. An MS blog I read is looking for someone to rescue a trial that they are doing to try to get people on treatment as quickly as possible: https://multiple-sclerosis-research.org/2023/12/dear-santa-help-give-profk-a-present-for-christmas-but-a-bigger-one-for-the-new-year/
If anyone has funds and is willing to help or knows of any tips on funding, please contact them. This is probably not as cost-effective as malaria nets, but with MS they say time is brain and the effects of the disease process are delayed, so the sooner treatment starts, the less destruction is done.
"The trial aims to determine whether people can get on active treatment within 14 days of symptom onset within the NHS and to put it in context many neurology patients do not get onto treatment within 18 weeks of referral…..I have seen the figures… This trial could help change practise and save brain for people in the future."
I had an idea about the nature of happiness and sadness. It feels overly simplistic, and it's certainly disconnected from other theories. As someone ill-versed in emotional psychology, I am looking for avenues of attack to poke holes in the notion or for grounds to refute or abandon it entirely. Here goes:
Happiness and sadness merely serve different functions. There's not one that's necessarily better than the other; they have different purposes. They are different tools, like a screwdriver or a hammer. Happiness has limits. Sadness does not. Sadness can extend indefinitely. Happiness cannot be felt in extrema. After a certain limit of happiness is crossed, the emotion transforms into some other area of life, outside the realm of emotions. Happiness twists itself into a cleaner room, some minor accolade at work, or a solution to some personal conundrum. That is happiness. Sadness can continue being felt on and on without end. One always may get sadder; in any scenario, to feel more sadness avails itself perpetually. Happiness eventually becomes something else in the overall person. Happiness and sadness serve different purposes.
1) Extreme happiness exists, but like extreme sadness, it is pathological if persistent. It's called mania.
2) I'm not sure what you mean about happiness transforming into something else. Happiness is far more conducive to action (indeed, that may be 'what it's for') but I wouldn't describe that as a transformation of happiness, just a consequence. Often times, actions undertaken while happy result in more happiness.
3) I'm also not sure that you can always feel sadder. It would be strange if this were the case (that our hardware supported indefinite levels of sadness) and if you look at people with the most extreme forms of depression, larger malfunctions like psychosis and catatonia start to occur. At the least, I don't see the motivation for saying that happiness has a ceiling but sadness has no floor.
4) If you're trying to characterize the functions of emotions, you might be interested in evolutionary psychology, which has a similar project so as to situate psychological phenomena in evolutionary accounts. This overview is very accessible: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242448259_Twelve_Crucial_Points_about_Emotions_Evolution_and_Mental_Disorders
5) If you're interested in characterizing the limits of emotional states, it would help to look at the extremes within the whole population of humans, including pathological states as seen in mood disorders, and not just the bounds of ordinary experience.
My thoughts about this are:
Sadness is resisted by most people because it’s unpleasant, and we are mostly conditioned to avoid or suppress it. The result of this is what you point out; it persists and deepens. If it is allowed to pass through us without resistance it resolves in the same way happiness does. It’s called somatic release, and it’s easy to see in young children. They wail and cry and then it’s over. As we grow up we are generally conditioned to “suck it up”, or distracted from it by “comforting“ ourselves with an external pacifier (here’s a cookie, stop crying). A big encouragement to substance abuse of all kinds.
When you laugh the world laughs with you. When you cry you cry alone.
This doesn't feel like a model, more like a couple of inferences. So true or not, you probably can't read too much into it.
A slightly more guarded expression would be: happiness has a shorter duration than sadness, and a more limited intensity. This reminds me of a quip about the long term success of couples: successful couples tend to look alike, but miserable ones tend to be unhappy in different ways. Which is another way of saying that "there are more ways in which something can go wrong than go right". True, as a general rule. Being happy (aka "successful" as an objective state, not psychological) is a lower entropy state and requires constant work. Lots of which can be outsourced to the environment (microwave popcorn vs plant a crop) so it's not forever hopeless, just... harder.
As far as happiness as a purely psychological state... yes, it may be designed to be short lived on purpose (see Hedonic Treadmill) but given that the reality usually takes care of that, I doubt it's a strong bias.
I'm not convinced. Happiness and sadness are brain states that can be activated by experiences. But any brain state can also be activated by a malfunction. If sadness gets stuck in the "on" position, that causes problems, and gets onto the radar of our medical system, and becomes known. But who would notice if someone's happiness got stuck in the "on" position? Isn't that just joie de vivre? It doesn't usually cause problems, so we don't medicalize it, so we don't know about it as much.
If someone is happy unsuitably, it could manifest as a sort of mania state where they make decisions with long term consequences but short term fun.
But agreed that medicine would probably not recognize "excessive happiness" until it starts causing secondary problems.
I've had depression where the effect was "having a negative mood all the time", and depression where the effect was "basically paralysis". They don't feel like the same thing from the inside, but my understanding is that the current medical consensus is that they're different ends of a spectrum. I'd suspect the same is true of "having a positive mood all the time" and "mania".
That is, clearly "paralysis" and "mania" are problems. But "usually negative mood" is generally seen as a problem and "usually positive mood" isn't, even though the underlying mechanism might be quite similar, just in the opposite direction.
I agree that sadness can continue and deepen pretty much without end and that happiness cannot. But I think happiness is a lot harder to pin down than sadness. When I am sad I know it. Being happy -- I dunno, I usually feel quite able to tell how much I want to continue what I'm doing, and things that I strongly want to continue doing are definitely enjoyable, but the word 'happiness' doesn't really capture what's positive about my state of mind. Flow states are deeply enjoyable. Doing a really good job is very satisfying. Being out in nature and feeling very aware of the smells and feel of the setting is extremely pleasant. Sex is tremendously compelling and gives great pleasure. But -- what I'm feeling at any of those times is not exactly happiness. When I I try to call to mind a state I'd call happiness, I tend to think of times was a child having a lot of fun -- running around on a summer night with a bunch of other kids chasing firelies. But maybe fun is a better word for the feeling of those times.
Also not versed in psychology:
Satisfaction or contentedness is probably the opposite or inverse of sadness.
The opposite of happiness is probably alarm or fright. Finding money on the ground, results in happiness. Losing money is alarm or fright. If you lose say the value of an hour's labor, how long does your alarm last? minutes, maybe an hour? It's not long term sadness, but short term alarm.
Viktor Frankel wrote in Man's Search For Meaning: that Responsibleness is the meaning of life. Happiness/contentedness is receiving the fruits of responsibleness. Sadness is of course not receiving the good things you think you deserve. If you've not behaved with responsibleness, you're very unlikely to receive many good things. Likewise, some people live with utmost responsibleness and only bad things happen to them. That number of people is rather small, not zero, but infinitely large if it is you.
In 2024, I want to work harder on avoiding procrastination. I’m going to try more positive visualization/daydreaming about what achieving what I want to, surfing the urge when I get distracted, and so on.
I sometimes find it helpful to listen to podcasts or audiobooks on this topic, but most of them seem like rah-rah twaddle. Anyone have recommendations for content with a minimum of BS?
I can find something, I'll post it later.
I suffer from procrastination, and whatI am working on is how I see the rewards of doing something. If I can get to a place where the main reward is pleasing myself, as opposed to any external reward, that helps me. Ymmv
A solid half of the solution is technique. At least. By all means, work on motivation, but also have the systems to support it. For example I found myself without any mood to work around the end of December, so instead of trying to psych me up I simply resumed an older habit: time blocking. I started shutting off everything for 30 minutes, and only allowing me to do one thing. And it worked, with very little fuss.
In random order, a few resources:
- a _summary_ of Getting Things Done. The whole book is ... well... a bit too large. It works extremely well with Trello or some other list-based project management tool.
- Atomic Habits, as recommended by somebody else
- Carl Newport, probably quite a lot by him but at the very least Deep Work
- to manage expectations: https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/speedrunning-college-four-years-later
- probably worth putting the list above into GPT and ask for some other suggestions in the same vain. Also add keyworks like "time blocking" or "pomodoro technique".
And as a rule, prefer toolboxes over frameworks. When a framework breaks, it tends to break completely, and it doesn't really allow you to properly outgrow it. Even stuff like GTD can be made more flexible with a bit of trial and error. And speaking of, when GTD is telling you that you should do something daily or weekly - do it. It'll 100% break otherwise.
Cal Newport has a podcast called Deep Work too. At least the first 100 or so episodes were very focused on expanding on the themes in Deep Work with a lot of practical advice to listeners that wrote in about things. After a while it got repetitive and then he had to kind of talk about current event things to fill time. I stopped listening after that. But I recommend the first 100 or so episodes. They were recorded doing the pandemic so there is a lot of content that is likely outdated, but a lot of good stuff too.
I fell off it, but I still recommend Atomic Habits' approach; take an ordinary routine you do, like brushing your teeth or making coffee, and make a commitment that every time you do that, you'll also take the first step toward furthering your projects ( mine was "every time I get coffee, I'll write at least one sentence in a fiction story"). The basic idea being that the hardest part is showing up, and once you can commit to repeatedly showing up then progress will happen.
Don't wait to feel motivated; only doing things when you feel motivated is like only ever running when you decide to run a marathon. You'll burn out badly and possibly die.
I think there are two parts to overcoming procrastination. Deciding what to do, and actually doing it. Of these two, the second one is more important, because when you already have the habit of doing things, changing the direction later is relatively easy. Many people fail by making plans and never acting on them. It is better to actually do a small thing, than to design a perfect plan on paper and leave it there. (You will actually learn many important things along the way, so it is not even possible to prepare a perfect plan in advance.)
Actually doing things is about motivation, i.e. *emotion*. The amount of BS is almost irrelevant. The proper moment to avoid BS is while deciding *what* to do. But when you actually start doing things, BS can push you forward as well as anything else, often even better.
Different things work for different people, because it is about what is means for you, emotionally. I find some videos by Akira the Don motivating, but if they don't mean anything to someone else, I understand that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9ZDUj7B9Kc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0mig8IeV-s Find something that clicks for you.
If you find something you like, I would recommend downloading it (so that YouTube does not show you ads at the wrong moment), then you can play it offline whenever you want.
Deciding what you want to achieve -- I am not sure a book or a podcast can help you with that. What you want is probably different from what other readers of the same book would want. I think what could help is list your dreams, and maybe order them by priority... then do the same exercise again in a few months... and notice which things remain at the top.
There are good resources on the visualization techniques, sadly I do not remember any specific book, that was long ago. But the key points are: (1) imagine the outcome from the first-person perspective, not third-person, i.e. imagine actually being there, not just watching a movie of someone else being there; (2) try to make it specific and vivid, imagine specific colors and sounds, don't just think some abstract words; (3) if anything feels wrong, do not ignore the feeling, think about it. Maybe what you think you *should* want is not actually what you want. Often other people tell you what to dream, and it is something that they want (or that they *think* they want, but actually... why aren't they doing the thing themselves?), not necessarily what you want.
Sometimes it helps to discuss these things with a friend. But some friends are not good at listening, and instead offer their own ideas about what you *should* want.
BS does sort of work to an extent, but the act of listening to it quickly becomes too painful to keep up. I've enjoyed Akira the Don in the past, so thanks for reminding me of that.
And I suppose I should truly get into learning about visualization. I've been more or less assuming I can just wing it, but that's obviously not ideal.
> Anyone have recommendations for content with a minimum of BS?
I partially solve this by never watching podcasts if I can possibly avoid them. But I confess to being a luddite in some respects. For example I don't use smart phone apps besides the two-factor authentication ones I have to use for work. Even avoiding podcasts, it's easy to be sidetracked by web content irrelevant to one's goal(s).
Also, have a routine, whereby you check emails, do Wordle, etc, at and for only certain time(s). Above all, disable notifications! Otherwise intriguing messages and alerts will be constantly popping up, causing more distraction.
Have you considered that you're procrastinating by trying to find ways to avoid procrastinating? Ultimately, there's nothing stopping you from just doing... whatever you're supposed to do. If you don't want to do it, nobody can really force you to do it.
I agree that’s a thing that happens, but I don’t think it’s the case here. My issue is often a lack of interest in what I’m doing, so getting more connected with the positive outcomes and how they will feel is helpful. This stuff also isn’t something I would do during work time. More like while having my morning coffee, in the shower, and that kind of thing. But thanks for your concern.
And yes, feelings and motivation are weird in that they’re invisible. In a Skinner box sense, you’re right that there’s nothing really stopping anyone from doing anything. And yet it seems like most people don’t do all the things they would like to. Odd.
Agreed: I remember hearing something about how talking about your goals make you less likely to achieve them, basically because you get to brag and feel happy about it before you’ve done any of the actual work, so your brain ticks that box, and stops focusing on that goal (https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/neuroscience-in-everyday-life/201801/why-sharing-your-goals-makes-them-less-achievable), so I’m not sure daydreaming is any good. As someone who’s been struggling with procrastination for years, I don’t want to agree that there’s literally nothing stopping you (or me) from just doing stuff… but also I can’t say it’s wrong. Best of luck, anyway!
Beeminder
Is there anyone with talent in philosophy, math, or the sciences who's interested in trying to start over with philosophy? I'm frustrated that philosophy hasn't gone anywhere in thousands of years and am trying to build a framework that might allow us to make better progress: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/philosophy-is-a-residuum-of-failure
I'm a smart guy, but I'm only one guy. This project could really use the attention of someone who agrees about the problem and is able to work towards a solution.
>interested in trying to start over with philosophy
There's a guy name Friedrich who was really into this, he's not on substack though :D
Going to try a defence of philosophy here:
Philosophy is not about finding new truths like physics. Philosophy is at once the training data and the training algorithm for improving the moist neural networks we have locked up in our skulls.
Playing a billion games of go against yourself might seem pointless, but it is how we trained alphago. Likewise it might seem pointless for adult people to sit down and compare the writings of a drunk Athenian with the ramblings of a syphilitic German, but you could actually be watching a non-artificial intelligence being formed.
Socrates and Confucius were completely in agreement on this: A persons skill in philosophy is determined by how he lives his life.
What science gives us is something akin to a good old fashioned algorithm for solving very specific problems, which is all good and neat, and it can be used by anyone after some education. But the problem of training our own brains to become good people must be repeated every generation. Hence, philosophy will always look the same whether you are living 2000 years ago or 20 000 years into the future. We can't copy paste our worldview into our children.
Admittedly much modern philosophy seems bad, but my guess is that nonsense have always existed but most of it will hopefully be forgotten later.
I'm reminded of Luke Muehlhauser's https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FwiPfF8Woe5JrzqEu/philosophy-a-diseased-discipline, his follow-up suggestion https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LcEzxX2FNTKbB6KXS/train-philosophers-with-pearl-and-kahneman-not-plato-and, and more recently in this vein, conceptual engineering https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9iA87EfNKnREgdTJN/a-revolution-in-philosophy-the-rise-of-conceptual (which is itself an introduction to the writer's larger sequence https://suspendedreason.com/2020/04/15/meta-sequences-introduction-criteria/)
Maybe you can consider collaborating with the author of that sequence? Since they also seem to be singlehandedly driving it forward.
As an armchair non-philosopher, I've thought about this a lot.
Efforts to construct a theory of everything in physics have so far been unsuccessful. Goedel's incompleteness theorem precludes a "theory of everything" in mathematics. In computer science, there's the fact that the halting problem is undecidable. I conjecture that a philosophical "theory of everything" is similarly impossible to formulate.
Specifically, I suspect that there's a sort of philosophical uncertainty principle at play. You can fully understand a thing with complete certainty, provided the thing isn't real (e.g., the Platonic form of a circle). You can have tentative, partial understandings of perceptions which seem to probably more-or-less correspond to the underlying reality (e.g., the physical sciences). And we have no ability to directly perceive (and therefore, no ability to "understand") the underlying reality itself.
I think philosophy should recast itself as more of an applied discipline. In the physical sciences, researchers study a specific problem (e.g., modeling the movements of planets), and in the course of solving that problem, they build up a toolbox of insights, theories, and conceptual frameworks which generalize beyond the original problem. Philosophers should do likewise. Look for particular problems which seem to be rooted in bad ontologies, unclear definitions, misapplied conceptual frameworks, etc. Solve those problems by coming up with the right definitions, ontologies, and conceptual frameworks. And in so doing, probably learn some new insights that transcend the original problem.
There are philosophers working on problems like that e.g. Daniel Dennet. Some areas of applied philosophical practise include bioethics, legal theory, political philosophy, military ethics, and (arguably) economics.
I think you’re close to something here. I see it this way; “everything “ is constantly in flux at a level of detail that we can’t begin to fathom, “everything “ is not a static condition. A theory of everything is identical to a theory that can predict the precise state of the surface of the ocean at any given time; good luck with that.
Go through the SMBC philosophy-themed comics, you might find that almost everything is covered there already.
This seems likely to at best result in the creation of another school of philosophy to compete with the existing ones.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png
Yeah, the problem is not that the good ideas are missing in philosophy (actually, most good ideas were probably already written by some official philosopher), but that the bad idea never get removed.
Philosophy as a whole resembles "the Library of Babel"; all the good things are there somewhere, but unless you already know precisely what they are, you cannot find them by just reading whatever you see there.
> Yeah, the problem is not that the good ideas are missing in philosophy (actually, most good ideas were probably already written by some official philosopher), but that the bad idea never get removed.
Whatever that contrasts with, it sure isn't the Sequences.
Doesn't this have the same solution as the library of babel? A curator who maps out good ideas in philosophy is itself the content of a philosophy.
But wouldn't different people see different ideas as 'good.' Such a curator would need to be able to map philosophies to people. Or, perhaps, to help translate from one philosophy to another, which is a ridiculously hard problem that seems like it should be easy.
You seem to have diagnosed the problem , that there's no gently agreed starting point, that it takes an epistemology to decide an epistemology. But I don't see why you would think there is some solution, especially without knowing what it is.
I'm interested, and my approach is to assume that there are ~truths yet to be established, and ask "Why haven't we found these answers yet?"
In other words, what is systematically weak about our current and past attempts? Which areas of possible truth are systematically neglected or misperceived?
I'd love to discuss your perspective IYI.
and IYI, I recently wrote this in the Qualia Computing Network FB group:
"What QRI seems to have pointed out, is that a lot of full-stack memeplexes feature concepts that cause as much resonance in the body as possible. For example, Bernardo Castro talking about how there is no past or future, and the present is infinitely small, so it is nothing, but out of nothing comes everything. These kind of ideas are limit ideas. In this case, it's the combination of two limits, the absolute lack, the absolute nothingness, and the absolute everything. This, jointly activated, especially if you include everything in between (which is, well, everything!), feels very resonant in our experience.
So a lot of these memeplexes seem fascinating and persuasive and powerful and quite reasonable when you hear and grok them. That's a big resonance in your organism, and then some people assume that large resonances within them indicate that the idea is true.
When you think about it, the big questions of where anything comes from or why we are conscious - the very *questions* in this space (it doesn’t really matter the answers) - come naturally laden, heavy with the universality of their pointing. They are like meditation prompts that help you activate all the various layers of your organism simultaneously.
QRI’s insight seems to flow from understanding the material bases for aspects of our qualia. And in particular, it helps to understand the material bases for qualia-aspects that people tend to depend on as truth-detectors. This whole area of thought has made me feel like I should be much more suspicious of all the theories out there that seems so striking and resounding, and then eagerly add them to a list of meditation prompts, because those are beautiful ideas that can help me access exquisite and exotic states of consciousness 🙂!
Because this could explain so much, about how smart and wise people can be so confident in their wrong models of reality. We’re at the stage in human history where we’ve realized that real truth converges, but we haven’t yet converged on the answers for the biggest, most personal, most poignant questions about our experiences. Plus, at this time, most people are still *so confident* that their personal memeplex’s answers to these questions are correct.
So maybe they’re experiencing a lot of resonance in their memeplexes, and that resonance gets converted into confidence. But if they’re reasonable people, then once they grok the real truth, it’ll resonate even more strongly in their experience, and they’ll update their ontology and metaphysics, ontological shock or no.
But how can that be? How can the same “real truth” resonate with all these reasonable people, if those people are strongly resonating right now with such different belief/ontology systems? Shouldn’t their demonstrated tendency to resonate with so many different and contradictory systems prove that they couldn’t resonate together in harmony, if presented with the right idea?
And maybe this points at something a little surprising about their various belief systems. That they “contain truth” without being true. That there are, on a reliable basis, reasonable and material causes for the positive benefits of these belief systems. Which means that, even if not for the reasons believers think, for *some* reason, their systems do allow them to interact effectively with the real world.
And the truth about the real world will thus contain aspects that explain what was so resonant about these various partially-true systems.
And there’s low-hanging fruit here, because it’s a subtle mistake that a lot of smart people make, confusing some sensation or other with an indicator of actual truth. If there are profound insights that have somehow escaped human detection so far, it might make sense to look in places that have been most plagued with fog. Re-analyze all the full-stack memeplexes with your material-basis-for-resonance functions, notice why they work on believers’ consciousness the way they do, and go from there.
So where else might insights lurk, where seeking has been unsuccessful? Perhaps in the blind spots of various thinking-styles (or information processing-styles would maybe be more accurate). The scientific and the spiritual people have struggled to dialogue productively with each other, but this is another area where QRI seems to have identified previously neglected veins of rich insight ore.
You can see why these insights might be missed, with the spiritual people failing to use rigorous methods, and the scientific people mostly ignoring the whole space.
But where else might we be able to deduce it would be productive to go looking for low-hanging fruit? Is it possible to calculate which under-mapped sectors of memespace will be more likely to contain abundant insights?"
What are you talking about? Philosophy has had many big of advances in that period, perhaps most obviously and notably formalization of logic.
Kant, Frege and Wittgenstein could all be considered revolutionary.
Well yeah, of course philosophy has gotten nowhere. It has absolutely no relation to objective reality beyond the psychology of its preacher. Arguing about it is as stupid as arguing over food preferences. The only "correct" answer is nihilism, but nihilism is boring. People would rather pretend that their suffering has purpose.
Philosophy is nothing because there is nothing. What are you even trying to find in the first place?
Without philosophy, there would have never been science. Al Kindi was the first philosopher to codify the scientific method as a process of hypothesis, experiment, and observation. And it's worth remembering that all the great physicists of the early twentieth century (Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, etc.) had a thorough grounding in philosophy. Though I can't find the quote, I think it was Einstein who said (I'm paraphrasing) that philosophy was as important to him as mathematics in that it gave him a framework to create his thought experiments.
BREAKING NEWS: 'Only Correct Answer to Philosophy is My Philosophy,' Claims Philosopher
Is this a problem? If Philosophy is a failure compared to Science, why not just do Science and leave Philosophy alone? Most doctors are happy to continue practising Medicine and leaving the Homeopaths to get on with it. But if Philosophy is really distinct from Science, then calling it a failure compared to Science feels like comparing apples and oranges.
Moreover, it seems like it's the pot calling the kettle black. For all the rah-rah about endless progress from the scientism crowd, it seems like we're in a period of scientific stagnation — that is if we consider that there haven't been any major theoretical advances in science or ground-breaking new technologies in the past fifty years. Theoretical physics hasn't made any progress towards a ToE, and all the inventions that are the basis of our civilization were made half a century or more ago. Who knows? AI might get us by this impasse, but right now we're running on the fumes from the twentieth century.
For what it is worth, new fundamental physics are not likely to be included in everyday inventions: if the Higgs boson was easy enough to produce to put a Higgs emitter into a mobile phone, then it would have been discovered much earlier than it was. (Of course, history is littered with people claiming that some discovery will never have any practical application and being proven wrong.)
The most impactful developments in technology in the last few decades are probably in computer tech. The most impactful development in philosophy in the last few decades are probably intersectionality.
Put bluntly, I would much rather live in a society which has researched the philosophy tech tree till Socrates and the science tech tree till Dirac than one which has researched philosophy till Singer and science till Archimedes. The former might be horrible (there is value to political philosophy, after all), but the latter will be an agrarian slave-holder society by necessity.
>there haven't been any major theoretical advances in science or
Perhaps. One could argue that particle physics hasn't had big theoretical changes.
>ground-breaking new technologies in the past fifty years
I disagree. The mRNA vaccines alone are a big advance. The orders of magnitude improvements in computing matter. The reduction in costs of communications. GPS. CRISPR. PCR.
Particle physics: We've still haven't advanced beyond the standard model of the nineteen-seventies. LHC found the Higgs Boson (yay!). Standard Model confirmed (Yay!). Onwards and upwards to Supersymmetry! (They've been shouting that one since I was a teenager fifty years ago!) Sabine Hossenfelder nailed it when she said: "Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science."
I'm asking: where are the really big twenty-first-century civilization-changing advances?
Nothing has appeared on the scene as transformative as the laser, the transistor, or the discovery of DNA. Those were all mid-twentieth-century discoveries and/or inventions that our contemporary world civilization couldn't exist were it not for them. You mentioned mRNA vaccines, but those are based on PCR technology (and please note that mRNA vaccines have been on the drawing board for forty-plus years). Yes, PCR may be the last major technological advance that the twentieth century gave us (but that was invented in 1983). We're almost a quarter-way through this century and it's been nada, zip, zilch when it comes to technological breakthroughs.
Fusion power is still twenty years away. Well, it was thirty years away when I was a teen in the nineteen seventies, so I guess we're making advances. Quantum computing could revolutionize all those niggly applications that require pattern recognition, which would not only turn cryptography on its head, but it would revolutionize logistics and supply chain problems, simulate quantum systems (yielding a better understanding of chemical reactions, and trickle up into drug design), and enhance machine learning by being able to sort through datasets quicker than the algorithms we use today (which were developed in the nineteen-fifties, I might add). But I don't expect to see quantum computers doing anything useful in my remaining lifetime. Maybe you'll live to see it. In the meantime, we reached the end of Moore's Law sometime around 2010 (transistor density vs cost). Classical computing will become more expensive from here on out. What does that do to our AI future? I'm not sure.
And while I'm at this rant, we haven't had any advances in political theory for the last hundred and fifty years! You'd think that we twenty-first-century brainiacs could come up with something more creative than the old Left and Right tropes. And the Arts? There've been no new musical genres for fifty years now. The twentieth century was an enormously innovative time for music: Jazz, Rock, Hip Hop, Country music, Ska, Reggae, and all those wonderful efflorescences of African genres — well, nothing new has come along except for tweaks to the old genres. The visual arts are in the same boat. It's all a mishmash of styles developed in the twentieth. Architecture? The same thing. Literature? The same thing.
All I see right now is cultural and technological stagnation. And I don't see any way past this impasse any time soon. That's not to say we can't all live productive and enjoyable lives in our stagnating Golden Age, but unless we find our way through our current dead end, this may be as far as humanity ever advances. Cheers!
Many Thanks! Re particle physics, yes Sabine Hossenfelder has a reasonable point. I do presume that there is at least a _puzzle_ about what dark matter is, but I certainly don't see anything like a successful experimentally demonstrated explanation.
>Nothing has appeared on the scene as transformative as the laser, the transistor, or the discovery of DNA.
There is a lot of ambiguity in how one looks at advances. A lot of work can either be viewed as "more of the same" or viewed as "orders of magnitude improvements, effectively a qualitative change". Many Thanks for acknowledging PCR! Yes, it is early in your 50-year window (as was the initial work on mRNA vaccines - but, still, cutting the development time from the previous record of 4 years to 1 year _matters_). GPS is also in your window, albeit the very start of it is barely at the edge of the window ( "The first prototype spacecraft was launched in 1978" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System ).
I _do_ think that, overall, the past 50 years have been disappointing technologically. I wrote a comment in ACX, which I'm having trouble finding, where I listed all the advances that we'd hoped for from the 1960s and 70s onwards that haven't happened. ( I echoed Vinge's term and called it an "era of failed dreams"). As anomie wrote, we still might see AI become as significant a technology as those you cited. I'm 65, so this is likely the last chance that I have to see a major qualitative advance. I hope I see it.
Re political theory - I'm not surprised to see no advance there. The old quip "The Greeks invented all known forms of government, and could make none of them work." is still reasonably accurate. There is, again, a bit of ambiguity in how one describes changes. Do nuclear-armed ICBMs plus the hot line deterring superpower full scale warfare and reducing the odds of war by accident somewhat count?
You're just going to ignore AI? We are on the cusp of creating an improved and optimized intelligence that may very well make humans obsolete. It doesn't matter if humanity doesn't make it much further than this, AI will simply continue in our stead.
Well, will you be able to implement the AI you're envisioning on the chips that are coming online today? There will be incremental improvements in silicon, but this is basically the technology you'll have to work with. It's not going to get much better unless we make some sweeping advances in quantum computing in the next few years.
Bigger AI will mean more chips which will mean bigger data centers with more power consumption. So we have to deal with how are we going to power those data centers. A moderately large data center requires what—100 megawatts to run? That's 876 Megawatt hours per year. Only about 83% is used to power the computing, though. How much energy do you think will be required by your AI even if we assume we can improve the energy efficiency of chips? That's why Microsoft is investigating building its own nuclear power plant, and Google bought up a big hydroelectric dam.
According to the IEA our civilization consumes approx 160 exojoules of energy each year. That translates to 4.444448×10^16 megawatt-hours (or 444 Trillion megawatt hours each year). Of course, half this is oil that's mostly used in transport, but without that oil energy the price of transport will rise. Sorry, renewables are not going to run globalized civilization at the level we see today. Hopefully, we do get fusion power in the next twenty years, because otherwise there will be less energy flowing into the world economy --> which means productivity will drop off --> which means deflation --> which means radically lower standards of living --> and possibly the return of cyclical famines when it becomes too expensive to run the harvesting machinery and price of fertilizer skyrockets --> which means hungry scared people --> which means wars.
Everybody's focused on the threat of global warming and the threat of AI, but the obvious threat is staring us in the faces and nobody seems to see it.
It is unclear that AI will e.g. experience qualia, without which I would not consider anything done by AI alone as "continuing in our stead".
It is also unclear that we are "on the cusp" of creating anything that would make humans obsolete.
I watched a Veritasium video about the Prisoner's dilemma, and it discussed two tournaments where bots played against each other, eventually concluding that Tit-for-tat is the strongest in the two pools.
However, everywhere I can find online that discusses the problem, the payoff for Defect-Cooperate has always been less than the sum of the payoffs for Cooperate-Cooperate. I haven't found any description of the Prisoner's Dilemma that requires this condition, but it seems to be the case in every example I can find. The example in the video is 3/3 for C-C, 5-0 for D-C, and 1-1 for D-D, so the cumulative payoff of 3 + 3 > 5. But what if the payoff was 7-0 for the D-C? What if it was 100-0? The basic premise of the prisoner's dilemma would be the same, where in a single game the rational choice would be to defect, but in a repeated game, the best strategies would be those that could arrange a alternating pattern of D-C and C-D.
Has this been explored before? Is this another problem altogether?
At this point you should also start playing with the other conditions. A fixed number of rounds for example favors defecting on the last. Also scoring - if you're doing an elo-style tournament, an Always Defect strategy is literally unbeatable. And if you score sum of overall points, then the number of games becomes relevant. And to keep it realistic, you want memory from one game to another, so you can at the very least get a feel for how "friendly" the environment is. And so on.
I don't know the answer to your question, unfortunately. I have a related one, also about iterated prisoners' dilemma: I've read summaries of Axelrod's experiments with iterated prisoners' dilemma and the evolution of cooperation (though not his whole book). Has there been any work on simulating tournaments where the strategic programs are also told when the iteration will _end_? In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation , the summary mentions 200 iterations (and then there are various complications where players can get rematched with each other and retain knowledge of past matches with the same other player). What happens in the simple case, with players matched with each other and knowing the other player's moves, C, D, C, C ... but _also_ told remaining iterations are 200, 199, 198, ... ?
That would be pretty interesting to see. The usual argument is that there's no reason to not defect on the 200th round, and so the same could be said about 199, so on, all the way to 1. So it follows that the strategy must be to always defect.
But it's easy to see that a strategy that cooperates (with another cooperating strategy), say, up to the 100th round, itself will outperform the always-defectors. I think that it boils down to guessing the preprogrammed "cooperation stopping point", with the winner being the one with the second-last stopping point. That strategy will be able to have max cooperation with everyone else and score an extra hit on the strategy with the last stopping point.
Many Thanks! Agreed that it would be interesting to see - whether some "stable" stopping point evolves, or the populations of the various partial-tit-for-tat/partial-stopping-point-defectors approach a limit cycle, or some other behavior...
Not that this answers your question, but you might find Thomas Schelling's book Choice and Consequence interesting.
Thanks, I'll have to check it out.
Since nobody is answering your actual question, I'll have a stab at it: If 2 * (Coop:Coop) isn't bigger than (Coop:Def)+(Def:Coop), then you don't have a proper prisoner's dilemma. I didn't manage to find a good name for your variant.
I suspect you can probably do a near-trivial mapping of iterated prisoner's dilemma to this variant: you can consider alternating your choices every round to be the new cooperate and not following this pattern to be defecting.
With this mapping, the only remaining question is how to synchronize the alternating coop-defect-pattern, which is probably very similar to how tit-for-tat tries to get out of punish-repunish loops when playing against itself. Having no good way of doing first round synchronization probably means you want a quite forgiving, exploratory strategy for the early rounds, maybe some weird kind of exponential backoff is my first intuition.
There's a good chance there is more interesting stuff here if you go deeper.
Ah, thanks, it does reduce to the standard problem in the manner you suggested. The synchronization problem is interesting, and I agree that randomized exponential backoff is probably the way to go. Thanks for your thoughts!
The winning strategy depends on what strategy the other players are using. For instance if all other players always cooperate, then the winning strategy is to always defect. Evolutionary sims often show an unstable equilibrium that vacillates between different strategies as the population changes.
Yes - that's why I specified "in the two pools." I'm more curious about the "variant" of the game that I described with slightly different relative payoffs.
I vaguely recall reading that someone proved, or had found strong evidence even if falling short of a rigorous proof, that following an opponent's defects "cooperate once but then defect" was the best strategy.
Without any constraints, it's impossible to "prove" any strategy as the best, as the performance would depend on the rest of the population. For example, if the rest of the pool had a strategy of "Always Defect", the strategy you suggest would come in dead last.
Assuming that there are different strategies the cooperate and then defect on a defect seems to win.
The everybody defects society would probably collapse.
Imagine a situation where most players share a secret code telling them what to do during the first 20 turns of the game (e.g. cooperate in turn 1, defect in turns 2 and 4, cooperate in 5 and 6, etc.). The code is arbitrary, but the same for everyone who knows it.
The point is that you play the first 20 turns with anyone according to the code, and if your opponent does the same, then after turn 20 you keep cooperating with them forever, because they are a part of the same conspiracy; but if they diverge from the code, you keep defecting against them forever, because they are not a part of the same conspiracy.
A society where most players start as members of this conspiracy would *not* collapse. They would pay some initial cost, but afterwards get lots of points by cooperating with the remaining conspiracy members -- as opposed to non-members, who get ostracized by the conspiracy members forever.
Wait, so if I input a secret code, they turn into CooperateBot forever? That seems incredibly exploitable, if it's a game that allows evolution.
In real life, you probably need to deliver continuous costly signals. (But their total cost is smaller than the cost of being ostracized by the group.) They stop cooperating with you even if you break the rules later.
Also, unlike in prisoner's dilemma, the players would observe how you interact with *other* players. For example if they find out that you are trying something like "follow the conspiracy rules with the members of the conspiracy, do tit for tat with everyone else", they may turn against you for that, too. (Depends on what are their rules for noticing such behavior.)
And if you always follow the rules of the conspiracy, then for all practical purposes you are a member of the conspiracy, that would not be really "exploiting".
Yes, seconding this - Zvi had a great post about a tournament on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and the meta-level game theory that led to certain people winning, it's not as simple as many people expect: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-darwin-game
Yeah, Douglas Hofstadter had a nice discussion in his "Metamagical Themas", and maybe in Sci. American. https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/AxelrodComputerTournaments.ExcerptsFromHofstadterSciAmArticle.1983.pdf
Apologies in advance if this is too long. Can someone suggest names of psychological conditions/named characteristics are correlated with the following traits of X, especially (i) and (ii) below?
(i) X cannot watch movies because X identifies too much with a character and feels nervous. Once X saw a youtube clip on the execution of Ned Stark, and it haunted them for weeks.
(ii) Conversely, X runs into social difficulties because they imbibe lessons from movies and media they shouldn't (those clips may be meant to be just fantasy, but for X it is a real life lesson). This is not because X is unaware of the lessons that movies are fantasy, but rather, X tends to be poor at disassociating themselves while consuming content, that they can't help subconsciously learning (wrong) lessons.
(iii) X cannot do "premortems". X knows that predicting how others will respond to a situation is nontrivial, so X puts in extra effort at not being presumptive, but yet is worse at anticipating and responding to situations than people who are actually more presumptive. Can this happen just because neuro-atypicality makes it harder for some people to work with others?/
(iv) I guess the following may be some sort of anxiety disorder, but can it be related to (i): X is very bad at processing uncertainty. (Is this even related to (i)?). X gets projects to accomplish from their office, and the fear that a mistake overlooked by X might create havoc becomes paralyzingly difficult, preventing X not only from working well, but also from checking their work (because the prospect of finding mistakes can be crippling).
Besides ASD1, it sounds like some OCD or what some folks call Ethical OCD, which cooccurs with ASD.
But I highly personally relate to (i) And I always assumed it’s that some people get things stuck in the wrong folders in their brains more easily.
Like how some people are more susceptible to PTSD than others and that even what I call Post Television Stress Disorder can occur from something we watch.
I have to be very careful what I look at on TV because it could get stuck if it’s really disturbing and then become an intrusive thought, but again, the intrusive thought is like OCD.
Or you could call it being more sensitive than most, more suggestible, more imaginative in some cases.
Thank you very much. The person knows very well that there is no "right", and the fear about getting it "right" is social/survival-based rather than ethical (ethical concerns exist, but at normal levels). Yours is a helpful comment, thank you.
Oh interesting. So it’s not that they desire the moral reward of “doing righteous or right deeds, fulfilling their duties, etc” but that they’re in fear of doing wrong and the real life repercussions of doing wrong. Fascinating.
Yeah, sounds more like anxiety/performance anxiety.
Indeed. "Acquired" (through multiple failures), rather than "congenital", performance anxiety. Thanks.
And by ethical OCD I mean an intense, uncontrollable and disruptive fixation on right and wrong in a moral sense and doing “right.”
Psychologist here. I'm a lot less sure than some people that Aspergers is autism light, but if I had to give X a diagnosis that's the one I'd give. The 3 most Aspergerish things on your list are difficulty navigating situations with people, difficulty tolerating uncertainty and perfectionism. I've seem lots of people with that triad.
I don't, though, think giving someone like X an Asperger's diagnosis is terribly helpful, beyond giving them some validation and a very general explanation: they have some atypical wiring. Regarding the person's social difficulties, a professional can explain that they probably have a sort of learning disability when it comes to understanding other people, and that they need to learn some techniques for compensating it. You can tell them their anxiety at work may be an understandable reaction to having to navigate in a world where their ability to predict what's going to happen next is less than the average person's, and so they keep getting unexpected results, often unexpected bad ones.
As for X's strong reactions to movies & YouTube videos, it may be that X is bringing to these artificial worlds and people the intense interest and vulnerability that most of us have for the real world. Movies and videos are usually easier to understand than events with real people, so these fictional worlds may be much more appealing and interesting to X than the real world. You know who the good guys and bad guys are, what the important issues are, etc. You often get to see actions or hear converstions where people's secret feelings and intentions are made clear. And you get to see the arc where all that plays out to an ending that makes sense.
Overall, an Asperger’s diagnosis gives you some ways of framing what’s happening, but doesn’t point to any particular meds or treatments that Work For The Disorder. Helpful ingredients to a therapy for someone like this would be:
-Explaining themselves at length to someone who’s on their side and gets it.
-Working with the therapist to develop better rules of thumb and also more complex skills for understanding and collaborating with other people.
-Finding some work and social situations that are a good fit for them, so that life is not so difficult and they are more appreciated.
I think X’s strong reactions to movies and videos is a plus. It’s good that they aren’t sort of globally numb, as some Aspergerish people are, plus movies and videos are actually a good vehicle for learning to understand people — but X needs a curated list!
Great points. X realizes they have a learning disability (having learnt it the hard way after multiple multiple frustrations), but probably not that that might be making them learn more from the "easier to understand" movies and videos. Thank you for the suggestions and pointers for X to follow. It is especially immensely helpful to know the limitations of available treatment. I really appreciate your responding here as a psychologist.
As for the limitations of available treatment -- there's no magic bullet, but I actually think people like X are quite helpable, if they are open to the idea of trying on some new ideas and habits to see if they make life work better. Here are some things that can make a big difference in someone's quality of life:
-Cognitive therapy regarding how one deals with uncertainty: I have seen lots of people who a stuck in some lousy situation, such as being unemployed, because they are holding out for something they are *sure* will be better. For instance somebody I see held back from taking a job that looked very promising because he could not figure out whether the place would be a unreasonably strict about things like deadlines, dress, how rapidly he took on new tasks, etc. There was no special reason to think the place was, but there really was not much data & there was no way to get more, so he kept delaying the decision, mentally replaying everything he knew about the place, looking for clues that would answer his question definitively. So for people like that it's helpful to talk about kinds of situations in life, and categorize them according to how much info about them you usually have in advance, how much harm you will suffer if the situation turns out to be bad, and how difficult escape would be. Then we consider the decision they're trying to make, and categorize it on those dimension. I also tell people like this that they seem to be wired to want to have more control and certainty that it's possible to have, and suggest that they experiment with choosing novelty at forks in the road 10% more often -- doing things like trying new restaurants. Often people discover that life under that guideline is more fun and interesting, and that when the novel choice turns out to be something that they don't like the unpleasantness is tolerable and escapable.
For social difficulties, shy people are often helped quite a lot by having a couple simple tricks in their pocket for getting a conversation started in a positive way: Things like making a positive comment about something the person did ("that explanation was very clear!") and asking open-headed questions ("so what's your take on –––––º). And. movies provide a great way to talk about. handling more complex situations. I have seen a lot of people who are far too honest & blunt in social situations -- they are like the guy in that movie who never lied, & announced to an elevator full of people that he was the one who had farted. (Although I personally find the bluntness and honesty of people on the spectrum very likeable. They do very little bullshitting and impression-management.)
And for perfectionism, exposure is a very good treatment. People can start with very low-risk situations in the office, with the therapist in the role of a hypercritical boss, saying lines designed by the client ("anyone who makes this many typos is the scum of the earth").
Anyhow, just wanted to make clear that the available treatments, while they don't re-wire the person, can make quite a big difference in quality of life.
Great. All these seem worth trying. This is a super helpful addendum to the earlier comment, and is very nice of you to have communicated. Much appreciated.
As the guy who mentioned ASD as a possible answer here, I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. What Sandeep describes sounds like ASD, but knowing that is no help (and Sandeep mentions that X isn’t neurotypical, so they probably already know that ASD is a thing, anyway). It’s massively useful to know you have ASD if you have it, but only if you have a therapist, or at the very least a good self-help book, that knows how to deal with it. I‘ve known I had ASD for five years, yet it’s only a few months ago that I met a therapist who didn’t take ASD as an answer, but instead used it as a guide to know what she should focus our work on, to solve the issues I’d come to to her to fix, and it’s a lot better that way.
Thank you for sharing this. Is there a self-help book you would recommend?
Nope, sorry. You can probably easily find good recommendations on how do deal with anxiety, though, which may be somewhat useful since the difficulties you describe seem to be causing a lot of anxiety. But that’s not your question, and even then, I don’t know any that’s in book form
I see, thank you.
Is this for some sort of pattern matching thing, or is it just a general question, because it seems like a very socially awkard person to me, but not necessarily neuroatypical:
i) Modern fiction that achieves popularity usually optimize for creating pathos: I know my initial emotional reaction to fiction is often stronger than to real-life stuff, because real life doesn't have carefully selected background music, perfectly timed closeups and maximally emotional dialogue, this is often despite the manipulation being completely transparent to me.
ii) This doesn't seem special, while proving a causal relationship at anything but the individual level is very hard, this phenomenom has been noted in different ways by lots of people: Nice Guys getting a distorted view of what behaviour gets you a girlfriend, Girls having unreasonable expectations for relationships due to "Big Romance", DC politics being completely ruined by one too many future staffer watching the West Wing. It seems to affect all kinds of people.
iii) That just seems to me like a bad heuristic, absent a very good prior understanding of the other people involved, or very strong interpresonal skills (way above those of the untrained normie), being presumptive is probably better: it gives you a framework to approach the situation that is probably, more often than not, correct.
iv) Yeah, that sounds like a lot of anxiety.
Thanks a lot, much appreciated. As for your first question, it is because having concrete names to look up might help. I see your point (and nice examples and explanation), but on (i) and (ii) different people are affected to different degrees, and hence more understanding, even in the form of concrete names that one could put to the phenomena, could help the vulnerable. For (iii), I guess being presumptive is better or worse depending on the probability of success, which in this case is qute low. Thanks again.
This sounds like a mix of anxiety and normal personality traits.
There are very high-functioning people who don't watch or read fiction because of how deeply it impacts them. And a great many more who are very selective about what fiction (and nonfiction) they expose themselves to because of the same. Having a disposition that leans anxious is likely to increase this sensitivity/reactivity.
There's an aspect of generalized anxiety that has to do with being afraid of one's own strong feelings and then we build up a panoply of coping habits to avoid being exposed to our own strong feelings. This experience can lead us to have trouble handling uncertainty (everyone has trouble with uncertainty, it's the human condition, so we're talking in degrees and extent of being disabled by this) because it's impossible to control for uncertainty much as we might try.
Perfectionism is an attempt to control for uncertainty by holding a mind frame that if I'm hypervigilant about getting absolutely everything right (either in one or more domains or in most all of them) then I can avoid the feared feeling of self-criticism or the guilt of disappointing others. Perfectionism is a way to cope with anxiety, though having it to some degree in some areas (and mostly about one's own expectations for oneself) can be functional, but if it gets extended farther than that, it's disabling and gets in the way of enjoying life and taking necessary risks.
If by premortems you mean rehearsing social interactions in a useful sort of way... is that what you mean? Then I read not wanting to do that as a form of emotional avoidance because it surfaces the same kind of tension-inducing feelings that some kinds of media do. If by "cannot" you mean is literally unable to imagine hypothetical scenarios, then that does sound more like a neurological thing.
There's some maybe helpful work in the arena of cultivating "psychological flexibility" that might be relevant. A terrible fear of making mistakes or difficulty recovering when mistakes are made is an important aspect of psychological rigidity, and it can be a real barrier to living life. Not wanting to check one's work seems like the same kind of emotional avoidance and perfectionism as not wanting to rehearse social situations or needing to avoid certain kinds of media. All of this can be normal human variation -- it's only pathological to the extent the person really doesn't want to live this way and/or is having trouble as a result sustaining work or relationships.
I'm in the midst of writing a piece about uncertainty, so I'll try to remember to circle back and post a link here.
Wonderful. Your comments on generalized anxiety and perfectionism seem on the mark. By the point about "premortems", and I now realize my phrasing was unambiguous if not wrong, what I meant to convey is that this person tries to rehearse, but the extrapolated/forecast scenarios are rarely the ones that materialize in practice, so as you say it may be a neurological thing: not necessarily difficulty in visualizing, but perhaps modeling others' brains on yours, which turns out to be wrong because others' brains are different.
I will very much appreciate if you have pointers on psychological flexibility, and will also appreciate if you come back and post a link, thank you very much.
I am no psychologist, and my answer will be inspired by how much I can relate to what you say. Hence, some amount of typical-minding is likely. But it really sounds like ASD? Which X would probably know about, since you mention not being neurotypical? 1. Identifying a lot with characters in movies isn’t on the lists of symptoms, but being very sensitive to emotions, taking up the emotion of people around oneself, is on the list, and that may be the same thing in that context. 2. Similarly "learns wrong lessons from movies" isn’t an official symptom, but it can make sense, as one learns social rules mostly by watching others, so if X watches a lot of movies, and is "naïve" (accepting what people express socially as true too easily), as autistic people often are, then that can explain it. 3. Being presumptive can backfire, as we all know, but it’s something humans are prone to do for a reason: it’s easier to work with people if you ‘know’ how they will react (aka if you’re confident you know how they will react and are usually right). So I’m not surprised that presumptive people do well. And, assuming X is autistic, not surprised than X isn’t quite as good at it. 4. Autistic people are famously terrible at dealing with uncertainty (though, in my case, I also had an anxiety disorder, so still worth investigating, especially given the extent of X’s uncertainty anxiety issues as you describe them).
Thank you. The correlations you mention indeed make a lot of sense. I didn't know autistic people were terrible in dealing with non-human-behavior-based uncertainty, will read up more on it. In the present case, I thought of anxiety rather than autism as the driver, but will try to look up/get to know more. Thanks again.
I was going to comment on a couple threads, especially the one about Trump/Criminal Trial/Actually Running for the election. I just don't have the energy. We've been having the same silly arguments for so long.
A) I want an Outside Context Problem to realign us
B) Maybe I'm depressed
C) Maybe this is what it's like when adults say "someday you'll understand," but this time it's about focusing on hobbies instead of stupid political shit
D) AI will solve our problems, so I'm going outside
You could also just do local politics. Which is fractious but over different things
Yeah, I have a sense that the Actual Problem (tm) is that these days we all get our media from algorithms that twist it into whatever we want to hear. It's like getting all of your food from algorithms that feed you whatever is most tasty. It's going to make you fat and unhealthy. Eat your diverse viewpoints and vegetables.
That right there was when I stopped using Facebook. When they started to make it harder to read all and only posts from people I followed, and instead started to filter out people I wanted to hear from and push people I didn't, I bailed.
A) We got covid-19, and it rapidly degenerated into tribal warfare. Although it was entertaining watching the wobbling before the final alignments became clear.
Covid-19 was an Outside Context Nuisance. Or more precisely, it was problematic to a highly variable degree across the population at large, and rarely problematic *enough* to override traditional tribal affiliations, which makes it a poor candidate for a realignment.
Fair enough. :-) If it acted enough like the Black Plague that our daily life resembled Pepys' diary, that would be more like it.
>A) I want an Outside Context Problem to realign us
NOOOOOOOO! Woke v MAGA is bad, but incoming nukes or runamuck ASI would be worse.
I doubt there's an outside context problem large enough to unite everyone even in a fairly small community, but it occurs to me that US national politics is particularly fractious if you're looking to participate in some discourse. So maybe you could pick some other corner to participate in that isn't "bad faith all the way down"
>I doubt there's an outside context problem large enough to unite everyone even in a fairly small community
<gallows humor>
Well, we had a natural experiment (writing from the USA). Covid was an outside context problem, and it _wasn't_ large enough to unite the factions, and this was true even with an ultimate death toll of over a million in the USA. I _really_ don't want to encounter an outside context problem that _is_ large enough.
</gallows humor>
I posted an extremely rude though not terribly practical proposal for dealing with Trump on the last open thread. It's not A - D on your list, and might at least amuse you.
Going outside is a good answer for most things, it seems to me.
This is a request for books that you think are forgotten gems in the history of psychology (or adjacent fields that bear on psychology).
I'm starting a blog that brings forward older writings that present-day clinicians and clients may not remember or know about. Or likewise, writings in adjacent fields that have valuable things to offer psychology.
I'm looking for books that are less self-help-y and more deep dives into psychological topics -- like relationships, work, self-esteem, anxiety, personality, death, etc. My hope is to offer a place where clinicians and psychologically-oriented people can go for a meatier engagement than is generally available.
I have a bit of an obsession about gems of years past getting buried under the onslaught of current material. Any suggestions of books in this vein that had an effect on you would be most appreciated.
Some favoriites of mine:
SERIOUSLY HEAVY BOOKS
Lots of stuff by William James.
Sartre, *Psychology of Imagination*.
EASIER READING BUT SOLID:
*Lives in Progress* by R W White, 1950's book about personality development using case studies. *
Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence* by Paul Meehl, who was sort of the Scott Alexander of Psychology.
*The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life* by Goffman.
*The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ* by Jay Haley -- Transactional analysis-influenced, smart & funny book.
*How to Think* by Alan Jacobs. Sounds like a self-help book, but isn't. A better title would be How to be Fair-minded.
FIRST PERSON ACCOUNTS
*The Inner World of Mental Illness*, a collection of first-person accounts.
*The Eden Express* by Mark Vonnegut. Wonderfully well-written account of a psychosis, by Kurt Vonnegut's son.
Came here to recommend Meehl; once again Eremolalos beats me to my comment!
I'd throw in Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, by Louis Sass (not to be confused with the homophonic Thomas Szasz)
Ah, another Meehl fan! He made a deeper impression on me than anything else I read in grad school. I'm not sure the book I recommended is the best one. The one I remember best was a collection of essays that was well-written and entertaining, besides being very smart in that Meehl way. I remember that one was called "Why I No Longer Attend Case Conferences." Do you happen to know what book that was in? And do you have the same impression I do, that his mind had a lot in common with Scott's? I'm not talking about smarts in general, but about a certain kind of smarts.
I know I had a similar reaction to encountering both for the first time. I'd identify qualities like a sharp synoptic view, the ability to put their thumb on something that's hiding in plain sight, a tendency to cut straight to the heart of an issue. Maybe too, a willingness to irritate the establishment and some immunity to its pull.
Oh I was hoping you might reply to my query, thank you Eremolalos! This is a wonderful list, many thanks!
Say, any chance you might put the link to that blog here? I’m no psychologist, and have no book to recommend, but I’d definitely read something like that!
That's encouraging to hear, thank you. When I get it up and running, I'll share a link back here. That's my hope, that it's not only interesting to clinicians, but to psychologically-minded people of all kinds.
It's going to start at the blog already on my website at florencegardner.com and then will hopefully spin off into its own thing. You can subscribe for free to my blog now if you want to.
The "States of Mind" back issue of Lapham's Quarterly has excerpts from many historical writings about the mind. It's not all psychological, but there are some interesting ones that might be in line with what you're looking for, like Alois Alzheimer's 1901 clinical notes for a patient who was the first published case of what is now called Alzheimer's disease.
Thank you, wonderful!
Art and Artist
-Otto Rank
Terrific, thanks!
Does anyone have westward expansion/frontier living/wild west book recommendations? Looking for something high quality and fun, mainly fiction, but I guess some history would be ok too as long as it is engaging. Thanks.
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
I like the look of that one a lot. Thanks.
I see no one here has yet mentioned Annie Dillard's "The Living" re: early settlers in the Pac. Northwest (Watcom County, Bellingham area). One of my all-time favorites. Beautiful writing and sometimes McCarthy-esque brutality. But mostly about how living and dying and just overall daily struggles were so intertwined in life and "progress" back then, with a backdrop of impenetrable forests and sometimes hostile/helpful Natives.
My dad was a big fan of Louis L'Amour. Apparently his frontier fiction was unusually well-researched - for instance, he'd describe a box canyon somewhere and there were enough clues that you could drive to wherever in Wyoming and, sure enough, there it was.
He had also apparently written some non-fiction and even an SF novel.
I also encourage you to check out O. Henry stories on this topic. His collection "Heart of the West" focuses on the West c. 1900 (I forget exactly when he wrote).
I like O. Henry in general, and personally prefer the NYC-bases stories, but there are some great Western ones.
Short stories, nice. Are there any ones you think are particularly good?
Random of Red Chief is Elsa focused on the West but it's a classic.
I need to go look in my "complete collection" to give you a good listing. Again I'm more partial to his NYC stories, and I've read about 2/5 of kid complete works.
A Call Loan, A Departmental Case, The memento, Christmas by Injunction
Ok Cupid a la Carte is one of my favorites.
Also the entire book "The Gentle Grafter" my mom likes, I haven't read.
You’ve probably already read it but “True Grit.”
I have not. Watched, and enjoyed, the film though.
Hopefully the one with John Wayne and Hailee Steinfeld, not the one with Jeff Bridges and Kim Darby.
The classic Southwestern author is Ed Abbey – I’d recommend “Desert Solitaire” over the “Monkey Wrench Gang” for first reading. Abbey is a great view into a very different kind of somewhat deprecated mindset (namely, the anti-authoritarian misanthropic rural environmentalist ethos of the ‘70s/‘80s).
He’s a harsh writer, but a spectacular creator of prose. Also in this vein is the other Cormac McCarthy. Check out “Blood Meridian” if you’re interested in extreme violence and bleak nihilistic depictions of human society on the frontier. It’s beautifully written, but if you prefer something a little more direct (Hemingwayesque) and merely pessimistic rather than brutal I’d opt for “No Country for Old Men”.
“Angle of Repose” by someone else here is great. Seconded. Stegner was a prolific writer but the quality of his writing did not suffer for it, so most of his stuff is well worth reading. “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is another highlight.
Where Abbey’s works are really about the landscape, and McCarthy’s are about more abstract themes, Stegner’s writing is really about the characters. If you’re looking for Weatern writing that’s truly emblematic of the genre, the best example might be “Lonesome Dove,” by Larry McMurty. It’s played very straight, but stands heads and shoulders above most of the other obvious picks in that vein. It’s recommended often for a reason.
If what you’re really looking for is something that captures that vibe of the age of exploration and frontier expansion, then “Roughing It” (Twain) and “The Plains Across” (John D Unruh) may scratch that itch.
I’ll give you a couple picks out of left field, if you’re still interested. “Sometimes a Great Notion” (Ken Kesey) is technically set in the American west, but as a character study set in the PNW during the 20th century, it defies many of the conventions of the genre. Nevertheless, I would call this book Western-adjacent, and it’s so good that it’s worth recommending if you’re interested in anything remotely close.
“West With the Night” (Beryl Markham) is not a Western by any notion. It’s a semi-autobiographical narrative from a white women who became a pilot after growing up in colonial British East Africa. It’s also one of the best-written novels I’ve read, full stop, and it captures that “frontier” vibe in a way that supersedes every true Western I can think to compare it to.
Let me know if this list needs to be expanded, for whatever reason.
Enthusiastic second for Desert Solitaire.
Thanks for the very thorough answer. I will look into all of those options for sure.
Not a book, but if you haven’t watched “Deadwood “ it’s worth a look.
I haven't watched it. Don't really watch much these days, but my wife enjoys watching things together, so I might be able to sell her on this one.
How does she feel about the word "cocksucker?"
It’s pretty damn good imo. You can taste the mud.
The first book of Robert Caro’s LBJ biography “The Path to Power” has gorgeous and vivid writing about frontier life in the Texas panhandle. I read it years ago and it’s still with me.
Interesting. I never would have thought of a president's biography. That's why I come here to ask.
I don't know if it quite fits the theme, but the best novel I've read adjacent to that milieu would be Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. (I also liked My Antonia, but that's not as georgraphically western).
I also thought of Willa Cather. I wouldn’t describe My Antonia as fun, though.
I probably should have said entertaining rather than fun. Both books sound interesting, and I remember reading a little bit of Willa Cather in the past and liking it.
A Lady's Life in The Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird.
Fascinating memoir.
Sounds interesting. Thanks.
This lady made her living traveling to foreign lands and writing about it. It is a great look at the 1860s wild West, confirming that our image through Hollywood, though cartoonish, wasn't *all* made up.
I have not read Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, but the reviews I've seen have called it entertaining, and none have challenged the author's command of the facts. With a title like that, the publisher certainly wants you to think you'll have fun reading it.
If it has Epic in the name, then it must be good, right?
You might try:
David J. Weber, "The Taos trappers : the fur trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846" (Univ. of Oklahoma Pr., 0806117028);
Marc Simmons, "Kit Carson and his three wives : a family history" (Univ. of New Mexico Pr., 9780826332974).
They're mostly on the fur trade in the early 19th century, but are interesting reads. I'm still hoping to find some French journals, as they were poking around the Gila River before both the Mexicans and Americans.
Those sound a bit more academic/specific than what I am looking for right now, but I will keep them in mind.
The Winning of the West is a 4 volume history, but it's by Theodore Roosevelt so has his characteristic style which can be quite fun to read.
Looks really interesting. I am not sure that I am ready to dive into such a thing right now, but I will definitely keep it in mind.
Shadow Country! A classic, and so good. But long. About some complicated figures settling the marshes of Florida in the 1800s with a very western feel.
This one looks very promising. I think that I'll check it out.
"Seventh Son", by Orson Scott Card comes to mind. (There's some magic in it.)
Not quite what I was looking for, but does seem compelling.
Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, one of my all-time favorites.
Looks interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.
As far as entertaining nonfiction accounts go, “Men to Match My Mountains” by Irving Stone is an all-time classic, it’s extremely engaging and readable. Can’t recommend highly enough.
I'll definitely check it out. Thanks.
The refund bonus project is probably going to fail to fund all three projects.
https://ensuredone.com/projects/2023-buridan
It was good discussion on the subreddit for why refund a bonuses might be a dud. I think the most compelling case against them are 1) it's a negative signal of quality that the founder is willing to offer a refund bonus. 2) The money spent on offering a refund bonus would be better spent on advertising.
Still there's a 5% refund waiting on the last project for anyone who wants it.
Pretty funny to me that the first line of that project is from a LLM, I assume it was not meant to be included.
Wow! You are correct.
At least it was reformatting and not something too terribly embarrassing.
I keep seeing Trump around 40-50% to win in 2024 in prediction/betting markets, and I just don't quite get it.
Trump is facing multiple, serious indictments which seem likely (80+%) to result in his conviction and going to prison. It is very hard to run an election campaign from prison. I'm not sure what the path to his victory is, to be so highly rated? If the criminal stuff wasn't involved, or was purely symbolic, sure. If it was generic R v. generic D, sure. Are we assuming it's <50% that he actually gets convicted? Why, when the federal conviction rate is very high and Trump has mostly exhausted his good lawyers by being a terrible client? Is it that he's expected to get house arrest? It doesn't seem like the trials will be delayed until after the election. I assume I'm missing something here?
He can run from jail, as Schilling and many others have said. He can appear as a martyr. And if it's between him and Biden...well, at least some people are worse off than they were five years ago (and some may have survived the pandemic well).
If nothing else, the polls say it's even.
It is highly unlikely that Donald Trump will be imprisoned in 2024. There's a fair chance that he might be *convicted* of something, but if so he'll appeal and he'll almost certainly remain free pending the appeal, and that will take into 2025 (unless mooted by his winning the election).
And being in prison is no bar to running for office. Eugene Debs ran for president five times under the Socialist banner, the last time while serving ten years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for sedition. He won more votes in that election than he had in any of his prior attempts. Being able to make public appearances is important, but being able to present one's self as a martyr is also quite useful in this context.
Trump already appeared as a martyr, and I don’t expect losing and appealing a court case to help him do that any better. His empty martyrdom claims signalled his allegiance with the lower working class. Being prosecuted won’t get much extra sympathy, because most people aren’t scared of that happening to them. If anything, it means Trump’s allegiance has shifted and he’s in it for himself. I wouldn’t want to call the election, but I would be surprised if Trump’s prosecution appears as one of the main election issues in surveys of Trump voters.
He was in prison for sedition, but no one said he was ineligible to run because of the 14th amendment? Seems inconsistent with today.
I would assume *someone* said he was ineligible to run because of the 14th amendment, but no federal judge ever said so. If any state judges had said so, they would have been in states where Debs was never going to win anyway, so who cares?
At most one of the trials Trump is facing involves insurrection. Sedition, despite its official anti-US features, is not necessarily a type of insurrection.
The definition of insurrection had not yet degenerated into today's version.
I looked up the difference between sedition and insurrection, and it appears sedition is inciting people to violence, whereas insurrection is doing violent acts seditious people incite you to do. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't know that anyone has accused Trump of doing violent acts.
It’s important to note that Sedition, Seditious Conspiracy, and Insurrection are legally distinct from one another. IANAL but I did a bit of research before posting this. Sedition per se would not invoke the 14th Amendment.
CHAZ taught us that seizing territory, extracting "taxes" from the population, distributing "military-style-assault-weapons" to your underlings so they can enforce "laws" and killing a few people in the process is not an insurrection but putting your feet on Pelosi's desk is. Because Democracy(tm) is so fragile that a dude in buffalo horns can kill it with a pointy stick. Unless you're in black bloc, that makes your violence goodful democratiscitist voice of the oppressed or some such thing.
While your first two points about CHAZ/CHOP are valid, I'd dispute the 3rd and 4th. AFAIK, the "security" people were just a thing that organically happened, and not everyone there was happy with them, but it wasn't a top-down thing done by people with a Plan. And for what it's worth, I truly think they made the place safer, although that's not so much a compliment to them as a condemnation of the rest of the CHOP. And all the shooters were, as far as anyone knows, ordinary criminals who found a great place to do crime where cops couldn't stop them, and no one would be willing provide evidence against them. I don't think the "security" people had anything to do with the shootings or deaths (or rapes). (I've seen various pieces online in the last few years claiming that the "security" people were involved, but as far as I can tell it's just rumor-mongering based on what would be maximally inflammatory.)
Also, the whole point of the name change from CHAZ to CHOP was that they were giving up their anarchist-inspired talk of secession, and were focusing on just being a BLM protest. (Which was the right move, IMO.)
Still, I agree that it should count as an insurrection, and my immediate reaction was that "the National Guard should go through Cal Anderson Park like Sherman through Georgia".
Threatening to murder the Vice President of the United States in order to force him to hand your team supreme executive power, is an insurrection even if it turns out you are pathetically incompetent about it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff#:~:text=The%202014%20Bundy%20standoff%20was,fees%20for%20Bundy's%20use%20of
would seem a closer fit to chaz. Your rather minimalist summation of what happened on January 6 (not to mention your almost hysterical summation of what chz was, and who the shooting victims were) seems to leave a lot of the record out of your consideration.. but I get the feeling it would be rather pointless to pursue a discussion on this further.
To make my prediction (which is 45% Biden, 45% Trump, 10% Nikki Haley), I took the four factors:
1) Trump’s electoral college vote count in each election he’s run in and averaged them together.
2) Every head to head matchup between Biden and Trump has been won by Biden.
3) Most elections are won by the incumbent.
4) I looked at Biden’s current approval rating and saw that he’s at the lowest approval rating of any modern president at this point in his presidency.
I’m putting low weight on the polls and Biden’s current approval rating. It’s way too early. My 10% prediction for Haley is because I think there’s a small chance the legal stuff could really go against him and also he’s at an age where he could die from a heart attack or stroke.
Remember when RBG fans were going on about "nevertheless, she persisted"? And how something said to mock someone for refusing to yield became a rallying cry? I think it's like that, but with the parties reversed.
I think that was Warren, when she was censured by the Senate for repeated violation of a particular rule.
Ah, yes, you're right. Thanks!
Look at the Clintons, and all the legal woes they underwent. Did the Democrats drop Bill or did they row in behind and support him? Same motivation at work here; for a lot of the Bill or Trump supporters, it wasn't "Gee, our guy is being accused of crimes, as law-abiding and respectable citizens we should disassociate ourselves from him", it was "That other lot are trying to get our guy with these nuisance lawsuits, well they're not gonna scare us off!"
I've read lots of people explaining the precise difference between Trump having boxes of secret documents in an office and Biden having boxes of secret documents in a garage, and why what Trump did was treason while what Biden did was simple mistake.
Same mindset in action: he's Our Guy and the Other Lot are just trying to get him any way they can because they hate him, so we double down on our support.
"It is very hard to run an election campaign from prison."
But not impossible; two American examples here:
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-indictment-could-run-for-president-2-others-did-2023-3?r=US&IR=T
Irish example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_South_Longford_by-election
He is not being charged with treason over the documents at Mar-a-Lago. He is being charged with obstruction of Justice. That is the fundamental distinction between Biden having documents that he shouldn’t have had, Pence having documents he shouldn’t have had, and Trump having documents he shouldn’t have had. If Trump had handed over the documents when they were requested and not tried to hide them, he wouldn’t be in this pickle.
The last time I voted for an R was in 19xx.
My distaste for Republicans is quite a bit lower than my distaste for banana republic level legal bullshit however.
If (and only if) Trump is imprisoned, I will vote for him.
I wouldn't go that far, but if he's imprisoned for Using the Wrong Slush Fund to Pay Off His Mistress, or for Boastfully Exaggerating How Rich He is, then yeah, maybe. Those are the white-collar equivalent of driving with a broken tail light, and if someone abuses their prosecutorial discretion to the extent of actually locking people up for it, they should expect serious pushback.
If he's in prison for inciting a riot on 1/6/21, and there was no serious hanky-panky in the trial, then let him rot.
Also, I would find the executive branch being run from inside a prison both entertaining and appropriate.
Qualified Immunity needs to die in a fire.
Credentialled Smart People(TM) tell me the justification is the "interrupting an official proceeding." Which is of course the entire raison d'etre for Code Pink, International ANSWER and/or any other org that gets a tongue bath from Amy Goodman. Not to mention that little incident when actual elected officials opened the doors so protestors could try and stop Kavanaugh's confirmation.
"But a presidential election is different!" smacks of strategic definitions. I would be willing to grant you the inciting a riot thing, if there weren't pre-existing non-prosecutions of elected officials working with, and even funneling money to black bloc groups.
We are living in a time when vandalism, arson and assault are normal and accepted part of protests... as long as the right people pare doing the protesting. The immediate about face between BLM and J6 was unbelievable if I hadn't witnessed it myself.
Bill Clinton's legal troubles didn't reach national-headlines level until he was done running for election, though. He wasn't on any ballots while under indictment. That kept it easy to say that he was getting impeached for having gotten a blowjob.
I lived and worked deep in the heart of liberal/progressive America during the 90s, the kind of circles in which literally no one even considered voting for a GOP candidate. (Or at least no one was foolish enough to say so out loud except me.) While I found the widespread circle-the-wagons reaction about Slick Willy to be both frustrating and alienating, it was clear to me that it was shallow. Many of the people I knew would have been pushed out of that stance if he was getting criminally indicted for felonies with co-defendants flipping on him and etc.
If Ms. Lewinsky wasn't so abominably stupid, there would be wikipedia articles about how the accusations were debunked and Linda Tripp would be a proven liar.
The difference is fairly obvious: Biden immediately turned his over on discovery, while Trump actively and repeatedly took steps to retain them after being asked for them, made false statements about it, and showed them off to his various hangers-on.
Trump is, by polling, the favorite to win both the primary and the general. The polls are mostly from mid-December but most show Trump with a 2-3 point lead over Biden and twenty plus point lead in the primaries. This is all after a bunch of cases were brought against him. So to think conviction is electorally relevant you have to assume there's a large body of voters who were not turned off by the accusations and court hearings but would be turned off by conviction. I don't think that's a safe assumption. So if anything 50% seems low and seems to be pricing in being removed from the ballot etc as real possibilities.
Also, due to polarization no major party presidential nominee ever has less than maybe a 33% chance of winning. Whenever you get numbers lower than 30-40% you're seeing wishcasting.
Trump supporters see him as a political outsider, battling "the system", from which they also feel somewhat alienated for various reasons. All these lawsuits, regardless of their legal merits, simply confirm that in the minds of his supporters, and are thus politically very ill-advised IMHO.
It's somewhat analogous to the situation with Julius Caesar in classical Rome, although with a curious reversal of the relevant political parties. At the time, there were two main factions or parties, the Optimates (the "bests", who were aristocrats and the rich) and the Populares (the "peoples' party").
After JC associated himself with the Populares, members of the Optimates in the senate tabled loads of lawsuits against him, with the aim of bringing him down by "lawfare". One thing led to another, and in the end following a civil war Caesar triumphed and the whole Republican system was replaced by imperial rule (albeit with trappings of the former system maintained for show).
Luckily Trump is much older than JC was at the time of these events, and arguably not as effective once in power, partly due to his personal shortcomings such as a short attention span (so I've heard), but also the greater complexity of modern political institutions collectively. Also, the US constitution is more robust, given that the founding fathers had learned lessons from the Roman carry on among others!
> Trump supporters see him as a political outsider, battling "the system", from which they also feel somewhat alienated for various reasons. All these lawsuits, regardless of their legal merits, simply confirm that in the minds of his supporters, and are thus politically very ill-advised IMHO.
It's not his most ardent supporters who matter, though. It's the (massively under-discussed) swinging voters, the people who aren't on the Trump train in any sense, but could perhaps be persuaded to vote Trump in 2024, but then again maybe not.
The people whose votes really matter are the people who voted for Obama in 2012, then Trump in 2016, then Biden in 2020. Can they be persuaded to vote Trump again in 2024?
Perhaps there's a faint glimmer of light in all of this then, if a few hundred thousand voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona are the rational few who can save America from itself. Who will reach out to the middle instead of throwing red meat to their base? I count myself in the rare category of people who could be convinced to vote either D or R in 2024, and have said in the previous open thread that the main thing Biden could do to win my support is pardon Trump in all of his ongoing federal investigations.
There's also the other swing vote (people who might vote for one of the principals, or stay home / vote third party). That swing vote matters too.
I made a lot of people angry on Manifold by suggesting this, but I haven't ruled out a plea bargain in return for Trump dropping out of the race.
I feel like a bargain like that would end the careers of everyone involved in it. There would be no way to claim political neutrality, and the courts really like being able to claim neutrality.
Unless you're talking about that being the back-room agreement with a fig leaf agreement up front. In which case it would be unenforceable and Trump would break it instantly.
This is a possible way for the impasse to be resolved, but it's also an amazingly bad precedent to set.
I think a lot of people with normal or large egos would take this plea bargain. Some people with very large egos might if scared enough.
This is Trump.
I'm sure this would be acceptable to Democrats, since their objective is to keep him from running, but it sure isn't justice even if you are in favor of it. To suggest it (which you didn't, but others clearly have) shows me further proof that the charges against Trump are politically motivated, not legally motivated.
I don't believe that any of the prosecutors whose motivations are relevant have suggested it.
I think Trump's criminal prosecutions and electoral fortunes are indeed correlated, but I think you have the sign of the correlation wrong. I think a supermajority of his base sees the prosecutions as politically motivated, and is energized to vote for him by them, so martyring Trump through the justice system will increase turnout among his base. I also think that a significant fraction of independents sees the attempts to disqualify him from running or throw him in prison as antidemocratic, and might vote for him (or refrain from voting Biden) in protest. The people who would place most weight on `Trump in prison' were mostly going to vote for Biden anyway. I think the chances of Trump winning the election conditional on being in prison on election day are North of 80%, but South of 40% if he is still a free man on November 5.
Sample size of one, but I can confirm that the ongoing legal shenanigans are the one thing making me toy with voting Trump for the first time.
Yeah I think this is mostly right. I was a democrat, but now I'm just disgusted by politics and I won't vote for either Trump or Biden. (In 2020 I did a write in vote.) I'm picking Trump to win, because of stronger support from his base. And I just wish for some third party candidate, I don't care that much who it is. Bring back Ross Perot. (Or better yet Teddy Roosevelt.)
RFK Jr?
Yeah sure, if he's on the ballot here in NY. My write in pick would be some women, Nikki Haley or Tulsi Gabbard.
The great luxury of voting in NY is you can throw away your vote on someone deserving of it, or not vote for anyone who doesn't.
Yeah, I'm going to say I would vote the same if I lived in Pennsylvania, but I haven't tested it.
Why do you say 80+% ? I’d say 5%. There is almost no timeline where he is convicted before the election. These things take years. There are dozens of ways they can be delayed.
Trump has surely been going to prison soon for about 7 years now. I’ve updated my priors.
Yup. Also the appeals process can drag on for years as well.
The federal interference trial has been scheduled for March 4, 2024, with estimated six weeks for prosecution's case (and presumably around that long for the defense's, so ~3 months, so June-ish 2024 completion). The judge has said she has no intention of delaying purely for Trump's convenience, as that's not how cases are done for anybody else. He obviously did the federal interference shit. Federal trials almost always (90+%) result in convictions. Thus, 80+%.
I think the 90%+ figure comes from cases very dissimilar to this one (mostly drug cases), so I would be less certain that this is a good metric to determine the chances of a conviction. This type of case is highly unusual, and even though the evidence is strong, there should probably be more uncertainty. In addition, your timeline precludes potential appeals, during which Defendants will sometimes be released on bond while they are pending. This could take an additional few months.
I still think it's likely he gets convicted and incarcerated, but maybe more in the range of 60%, given the odd circumstances.
I think it will be very close as it has been for awhile and D’s will be able to exploit that. With the way we conduct voting now, there is basically a slush fund of questionable votes that can be activated where needed to ensure Biden wins. It’s a subjective process after all, and D’s are more likely to be those government employees tasked with the machinery of election.
I don’t think people need worry, in other words. They underestimate too, how powerful people came together last time, put their heads together to get Biden elected.
If anything, there seems to be greater hysteria on the subject now - and a strongly public- minded feeling - “ this is what I got rich and powerful for, to save America” from what is felt to be the evil half of the electorate.
>D’s are more likely to be those government employees tasked with the machinery of election.
The vote-counting process is overseen by people of both parties. Of the six key battleground states (NC, GA, FL, MI, WI, PA), three have Republican Secretaries of State (GA, FL, and PA). You might remember some news in 2020 about how Brad Raffensperger got a call from Trump asking him to "find enough votes" for him to win, and he refused to cooperate.
Don't make inflammatory claims of a "slush fund of questionable votes" being prepared for 2024 unless you have evidence of that actually happening.
Also, while apologizing for writing something based on my own experience, rather than from the internet - I will relate one other anecdote. I was sitting in a pollworker training session. The head of the training staff dropped in and was fielding questions. Every so often they would change the technology or the paperwork and you really had to pay attention to how they wanted various triplicate forms and so forth. We would go through various scenarios - no ID, voter registration says "moved", etc.
We were learning about an affidavit for some or other voter issue, that would result in the casting of a provisional vote. Among other questions on this form: ask voter if they are an American citizen. As the election office dude moved past that without comment, I raised my hand and asked, "What if they say no? Do we need to go on with filling out this affidavit? Or can we just tell them they are not eligible?"
The guy looked utterly bewildered. He turned to the younger training employees for help with this question. They looked blank.
"That is an excellent question," he said - "I will have to look into that and get back to you."
This was the number two administrator at the county election office. He didn't have a clear notion of whether you needed to be a citizen of the US to vote.
This was the attitude of the place: we want everyone to vote. It was nigh impossible to get them to say that anyone *should not vote*.
There are citizen party representatives, to be sure, standing around on election day (though not throughout the 3 weeks of early voting - they are permitted to, of course, but don't - one of the issues with early voting if you are putting a lot of faith in the watchers). But they are outsiders, not the actual election office employees. As for the slush fund of votes - that is based entirely on my own firsthand experience as a pollworker, where I have seen every possible example of questionable - and indeed fraudulent - voting. It is very much baked in to the "let everyone vote" and "voting is the highest possible act" philosophy that is an obsession of modern liberalism.
I remember a memorable election evening when we were very late getting finished, having been processing voters still in line when the poll closed. The election night closing procedures were different than the early voting ones. I don't recall the various technology issues, but it took a long time - like an hour - for the key computer process to finish spinning. The watchers - with whom we had been mutually chilly since their arrival, as we were told that we weren't supposed to talk with them - and, you know, the weirdness of being watched - ultimately pitched in to the tech problem issue, and putting away the tables and such; and we were all chatting pleasantly by the time we got all the materials ready to go back to the county. (They would follow to observe the handoff.)
They saw, and said they saw, how airtight the tech procedures and safeguards were - from our end (we were paid but not employees of the county; I think these positions used to be volunteer).
The opening for illegitimacy did not lie with the technology. Or with we thrice-yearly pollworkers. It lay with the laxity enshrined in policy toward who could vote, and an unwillingness on anyone's part to challenge the fact that people were voting for other people, people who were not literate were voting and those votes were being cast by others, elderly chain-migrated people who had not a single idea about what they were doing, were "voting" with the aid of their kids; and people who had not followed the basic rules to register to vote in the area where they lived - were nonetheless provisional voting.
The whole thing is a comedic delight. I have no idea why Trump supporters even imagine it's possible to elect him this time. I hope that they know what kind of people they are, and that the silly little unarmed trespassing on Jan 6 really was the closest to meaningful collective action they're capable of (i.e. very far from meaningful).
On the other hand, only those deranged enough to think that -this time surely- Trump would, if elected, show himself to have always been Orange Hitler (instead a normal moderate republican with a knack for self-promotion) also think his downtrodden, cop-loving, law-abiding supporters would ever do anything violent.
I hope we get President Kamala Harris. That would be the pinnacle of comedy.
How DARE you minimize and whitewash the most violent and insurrectionisty thing that had ever happened in US history!?! It's worse than the Civil War multiplied by the War of 1812 and 9/11 combined!
/Schiff, Kinzinger, Cheney et.al.
It's weird, these should be "interesting times" and yet I find them kinda dull. The SNL skit about the Ivy presidents, while I didn't see it, struck me as pretty funny - that is, funny where they apparently found the funny to be, while skipping the (to me) obvious funny. But this sort of thing is commonplace - I'll send some current ridiculousness link to my husband - "funny" - but it's never exactly hilarious.
That may just be a function of age. Do younger folks on here feel they are living in interesting times?
Well, anyway, he's unique - he's their creation, really. They never had anything like him before and while some core group must really believe that politics in America is still going on normally and that Donald Trump being their candidate is completely normal and they will help him win, surely for many of them it is more like shouting an insult as you're being escorted out the door.
I might wish their high spirits had been channeled more productively, and earlier, but then like most Gen-X-ers I never engaged with the world.
The events can be extreme and alarming, but the talk about the events keeps going around the same points.
Yes, that's very true. Meanwhile some of us have things we care about that don't get much talk at all. Thus, all this big drama plays out more like a puppet show, to me. The real drama is elsewhere.
Just 15 minutes ago I laughed out loud at a photoshopped image of Trump on the front-door Ring camera holding an AR-15, wearing a shirt that reads "NEVER GO ON" (with the kerning making it look like 'GOON'), and screaming.
The times aren't interesting by some standards but I'm laughing my ass off about 'em.
In other words, the higher his polling - the less likely he wins.
I don't think the probability that he is convicted and imprisoned before the election is anywhere near 80%. I think it's maybe 20-30%. Trump is not a normal defendant. He is wealthy and politically connected.
Even if he is imprisoned, I don't think it would have a large impact on his odds of winning, and the small impact would probably be positive. I think the disadvantage would be limited to being unable to do rallies and debates (assuming he wants to debate Biden). The advantage would be that it would give him martyr status among many of his potential voters, which could motivate them to vote rather than stay home. It could also serve as proof for them that Trump is genuinely an enemy of the political establishment. This is assuming he is still allowed on the ballot, at least in red and swing states.
TBH I think those odds are too low if anything - Trump's been consistently ahead in polls for a while now, and we're starting to come out of the "top soon to be predictive" period without much change. I don't think him getting criminal charges (or maybe even being in prison) would change much, I think that's already mostly priced in.
(Being in prison might skeeve off some swing voters? But I doubt he'd actually get prison time during an election).
Well, him being in prison would imply he lost a widely-televised trial. But also it is hard to go to rallies, debates, etc, when you are in a prison cell. Just a few percentage points would be enough to make it effectively impossible for him to win, given how the R/D are pretty tightly-balanced.
Trials aren't televised though. There's always been a lot of news about how he's pretty criminal, I don't think a slightly larger amount of that would change many people's minds. I also don't think rallies or debates matter much - he's already super familiar to everyone anyway.
Sorry, widely-covered trial where every line of the transcripts is poured over. It is impossible to imagine that it will be some "blink and you'll miss it" news matter - it will be the first time a former US President has stood trial for anything, and in this case it would basically be trying to do a coup.
Except he clearly didn't try to do a coup. And they already investigated that for literally years in widely covered impeachment hearings and various other proceedings.
All the current trials are about relatively trivial procedural matters.
He absolutely tried to do a coup, and one of the trials is very explicitly about that.
"Election interference" is just the specific way he attempted an insurrection.
>80% is very high, what makes you so sure? On Manifold, the likelihood of Trump never being imprisoned is at 40%: https://manifold.markets/MartinRandall/when-will-trump-be-imprisoned
Those results just make me more confused. 2025 is more likely than 2024? The federal and Georgia trials are both scheduled for 2024 and will presumably complete in 2024, given they would probably take 3-4 months each. If he only goes to prison in 2025 that requires him not to get elected, since they almost certainly will not imprison a sitting President, barring, idk, him turning out to be actively undermining US military readiness so Putin can take back Alaska or something equally absurd.
I think >80% because federal cases have well >80% conviction rate (91.4% in 2022; https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-than-1-of-defendants-in-federal-criminal-cases-were-acquitted-in-2022/ ). Plus the multiple cases, plus the highly public nature of his actions, for >80%. Yes there's some downward pressure (e.g. political impulses/biases directing prosecutors to take a case that's not strong enough), but I don't think it's strong enough to send far below 80%.
e: Okay, if the sentencing in the Georgia case takes too long then that would potentially push it into 2025. The federal interference one starts in March, though.
91% would make the CCP justice system blush.
Yup, that is indeed suspicious.
For an even more extreme case (and _not_ in the PRC or Russia)
>Japan has a 99.8 percent conviction rate in cases that go to trial, according to 2021 Supreme Court statistics, so the decision to indict or not has enormous significance.
from https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/05/25/japans-hostage-justice-system/denial-bail-coerced-confessions-and-lack-access
Okay, let's have a look at what the federal charges are, and they don't seem to be "interfering with an election":
"The U.S. Justice Department indicted Trump earlier this month on 37 counts relating to seven criminal charges: willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.
...Broadly speaking, however, the charges against Trump are rare. In fiscal 2022, more than eight-in-ten federal criminal defendants in the United States faced charges related to one of four other broad categories of crime: drug offenses (31%), immigration offenses (25%), firearms and explosives offenses (16%) or property offenses (11%). In Florida’s Southern District, too, more than eight-in-ten defendants faced charges related to these four categories."
So a lot of that is the to-ing and fro-ing over the documents he took with him after his time in office, and that could go any way.
The Georgia trial is a different matter; that's a racketeering charge about trying to change the result of the election. That one, so far as I can tell, is *not* a federal charge so the "80% conviction rate in federal cases" doesn't apply here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_election_racketeering_prosecution
However, there *is* a federal trial as well:
"Trump’s current schedule includes: his Washington trial on federal charges over efforts to overturn the 2020 election on 4 March, his New York trial on local charges over hush-money payments to an adult film star on 25 March, and his classified documents trial in Florida on 20 May."
That slate of cases looks more like trying to get him on any way they can (how is the NY prosecution about over-inflating property values for bank loans going?) and does anyone, for example, really care about Stormy Daniels, especially since her travails with Michael Avenatti as her representative who has since, himself, been convicted on criminal charges?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/02/michael-avenatti-sentencing-stormy-daniels-book-deal-trump
My main gripe there is Daniels took money to keep her mouth shut but got greedy and went back on that. So she should have paid back the money, but didn't and wanted more by going public about Trump. Avenatti cheated her, but she was a cheat herself, so it all works out in the end. Trump shouldn't have paid her off, but rather emulated the Duke of Wellington re: 'publish and be damned', because it's been established historically that sex workers have a short shelf life and will try to maximise revenue by 'tell all' blackmail when their looks and appeal fade. She was never going to keep her mouth shut when the prospect of more money was dangled before her.
(how is the NY prosecution about over-inflating property values for bank loans going?)
Extremely well for the prosecution. The judge is allowed to decide for themself that Trump is an icky badperson, regardless of what any of the defense witnesses say about how bank loans work.
"his Washington trial on federal charges over efforts to overturn the 2020 election"
This is the important one, the results of which should, if he's convicted, see him ineligible to be president.
If he did get a prison verdict, I'm guessing the judges would suspend it until he was no longer a candidate (or a president), since they don't actually want to directly impact an election like that
From what I've seen, the judge in the federal case is going with the "Yeah, sucks to have other commitments, that's what happens to all criminal defendants though" angle on going with the March 2024 date, so I'm very dubious on this actually mattering.
I'm not sure Trump will go to prison, though he is clearly guilty. If there is at least one trump supporter on all the juries they will probably find Trump innocent no matter the evidence.
Where does the energy for magnetism come from?
Magnets, how do they work?
The Big Bang, when magnetic poles got separated. Anything since then is just those poles using that energy to move back together, or something else applying energy to move them apart.
By `magnetism' do you mean ferromagnetism? i.e. bar magnets? It comes fundamentally from the interplay of the Coulomb repulsion between like-charged electrons and the Pauli exclusion principle, which says that two identical particles cannot share the same quantum numbers. Having the same microscopic `spin state' means electrons have to stay further apart from each other (Pauli exclusion), which reduces the energy cost associated to the Coulomb repulsion between them. Thus, in ferromagnets electrons can lower their total energy by aligning all their spins, which means aligning all their magnetizations, which generates a total magnetic moment.
If you were not thinking about ferromagnets...well I can probably still answer the question but you'll need to clarify what you mean.
It depends on the situation. For ferromagnetism, it's the potential energy between individual electrons. It's possible for potential energy to be negative, and this is the case with two magnets stuck to each other (ignoring the self-interaction energy of each magnet), so the potential energy of that configuration is lower than when they're very separated (with 0 energy), hence the force and its ability to do work to reach the stuck-together state.
With electromagnets, it's the electrical energy of the circuits. An electromagnet approaching another magnet in an attracted manner produces a voltage in the electromagnet, and the power source for the electromagnet has to do work to overcome that voltage and keep current flowing. Oddly, with two electromagnets, this process actually takes more electrical energy than the amount of work done by the magnetic force, the excess being stored in an increase in the energy of the magnetic field. If there is no power source (e.g. a superconducting ring), the current decreases instead, reducing its stored energy.
That was a helpful comment.
Think of it like gravity. Where does the energy for a ball rolling down a hill come from? It was “gravitational potential energy” the ball had the whole time due to its mass and position within a gravitational field. Similarly, an electrically charged particle in an electric field will have electric potential energy and a magnetically charged dipole in a magnetic field will have magnetic potential energy. (A raw piece of iron isn’t a magnetic dipole, but it will be induced to become one in a magnetic field.)
I'm going to assume you mean ferro-magnetism, which is really cool stuff. (meant to be a bit of a joke 'cause the magnetism goes away at high temperatures.) The effect is caused by the exchange interaction between electrons in adjacent atoms. And so it is a purely quantum mechanical process. A piece of material can spontaneously magnetize (get the electron spins to line up) because the energy of two adjacent atomic electron spins is lower when the are parallel vs anti-parallel.
Magnetism is not an energy but a force. Is is possible to store energy using magnetism but you need to but in the energy in before you can extract it.
Force doesn't require energy? I'm thinking that a magnet's ability to pull or repel other magnets has to come from somewhere, but I'm probably missing something.
In general, force does not require energy. Think about a load-carrying column that supports a section of a bridge. Say the section weighs 1 ton. Then the column sustains 10 kN of force, indefinitely, without any energy source.
This feels counter-intuitive because if I’m holding a 10 kg dumbbell above my head I am definitely expending energy, but that’s because I’m sustaining muscle tension to do so.
Think of a rubber band. When you stretch it, it has energy that can be used to do work, but you had to put that energy in there by stretching it. The molecules in the rubber band are more comfortable in a curled-up configuration than when they are pulled a bit straighter.
Pull two magnets apart and you are in a sense 'stretching' the electromagnetic field of the universe into a less comfortable configuration. It would be the same if you separated two opposite electric charges. (Magnetism is a bit more complicated because it comes from electric charges linked to particles in a physical system that essentially keeps them moving in circles very fast - it's this system that you interfered with.)
The electric and magnetic forces are fundamental forces, just like gravity, there isn't a deeper underlying explanation (you can invoke `exchange of virtual photons' if you find that illuminating but probably you don't).
Also what looks like a magnetic force in one frame of reference looks like an electric force in a different (boosted) frame, so there isn't really a clean distinction between electric and magnetic forces (and in both cases, we're dealing with a fundamental force that doesn't really have a deeper explanation than `that's the way nature is.')
Forces acting over distances* do work and produce energy differences. The energy differences come from the forces.
* Strictly, the line integral of the vector dot product
You can have a deeper underlying explanation if you really want, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TKSfAkWWN0
This is an explanation for how electric and magnetic forces can be interconverted by shifting to a boosted frame, it's not a `deeper explanation for where electric and magnetic forces come from.'
It absolutely is a deeper explanation for where the magnetic force comes from. It is an emergent phenomenon, in particular of the electric force and special relativity.
When magnets are pulled apart energy is being added to the system. So when magnets are moved close and are attracted to each other, they are just using up energy that was previously added.
I'd like to talk about assortative mating among elites - specifically with "elite" defined by "1-3 SD out on several measures" rather than simple education, wealth, or income.
It's been my personal experience in my social circles that a man with several SD advantages in multiple areas will typically end up with a basically average woman with maybe one or two areas with maybe a 1 SD advantage. I'm curious about this, because I've seen multiple examples of it happening, but N is objectively low, and this could just as easily be a "matching is hard" thing among extraordinary people, as it could be an explicitly gendered thing.
So I ask my fellow SSC compatriots! There must be elite (in this sense) women here, and people who know them, so I think we may be actually able to shed some light on whether it's symmetrical across genders as merely a "matching at the far ends of the bell curve is genuinely hard" thing.
An example: one friend, 6 foot 4, attractive (routinely got chili pepper ratings as a prof, so an objective measurement there at least), Phd in a STEM discipline, been making 400-600k annually for nearly a decade now, athleticism and fitness 1 SD out, vegan and very moral minded, etc. Yes, I've just described like a quarter of Silicon Valley men (except maybe the height), but he's on the East Coast where women outnumber men, so he's not even at a demographic disadvantage like west coasters.
So the reason I immediately think of him, he struggled for *years* to find a good relationship - and it's because he basically wanted his counterpart, just in a woman. He wanted a tall, Phd, good-career, attractive, fit woman to match him on his various attributes. And we (his male friends) all used to laugh at him. "It doesn't work that way!" we'd howl, "this is exactly why you've been single for X years!"
We thought it was funny, because based on our own experiences, it doesn't matter how great or how many SD's you are from average as a man in how many fields, you can't *possibly* expect to find a woman with more than one or two fields with a 1-2 SD advantage, even if you have four or five fields with 1-3 SD advantages.
Why is this? I genuinely don't know and am curious if others have seen it - just empirically, in our own experiences, it's a ground truth you can't get around. We, his male friends, enjoy a similar range of SD advantages in a similar amount of areas, and in our own experience you can optimize on ONE, maybe two, areas for 1-2 SD out in a female partner, and anything else is laughable fantasy. We've accepted it as a sad fact about life, but he wouldn't for many years. He eventually settled with somebody with the usual 1-2 areas with a 1-2 SD advantage, and seem pretty happy with her, so that's great.
But I genuinely wonder if this is a gendered thing, or a "difficulty in elite assortative mating" thing. I've certainly heard from my mom, who was a 6 foot tall model in her youth, that it's extremely hard to find a high quality man (or other female friends) as a tall woman, a noticeably smart or articulate woman, or a model-level attractive woman (and compoundingly worse with all 3 attributes). I similarly hear about many high-powered career women who struggle to find a quality match.
So somewhere, there must be my friend's equivalent - a tall, attractive, higher-degree-having, athletic, high-powered career woman who can't find a good match. Why couldn't they find each other? What eventually happens from the female side? The same settling for a 1-2 SD advantage in one or two areas that we all ended up at?
Just thinking historically, people like Ed Thorp and Einstein and Feynman and Bohr all basically ended up with essentially average or the standard 1 SD in 1-2 areas women. Most of those are confounded by time period and culture, though. If I think of the "elite athletes plus other SD advantages" with LTR's that I know in powerlifting or rock climbing or Ninja, it's the same story for all of them.
I've got an N of about 6 on the multiple SD advantages across 4 or 5 areas from the male side (and maybe N=5 on the athletic side, usually at around 2-3 areas), and it's been universally true there, but that's a pretty tiny sample. I genuinely wonder whether we could or should have been doing anything different than the usual online dating apps and the typical work and cultural social milieus in big coastal cities, but if so, I have no idea what it would be.
Does anyone here have examples of similarly extraordinary folk actually finding each other?
What do folk here think - is this a gendered thing, or a symmetrical thing where matching out on the long tail is just intrinsically hard?
1. Dude's a STEM PhD, right? Not a lot of women in that, and women outside it don't tend to find that that attractive unless there's money involved. This may be in part a cultural thing--apparently Japanese matchmakers would look for high education, height, and salary, compare with the six-pack, six feet, six-figure salary over here. There's a small subset of women who find intelligence attractive, but it's not too big, and they all lean hard left (not sure what your friend's politics are.)
2. Not all positive things are correlated; you want tall, smart, athletic, and rich, there aren't a lot of people like that, and they tend to be in demand (perhaps not 'tall' for women but replace it with 'attractive').
3. The high-powered career women want a guy who makes more money than them--the normal 'find a good provider' instincts operate, but now the bar is much higher. Of course, high-powered career men often want someone cute rather than successful. Don't feel too bad for these ladies--they get to complain about it in movies, books, and the sorts of publications that doxx heretical bloggers.
Assortative mating is a thing (and produces lots of previously-impossible matches like the descendants of men who mastered the Talmud and those who mastered the Confucian classics), but it's not absolute.
Honestly, dating's always been hard. Matching out on the long tail is even harder. And it is gendered.
On 1, really? I always thought intelligence was always one of the top 3 things women say they're looking for, and that famously they'd date men as intelligent as them or smarter, which should have worked in his favor on this one thing. Plenty of smart women out there struggling to find a match because of this.
2 - agree, totally. Plus "rich," whether it's high income or assets, is also skewed quite a bit more towards men. None of the men-besides-this-one-friend in my circle even care about a potential date's career / income / assets, it's too strong a filter and doesn't really matter if you're bringing them.
On assortative mating not being absolute, I'm not sure - the single biggest thing that I took from Greg Clark's The Son Also Rises was that assortative mating must be an *impossibly* intensely optimized thing (for the many trends and degrees of achievement in the book to be true hundreds of years later in the same lineages), and my own observations have shown me that pretty much everyone tries very hard to maximize the quality of long term mates (and this post is specifically about why even with that extremely strong drive, the best that multi-SD-advantaged men, men who are above and beyond even the 6/6/6 criteria you mention, always end up settling with basically average women).
I mean, the women in 3 are doing exactly that - trying very hard to optimize that mate quality, and complaining about how hard it is, right?
On it being gendered, that's exactly what I'd love to see data for - we've all heard complaints from women in 3), and smart women who will only date "as smart or smarter" men...why then did my friends (and myself) struggle so much finding somebody comparable?
I'd bet this boils down to a "looks and age" thing conjoined with "all the good ones are off the market," honestly. In my experience, looks are basically always optimized, usually first (and especially now that all apps or picture-optimized or pictures-exclusively when swiping).
Men who can do so strongly optimize looks and age (and per Christian Rudder, women famously strongly optimize looks, with 80% of men not even being considered because of it), and if those are near the top of an optimization list of most people, despite IQ being positively correlated with looks / height / whatever it's simply not enough. Any woman with multiple positives pairs up sooner and stays off the market, and the ones without looks end up endlessly optimizing for "smarter AND better career AND more income" etc forever and end up complaining as per 3) above.
Maybe my experience is highly nonstandard here, but the idea of optimising for traits is wildly outside of my dating experience. My dating success (I'm now happily married with two children) is essentially entirely related to me making other people feel good about themselves, calm, safe, and listened to.
I had a woman ask me out on the spot when in university when she saw me share two out of my three Reese's cups with people I happened to run into, with the explicit reasoning "that's the kind of guy I want to be with". My now wife, objectively much higher quality than me based on the types of traits you list above, similarly asked me to marry her based on those traits.
Maybe the real solution to your friend's conundrum is that the highest quality women are smart enough to
1) not faff around 'optimising'
2) lock good men (here I mean kind, loyal, and emotionally stable) down in their twenties, when they are relatively undervalued
Yaaay, we found the human!
At least, I'd bet your approach is closer to how the median person would think of and describe it.
We are a bunch of highly-selected, overly-analytical, male-skewed,STEM weirdos here on SSC overall, though, who probably don't subscribe to or think of the process that way in the main.
An optimization process is still an optimization process though, regardless of what it feels like from the inside, or how you choose to describe it, and assortative mating is definitely strongly optimized. I would happily bet that nearly ALL women, and ESPECIALLY the "highest quality" women do indeed "faff around optimizing" if we could operationalize it, even if they might not think that way.
But we don't really need to - because we see people of general qualities pairing off on average. Attractive celebrities with attractive celebrities, rich people with attractive people, smart people with smart people, etc.
I am glad for you that you didn't have to try very hard (or at all, seemingly), due to maxing out on the Generosity characteristic (or whatever your described advantage amounts to). Congrats!
1. So you are aware women don't always answer truthfully when asked what they find attractive, and may even be fooling themselves? (I mean, men aren't totally truthful either, but everyone from feminists to redpillers knows beauty is the big thing so there's not much point lying.) I'm totally sure there are *some* women who find intelligence attractive, but usually they tend to be women in more cerebral fields for whom that's their most attractive attribute--and then it winds up being a dominance thing. That and they also want them to be charming, etc., when most of the small group of men smarter than them are kind of awkward.
2. I mean, yes, it is a thing, but Clark is on the level of 'banker marries banker and farmer marries farmer' (wife in earlier era), not 'Nobel laureate marries Nobel laureate'. Marriage was historically about wealth and property, which is why you did see and do see the top tier in *wealth* pairing off--royalty were contracting political marriages all the time.
And your friends don't settle with *average* women--you said he paired off with someone 1-2 SD above the norm in various things, which is abnormally high as stuff isn't necessarily correlated. A cute pediatrician at a community hospital is still much smarter than most people.
The underlying question your friend is asking is, "I'm in the top 0.1% of attractiveness, why can't I find someone in the top 0.1% of attractiveness?" The unpleasant answer is, "You're not in the top 0.1% of attractiveness." It's similar to the situation the career women below are in, albeit less severe--the thing you worked for all your life isn't what brings the opposite sex in to the greatest degree. Of course, he *is* in the top 1% of wealth (and height), so he had better choices than a lot of guys. His wife isn't *ugly* or *dumb* from what you say, she's smart and cute, just not brilliant and smoking hot.
Also if you optimize for one thing you often don't get the other--Bezos dumped his wife for a lady who isn't that bright, and Zuck's wife isn't that cute, though she is very bright (got into Harvard Med as an Asian).
I suspect, again, he's a dork, which those 'always looking for smarter women' don't want, they want witty and charming on top of it--Voltaire, not Einstein.
3. Data in the modern era is limited due to the difficulty of publishing anything politically incorrect, but even the deeply offended Wikipedia article on fertility and intelligence basically admits a higher IQ depresses women's fertility:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
I'm sure someone else here has some data (please post if you do); Cremieux writes about this stuff a lot.
It seems to me that men who are 2-3 SD above average and looks and intelligence are likely to do well, *unless* they are walking around preoccupied with how many SD's they have on the average person, and how many motherfucking SD's the woman they're on a date with have. I can't begin to tell you what a ugly, narcissistic configuration that would strike most people as being. It would strike *me* that way, and I would probably fare OK on whatever subtle probes or playful tests Mr. 3 SD administers ("I heard a fun thought puzzle the other day. Want to try it? Just for fun!").
You think people can't pick up on tests like that? Here's a story for you. I once went on a hike with a guy a friend had introduced me to. It was basically a first date, though we didn't call it that. Being an outdoorsman was a big part of his identify. For me it was an interest I was just getting into. So not far into the hike was a place where the trail crossed a little stream, and the only easy way to cross was to walk on a tree trunk spanning the 10 foot gap. So bloke was in front of me, and crossed first, walking fast and coffidently. When it was my turn, I hesitated about doing it. It was not a very thick tree trunk, and I wasn't able to estimate how difficult it would be to keep my balance, And the fall to the stream bed was about 8 feet, and it was full of round slippery boulders, so it would have been a really bad, ankle-twisting landing. Bloke didn't say a word, just watched me from his side of the gap. So I went ahead and crossed, though not very fast or confidently. And I looked at bloke and thought, "fuck you buddy, for putting me in a situation where I had to choose between flunking and risking a broken ankle." I may have passed his test, though not with flying colors, but he had flunked being humane, friendly and reasonable in my book.
That's more than just obnoxious, that's actually dangerous. Dang. I've played power games but only with people I knew were into it beforehand and never where any actual risk was involved.
Three things to keep in mind here:
a. Women and men on average value somewhat different things, which is why (among other things) that it's easier for a 40 year old man to be seen as very attractive by a 25 year old woman than for a 40 year old woman to be seen as very attractive by a 25 year old man.
b. I think on most traits, Men have a wider distribution than women, so at both ends of the distribution, you're likely to find more men than women. More men than women will be geniuses, more men than women will be dunces, etc. That probably has interesting effects wrt assortative mating at the top and bottom.
c. For whatever reasons (maybe social, maybe biological, maybe a mix), most women really prefer a man who is taller and more financially/career successful than they are, and most men prefer to be taller/more successful than their wives. That isn't always true, and I know some apparently very happy couples where the wife is taller or the wife is the main moneymaker, but they're unusual.
a. You do see more of the reverse age-gap marriages these days, but it's still rarer; biology's atavistic hand always gets involved. So I agree.
b. I've heard that, wonder if it's true or if it just doesn't make as much sense given female life schedules to invest 90 hours a week in your career, so you have fewer at the top.
c. Agree again.
> It's been my personal experience in my social circles that a man with several SD advantages in multiple areas will typically end up with a basically average woman
Or vice versa, presumably. One can have too much of a good thing though, in that if both parents are brilliant intellects then their offspring may well be mentally unstable or downright mad!
Something you're not taking into consideration is that if you search for and find and marry some brilliant and beautiful woman whom you see as your equal, the kids you have are going to grow up to be other people and they will bust you for your bullshit. Your smart and handsome teenage son will tell you that his mom thinks you never loved her, you just married her because she was a physicist and you wanted her high IQ genes. He'll ask you, "how would you have felt about me if I was like Jeremy?" [Jeremy is your son's best friend. He's an excellent artist, but a so-so student and not IQ-smart. His IQ is probably about 115.]. He'll say "Janine [his sister] thinks she's a disappointment because she's not into academics, just really good at games, and she didn't turn out pretty like Mom. Actually, Dad, she looks like you."
If he really wanted to get him, he'd tell his dad she *doesn't* look like him. ;)
That sounds more like an evolutionary psychologist's kid taking the piss out of him, and nobody else's.
My kids have long-since picked up on the usefulness of the snarky genetics-based response:
"Why the hell did you do <dumbass thing>?"
"I dunno, it's probably genetic."
"Your smart and handsome teenage son will tell you that his mom thinks you never loved her, you just married her because she was a physicist and you wanted her high IQ genes."
I think you're projecting your own system of ethics onto this hypothetical kid...
I think it's pretty plausible., & I have a pretty good data set. Not only have I parented a teen, I also listen to people talk about their parents every single day (I'm a psychologist & psychotherapist). Adolescence is a tumultuous time, and most kids go through periods of being quite angry and unhappy and openly criticizing their parents. And after 15 years or so of living with you, teens generally have your number, and will spew quite valid criticisms of you in angry confrontations. Might that kid go after his dad for other bullshit besides his narcissistic investment his and his family's total SD score? Yes. But the thing about being over-invested in these measurables is that it is likely to play out in a way that involves how cared about various people in the family feel, and all kids a very attuned to the love and loyalty or lack thereof of their family members. So it's likely that whatever criticisms the kid launches will have to do with that. One of my objections to somebody's being determined to find a mate with a high IQ is that it suggests that the person would not be able to love and deeply commit to someone who fell short in that area. So say the man finds & marries a woman who has a 170 IQ,, same as him. It is not a bit unlikely that one or more of his children will be nowhere near as IQ-smart as the parents. Will this dad be able to love that kid? If his love is muted by his disappointment, I guarantee you the kid will have sensed that.
I am female, and probably 3 SD out on a couple things, and I never had an agenda of finding a man whose SD portfolio was equivalent to mine. I was drawn to men who enjoyed my company, appreciated my quirks, sympathized when I was sad, made me laugh and introduced me to new things. Why the fuck look for someone who is Best of Breed, and might give you and them a combined gene pool likely to produce children who are Best of Show? https://i.imgur.com/eXY1bCA.png
Jokes aside, this is probably closest to it; people find someone they like, not necessarily engage in a eugenics breeding program. Of course those things affect attraction, but most people aren't *that* picky. I think this is more of a disease of the highly successful who get demanding and want the best of everything.
I agree. It's an idea of people who want the best of everything, but have simplistic and frankly kind of dumb ideas of what constitutes the best. (Trump's golden toilet is an example of the same kind of dumbness). There are lots of qualities that make someone a great mate beside their being extraordinary on certain measurables: They really get you. They bring out the best in you. They are resilient. They are flexible thinkers with high ideational fluency. They are perceptive about things you are not. They are able to enjoy things you do not, and can teach you how to enjoy backpacking or art museums or Salsa dancing or whatever. They make you laugh your ass off. They are delightful sexual partners.
I don't think I could have been seriously romantically involved with someone who wasn't pretty smart--I'd get bored. And having a smart wife is a good way to increase your chances of having smart kids.
OTOH, you're looking for someone you want to make a life and raise a family with, so intelligence is necessary but not sufficient. Smart with no sexual chemistry or smart with fundamentally different values about how to live life would both probably make for a not-so-great marriage.
Right, but you weren't obsessed with picking someone with an IQ of 145. And lots of people don't value intelligence at all--how many people here apart from Performative Bafflement's friend are obsessed with the athleticism of their partners? But as you and Eremolalos say, sexual chemistry and compatible values are a much bigger deal.
Ha! Is that the Zuck dog? Funny.
I think this is just a framing thing putting you off, literally *everybody* tries to maximize the quality of their mate, on whatever metrics are important to them.
I personally think optimizing on career / income / wealth is silly, and have never done it, and mainly brought them up because my friend *was* trying to match on them, and they're easy to measure and verify "yeah, actually, I can confidently say somebody is 1,2,3 SD out on this."
Of course other metrics are important (or more important) than those things for a good relationship, but EVERYBODY tries to maximally assort their mating, and find the best mate they can, regardless of whether they frame it in SD's or deciles or not.
Actually not everybody tries to pick someone whose traits they think are great. There are plenty of people whose self-esteem has taken such a beating that they do not feel entitled to a mate with qualities they think are great -- they just say yes to the first person who offers. And then some people's choices are dominated by a single trait in a way that leads to bad pairings. For instance, people who have been abused as children often pick a mate whose most notable quality is that they are kind and not the least bit violent, but they don't give consideration to other qualities they in fact care about because the will-never-hit-me criterion looms so large. But I agree that people who are not burdened by the consequences of really bad early experiences do try to find someone who is ideal by their standards.
Hoo - quite a downer to contemplate. But yes, you're totally right, some people are burdened enough that they don't do this. Some similarly burdened people probably don't believe in or pursue happiness itself. I honestly admire you for doing your best to help these people.
What kind of person? Maybe someone who's so into abstraction that they aren't paying attention to their own life.
For a start, your friend is *not* " a man with several SD advantages in multiple areas" if "(you've) just described a quarter of Silicon Valley men".
If a lot of men share those same attributes, then those are average, not stand-out traits. That's how it works: the women can choose from a relatively plentiful supply of tall, smart, handsome, relatively well-off vegan guys who love to climb and hike. He's not standing out there in the market.
As for tall etc. women - if he's taller than the average (6' 4") and wants a woman of the same relative height, he's not going to find one easily; going by this, the average height for American men is 5' 9" and for American women is 5' 3"/4". This strikes me as rather on the short side, but I suppose in a large enough population you'll have very tall and very short people so bringing down the average:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm
This handy summary tells me:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585718168419c246cf6f204e/t/5ab7e2de70a6adbbb6bcf676/1522000606378/STATISTICS%2B-Dimensions%2B-%2B3-19-18%2B%281%29.pdf
"In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Roughly 1% of US women are 6 feet tall or taller. The equivalent height cutoff for US men (only 1% of population taller) is about 6ʹ4″."
So if your friend is looking for a woman at least 6' tall, he's looking for 1% of the entire female population of the USA. It sounds rather like the "fast, good or cheap" problem: you can have it fast and cheap, you can have it fast and good, or you can have it good and cheap, but you can't have all three.
If he wants tall AND smart at that level AND sporty AND beautiful etc. he's looking for a tantalum needle in an entire Kansas plain of haystacks.
Out of curiosity, if your mother is this tall smart model, what is your father like? Is he too outstanding in several fields at 3 SD, or is he just 'average'?
Oh, totally. The SV thing was more a joking aside, and was also referring to base rates and demographic skews (West Coast way more male-skewed and therefore competitive for men dating than East Coast). But your overall point totally stands, at whatever level is appropriate. I jokingly posited he would only be top 25% in SV vs the (presumably) top .03^5 he'd be most other places in America, but I think the point you're making stands.
If he was merely top decile somewhere, he could only expect to find a top decile match - but I doubt he (or similarly qualified men) would even be able to do that, given what I've seen.
And I definitely agree he was looking for a needle in a haystack, that's why we were all laughing at his obduracy in holding out for years.
And yeah, my dad is pretty great. Tall, Golden Gloves champ, off the charts discipline and work ethic, from rural poverty to serial entrepreneur in multiple industries who's never had a boss or "real" job, authored 3 books, hobbyist aviator with 5000 flying hours and an ATP and has owned and flown everything from Cessnas to King Airs and Lears, can fix or create just about anything, etc.
Honestly, I envy my parents' relationship, they're one of the few genuinely good and happy and enduring marriages I've ever seen.
Honestly, I think they're nerds. Women hate nerds.
I think it's a cultural thing--Asian women seem to do so much less, and starting to read Three Kingdoms, it seems to go back a way. For a historical novel about warfare, there's about 1/5 swordplay and archery, 2/5 let's trick the other guy into attacking us at the wrong time or place while he's trying to trick us into doing the same thing, and 2/5 let's send a letter to some other guy to get him to attack this guy who's bothering me. Most of the success seems to come from having the right advisors and picking your battles. And Zhuge Liang hasn't even showed up yet.
(Well, more 1-2-1, but the sum of those numbers is bad luck.)
Yeah, a bunch of people have played the "STEM Phd?? Neeeerrrrrrdd!" card in here - a delightfully surprising outcome given Scott's median reader / commenter. :-P
Even better, since we pretty much all met and started our friendship in the same gym picking up very heavy pieces of metal - lifting bro's in the Church of Iron. But I'm not gonna lie, you can say the word "nerd" and make it stick to most of us, and we'll cheerfully admit it.
How is Three Kingdoms, btw? I've read a few Roman warfare books (Caesar's Gallic campaigns, Agrippa's campaigns), two on Genghis Khan's campaigns, and a few about Alexander the Great's campaigns, are they at all similar, or is it more court intrigue and subtle cleverness stuff?
Oh, that's the thing. It's Scott's median reader/commenter, his average reader/commenter, his modal reader/commenter, and probably everyone within 1 standard deviation of the mean. This isn't the outgroup making fun of nerds, this is the ingroup making fun of our own situation, because we know how it is. ;)
There's quite a bit of court intrigue and subtle cleverness; there's also swordfights and archery, some even with detail, but the balance definitely leans toward then cloak-and-dagger stuff. Part of the fun for me is the random cultural stuff; you have definitely Chinese stuff like Cao Cao starting to threaten Liu Bei by talking about the ecology of dragons, but you also have stuff like Zhang Fei getting drunk and whipping a soldier who won't get drunk with him that could happen anywhere. If you've read Caesar and Agrippa, Genghis Khan, and Alexander the Great, well, you'll probably get even *more* out of it than I did. There is a *lot* of battlefield maneuvering and strategy, and even my untrained eye caught a few things straight out of Sun Tzu (who, of course, all these people would have read!) I'm reading it as part of broadening my literary base and trying to make myself less painfully honest, but if you're a serious student of war you should read *something* Chinese, it is a major world culture and one our nation is likely to at least be competing with in the future. I'm warning you though: it's long.
Nice, you do a great job selling it.
For all that I spent years going back and forth to China for business, I know shamefully little about the (very deep) history and cultural history there, topping out at about Opium Wars / Boxer Rebellion / Communist Revolution / GLF / Deng Xiaoping opening / Hu Jintao / Xi Jinping, which is all pretty recent.
I'll pick it up, thanks for the recommendation.
I don't think this is strictly a matching problem. Many important traits are desirable across the board, e.g. both attractive and unattractive people want an attractive mate, both smart and stupid people want an intelligent mate, so a 60th percentile person seeking a 60th percentile person will have a much easier time finding a suitable 60th percentile mate than a 99th percentile person will finding a 99th percentile mate, since the latter is in demand for everyone, and is thus much more likely to end up matching with a lower percentile mate for circumstantial or idiosyncratic reasons.
Do they actually, though, in data anywhere? Genuinely curious here - Scott's post on generationally great families seems to suggest there's at least a subset of elites that DO manage not to settle.
Yes, settling is the norm in the small pops I've seen personally, but I'm pretty curious how prevalent it is more widely, and whether there is in fact a gender skew on which gender settles more, due to dispersion at the long tails.
Or maybe it's all genuinely hard and symmetric, and the great families are the handful of families reliably succeeding at the genuinely hard problem.
i dont know elites, but i think the problem is these men want equality in traits but don't want equality otherwise. The wife is expected to be support and to sacrifice in the relationship. This means the woman has a value premium compared to a man, no matter the status.
Temagami below described the perfect "support" wife, which i wager a lot of elites need to make things like having kids even work, or enabling their "masters of the universe" lifestyles. A wife who also is working 60 + hour weeks chasing her own vision is not going to easily be able to do that and may even look for a support husband which is vanishingly rare too.
so women will always have a premium over men unless the relationship is much more tenuous. the men pay the price to be happier, i guess.
Yeah, this is a great point too - I've never personally optimized on career, income, wealth, or educational attainment, and none of my friends in the same boat did either, except this one friend.
That's part of why we would laugh when he was puzzled about how hard it was. But absolutely, wanting somebody young enough to have kids AND a willingness to have however many kids AND all the other stuff is ridiculous, for sure. But you could maybe expect to find 1-2 SD in looks AND kindness AND mutual sexual compatibility AND...etc in this pop, and you just can't empirically.
those aren't population based traits except for looks?
i mean i take your friend as asking why he can't find same career, educational, wealth, intellectual, and looks based traits because elites are definitely on a curve there but kindness or sexual compatibility? some things are individual traits really or relationships between people.
I think ultimately you could frame nearly anything as a population-based trait - after all, there's definitely a distribution of "kindness" or "cooking skill" or whatever in any given group, it's just your own life experiences or your own local population of known people ranked by decile. So if you can look at somebody and judge them as at least top 10% kindness (or whatever other trait), that's close enough to being 1-2SD out on that trait to work.
^ Came here to say this. If the guy in question wants kids, then it's unlikely that women with the same traits will want to sacrifice their career, I know I sure as heck don't.
I'm one of the lucky ones with a support husband and it's a very nice balance. He's slightly more intelligent and wealthy, whereas I score slightly higher on looks and people skills. He's mostly retired whereas I work a 6 figure job, so we keep each other motivated and emotionally balanced. It's a fantastic deal. The idea of having some stressed out overachiever sounds like no fun to me.
yeah, definitely. A guy really benefits from the emotional support of his wife, and it's harder for us to be able to shift to support because so much value is placed on being a high status earner. The culture would have to change a lot to prevent guys from being seen as failures if they choose to support; girls wear jeans but guys cant wear dresses. tough problem.
I think you may be underestimating how exceptional the women in question are in a couple key, under-researched metrics: openness to and capacity for a (male-)desirable kind of marriage.
Oh, no doubt - I was just delineating areas where I can find actual base rates and know percentiles / SD, and fully agree they're a tiny part of what matters about compatibility and actually having a good relationship.
Which, of course, is probably WHY you can only seem to optimize for 1 or 2 areas in a partner - the other stuff is also important but rare, so that you're lucky to even find the ones with 1 or 2 areas + real compatibility.
When I've back-of-enveloped stuff like personality trait distributions before in past dating conversations with friends, I've always assumed normal distributions, independence, and then a decile threshold - you're looking for top 10%, or top 20% or whatever, in kindness, humor, intangibles, etc.
It's pretty funny where non-settlers end up. I had a female friend who, when you calculate the incidence and confluence of all the traits she wanted to optimize on, wanted something like a 1-in-10 billion man.
Have you looked into the opposite? How women who qualify as extraordinary in those areas end up marrying?
I literally don't know and couldn't find any info like this, and is why I asked this here - I figured the SSC crowd has one of the best chances of having / knowing women like this, and could at least see some anecdotal evidence.
Specifically, if greater dispersion amongst genders in the traits being mentioned is true, then it's not symmetrical and the anecdotal evidence should point towards women like this being able to find similar or better matches at higher rates.
But I'm genuinely curious about the answer either way, and appreciate any anecdotes or data anyone has to offer.
Presumably you can just look up a few hyper-accomplished and see who they married to get a matching set of anecdotes. Hedy Lamarr or Mayim Bialik or whoever.
Actors of both sexes tend to have histrionic (duh) personality types and tend to have more unstable marriages as a result--how many long-term celebrity marriages do you know?
Lamarr got married 6 times and wound up dying in seclusion.
Bialik is alive, so I won't comment.
Going to the scientists...
Marie Curie actually seems to have married an intellectual equal and managed to have a bunch of kids before dying from playing with radioactivity.
Rosalind Franklin died alone, though she might have been handicapped by the sexism of the era.
Lynn Margulis married twice, both scientists, and said you couldn't be a good wife, good mother, and a first-class scientist--not enough hours in the day.
I suspect if you want to do first-class work you either stay single or have someone supporting you.
I think this is generally true--being at the absolute peak of anything involves making tradeoffs in all the other areas of your life. If two first-rate scientists get married, I think the ideal situation would involve having enough money to pay people to do the less important stuff like keeping house and cooking and changing diapers, so the high-value time of the couple can be spent on the important stuff.
Yes, me and my wife. I’m like your friend. My wife is 2 SD above average in beauty, skill with children, social ease, cooking, fashion sense, creativity, and sexual chemistry with me. These are just as extraordinary as all the traits you listed, and I would argue much more important when considering a wife.
Many of the ways women can be extraordinary do not fit on a resume. I met Thorpe’s wife many years ago. Your characterization of her is utterly ridiculous and explains why you are confused. Sorry, but it’s actually a little upsetting seeing such a magnificent woman described in such a way.
Apologies, I've of course never met her, and was only going by Wikipedia's descriptions and the descriptions in A Man for All Markets.
In what ways and to what estimated degrees was she extraordinary, I'd love to hear it.
I totally agree with you that the attributes you list are almost certainly more important than the usual career / income / education level etc in terms of being a good partner - it's just those are the ones it's easy to find base rates for, and actually know the percentile you and other people are at.
PhD in a STEM discipline? He probably had little to no rizz. Attractive women need more than a list of qualities on a sheet of paper.
There's a usual claim that men have more variability than women, so there are more men at both tails of the bell curve, and women tend to be closer to the middle.
Yeah, I think this is a good point and is probably a part of it. I've tried to find actual measures of the dispersion between the genders, and can't come up with any quantified measures that seem to significantly skew it.
The few I found, in IQ the SD in men is 15 vs 14 in women - the male variance in math test scores is 10-20% higher than women's - in height, the SD in men is 3 inches vs 2.5 inches in women - males are roughly 10x more likely to be psychopaths. As far as education level goes, more women than men get both Masters and Phd's, so that should actually be in favor.
None of these seem terribly differentiating or skewed in the base pop, at least enough to cause a great degree of difficulty, but it's also really hard to find any actual measures of dispersion, and I'd assume the actual dispersion is higher than measured, or notable when quantified for the things we haven't tried to quantify.
Oh, found a few more measures of dispersion - for US Phd holders, men are 24% higher in income than women (difference of about $20k).
There are still sig skews in STEM Ph'ds - about 60/40 men.
There are definitely significant "athleticism" skews:
For ranked or professional athletes, they are 16.4% women and 83.6% men, so pretty significant skew in elite athletes, but couldn't find anything more realistic like gender distribution in local meets / competitions.
For Olympians, it's a pretty steady trend from 1948 to 2000 or so, with men being 95%+ of Olympians in the earlier years, and slowly descending to ~2/3 in 2000 (after that, there were explicit efforts by IOC to make it 50/50, and they're projecting the next Olympics will be 50/50).
For triathletes, men are historically 80% of triathletes, and despite some pretty significant efforts by various grant makers and athletic bodies, USA Triathlon's current membership is still only 39% women, and this goes way down in favor of men with ages above 40.
For Obstacle Course Races, women are about 30% participation, with this number going down the more competitive the OCR.
For rock climbing, one source claims it's a 60/40 split in favor of men, and Statista has it 75/25 men.
PB, thanks for posting this (and thanks, Nancy, for bringing it up).
I've wondered for a while now if the difference was in strategies, not base capability, i.e. the warriors vs worriers model: standing out vs fitting in. When I was young, I observed that very smart and sub-average girls acted very similarly except under close observation, whereas the expressed range of male intelligence was staggering. I have a hard time believing anyone who doesn't report having known many more incredibly and exasperatingly stupid men (or deeply ugly and awkward men) than female counterparts.
It's an interesting idea, in my experience it's definitely in men's interest to "peacock" and have flamboyant or overt displays of wherever they had noticeable SD advantages over baseline. Certainly when I was doing dating profile optimization, I saw noticeable differences in quantity of responses / dates with pics and profiles doing more of this. I've heard similar thoughts from my friends. The sad part is, quantity goes up, but quality probably goes down in aggregate - it seems to cast a broader net, and bring in more "casuals" for lack of a better term.
In a rational world, peacocking would work out because the noticeably smart / whatever women would be preferentially attracted to and message or approach the men - but of course, we don't live in that world. In a "men pursue" scenario, with subtler signals from women, I can absolutely see a lot of false positives and negatives skewing somebody to think "there are no extraordinary women" even if they might actually exist at higher rates than perceived.
And now that no text-heavy dating platforms exist, it's all pictures anyways, so trying to match on intelligence / humor / non-visual attributes has become correspondingly harder.
Thank you. I've seen so much talk about greater variation among men that it's good to see someone looking into the details. Maybe there isn't very much there.
Interestingly, if the dispersion thing IS true, then it actually is skewed - an extraordinary woman will have a much greater chance of finding an equal-or-better mate vs an extraordinary man, due to base rates on the long tail.
If you are 2 SD out then you're ~3% of the population on that metric. If you're 2 SD out on multiple metrics then you're 3%*3%*3%... etc of the population. Even taking into account these are correlated factors, there is a vanishingly small dating pool of "equals." Assuming 2SD up in attractiveness/fitness, positive social attributes (prosociality, charm, reliability, honesty, etc), and wealth, and these aren't correlated (incorrect, but whatever), and are the only traits that matter (also incorrect, but whatever), then there'd be like 8k people in the whole USA with those traits, probably ~half of whom are already married. (Probably even more. Good partners get held onto, while bad partners get tossed around, almost by definition.)
Yeah, both your points are definitely part of it. Of course as you point out, you can't assume independence in traits, and your "8k in the whole US" assumes a broad dispersion across the US, when people like this are almost certainly abnormally concentrated in a handful of large coastal cities. But even flexing for those two things, you probably have a candidate pool of ~20-30k in a given MSA of 5-20M, and that's assuming equal distributions rather than more men in the long tail.
Then demographics come in - filtering on any sort of career or degree obviously skews your pop older (and probably already matched, as you point out), so you have to carve out the much smaller "single and appropriate age" band.
So yeah, I guess base rates alone account for most of it, but this is why I'm curious if women in this position settle as often as men. It would be the distinguishing crux on whether base distribution dispersion amongst males vs females makes a difference, and whether it is symmetric or gender skewed overall.
This.
Realistically, how hard was your person trying?
The obvious answer why they match with people less extraordinary then themselves is regression towards the mean. You have to put in a ton of work and effort to find the TINY number of people who are as extraordinary and also compatible - if they even exist.
Sadly, there isn't really someone out there for everyone. Anyone who is extraordinary and not just merely above average should expect to settle (on those metrics) in average.
Well, he dated many different women a month for several years, and probably swiped on a 10-50x bigger pool than he dated, so he definitely evaluated a lot of candidates, even if only a shallow "read a profile and swipe" way. I think it's just genuinely hard.
Several years ago, I actually calculated the answer to the Secretary Problem of finding a partner who was where I wanted in demographics and various attributes, and came up with having to date something like 1000 people and swipe about 10x that to have more than a 2/3 chance of finding somebody.
I dated 2-3 different people a week for a year and a half, and eventually caved and settled because dating, and swiping and chatting enough to maintain that dating pipeline, was so much effort, and even the filtered-population ending with in-person dates were so far from ideal, that I figured it wasn't time well invested to keep going.
Now *why* it's so hard is what I was curious about, and I think it's a combination of Nancy Lebovitz' point about greater dispersion in distributions and Crimson Wool's point about base rates and mate-quality capture dynamics.
Still curious about whether it's symmetric or gender-skewed though - if male vs female dispersion on the tails is true, it would be skewed.
Am curious about what "settling" or giving up felt like. What qualities did you compromise on and do you feel like you'd be significantly happier if your partner had those traits? Additionally what traits did you ultimately select for? I feel like settling would feel somewhat cold? I imagine viewing your S/O as inferior or unfitting would be detrimental to the both of you
Do you have a close friend, parent, sibling, or child who you're better than on many measures? Do you love them any less? Do you think of them as inferior all the time, or even at all? Of course not!
Regardless of our attributes, we are all people at the core, who want to avoid suffering, and to live the best lives we can, and we all love and care about the people we choose to befriend, date, or lovingly associate with.
But if you have any sort of dedication or tendency to actually viewing things as they are, you incontrovertibly know you're better on however many measures if you think about it. It's not like you think about it all the time, and burn with rage for having to associate with all these droogs and inferiors or whatever. But a fact is a fact.
I'd prefer not to go into the 2 things I personally optimize for, and the corresponding other things I'm compromising on, in a public forum. If you're really curious and there are direct messages or something here, feel free to reach out.
But it's definitely not a viewing / feeling your SO or loved ones are inferior sort of thing at all, any less than you'd view a friend / sibling / child who is worse than you on several metrics as inferior and unworthy of your love / attention.
I realize I'm projecting pretty hard with that comment, though 50/50 on either end.
Probably stems from being insecure about being perceived as inferior (and feeling that a previous partners saw me the same).
Apologies
The interface for comments is getting worse I think. Not only is "new comment" repeating comments I've seen, I think it's skipping comments I haven't seen.
And using "continue thread" opens a new window with just that thread and destroys the inadequate information I can get from "new reply". The way that's gotten worse is I think it's showing up after fewer layers of nesting.
I've got pycea's ACX aid, but I don't know how to apply it.
Each time I post a comment, Substack trundles through a couple of profile set up screens. Evidently my profile is incomplete, or something not set which it expects to be, but I can't for the life of me see what.
Pycea's ACX extension has a feature that lets you manually set the cutoff for "new" comments, which I use when Substack's interface messes up my "new comment" threshold. It's called "New comment time range". Just click on the icon, and it should be about halfway down?
Hey, what exactly is the issue you're having? Are you saying the extension isn't highlighting new stuff properly?
Yeah, it's also skipping comments I haven't seen. Also, it used to be that clicking on a notification that someone had responded to your comment took you to your comment. Now it takes you to the top of the thread that you comment's on.
New York politics suggests taxing all stock transactions every once in a while. If that ever actually passed, how hard would it be for the stock exchanges to just reincorporate in New Jersey? The actual physical servers are all already there anyway.
If I have a task to get done that's intellectually challenging and fun but I also have something boring that I need to finish for work, I end up working on neither and waste time doom-scrolling instead. As a conscientious worker, I can’t give myself permission to work on the fun stuff while there is important stuff to get done.
I think the same thing happens at the level of life events: I'm held back from emigrating to California because of my social obligations in suburban London.
I wrote about it here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/procrastinating-authentically
Holy shit this very well described me… even down to the specific geographics 😳
Bloody hell tell me about it. I've been stuck on the same tiny little job since before Christmas. The task should be easy. It's the last blocker left before I can move on to the fun stuff. It's probably not even that hard! But every time I go to look at it, my eyes slide right off the page, I spend the rest of the day feeling guilty and stressed, and now I'm entering the New Year and the bastard thing is still on my plate...
It's even worse when it's a small job.
"Why can't I just finish this so I can get to the fun stuff?"
I'd suggest we trade. We'd probably find each other's tasks easy. Except the amount of explanation and prior knowledge required is many times larger than the actual job.
Hey, screw our work - let's procrastinate by building a site where procrastinators can swap nemesis, mental-block tasks with each other.
>I'd suggest we trade. We'd probably find each other's tasks easy.
Sluggards On A Train.
It actually might work for you and ragged clown to make a pact, where you each make a commitment regarding the procrastinated tasks, specifying you'll put in a certain number of hours, or accomplish certain things, on a specified date.
I love this idea!
Other people's tasks are always easier, I agree.
> a site where procrastinators can swap nemesis, mental-block tasks with each other.
The offline version is called "friends".
This is a big problem of socializing on internet, that many tasks require some physical work, or local knowledge, so we can't swap them with friends.
I'm in!
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!")
So what happened there is the child drilled a straight borehole down through concept-space. That's great, but they missed untold wealths of both theoretical and practical knowledge branching off on all sides.
For eg, if the child had asked, "but why do the electrons make the light shine?", 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?
NB: this is re-posted from the last Open Thread, and since there was a some friction last time, let me clarify that this is an armchair problem, I am not actually trapped in a room nor am I looking for child rearing advice, the "child" in question is just a character and you can think of it as the "asker" if that makes things easier.
Ever think about trusting that the kid knows instinctively how to fill its own brain? God damn rationalists re-inventing everything constantly, crowing that they're the only adults in the room because they're the living embodiment of this comic: https://xkcd.com/793/
You hated the answers you got on the last open thread. Your account of the adult/child interaction gets people off track. I think you should ask it another way. What if you started your question this way: You are getting a tour of a very alien alien world from an alien who speaks English and can answer any question but has no ability to grasp your deep disorientation and explain things in a way that's helpful. The world is so alien that you can't tell which things you see are natural and which constructed by aliens, which things are alive and which mechanical, which common and which rare, much less identify familiar categories like nourishment, danger, conflict, cooperation, weather, etc. Around you are some other aliens, some moving fast and some stationary, various things in motion, some holes with gases coming out of them . . . Is there an optimal approach to asking questions that will increase your understanding the alien world?
> You hated the answers you got on the last open thread. Your account of the adult/child interaction gets people off track.
Enough people seem to understand it well enough. I'd rather write something slightly quirky that makes sense to people already on my wavelength, than sacrifice that by writing defensively against misconstruction or pedantry from people who aren't.
Being charitable, I had asked a separate question that *was* related to child-rearing in the last Open Thread, and Substack's performance is such dogshit that it's actively hard to read comprehensively. So those people could easily have had a higher prior on that interpretation than they would have done if able to easily read the question in isolation.
I wouldn't have engaged the mad lady who ran in shouting "Piffle!" (Love you Deiseach!) if I hadn't had a sleeping baby on one arm rendering me unable to do anything except sit there on the internet, and I hope I would have displayed a lot less impatience if said baby had instead chosen to sleep through the night. I won't be repeating the exercise with Arnold Fare who posted after you, for example.
Your alternative question is a different one, but if it turns up interesting avenues to explore then I'm all for it.
The addition of disorientation and danger/survival concerns puts me in mind of the exploration/exploitation metaphor, where the world is a big murky landscape and you can either choose to venture out into the unknown, or sit there working the "safe" land you know already.
What's your address and do you and the child have enough water? Is there a toilet? Help is on the way!
Seriously though I think the actual problem is a psychological one of why it is that people ask questions. Yudkowsky hints at this in such classics as "avoiding your belief's real weak points" and the one about not just stopping at answers that sound good without also understanding them. But there are other ways in which question-asking can be flawed. Slavoj Zizek, paraphrasing, puts one of them this way:
"Bodenheimer articulates this dimension apropos of the child's question, to the father: 'Father, why is the sky blue?' - the child is not really interested in the sky as such; the real stake of the question is to expose father's impotence, his helplessness in the face of the hard fact that the sky is blue, his incapacity to substantiate this fact, to present the whole chain of reasons leading to it. The blue of the sky thus becomes not only the father's problem, but in a way even his fault: 'The sky is blue, and you're just staring at it like an idiot, incapable of doing anything about it!' A question, even ifit refers only to a given state of things, always makes the subject formally responsible for it, although only in a negative way - responsible, that is, for his impotence in the face of this fact."
I think Zizek has a horrible and unlikely framing. My guess is that when a child is doing persistent questioning without seeming to absorb the answers, it's an effort at socializing-- the child wants a response and attention, but isn't more aggressive than that.
I'd say it depends on the family in question. The preceding passage was about how the way we address questions to children is condemnatory: "where were you doing?" assumes the child's guilt until proven innocent (and even then the stain remains). When that child then asks a parent impossible 'why' questions, it's reasonable to see in this an adapted form of a learned behavior. Hence why such parents respond with annoyance: "Don't ask stupid questions" says a man who has no idea what rayleigh scattering is and feels subtly called out.
Sounds to me like you’d just want the child to do a breadth-first search of the concept tree rather than a depth-first search. Is that about what you’re getting at?
Yes, but this question is also about nailing down the nature of the concept tree itself. If you're thinking of a Wikipedia-like graph of nodes consisting of a concept name and a description written in terms of other concepts, you can answer "What is X?" questions fine, but you have no machinery with which to reason about "how?" or "why?" questions.
Unlike "What is X?", which takes only the one parameter X, the questions "How does X do Y?" or "Why does X mean Z?" involve more information, and I was interested in following that line of thought a bit further.
"Understanding" consists of tree-traversal. And the tree of knowledge is to be judged by the fruit it bears.
The 7 classical Liberals Arts used to consist of a Trivium and a Quadrivium. The Trivium is comprised of 3 levels: Grammar (basic jargon); Logic (theoretical modeling); and Rhetoric (practical application).
The kid is stuck on the Grammar level. They might glean what certain nodes correspond to in meatspace. But they sure won't be swinging like Tarzan.
The "best" algorithm probably depends on the nature of the topic. And in any case, the depth of the kid's understanding will probably be determined not by the algorithm, but by how motivated they are to explore, and the nature of the problem they're trying to solve.
Yeah, I think this is an illuminating way to frame it - it seems to me with how categorization works, there's essentially a fixed amount of concepts in a concept tree you want to be explored.
But if there's a fixed amount of nodes in the tree, each of which must be traversed, I don't think breadth-first vs depth-first matters much, and the only difference would be differences in neural architectures or individual learning styles in terms of being able to tie all the nodes together in an overarching schema.
Hmm, it seems to me that asking the right questions is what humans have been learning to do for a very long time. I don't think there has to be any sort of algorithm. And in many cases we can ask questions which we are not able to answer yet. We need technology (or the answer to other questions) before some said question becomes meaningful. (that we can hope to answer it.)
How did life start? We can't answer that question yet.
What about some kind of ontological coordinate system, where "what?", "why?", "how?" etc are the directions.
Jumping off a concept in the "what" direction leads you to other related concepts - exactly like the way Wikipedia articles work.
Jumping off a concept in the "how" direction leads you to explanations of the underlying structures and moving parts.
Jumping off a concept in the "why" direction leads you to reasons and justifications.
The question words have very different "valences". A "what" question has exactly one answer. The question "How does it work?" has one or a small number of answers, and they're probably all useful (except for that one twat who says, "By magic.") The question, "Why does it work?" has many possible answers, from, "Because someone designed it to," to, "Because the heat has to go somewhere, so it ends up expanding the water," to "Because this is the shape that maximises the parameter k0."
So while a "what" question might be basic, a "why" question is clearly in need of some extra definition - there's an intention or context that needs to be provided with a "why?" question, which needs to be defined.
I thought about your question last night, & it seemed to me that the optimal approach depends a lot on the situation. For instance in the game Clue, I'm sure there is an algorithm for asking the questions with the most bang for the buck. But that's a world where you know all the rules, you just don't know the details of this particular instance.
But if a subject is utterly unknown -- like in my example somewhere in this thread of being in an alien world where you understand almost nothing -- it seems to me that you need to start by finding things that fall into categories you understand: alive vs. not; natural vs. made by intelligent beings; common vs rare; important vs. unlikely to have much impact. Some of these categories may turn out to be meaningless in the alien world. You need to start by finding a few categories that are meaningful, and which things are instances of those categories, so that you have an area of solid ground to stand on.
But then there are situations where what you need to do is to identify the bit you do not understand, and ask a clear question about it. For instance somebody might be telling me about making a certain piece of jewelry from copper -- how you cut it, smooth it, shape it, etc. But they keep talking about annealing and work hardening, and I don't know what either of those are. There, all I need to do is ask for explanations of those terms.
I definitely think known and unknown and "solid ground" are good metaphors to start from.
When thrown into an unfamiliar subject - let's say power electronics, for example (and pretend you don't know it already): every concept you encounter - phasors, Johnson complexes, Clarke transforms, reactive power, impedence, concomittance, etc - is completely unknown. To the point where you can't tell which of those words are real things and which I've just made up.
The more you learn, the more of these nonsense words appear - you can read and read and learn all about how these nonsense things relate to each other, but that still means nothing concrete. "A Clarke transform turns three phase axes into two phase axes" makes equal sense if "phase axes" are plotted voltage measurements or cakes on a plate.
It's only when you start seeing words you *do* understand popping up - "voltage", for example - that all the rest can start making sense.
Metaphorically it's like you have an existing edifice of stuff you know and understand, and you have to build out from that. When thrown into the unknown, you construct this big free-floating network of concepts - but no matter how big it gets, that network carries no practical meaning until you can connect it back to the nodes in your home base.
Shy people: what helped you?
Disclaimer: I feel this won't apply to other people, since it's very specific to my personal history.
I used to be very shy in conversations. I think that playing a musical instrument and performing live with a band in front of a (small) audience was extremely helpful to improve my shyness.
I realized this many years later, it was a very gradual process. I think that performing in public after a ton of rehearsals (so even if you are still nervous your muscle memory does most of the work) gave me a bit of confidence in the fact that I can express something worthy of other people's attention and that was somehow translated to conversations.
This is a little bit of the cart before the horse, but getting married. I never realized it, but 90% of my social anxiety was caused by treating all of my female peers as potential dates. I also put women on a pedestal, but getting married to one made me understand them more and treat them normally.
Post from Richard Hanania on the topic: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-i-overcame-anxiety
1. Find super cool charismatic people to emulate
2. Fake it 'till you make it
3. Realize those super cool people were also faking it all along
My confounder is that I might've "memed" myself into being shy, because of second-hand embarrassment that my dad is very much the opposite (maybe bullying and therapy also contributed), but what mostly worked for me was:
* finding out I had (still have) a subconscious feeling that nobody likes me and that talking to / interacting with other people is an imposition of them.
* observing that this was, by most available evidence, not the case post primary school.
* realizing that, even in the cases that it was, minorly inconveniencing other people sometimes is not a terrible price to pay for not being chronically unhappy.
* Whenever I start getting the aforementioned feeling, point out the latter observations.
Practice. I would force myself to out to bars or coffee shops and converse with people. Over time I got more and more used to socializing and also better at it. There's no substitute for experience.
I suffer the same malady. Let's both resolve to be more social but also, on my part, less grumpy
Sorry you probably won't like my answer, but in any case here it goes. I am one of those who wasn't naturally shy -- if anything, I was shameless (as I still am online) -- but came to gradually realize that I should have been shy "in the real world", and this realization has been, even if ploddingly, moving me in the direction of realizing that ideal. This is because, while it is true that social interactions can be tremendously helpful, one needs some basic social and conversational intelligence to extract utility out of it. Those who don't possess it are actually better off being shy.
So what I would recommend is: evaluate your interactions with others quite closely and see what levels of shyness optimize your rewards. Hopefully, as your brain comes to terms with the incentive structure, it will evolve accordingly.
Alcohol. Later realize that the power has always been in you, so you can switch to placebo drinks and just pretend to be drunk.
Practice in low-stake situations, for example find people you have never met before and you are probably never going to meet again.
Get older and realize that you are soon going to die. That puts social fears in perspective.
Generally, get some parts of your life in order, so you know that if you screw up somewhere, you have a safe place you can return to.
Realize that most people are just pretending that they have things under control. Among the actually confident people, 9 out of 10 are merely too stupid to realize how incompetent they are.
There is probably a pill for that; or they will invent one soon after you die.
The difference in height from the first floor of my house to the second is about 13 feet. I can't leap from one floor to the other. But I can easily climb the stairs, making 13 "leaps" of one foot at a time.
I could not go from being shy and self conscious to speaking in a large group of strangers at a party in one "leap". But I was able to do it in small steps:
1. Show up at some group event that happens regularly ( like an ACX meetup). Just listen to others.
2. Write your name on a tag. Learn the name of two other people. Make small talk by planning three questions you can ask a stranger.
3. Remember what people said last time. Ask how something turned out next time.
4. Start to have conversations without planning what to say in advance. Start with someone you know.
5. Join a larger group talking about something. Say something to the group.
3.
Shyness in general is a whole other issue, but here’s one particular thing that made a difference for me in one particular uncomfortable situation: parties.
I didn’t enjoy parties or really get why they were fun until I was about 25. At some point, tired of being the uncomfortable awkward one, I decided I’d just look for whoever looked uncomfortable and try to make their night better. When I had a job, helping somebody else converse and connect, I got better at connecting myself. When I stopped being afraid, I had a better time in general.
Yeah, I would find the awkward people and talk to them. Made some friends that way.
Go on the attack! Focus on other people, notice all the little mistakes they make that would be really embarrassing if it was you, not them.
Then observe that no one is judging them on any of it, and even you yourself don't actually find your opinion of a guy dropping just because he does something awkward in most cases. And even for more serious offenses: just watch how quickly people seem to forget and move on, especially when the offender is carrying on as if nothing happened.
So on the one hand, you can see this person you're supposed to be shy around is making plenty of mistakes of their own, so they're not all that and there's no need to be intimidated by them.
And on the other hand, even if you do make some slip up, you've seen first hand how quickly people ignore and forget them, so it's safe to assume you're not special and the same rules apply to you.
So you can be less scared of other people and less bothered by your own mistakes, all from one neat trick.
Focussing on others instead of yourself can also make you a better conversationalist.
This was the thing that worked best for me. Anything I felt insecure about, I looked for in other people, and when I found it, it was either hardly noticeable had I not specifically looked for it, or it didn't affect my opinion of the other person at all.
The downside of this is that it makes you attuned to flaws you might wish you didn't know about. It's a tradeoff.
I was very shy until my 20s when I learned to just fake it — just pretend I am not shy. It took a long time and was emotionally painful but I can get by in any situation now and most people don't even realise that I am shy. I am though, of course.
My two kids are both in their 20s and painfully shy but they are learning to fake it. It has been much harder for them but they are getting there.
Exposure helps mine over the course of weeks or months; just being around people lowers my reluctance to be around people somewhat. In the very short term, alcohol can help, but is obviously a dangerous tactic in this context.
Re-reading old posts continues. "Epistemic learned helplessness" (https://archive.ph/xdKQl#selection-1991.0-1991.30 https://pastebin.com/MKTiycn0) is one of the concepts introduced on the old blog that entered the local parlance. It's a concept I find disturbing.
It reminds me of Kant’s antinomies in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, who notes that for various metaphysical propositions (like “every effect has a cause”) there are totally valid arguments both for and against. He goes on to synthesize and explain in what sense both (or neither) argument can be true, but it just goes to show that even the most rigorous philosophers have to admit that valid arguments are not equivalent with truth. (You could also phrase this in the language of logic by saying that not every valid argument is sound.) Ultimately, you really can’t get away from the categories of skepticism and its counterpart belief.
Why is it disturbing?
Because the post sort-of endorses closing your ears and not even trying to engage with the arguments as a reasonable thing to do, some of the time.
But the point of the article is that this is literally the best move a lot of times, due to the opportunity cost in time and the limitations of biological brains.
Pointing out an underlying fact about the world, even if unpleasant, is still a great thing to do. If nothing else, it calls the problem to attention, and allows people to try to solve it (whether individually with practices and behaviors, or in a larger base with technology) if it's important enough.
To be clear: I don't disagree with the above, or seriously object to the article.
The point of the post is recognizing your own limitations (noticing bounded rationality). This is an essential and underappreciated skill, otherwise you will trust your own cognition way more than is warranted and end up being gamed or taken advantage of by those who are more skilled than you.
I think of fact-posting (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sdx6A6yLByRRs8iLY/fact-posts-how-and-why, also https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/) and learning by writing of the taxing kind (https://www.cold-takes.com/learning-by-writing/) as the only approach to combating ELH. Actually maybe forecasting too come to think of it, but done properly (e.g. https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/ and https://aiimpacts.org/evidence-on-good-forecasting-practices-from-the-good-judgment-project/#15_Tetlocks_Portrait_of_the_modal_superforecaster).
If you want to do Scott-style predictions for 2024, you can use Fatebook: https://fatebook.io/predict-your-year
Happy new year!
Unlike Predictionbook, Fatebook doesn't seem to have anywhere where it shows a feed of other people's predictions? It's such a basic feature that I keep thinking I must just be missing it but I can't find any sign of it. Either way the lack keeps me bouncing off of it despite using and enjoying Predictionbook while it was up and running.
There is a page where you can see other people's publicly shared predictions: https://fatebook.io/public
Predictions are private-by-default though, unlike PredictionBook, so there aren't so many public ones listed.
Thought experiment: If we had access to practically free electricity, would it be feasible and worthwhile to recycle waste and recover rare and valuable materials by heating the waste until it turns into a plasma, thereby breaking chemical bonds, and then separating the different elements before they cool down and form new, undesired molecules? Not for bulk waste, but for low-volume stuff, like electronic components.
What materials would we be looking for if we already have free electricity?
It seems like free electricity would make aluminum recycling less valuable.
I'm not sure what you're asking. You can't actually build anything interesting purely from electrons running through wires – unless you're thinking about transmuting particles in an accelerator?
The question is about recovering rare and valuable materials, so... what are we using those materials for? Quite a lot of them are valuable for making cheaper energy. If those are the ones we're recovering, it seems like a waste of time.
Well, if you're recycling electronics, then you might want to manufacture new electronics from the recovered materials. As for energy: even if the _generation_ of electricity were a solved problem, you'd still have to _store_ electrical energy for mobile consumers, like phones and cars.
Even granted zero-cost electricity in arbitrary amounts, I still think the size and complexity of installations to do that would be very expensive. I don't know much about the process, but my impression is that the processes used today that involve turning things to plasma (like vapor deposition) can be done at industrial scales, but only turn very small amounts of matter into plasma, and require expensive hard vacuum etc to do it.
I'm also not sure separating the elements is easier when it's plasma? Though here I really don't know what I'm talking about 😅
> I'm also not sure separating the elements is easier when it's plasma?
From my admittedly very limited understanding, in a plasma, all chemical bonds between atoms are dissolved. No more molecules means that the different elements can be separated using centrifuges – I think.
There are two gas-phase separation processes that I know of that might be applicable, both used in real life but only as a last resort when chemical processes absolutely won't do (because the things being separated are isotopes), because they're horribly complicated and inefficient. I don't get the impression that in either case the main cost is power. One, as you said, is centrifuges, like those used for enriching uranium. Centrifuges are generally better at separating things the larger the particles are, so they're terrible at separating atoms, so much so that the size and difficulty of making this sort of uranium enrichment facility is a major factor in the nuclear non-proliferation strategy. Doing this with plasmas has the additional difficulty that you'd need to somehow avoid vaporising the centrifuge. Magnetic confinement techniques may be possible, like for fusion, but presumably that would be very difficult, like for fusion. Centrifuging gases also becomes less efficient at high temperatures because the rate of atomic diffusion (which mixes things back together) increases. Separating everything at once does have the slight advantage over separating U-235 and U-238 that the masses may be better separated, but there's also the issue of equal mass isotopes of different elements, like Fe-54 and Cr-54, which would require a separate separation (although there aren't all that many cases where both have non-negligible abundances). The other technique is mass spectrometry, which is used to isolate calcium 48 for nuclear physics experiments. This is even more expensive than gas centrifuges, used only because calcium has no gasseous compounds. It gets around melting the apparatus just by having such tiny quantities of the substance that the heating is manageable. Most of my information on the use of mass spectrometry for purification comes from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CodBk7xewRk .
>The other technique is mass spectrometry, which is used to isolate calcium 48 for nuclear physics experiments. This is even more expensive than gas centrifuges, used only because calcium has no gasseous compounds. It gets around melting the apparatus just by having such tiny quantities of the substance that the heating is manageable.
Many Thanks! That was exactly the technique, and exactly the limitation, that I was thinking of citing.
If you have infinite energy then I think you can basically do arbitrary alchemy, yeah. Otoh the waste heat from doing that at scale might be a significant problem.
I believe the heat arising from any conceivable manmade process is a mere fraction of the heat ariving every day from the sun. The reason global warming is a concern is that CO2 and water vapor increase the fraction of solar energy that is kept on Earth.
In normal life yeah, but if we're imagining mass plasma manufacturing from a free energy source then maybe not
If you have no conception of the magnitude of what you are imagining, then it pointless to be concerned about the side effects.
If you don't know whether or not it's an issue, it could still be worth raising the possibility so it can be checked. Let's estimate.
Global electronic waste production, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/499891/projection-ewaste-generation-worldwide/ , is about 50Mt per year. Assume, as a very rough estimate, that this is all silicon and needs to be raised to just above silicon's boiling point 3538 K, and that that takes 35kJ/g (based on the atomization enthalpy of silicon and the energy of an ideal gas at that temperature), then this gives about 50GW to vaporise all the world's electronic waste, about 1/400 of the total power consumption of humanity. Of course, with the actual separation process and inefficiencies taken into account it would probably be much more than that, but that still seems quite manageable (for just waste heat disposal of course, the magical energy source is still required).
We're not just boiling the silicon though, we're turning it into plasma. Quick Google suggests that happens at around 10,000K (which is surprisingly low to me, but I could be misunderstanding), I'm not sure what the relationship between heat and required energy is but it doesn't sound like enough to meaningfully change the analysis (unless the phase transition energy is very high).
50 GW is a measure of power not energy. How much energy is that?
https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Solar_energy_to_the_Earth
1000 W per meter squared
diameter of Earth is 12,756 kilometers
rounding down radius is 6,000,000 meters
Area = πrr
3.14159 * 36 * one T sq m * 1000 w * 365 * 24
3.14159 * 36 * 1000 * 365 * 24 terawatthours
Roughly 1 billion terawatthours
That's the total energy received by the Earth from the Sun in a year.
Please check my work. :-)
Happy New Year!
Back atcha!
Happy New Year everyone!
I thought people here might be interested in this bit I wrote about a general class of problem in science/epistemology. I would particularly appreciate suggestions of examples of this not taken from physics to maybe include in Part 2: https://aetherialporosity.substack.com/p/neptune-and-vulcan-part-1
(I guess this is me spending my (was it yearly?) opportunity at self-promotion in an open thread. Sadly this blog was on a long hiatus at the time of the previous Classified thread, but there were some people from here apparently enjoying it before this hiatus, and this topic seems particularly relevant for this community - so now seemed like a good time to use this!)
Anyway, thanks everyone, and have a great 2024!
I noticed that question 41 of last year's prediction contest ("Will an image model win Scott Alexander’s bet on compositionality, to Edwin Chen’s satisfaction?") is at 62% on Manifold, so I tried typing the queries into ChatGPT (prepending the words "Please draw"). Contrary to the contest rules, I only made one attempt for each.
As a reminder, the queries are:
1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat
3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert
4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick
5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
Results are at https://photos.app.goo.gl/MZREnriZutKYsyeP6.
For 1, it is definitely a stained glass window showing a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder, but it still can't get the key in its beak.
2 seems great. The man is also wearing a top hat, which suggests the computer may be hedging its bets as to wear the hat should go, but the cat's hat is much nicer. The cat is staring directly at the viewer, while the man looks at it with an ambiguous expression (is wondering why the cat has a better hat?). It's quite an arresting image.
On 3, the computer is still putting the bell in the llama's mouth and not on its tail. Otherwise correct.
4 and 5 are both perfect.
I don't know about Edwin Chen, but I'm satisfied that 3 out of 5 images are correct. There's also a striking improvement in the quality of the images compared with Scott's 12 September 2022 post.
I. was able to get a slightly imperfect raven in about 5 tries, and a better one in about 10:
https://i.imgur.com/cHvloYU.jpgM
https://i.imgur.com/ieSYmuS.jpg
I call the first one imperfect because the entire image isn't exactly stained glass -- it's more like a woman with a raven on her shoulder standing in a rel library, standing in front of a stained glass window. In the second one the woman and the raven are much more clearly made out of stained glass.
Also got the llama, though I had to use a sneaky approach to get it, and it took about 50 tries. Also, llama's tail is shaped like a pony's tail.
https://i.imgur.com/dBUupdN.jpg
I think you're harsh: the first example looks obviously stained glass to me. You may be over-indexing on a particular style of stained glass.
It is interesting that in all these examples the computer chooses to place the woman and raven directly in front of a window. Presumably it associates stained glass with windows, so it feels it needs to put a window in the picture. Although I have been in libraries with impressive windows, the more typical case is to use artificial lighting so that the books can run floor to ceiling.
PS I guess another point is that I cannot recall ever seeing a stained glass window where the scene depicts a further window as a prominent element. Although that sort of playfulness is popular in some artforms, I'm not aware of it in stained glass. I would also expect the glazier to use clear glass for the (interior) windowpane in this case.
Yeah, I may be being too strict. What was on my mind was whether somebody judging the images would rule out the first one I gave as too flawed to count. I made quite a few images from this prompt, and they actually vary quite a lot in how stained-glassy the woman & the raven and the books in the background are. Degree of stained-glassiness comes down to presence of thick black outlines around an element (in real stained glass, these would be places where 2 pieces of glass were joined) and how broken up the elements of the picture are by black-line divisions . In the first image, major elements of the image (raven, woman's hair, woman's face) have black lines around them, but are not broken up into smaller pieces. In the second, they are. Note the black lines dividing up the woman's face, neck, and dress, and the raven's feathers. As for the books in the background, in the first image there are no black lines around them -- no visual cues that these are a stained glass representation of books, rather than a real shelf of them. In the secon image the books all have lines around them, and also are interspersed with decorative elements.
Is it incapable of getting the key in the beak, or is it reluctant? I was asking an AI to make a bunny eating spaghetti, and it kept not putting the spaghetti in the mouth. When I went out of my way to clarify that the spaghetti should actually be in the bunny's mouth, a message indicated that my request might be inappropriate.
I eventually got it to do it by asking it to make the spaghetti like yarn.
One trick to get better results in a situation like that is to put the thing that the AI is reluctant to do first. So if you want a big white bunny eating a bowl of spaghetti on a piano bench, you ask for "a bunny eating spaghetti out of a bowl." then add the other info in a 2nd sentence.
I'm not able to say, although I note that in the case of the llama it has put the bell in its mouth when it should be on its tail, so I don't think it's a general taboo against creatures holding things in their mouths.
DALL-e is very very determined not to make an image of a llama with a bell on its tail. It is behaving the way it did in the past when I would ask for physically impossible things, like a person swallowing himself, just to see what it was like. It's like it just cannot wrap its"mind" around the idea of a llama with a bell on its tail. Something about the training set? I have a little collection of its weird shenanigans when asked very forcefully to put the bell on the tail:
https://i.imgur.com/30E2Kam.png
https://i.imgur.com/V2q7a76.png
https://i.imgur.com/8gdX1Rh.png
https://i.imgur.com/hJVwy2m.png
https://i.imgur.com/sFg57Vo.png
It's an odd confusion. As far as I can tell, llamas do not usually have bells at all. Cows and cats of course do have bells, which in both cases always hang from their necks, so if the computer thought that creatures with bells always had the bell on a collar, I could understand, but it seems to want to attach the bell to the llama's muzzle/harness.
It's not hard to get Dall-e to make animal pictures that show aniimals doing things they never do -- for instance, a cat wearing a suit. But perhaps something like a cat in clothes is easy because lots of animations -- Disney, etc. -- depict animals doing human things, including wearing clothes. But llama's are not commonly used in animations that do that sort of thing, so maybe the lack of vaiability in llama representations in the training set make DALL-e rigid to the point that it can't deal with being asked to show a llama with a bell in an unusual place.
I was interested to learn recently that the NYT's famous front page about UFO/UAP that kicked off the renewed interest in all that stuff came shortly after an Iranian report on its airforce encounters with strange aerial objects. They concluded that they were American hardware. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/01/14/did-iranian-fighters-battle-ufos/).
I'm just requesting any articles about how this discourse has changed in recent years that seemed particularly sensible and helpful to ACX people. Also, Happy New Year everyone.
Doesn't directly answer your question but you may be interested in this documentary that just came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t72uvS7EJT4
Thank you - I didn't know about it.
Happy new year everyone.
My topical question is about exactly how unhealthy alcohol is.
Obviously there are a lot of studies suggesting it has harmful effects, but without medical expertise it's hard to aggregate them into an overall picture of how concerned you should be. Is the average drinking habit roughly equivalent to smoking some number of cigarettes a week? being overweight? not excursing?
The takes I've seen on the overall health impacts range from: fine in moderation, to somewhat harmful but probably still worth the recreational benefits, to, basically like smoking and in a rational no one would consume any of it.
Does anyone have an evidence based take on the cost benefit calculation of drinking compared to smoking or other recreational dugs, or just sobriety?
I liked this podcast on the subject: https://soundcloud.com/user-344313169/episode-118-the-effects-of-alcohol-on-health-and-performance the hosts are two doctors. There are links to sources on that page if you aren't interested in listening to the podcast. I believe at the end of the podcast they both said, after reviewing all the evidence, they each have 1 to 3 drinks a week.
My understanding from my oncologist and the NYT reported studies is that even small amounts of alcohol are now considered risky. Small meaning two or three drinks a week. This evidence has been accumulating over the past decade or so and seems to have hit a critical mass.
I was someone who had a small glass of red wine most nights with dinner. Having just had breast cancer without any genetic or other risk factors, I now don't drink at all and don't eat meat, as well as a bunch of other things. Substantial exercise and less meat and more vegetables is correlated with a half or more reduction in risk of recurrence for people in my situation (the drugs I take don't have that big of an effect).
I'm going to make the leap that if those changes make such a huge demonstrable effect for people in my category, that they're likely to be important for those wanting to prevent cancer.
I think smoking is pretty clearly worse compared to a small amount of drinking. Drinking and smoking together I think has an even riskier synergistic effect. Recreational drugs encompasses a huge category of things from almost no risk to very high risk, and depending on dose and frequency.
It's a public health question which means it's very hard to answer, because public health is junk science. For an alcohol-specific example, I learned a few years ago the history of the UK's official advice on drinking and where it came from:
https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/22/drinking_made_it_all_up/
"According to The Times newspaper, the limits are not based on any science whatsoever, rather "a feeling that you had to say something" about what would be a safe drinking level. This is all according to Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party who produced the guidelines."
"The latest bunch revised its advice to pregnant women on what could be considered a safe amount to drink while pregnant from a little, occasionally, to none at all, ever. Again, this advice is based on no new evidence"
That was back before the Woke Revolution. Since then the guidance was updated yet again to remove any distinction between men and women, as clearly there are no biological differences between them at all.
This is roughly how all public health and epidemiology works - academics realize they will be feted as experts if they pull some "science" out of their arse, do so, and there are no repercussions. This advice then becomes slavishly followed by doctors who can get struck off if they object too loudly with this new medical expertise. Eventually the academics conclude they can say whatever they want and use their position of trust to engage in social engineering.
There's probably some useful data out there somewhere, but you're just as likely to encounter noise that looks reliable but isn't.
You are confusing epidemiology as an academic subject with the making of official recommendations by governmental agencies.
Sadly not. I read lots of academic epidemiology and the government officials were just doing what they were told by the academics. The rot starts there.
Speaking of distinctions between men and women, is it possible that safe alcohol amounts should just be based on weight?
It's determined by blood volume and liver function. Since blood volume doesn't increase linearly with weight (though it increases somewhat) you'd need a function keyed off ideal weight which then increases asymptotically as the person gets fatter. And then you'd need to apply an additional reduction for women since women's livers are worse at processing alcohol than men's.
Likewise, male livers are worse at processing cholesterol which makes them more susceptible to heart disease. So men should be advised to stay away from cholesterol rich foods more than women. For reasons left to the reader this fact is not nearly as controversial.
It might be worth studying people who don't drink because of a history of alcoholism in their family, but who have never been alcoholics themselves. This isn't a perfect proxy for the whole population because they might be more conscientious than most people, and they might have more adverse childhood experiences because of alcoholism in the family.
I also wonder whether people like me who don't drink because of detesting the taste of alcohol are a distinct subgroup. There's got to be some metabolic cause, but does it correlate on its own with better health? Worse health? No effect?
I had a previous version of this comment, but when I posted it, it appeared twice. I deleted one of them, and they both went away.
One thought I have with respect to this:
>> It might be worth studying people who don't drink because of a history of alcoholism in their family...
I've seen claims that alcoholism has a higher score for 'inherited' than most other behaviors or social factors that have been studied for being caused by inheritance.
Is that true? If so, is it possible that behavior-patterns that would be called responsible-drinking, or not-alcoholic, are also inherited?
I always wonder about that as well. My family has a long history or alcoholism with some bad effects, and personally, I love the taste of alcohol and how it feels being drunk. It is one of the best feelings in the world for me. I pretty much completely stopped drinking after college to avoid having the same problems as my family.
My wife dislikes the taste of most alcohol, but most importantly, hates the feeling of being drunk. She considers it profoundly unpleasant, so when she does drink, she makes sure to stop at one glass.
There must be some genetic differences causing the different experiences, and it'd be so interesting if we understood it better.
Epidemiological studies have shown that moderate drinking (less than 3 standard drinks per day) potentially has health benefits, such as reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. But epidemiological studies are hopelessly confounded; in particular, it's often people who already have underlying health issues who give up alcohol entirely. I was taught in medical school that moderate levels of drinking are good, actually, but consensus has shifted in the past 10 years - not many scientists still take that point of view.
However, there's still not much evidence to suggest that moderate levels of drinking (no more than 2 standard drinks a day for men, no more than 1 for women) has significant harms. It may in theory slightly increase the risk of head, neck, oesophageal and gastric cancer. And drinking within 2 hours of sleep definitely decreases heart rate variability during sleep, which is a marker of lower quality sleep and can lead to health problems down the line.
Essentially, if you're trying to optimise health -
- have alcohol only with meals
- never have more than 1 - 2 drinks per day
- don't drink within 2 hours of going to sleep
Or just abstain - completely fine. Personally I only ever have alcohol on special occasions, and no more than 1 drink.
Also, and quite obviously, there's a lot of space between total abstinence and ~3 drinks a day. I find "a few drinks a month" to be quite sane. Negligible health effects if any, but you still taste it as an occasional unhealthy treat.
Just wanted to add to this that my mother had alcohol (a glass of wine) only with meals and only about two drinks a day, and died of liver damage after thinking she wasn't doing anything wrong for two decades. The missing variable (as far as I can tell in hindsight) was that she ate very little in general, and she drank less water/tea/etc between the wines than would have been sensible, just out of general dislike of ingesting things. Between low weight, being female, and probably having a genetic predisposition to a weak liver, it was enough to kill her.
That’s terrible. My condolences.
Thank you; I miss her a lot, she was a very special woman and steep role model to try to live up to. Honestly, though, I reckon all deaths are terrible, I just wanted to share this one as valuable anecdata for people who might be on the fence about their drinking habits while maybe being in a remotely similar situation. If I can help stop someone die that way, I'd like to. Maybe my random internet comment helps someone.
You can read the first pages of this report to get an overview, for what it’s worth. For example pages 10 to 16. (p 5 to 11 according to the page numbers in the document. )
https://www.ccsa.ca/sites/default/files/2023-01/CCSA_Canadas_Guidance_on_Alcohol_and_Health_Final_Report_en.pdf
In studies, people who drink a bit are healthier than people who don't drink at all. It's a chicken and egg problem, because a lot of people don't drink because they are unhealthy, because it would interact with their medication, or because they're recovering alcoholics.
It's also a bit difficult because everyone has a strong agenda. People with a religious anti alcohol bias will say any amount is bad. People with a normalcy bias will assume that a bit of alcohol must be ok.
So the question whether light alcohol consumption (like a glass of wine with dinner) is better or worse than abstinence is impossible to answer from the evidence.
Heavy drinking to the point of drunkenness is bad. Being drunk makes you prone to vomiting and injuries and bad decisions. In the long term it hurts your heart and brain and liver. Of course, most people who occasionally get drunk are still fine. But there's always a risk of developing alcoholism, especially if anyone in your family has it.
Whether it's better or worse than other drugs is difficult to say, because "other drugs" is a pretty broad field. Alcohol is legal and regulated, so I'd feel more comfortable drinking a glass of wine at any given moment than taking basically any other drug. Just due to concerns about a predictable dose and possible adulterants.
In short, small amounts of alcohol are probably fine and possibly even beneficial. Large amounts are bad. Getting really drunk every day is probably worse for you than smoking every day, if only because of the acute injury risk.
My personal recommendation would be not to drink alcohol, or to drink the minimum amount needed to fit in with whatever social group you're hanging out with (if they're all heavy drinkers, find a different group). But if you enjoy it, a glass or two every now and then is probably harmless.
nit, re:
>Alcohol is legal and regulated, so I'd feel more comfortable drinking a glass of wine at any given moment than taking basically any other drug.
Caffeine and the other methylxanthines (e.g. theobromine), as generally used in coffee, tea, chocolate etc. are also generally regarded as safe.
edit: FWIW, I've drifted towards teetotalism, but with no ideological or religious component, just the way my personal habits drift. At the time that the cardioprotective effects of one drink a day were thought to make it the most prudent choice, I tried to work it into my habits, but it didn't really fit.
> It's also a bit difficult because everyone has a strong agenda.
I suspect that alcohol is a traditional tool to expose psychopaths in your social circle.
Psychopaths are emotionally different from other people (they lack the ability to feel certain emotions), but they mask it by observing people and displaying emotions they don't actually feel. When they get drunk, they (1) are in an unusual emotional state, and (2) their ability to observe and pretend emotions is impaired, so they are likely to expose themselves by doing something improper -- other people will probably not pay much attention at given moment, as they are also drunk, but they may remember it the next day, and they will have common knowledge.
Therefore, if I was a psychopath, my goal would be to convince everyone to only talk about how unhealthy alcohol is, and ignore its use as a social tool.
Not what you're asking for I realize: But in my mind the risk of alcoholism outweighs all other effects of alcohol, whether health- or pleasure-related. I don't have any numbers to add, but I've seen several (unrelated) situations first hand of how it ruins lives, often across generations. After that it's just never felt very enticing.
(I've been drunk a handful of times and don't particularly regret it. I had fun in the moment I suppose. I also don't begrudge anyone else their drink, as long as it doesn't affect me or ruin the lives of people I care about. I just wouldn't recommend it.)
I think alcohol is way worse than smoking for people who get addicted to it. At least smoking doesn't destroy your relationships and your sanity.
Absolutely: Alcohol ruins your judgment and personality: Smoking only ruins your lungs. Those can be cut out.
2026 first violent AI rights demonstration in the UK or USA is my only current major prediction. Labour to win UK in 2024, Trump no idea.
Nearly no one will give a shit about AI rights. It's way too low on the Hierarchy of Cuteness.
I detect a fallacy here. Are you an Effective Altruist? They are fond of suggesting that everyone except themselves thinks charity begins and ends with funding rescue centres for little fluffy kittens. In fact plenty of people are prepared to campaign for south Africans and Gazans and the trans without as far as I know claiming that those groups are above average cute.
1) Those are humans. The instinct that humans matter is already quite common.
2) The hierarchy of cuteness is a heuristic, not a law. Nobody is claiming that cuteness is sufficient to accurately predict how people will weigh something morally.
Contra all that, I would say
1. Humanity is in my view the self awareness we share, common genetic descent is just an accidental quality which as far as we know happens at the moment to have the same extension as self awareness. This may be right or wrong, what matters for my prediction is that enough people believe it.
2. Any campaign to recognize AI rights will have at its disposal all the persuasive abilities of AI, which is already thought pretty good at that sort of thing.
3. This genuinely has the possibility to be the biggest philosophical and political question in human history. I have a pretty good idea what I am going to think about known unknowns; I have no idea what will make me think machines are self aware or what I think the moral consequences are.
4. Even if it were not, there are at least two constituencies who will be highly incentivised to make it an issue. One is culture warriors/SJWs, and the other is Yuddites (or neo Yuddites or anti Yuddites) who realize that there's more to worry about than PCM, and another whole new academic discipline to be founded here. It is laziness that prevents me from sitting down to write the Superintelligence of AI moral philosophy.
>I have no idea what will make me think machines are self aware or what I think the moral consequences are.
An even knottier question may be caused by the very broad range of possible "motivations" of AIs. Is reinforcement learning part of "growing" an AI or coercing it? What should count as an "authentic" statement of preference from an AI? LLMs are being built with an eye towards applications - is "desire to perform a task" part of the "inner" motivation? Part of a constraint?
And there's the rub. Potentially sentient things including humans are black boxes to us. If you buy a used car you can't ultimately know if the vendor is consciously defrauding you or not, despite you both being human and there being only two possibilities. So how are we ever to know what an AI is thinking? It becomes a matter of faith. Possible bad outcomes are we wrongly deny sentience and commit a huge injustice or we wrongly affirm sentience and a hundred years down the line learn what it is and how to detect it. Turns out AI never had it and we have been dancing to the tune of a lot of hallucinating Chinese room operators with no more self awareness than an electric toothbrush.
I’m with you 100% on all four. My intention was to push back on the claim that the hierarchy of cuteness is a fallacy, but if that line was meant more as a rhetorical flourish than a serious claim we might just be in agreement (I also think people over-index on it sometimes).
Sorry yes, you are right. What I meant was (and you can't tell this from what I said) that Effective Altruists make the fallacious claim that donors to charity are either Effective Altruists or fluffy kitten sanctuary sponsors. No intermediates.
I have had this claim made to me by an EA. Trouble is it was on here, where finding anything again is impossible.
Rights? People will be demanding that AI is restricted if anything.
There will be calls to that effect, sure, just as there were no doubt people who wanted to extend rather than abolish apartheid. But I find it at least as plausible that there should be self awareness in a box of electronics as that there is a real and objective quality called gender as distinct from sex in a human being, and people seem keen enough to assert rights based on that claim. I also think non recognition of self awareness is a much greater injustice than non recognition of gender.
Iiuc metaculus doesn't have a submission deadline and is instead doing their usual thing of allowing you to update at any time. Wish they did it differently - I like doing one day's work submitting predictions and then forgetting it until next year, with metaculus as is most of the alpha is in remembering to update on news.
(Not to blame Scott here, congrats on the twins and your swampedness is understandable and sympathetic).
> The ACX 2024 Predictions Contest challenges your ability to forecast deep into the new year from its earliest weeks. To participate, make your predictions, and we will take a snapshot of every standing prediction on January 21st, 11:59 PM PT. These snapshots will determine the contest winners.
Ah, I missed that line, thanks.
(I think you can still see other people's predictions before submitting? But I could be equally wrong about that)
They will be revealed after the snapshot.
Happy new Year
I love them too. They're better for mental health because you don't feel like as much of a failure if you fall short sometimes. For me, it's the Year of Attention. Over the last several years, my ability to pay attention to things I really want to care about has diminished greatly. Whether it's books, TV shows, movies, sometimes even time alone with my girlfriend. I don't think it's healthy, so I'm trying to find habits and engage with better forms of media, put my phone down more, and retrain that muscle.