I see Freddie DeBoer has disappeared from ACT's blog roll. I assume this is because DB came out against EA very aggressively, but I wonder if Scott has publicly discussed his reason for the removal.
E-stim is an effective method of helping wounds to heal.
"PT wound focuses on interventions vs nursing wound care which mostly focuses on dressing changes.
Reimbursement dropped suddenly about 10-15 years ago for these procedures. To the point where 15 minutes of Estim for wound care is like a $20 service and so most places stopped offering it. Even though the research supports it. Medicare don't care with their fee schedules.
Same thing with compression, serial debridement, NPWT, pulse lavage, ultrasound MIST, UV light treatment, maggot therapy, and iontophoresis. All of which are evidence based and have a significant impact of wound healing outcomes."
This can be viewed as an instance of the American medical system being especially wicked, and there's a case for that, but there's also a point that if a centralized system isn't isn't centralized in your favor, you have a problem.
Could there be an effective charity which focused on evaluating medical procedures used in various countries and advocating for procedures that aren't widely used? It might not be EA because what it's doing isn't is similar enough to be checked numerically.
I will probably repost this in the next open thread.
You absolutely cannot lose, and while I don't quite know how the site works there should be a mechanism to resolve such bets that have already been falsified.
A question for the Jews in the audience. If you take a genetic test like 23andMe, what location does it point to as the source of your ancestry? Israel? Some place in eastern or central Europe?
How much of a son's intelligence is determined by the mother? Supposedly, it's significantly more than the amount determined by the father. I did a surface level dive into this, but I'm getting a lot of conflicting results.
More than five years ago the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality published a systematic review of treatments for Bipolar Disorder in adults. In their conclusion, the agency "found no high- or moderate-strength evidence for any intervention to effectively treat any phase of any type of BD versus placebo or an active comparator." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532183/
Has there been any new research in the last few years that does provide higher-strength evidence?
"Emma keeps a journal filled with questions – she doesn't always answer them all, it's more of an exercise in thinking about the world." This is very good. See also Theodore Sturgeon's "Ask the next question."
She started with a survey of people in and near her school. 150 replies. Then it went viral. 30,000 replies.
The first questionnaire supported her hypothesis that magpies are more likely to swoop at bald men.
She also figured out a way, using Legos, to represent the results.
I think the idea behind the presumption that Black-sounding names won't get a job interview is that the racist interviewer doesn't actually hate Black people, s/he just thinks they're likely to be incompetent, lazy, all the old racist stereotypes about Blacks.
So if the Black person does get an interview, this gives an opportunity to prove oneself diligent, industrious, intelligent, etc., and thus overcome those prejudices. This wouldn't work if the interviewer is actually opposed to hiring Blacks, but it could work if all that's needed is to overcome stereotypical prejudice with actual evidence.
I've noticed that the "new reply" indicator for ACX has become more reliable. If I click on new replies at the top, I actually get new replies at the top instead of the earliest comment staying at the top, and I don't seem to be getting comments I've seen listed as new replies.
Posted on the general principle that if something is worth complaining about, it's also worth mentioning when it's fixed.
I recently ran into the matter of people giving contradictory orders in a couple of different contexts.
*Not* giving contradictory orders, and generally thinking about whether the orders you're giving are clear and feasible is not taught in the mainstream as far as I can tell. I think it's taught in the military, but I don't know whether the lessons are remembered reliably.
I'll cash in my self-promotion voucher now if that's cool.
I wrote a response to Freddie deBoer's recent pair of articles on trans issues (https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/contra-deboer-on-transgender-issues). Some of the points I made were reiterations of points I made while commenting on Scott's articles on this topic, so I want to think the commenters here for the inspiration.
There's a lot of talk about declining populations, but I haven't seen analysis of what the world of declining populations will look like.
I've believed for a long time that a great many old people will die of neglect-- the only way to get adequate care toward the end will be if you're ahead of average in both love and money, though having a sensible government helps.
However, that doesn't get into the fine-grained stuff. Country A is down to half of its previous population. Adjacent Country B is down to three quarters. Does anything predicable happen?
Saw some new TFR (total fertility rate) measurements for 2023 a little while ago. Shocking no one, they were bad. New lows across most of the developed (and a fair amount of the developing) world. At this point I imagine most people around these parts are aware of the global decline in fertility and also aware that basically no one has figured out how to reverse it. While in the past I've wondered and occasionally fretted about what we can do to increase the number of babies people have, I think I've finally come to point where I realize that our efforts (to a degree) don't really matter. What I mean is that baring a massive, fast, and sustainable jump global fertility the change in demographics is already baked in. We're staring down multiple decades of declining population and even if people do start having more kids it will be many decades before they grow up, enter the work force, and have kids of their own. I guess what I'm saying is that, to use a climate change analogy, I'm past the "We need to stop it" phase and into the "We need to adapt to it" phase. So what does that look like?
Certainly that's a big topic, but I want to focus on one area in particular that's been troubling me. It's the area of economic investment. A common refrain I hear from those who look forward to population decline is that it will lead to more abundant resources for those who are still here. But that doesn't make much sense to me. With rare exception, resources aren't just lying around waiting to be used. They need to be harvested, refined, and brought to market, all of which requires investment of capital. My fear, and here I stress that I'm not an economist and may be incorrect on this, is that we are blundering into a future where it makes less and less sense for individuals and companies to invest in new products and industries due to the expected decline in demand that will accompany population decline. With fewer expected customers, less investment leads to lower production of goods, leading companies to hire fewer people and increasing unemployment, causing a positive feedback loop of spiraling economic deterioration. This could seemingly be offset if other adaptations (such as increased automation) lead to increased labor productivity and the attendant increase in purchasing power by workers, but I imagine it would have to be a significant increase. Or of course the development of a new economic model (if a viable one exists for our current situation).
So that's my fear (or at least one of them). That our current debt-driven investment model and the massive increases in quality of life we have come to expect from it is in for a very rough few decades and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Maybe I'm being irrational and jumping at shadows. But I look at our near future and I get very worried.
I noticed that since New Years, I immediately (ie within 1-2 minutes) get about 40 - 50 likes on all new posts, regardless of how good they are. This didn't happen before. Has anyone else with a Substack noticed anything like this, and is there a known explanation?
Not sure about self-promotion rules here, so please forgive me if I am transgressing some explicit or implicit rule. I just completed a project that I feel would be interesting to readers here. I wrote a song that begged for a manifestation by a famous vocalist who has long since passed. I leveraged some open-source AI tools to accomplish this, and I have to say I like the results. You can listen to the piece here:
In creating this, it became apparent that the legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of AI to modify and generate content in this context are far from being fleshed out, and there is no apparent consensus on where the boundaries lie between copyright, fair use, droit d'auteur, etc. lie.
I discuss this in the description on Youtube:
Yes, AI software was involved. However, this recording was not a "1-click" gimmick. It took real work, and if we may say so, at least a modicum of musical talent and experience to pull it off. Questions may arise regarding the appropriate use of simulated voices of well-known vocalists to produce novel performances. This is especially relevant for artists who have passed away, or are no longer producing new material.
Andy Warhol famously "art-ified" images of famous people and products such as Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's Soup. Hip Hop was founded on a culture of 'borrowing' samples of older records and reinterpreting them in new forms and ways (one of the musicians on this track worked with De La Soul; google their efforts to clear all the samples in "3 Feet High And Rising").
The impulse behind this recording is not to defy Intellectual Property rights, nor is it to deny artists their fair share of remuneration for their work. The world of music and the business thereof have struggled with technical innovation since the invention of the printing press, followed by the player piano, audio records, sampling, file sharing, and now with AI-enabled works. We hope to spark a discussion on this topic. Presently, there is no clear legal guidance regarding this issue, so we offer this piece in the spirit of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".
It's 2024, and as part of my project of giving less of a shit every year, I'm considering that it might be time for an anime girl profile picture. Unfortunately, I don't watch anime, and I don't have time for a new hobby. Is there an online guide, or possibly an AI chatbot, to help me through the process?
Ever since antisemitism went mainstream on the left, most forms of social media has gotten significantly worse.
There's an interesting conclusion here about speech norms: Some leftists want to "ban nazis" from their online spaces, because they're afraid of being overwhelmed by nazis/trolls. But there aren't really enough far-right online trolls to do that at scale - it works on neiche sites, but wouldn't work on a major site like Reddit. On the other hand once significant numbers of leftists (which are much more common on online spaces) started going full or semi nazi, it not only became frequent, it wasn't really pushed back on by mods, since they can't politically push back on it as easily.
This also has implications for the Colorado Trump ruling: If banning someone from the conversation is something that only ever works when punching down socially, banning Trump can only really work if he's genuinely unpopular (this only works in places without strong repressive centralized rule, but american elections are mostly like that - you can't really ban Trump in states where he's genuinely likely to lose).
(1) My previous username was inflammatory (though not wrong and entirely justified), I changed it by switching the object of hatred to something less confusable with humans, Intellectual Property laws.
I maintain that it's entirely ok (and - from my POV - desirable) to express hatred for non-human entities such as States and Religions, but I also recognize how easy it's to mistake an expression of this form as a coded expression of hatred towards the people who live in those States or follow those Religions, and I'm sorry. When I chose that username, I wasn't in my most rational state either.
I agree with and endorse everything in the Arabic and English phrasing of that declaration (nothing against the Hebrew version, I just don't understand a single word in it. Yet). Of particular note:
> We [...] pledge to fight the dehumanization of Gazans, Palestinians, and Muslims, and the dehumanization of Israelis and Jews in general.
> As proponents of human rights, we must fight apartheid and oppression. However, this should not involve demonizing the civilians who are associated with the stronger side, and such a struggle certainly must not condone the massacre and atrocities committed against Israeli civilians and other nationals on October 7.
> [However] the widespread support among the Israeli public for the nature of the Israeli retaliation in Gaza — a retaliation which in itself resulted in a horrific extent of killing and suffering — together with the calls by prominent public figures (as well as parts of the Israeli public) for ethnic cleansing and population transfer, are cause for deep concern. [i.e. fucking nuts]
> In the West, a disturbing trend has emerged among some young people of dehumanizing Israelis, and, sometimes, Jews. This serves to rationalize killing them or violating their rights by reducing them to proxies of Israeli oppression.
> The dehumanization of Israelis and Jews, as well as Palestinians and Muslims, is unacceptable. A person is not merely a representation of a collective identity, history, events, or political orientation. A consistent humanistic approach must address all these [fucking nuts] developments.
> we must oppose any rationalization of crimes against civilians, regardless of their identity or location.
Square brackets mine, inserted whenever I find the original phrasing too soft.
(3) I noticed that a relatively disproportionate number of the music I hear is due to the recent flaring of the conflict and my recent interest in Hebrew, Judaism, and the history of the conflict in general.
Topic: Zionism, Biblical promise of Palestine/Judea to Jews
Sentiment: Pro-Israel, Zionist
Note: The linked version is a parody by artist Nina Paley, which flips the original sentiment on its head and critiques the Zionist project by the choice of visuals alone
I’ve started a health and healthcare Q&A on my substack in the hopes of improving health literacy and understanding of how to navigate the healthcare system; Evidence-based and inspired by reader questions. The clinical trial essays turned out to be really helpful for people so I wanted to write more and reach more folks than I can in a shift. No questions too weird, complex or basic. Would love to start strong with ACX reader questions and get some feedback if anyone’s interested?
Sometimes you hear people saying that Iraq should have been partitioned into three vague ethnostates and that this would have solved a whole lot of problems. Sometimes you also hear the same sorts of people complaining about the partitioning of India, and saying that India/Pakistan/Bangladesh should _not_ have been partitioned, and that not partioning it would have solved a whole bunch of problems. Is there any way to win this?
Is "India shouldn't have been partitioned" just a Hindu nationalist belief anyway?
and my interlocutor predicted that Scott would have significantly updated his take by now to downrate the power, robustness, and sustainability of "universal culture".
So:
1. Scott, if you're reading this, have you in fact updated and if so to what extent?
2. Others, have you updated on the issue since 2016?
Personally, I have updated against the short-term monotonicity, but not (much) against the long-term inevitability, of the triumph of universal culture. I'm biased, because I'm a convinced militant Anywhere and thus natural cheerleader for that triumph. But two things seem in its favor:
(a) much of the current apparent resistance to universal culture is cosplaying; many fewer people want to actually return to pre-universal mores and lifeways than to symbolically raise those mores and lifeways in status.
(b) the long-term trend is still positive: the world is arguably still more universal-cultured than 20 years ago, and certainly than 50 years ago, and it's too early to tell (insert obvious Zhou En-Lai reference) whether present-day ructions indicate a lasting shift against that or only, as I would bet, a temporary hiccup.
I don't remember ewhere I saw it but I recently saw someone indicate that the distinctly black "creative" names are currently way less popular among African-Americans than previously, making them a generational trend that is not being repeated among the currently born babies. I'm not sure how to measure that, though - popular name lists would be a bad way to see this effect, since the whole point of unique names is that they're not popular.
In the US, It looks like the spike of violent crime surrounding Covid has faded, and we are now back on the general downward trend we've been on for the last thirty some years. 2023 had the fewest homicides (edit: per hundred thousand people) since 1966. Whatever the cause, we live in a dramatically safer society than our parents grew up in.
There seems to be a lot of people who want you to believe otherwise, I've noticed.
I question the assumption that a Dispreference for unusual names is racism, specifically. There's no clear evidence that Deshawn does worse as a name than Ng or Blart. Dispreference for unusual names does not target a specific race and most studies are not controlled with the addition of random names not associated with a particular ethnicity. I also question whether it can be assumed that preferences in vetting resumes correlates perfectly with vetting in hiring practices within an organization. Early stages of interviews are sometimes even outsourced.
Maybe you should add the correction directly to the original Dad article in the form of a footnote, since people who read the article might not read this open thread.
A friend is about to get his masters in data science, and is starting to job hunt. How does he find good into about which industries are doing the most hiring of people in that field? I asked in a google and got a bunch of places that want to give you advice and get you to pay for their seminars. I want some trustworthy site that just summarizes the actual info.
Hello, I'm a criminal defense attorney and I've written a little legal parable about the recent trump disqualification in Colorado and the attitude that courts should just "stay out of it"
There is a second story about names, that students with names closer to the beginning of the alphabet (ie, near the top of lexically ordered lists) do better in school. This "alphabetism" has been attributed to these students recieving more and more favorable attention from their teachers. Here's a paper which finds a boost that persists until people are in their 30s:
No need to speculate on the names. Cremieux already posted sibling control studies, which show no effects of names on anything worth caring about. It's a standard story of selection bias: low human capital Black parents give their children low status names. When you look at siblings in the same family, the children with Blacker names don't fare any worse than their siblings with less Black names.
psst is great for people who want to deeply understand what they do and verify every step, and for anyone who has fun with information theory and cryptography. And for fools like me who want to implement their own crypto ;-)
psst is also very new. I welcome any feedback, particularly if you tried psst, or if you find a security flaw.
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). This is the 2nd time I posted this here and I won't post this any more:
I was reading Scott's post "Is Enlightenment Compatible With Sex Scandals?" again, it is one of my favorite posts.
Ive always wanted to explore why this is, and wrote a post to expand on this "Why Do Gurus Have so Many Scandals?".
The tldr is: We think enlightenment is a one shot affair, you're either enlighented or you're not. But it would be better to think of it as a spectrum with people falling all over the line. People can be spiritually awake in some areas of their life but completely asleep in others.
Which means just because someone had a spiritual awakening, doesnt mean they have dealt with their sexual shame/obsession, or their anger or any other vice.
In fact, all these vices become supercharged and rush to the surface, and if the Guru engages in spiritual bypassing (which most traditional paths do), they try to ignore their issues, until one day they can't. And that's why Gurus keep having scandals.
A related thing is we treat gurus like celebrities, and like with celebrities, there is a tendency to either lift them into the sky or try to tear them down. There is no "middle" ground, where we accept flawed humans who nonetheless have something useful to say.
For my Substack writing I've been using an old school text-processor, which meant that each time I turned to publish on the platform I had to go through the rigmarole of manually, point-and-click, edit in the italics, headings and so on. It occurred to me only now —better late than never— that I could first export my texts to .docx (or equivalent), then copy paste the result into the Substack interface. A quick testing showed me it works.
I direct my question to those who have been doing something similar or directly composing in Word: Are footnotes also correctly copy-pasted? Are there any limitations to this? Does this fail in any aspect?v
Usually when you don’t want to do a rote task like folding laundry or memorizing flash cards, you can just force yourself to do it and get pretty much the same result as if you were intensely interested in the outcome. But for tasks like learning complicated new conceptual information, I think we have some kind of defense mechanism that prevents us from actually changing our understanding of the world to adopt new facts / concepts / procedures. It’s a much higher metabolic expense too.
Why does extreme loss of interest / extreme apathy happen? We know it exists decoupled from just procrastination or aversion because of how it changes our ability to absorb information, even the kind we are told to learn (like when you get depressed or unusually apathetic in school, not only is it harder to start a reading assignment, the retention and understanding seem much lower too). If our behavior and meta-learning are so optimized for inclusive fitness / survival, it’s very strange that we have some kind of behavioral encoding for this. I used to think that super-stimuli and a very novel world to our ancestral situation would account for this, but most people are functional and not depressed, and humans seem pretty goal rational at all times. If it’s a nutritional or very specific environmental thing, how would we know what to look for?
I have a memory that sometime last year, Scott posted a link to a Twitter/X thread about keywords to use when searching FB marketplace for antiques and stuff, but I can't find the link! Am I crazy or is the link somewhere and I'm not finding it?
I appear to be in charge of sections of two small rivers/creeks. Does anyone have any tips on "land" management of such things?
I'm generally aiming to keep them clean, and suitable for small children to wade in, and reduce erosion, while also making them look nice (i.e. not overgrown jungles that you need a machete to get through). The current setup looks pretty good on the erosion front, with the banks covered with small trees, shrubs, vines, and other things, except for a few small openings here and there which tend to have rocks around them. I've got access to a few decent-sized tree rounds (~2 foot diameter, about 1.5 foot high) and a never-ending supply of moderate sized sticks and branches.
Previously I posted a link to my imaginative paper on combining a linear city with a vactrain (vacuum transport). I received some helpful feedback.
I decided in December to greatly enlarge my personal goal of explicating this concept. I decided to read some of the classic books (or synopses) on urban planning and consider in depth how my concept would stand up according to the principles and critiques explained in these books.
The following link leeds to my bibliography which includes my attempt to create overarching categories that would serve as a chapter outline for the book that I hope to create.
Anyone with a casual or serious interest in urban planning would benefit from clicking on the link.
I have a pretty unique first name and I definitely think it’s been formative in terms of my personality and way of relating to others. I think others with unique names probably have a similar experience of feeling different or somehow Other, compared to folks named Mike or Dave.
It would be interesting to see if rarity of first name correlates to anything in particular.
I think that, with racism in its current form, a black person who seems culturally white has a better shot than one who doesn't. And I think black people think that too. I overheard a coworker tell someone that he grew up in the ghetto, but you'd never know it from how he presents himself. He's like a black Ned Flanders. I've heard of other black people doing the same thing.
Re: AI take-off, what are the arguments that intelligence progression is likely to be explosive/increasing rate, instead of each step getting harder faster than the agent gets smarter? Yes the AI can at some point do its own research, but what is the argument for the next step of intelligence getting progressively easier relative to the existing step of intelligence?
I wrote another essay, this time it's on QTc prolongation and psychotropic drugs. It's primarily for a medical audience, but I think it will be interesting for anyone who wants to refine how they think about medical risk systematically.
This is more venting than asking advice, because I know I'm just going to have to put up with it, but here goes.
I will shortly be interacting once again with a family member I don't want to interact with, because we're on bad terms, because they like to use weaponised apologising.
By which I mean, any time they perceive something you say as criticism (and they perceive everything out of your damn mouth as criticism), they start in on the "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" bit.
And if you try stopping them, they take that as "I've angered you more! I'm sorry, I know I'm worthless, I know you hate me, I know I should be dead" - well, you can probably imagine for yourself the litany that results.
All of which ends up with "I just wanted you not to run the washing machine 24/7" being forgotten and instead now *I* am the Big Bad who is angry and abusive to the mentally fragile martyr.
(You can tell I'm disgruntled from the above).
But I think that this kind of weaponised apologising must go on with other people and in real life elsewhere as well, because it seems like a useful weapon: when faced with being called out on poor behaviour, or even mildly requested not to do something, you can turn it about to make the other person the Bad Guy by going into full-on self-flagellation mode, especially when you then go running to a third party about how terrible you are and how bad you feel about upsetting Original Person, and then third party gets onto Original Person about "look, can't you just get along with this person, why do you have to be constantly picking on them?"
So, yeah. Not sure how I'm going to deal with it apart from saying as little as possible as I can get away with and avoiding this person as much as I can for the next few days.
Speaking of the dadpost and names: I'm not sure if the call on name rankings was controlling for gender and age variance in what a given ranking means. The 50th percentile marker for SSA rank/real-world popularity has dropped precipitously over the decades (I think it's somewhere in the 500s these days, while would've been hundreds of ranks higher when most readers were born), and always been slightly lower for girls than boys.
Another tricky part of directly translating ranking to IRL 'popularity' is that a large chunk of nominally unpopular names are variant spellings of more popular ones, so the names you 'hear' are a smaller group than all listed names. This kind of counters the earlier effect a little, as the difference between Sophia, Sofia, Sophiya, Sophiah, and Sofeeah doesn't matter to someone who is not named any sort of Sophia, and thus the non-Sophia names come across as rarer than they might technically be. I know the /r/namenerds guys had a list of "adjusted SSA rankings" at one point, which showed that Sophia and Jackson retained 'first place' years after they both nominally lost it. (Descriptively that should be Jaxon, as it's the more popular spelling by a noticeable margin. Some people shudder at this. I don't -- name spellings are descriptive, not prescriptive. I do, however, reserve the right to object to Jaxson.)
One more complication is that what names are 'normal' or 'abnormal' varies a lot by region/culture, too. There's really no regional unity in US baby names these days, if there ever was. The archive of Baby Name Wizard has a bit on this:
The names there are a touch "outdated", in that they describe more of a late zoomer/early postzoomer cohort, but the sensibilities are clear enough. I particularly like the last one, re. Red/Blue Tribes, because it shows the unintuitive-to-most-people fact that conservative names are "liberal" and liberal names are "conservative" (e.g. conservative parents really dig unisex names). Unisex names are kind of their own rabbit hole down naming forces -- most people's intuitions about them are wrong (e.g. the pattern of names being "irrevocably" feminized isn't real) -- but that's a particularly interesting intuition to poke at, because people tend to assume a sort of political or ideological reason behind unisex names.
What actually keeps fascinatingly showing up about names is that they're based on some sort of ineffable Vibe, but this Vibe is *shared*, in a way you can't call anything but "collective unconsciousness". It's consistently very funny to get people to look up the patterns of "names they thought sounded really cool and unique as a kid", and see how they're always starting to creep up the list indelibly. The classic WaitButWhy post on baby names alludes to this -- everyone comes up with the same "unusual-but-not-too-weird creative name to call my kid", without cross-referencing it, and all the kids end up with the same name. This cohort it's Luna. There are more Lunas than you think. More than that. It's the tenth most popular name right now. "Well, there's always my backup unusual-but-not-weird creative name, Evelyn." That's the ninth.
I argued with a progressive/communist about Israel and Palestine last night, probably not my smartest choice. He's convinced that Israel doing a lot of killing and destruction is simply bad, and he's doing his bit (going to demonstrations) to try to get the US government to pressure Israel.
A lot turns on what "From the river to the sea" means, and there's a rather sharp divide between people (mostly not Jewish) who think it means a democratic, peaceful state which includes what are now Israelis and Palestinians and people (mostly Jewish) who think it means expelling or killing all the Jews in the region.
Of course, there might be a difference between what's in a lot of people's heads and what policies actually happen.
So, after some intellectual and emotional effort (I was very angry), I concluded it's worth looking at how much thought has gone into how a peaceful one state solution might work. Who's in charge? What's the structure? What can be done about Hamas? Or the violent right-wing Israelis?
I don't know what's going on there with the interviewer. What proportion of jobs have the same person screening resumes and doing the interview? Seems like in many cases they're different people, and so if you have a name signalling a discriminated-against identity, you get two opportunities for adverse prejudice: the screener and the interviewer, whereas if your name doesn't signal your identity, only the interviewer's prejudice matters.
Perhaps I'm over-indexing on tech and big corporate jobs. They'll have separate people doing screening vs. interviewing. But perhaps most jobs aren't like that.
For anyone working in Data Science/AI in the US, how's the job market at the moment? My partner and I have been discussing emigrating to the US from Canada, but I'm not sure how tough the process is/how competitive my profile is. I have an MA in Econ (+ some PhD years but didn't complete) and work experience, but nothing too incredible. I'm not necessarily trying to work at tier 1 companies, but I would prefer to live in one of NY/LA/SF
Is WHR (waist-to-hip-ratio) overrated? It always makes me cringe a bit when I hear psychologists mention that the optimal WHR is 0.7 as if it's something super scientific. I think psychologists make a big fuss of WHR because it's such an easy thing to measure. Just measure across the hips, then the waist, divide one by the other and you're done!
Looking at WHR in isolation, if you show men silhouettes of female figures with varying WHR they pick 0.7 as the most attractive, but this is an unrealistic situation. In the real world it's not that important. When a man checks a girl out he doesn't pay mention attention to her WHR. Face, BMI, boob and butt shape are much more important. As long as a girl has a general hourglass figure it's fine. The precise ratio whether it's 0.7 or 0.8 just isn't very important. I've heard psychologists claim that the WHR is the most important thing of all when it comes to female attractiveness and all I can do is laugh.
According to this study WHR only accounts for something like 2% of a girls bodily attractiveness. Over 80% was determined by just BMI.
The two most important things when it comes to a female attractiveness are face and BMI. The facial proportions men find most attractive are those typical of girls about 14. The BMI men generally prefer is about 18-20 which again is typical for girls about 14. A cute face and slim petite body is what men like. Adult women are generally a bit chunkier than what most men prefer. Maybe not so coincidentally about 14 is also the age women report receiving the most sexual harrasment and are most likely to be sexually assaulted.
A further coincidence is that girls of this age that would have been just prior the beginning of their reproductive lifespan in ancestral times is exactly what biology predicts men would be most interested in, but we're not allowed to talk about this. We can talk about the adaptive value of rape, murder, kidnap, wife-beating and genocide but the possible adaptive value of attraction to minors is taboo and off limits. Strange.
Boob size is probably overrated too. Breast pertness is more important than size. Small perky boobs with soft unused nipples are more attractive than big heavy ones, because they signal youth and nulliparity. When women have boobjobs they make them both big and pert giving them a kind of super-pubescent look.
Skin texture is something that hasn't been studied much to my knowledge but is very important in determining attractiveness. Much more important than WHR at least. Imagine a girl with a cute face, nice slim petite body and perky boobs... but the grey wrinkly skin of an 80yo. Gross. If it's ever studied I'm confident it will turn out that the soft smooth skin texture of young teen and preteen girls is what men find most attractive.
Be particularly careful with EEG, the field is full of grifters hiding just how noisy and low bitrate the only method is. I'd even advise ignoring it completely, yes, even the startups saying they can use AI to get magic patterns from mathematically opaque datasets.
The thing that really irked me re. the 737 door blowout incident is the 2-hr limit on the cabin voice recorder. I don't know anything about designing planes, but I do know a lot about recording technology, and this 2-hr limit feels like something from the 70's. At least they are not using cassette tapes, I checked: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/Pages/cvr_fdr.aspx .
It seems reddit is very, very unfriendly to unverified accounts.
I made an account to post in a subreddit I read a lot, and commented too quickly and got shadow banned. Perhaps they deliberately make drive-by commenting like that difficult to impossible for new accounts to prevent spam, but it's also annoying and I guess I will use reddit all the less.
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.
There's something I don't understand about my body. I'm the princess in the story "The Princess and the Pea"! Even the smallest bit of debris underneath me is intolerable. Even a spec 1mm in diameter feels like a boulder. Is anybody else a princess in this way?
I see Freddie DeBoer has disappeared from ACT's blog roll. I assume this is because DB came out against EA very aggressively, but I wonder if Scott has publicly discussed his reason for the removal.
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1830769.html?nc=4#comments
E-stim is an effective method of helping wounds to heal.
"PT wound focuses on interventions vs nursing wound care which mostly focuses on dressing changes.
Reimbursement dropped suddenly about 10-15 years ago for these procedures. To the point where 15 minutes of Estim for wound care is like a $20 service and so most places stopped offering it. Even though the research supports it. Medicare don't care with their fee schedules.
Same thing with compression, serial debridement, NPWT, pulse lavage, ultrasound MIST, UV light treatment, maggot therapy, and iontophoresis. All of which are evidence based and have a significant impact of wound healing outcomes."
This can be viewed as an instance of the American medical system being especially wicked, and there's a case for that, but there's also a point that if a centralized system isn't isn't centralized in your favor, you have a problem.
Could there be an effective charity which focused on evaluating medical procedures used in various countries and advocating for procedures that aren't widely used? It might not be EA because what it's doing isn't is similar enough to be checked numerically.
I will probably repost this in the next open thread.
I don't have a manifold account, but anyone who does should engage in arbitrage by buying NO on The Winds of Winter being published by 2023:
https://manifold.markets/DylanSlagh/what-year-will-the-next-book-in-the
You absolutely cannot lose, and while I don't quite know how the site works there should be a mechanism to resolve such bets that have already been falsified.
A question for the Jews in the audience. If you take a genetic test like 23andMe, what location does it point to as the source of your ancestry? Israel? Some place in eastern or central Europe?
How much of a son's intelligence is determined by the mother? Supposedly, it's significantly more than the amount determined by the father. I did a surface level dive into this, but I'm getting a lot of conflicting results.
Could a boat like this do a round the world cruise?
Could it cross the Atlantic without refueling?
Could it survive rough seas?
https://youtu.be/rBDXRb3rmUo?si=NIpYmg6333UvI8lj
More than five years ago the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality published a systematic review of treatments for Bipolar Disorder in adults. In their conclusion, the agency "found no high- or moderate-strength evidence for any intervention to effectively treat any phase of any type of BD versus placebo or an active comparator." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532183/
Has there been any new research in the last few years that does provide higher-strength evidence?
Community science!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-09/magpies-swoop-bald-more-often-survey-finds/103297520
"Emma keeps a journal filled with questions – she doesn't always answer them all, it's more of an exercise in thinking about the world." This is very good. See also Theodore Sturgeon's "Ask the next question."
She started with a survey of people in and near her school. 150 replies. Then it went viral. 30,000 replies.
The first questionnaire supported her hypothesis that magpies are more likely to swoop at bald men.
She also figured out a way, using Legos, to represent the results.
I think the idea behind the presumption that Black-sounding names won't get a job interview is that the racist interviewer doesn't actually hate Black people, s/he just thinks they're likely to be incompetent, lazy, all the old racist stereotypes about Blacks.
So if the Black person does get an interview, this gives an opportunity to prove oneself diligent, industrious, intelligent, etc., and thus overcome those prejudices. This wouldn't work if the interviewer is actually opposed to hiring Blacks, but it could work if all that's needed is to overcome stereotypical prejudice with actual evidence.
Is there a "fractal wood burning" technique that works in metal? Like, something resulting in similar patterns.
I wrote a short story about the meaning of life (kinda):
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/
Warning: somewhat dark, a way to process recent tragedies in my life
I've noticed that the "new reply" indicator for ACX has become more reliable. If I click on new replies at the top, I actually get new replies at the top instead of the earliest comment staying at the top, and I don't seem to be getting comments I've seen listed as new replies.
Posted on the general principle that if something is worth complaining about, it's also worth mentioning when it's fixed.
I recently ran into the matter of people giving contradictory orders in a couple of different contexts.
*Not* giving contradictory orders, and generally thinking about whether the orders you're giving are clear and feasible is not taught in the mainstream as far as I can tell. I think it's taught in the military, but I don't know whether the lessons are remembered reliably.
This is both an ethical and practical matter.
I'll cash in my self-promotion voucher now if that's cool.
I wrote a response to Freddie deBoer's recent pair of articles on trans issues (https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/contra-deboer-on-transgender-issues). Some of the points I made were reiterations of points I made while commenting on Scott's articles on this topic, so I want to think the commenters here for the inspiration.
There's a lot of talk about declining populations, but I haven't seen analysis of what the world of declining populations will look like.
I've believed for a long time that a great many old people will die of neglect-- the only way to get adequate care toward the end will be if you're ahead of average in both love and money, though having a sensible government helps.
However, that doesn't get into the fine-grained stuff. Country A is down to half of its previous population. Adjacent Country B is down to three quarters. Does anything predicable happen?
https://visakanv.substack.com/p/are-you-having-fun-son
Sensible article about the nature of fun, the importance of fun, and the challenges of having fun.
Saw some new TFR (total fertility rate) measurements for 2023 a little while ago. Shocking no one, they were bad. New lows across most of the developed (and a fair amount of the developing) world. At this point I imagine most people around these parts are aware of the global decline in fertility and also aware that basically no one has figured out how to reverse it. While in the past I've wondered and occasionally fretted about what we can do to increase the number of babies people have, I think I've finally come to point where I realize that our efforts (to a degree) don't really matter. What I mean is that baring a massive, fast, and sustainable jump global fertility the change in demographics is already baked in. We're staring down multiple decades of declining population and even if people do start having more kids it will be many decades before they grow up, enter the work force, and have kids of their own. I guess what I'm saying is that, to use a climate change analogy, I'm past the "We need to stop it" phase and into the "We need to adapt to it" phase. So what does that look like?
Certainly that's a big topic, but I want to focus on one area in particular that's been troubling me. It's the area of economic investment. A common refrain I hear from those who look forward to population decline is that it will lead to more abundant resources for those who are still here. But that doesn't make much sense to me. With rare exception, resources aren't just lying around waiting to be used. They need to be harvested, refined, and brought to market, all of which requires investment of capital. My fear, and here I stress that I'm not an economist and may be incorrect on this, is that we are blundering into a future where it makes less and less sense for individuals and companies to invest in new products and industries due to the expected decline in demand that will accompany population decline. With fewer expected customers, less investment leads to lower production of goods, leading companies to hire fewer people and increasing unemployment, causing a positive feedback loop of spiraling economic deterioration. This could seemingly be offset if other adaptations (such as increased automation) lead to increased labor productivity and the attendant increase in purchasing power by workers, but I imagine it would have to be a significant increase. Or of course the development of a new economic model (if a viable one exists for our current situation).
So that's my fear (or at least one of them). That our current debt-driven investment model and the massive increases in quality of life we have come to expect from it is in for a very rough few decades and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Maybe I'm being irrational and jumping at shadows. But I look at our near future and I get very worried.
I noticed that since New Years, I immediately (ie within 1-2 minutes) get about 40 - 50 likes on all new posts, regardless of how good they are. This didn't happen before. Has anyone else with a Substack noticed anything like this, and is there a known explanation?
Hypnotherapy: is it bullshit? (My own impression is that it's a field split between hucksters and legitimate people)
Relatedly can anyone recommend a hypnotherapist if you had a good experience with one?
Not sure about self-promotion rules here, so please forgive me if I am transgressing some explicit or implicit rule. I just completed a project that I feel would be interesting to readers here. I wrote a song that begged for a manifestation by a famous vocalist who has long since passed. I leveraged some open-source AI tools to accomplish this, and I have to say I like the results. You can listen to the piece here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqiqIcmcZ1M
In creating this, it became apparent that the legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of AI to modify and generate content in this context are far from being fleshed out, and there is no apparent consensus on where the boundaries lie between copyright, fair use, droit d'auteur, etc. lie.
I discuss this in the description on Youtube:
Yes, AI software was involved. However, this recording was not a "1-click" gimmick. It took real work, and if we may say so, at least a modicum of musical talent and experience to pull it off. Questions may arise regarding the appropriate use of simulated voices of well-known vocalists to produce novel performances. This is especially relevant for artists who have passed away, or are no longer producing new material.
Andy Warhol famously "art-ified" images of famous people and products such as Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's Soup. Hip Hop was founded on a culture of 'borrowing' samples of older records and reinterpreting them in new forms and ways (one of the musicians on this track worked with De La Soul; google their efforts to clear all the samples in "3 Feet High And Rising").
The impulse behind this recording is not to defy Intellectual Property rights, nor is it to deny artists their fair share of remuneration for their work. The world of music and the business thereof have struggled with technical innovation since the invention of the printing press, followed by the player piano, audio records, sampling, file sharing, and now with AI-enabled works. We hope to spark a discussion on this topic. Presently, there is no clear legal guidance regarding this issue, so we offer this piece in the spirit of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".
YES!! It's finally been done, perhaps one of the greatest technical achievements of recent years!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12940397/310-AI-cat-flap-automatically-stops-pet-moggy-bringing-dead-prey-home-films-attempt-watch-back.html
Millions of cat owners, including myself, have been eagerly awaiting this for a long time!
It's 2024, and as part of my project of giving less of a shit every year, I'm considering that it might be time for an anime girl profile picture. Unfortunately, I don't watch anime, and I don't have time for a new hobby. Is there an online guide, or possibly an AI chatbot, to help me through the process?
Ever since antisemitism went mainstream on the left, most forms of social media has gotten significantly worse.
There's an interesting conclusion here about speech norms: Some leftists want to "ban nazis" from their online spaces, because they're afraid of being overwhelmed by nazis/trolls. But there aren't really enough far-right online trolls to do that at scale - it works on neiche sites, but wouldn't work on a major site like Reddit. On the other hand once significant numbers of leftists (which are much more common on online spaces) started going full or semi nazi, it not only became frequent, it wasn't really pushed back on by mods, since they can't politically push back on it as easily.
This also has implications for the Colorado Trump ruling: If banning someone from the conversation is something that only ever works when punching down socially, banning Trump can only really work if he's genuinely unpopular (this only works in places without strong repressive centralized rule, but american elections are mostly like that - you can't really ban Trump in states where he's genuinely likely to lose).
(1) My previous username was inflammatory (though not wrong and entirely justified), I changed it by switching the object of hatred to something less confusable with humans, Intellectual Property laws.
I maintain that it's entirely ok (and - from my POV - desirable) to express hatred for non-human entities such as States and Religions, but I also recognize how easy it's to mistake an expression of this form as a coded expression of hatred towards the people who live in those States or follow those Religions, and I'm sorry. When I chose that username, I wasn't in my most rational state either.
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(2) Amnesty International Israel published a declaration that a lot of Israeli celebrities and cultural figures signed: Resist the dehumanization of Palestinians and Israelis https://www.amnesty.org.il/2023/12/13/%d7%9e%d7%9b%d7%aa%d7%91-%d7%a4%d7%aa%d7%95%d7%97-%d7%94%d7%9e%d7%97%d7%a0%d7%94-%d7%94%d7%a4%d7%a8%d7%95-%d7%90%d7%a0%d7%95%d7%a9%d7%99/
I agree with and endorse everything in the Arabic and English phrasing of that declaration (nothing against the Hebrew version, I just don't understand a single word in it. Yet). Of particular note:
> We [...] pledge to fight the dehumanization of Gazans, Palestinians, and Muslims, and the dehumanization of Israelis and Jews in general.
> As proponents of human rights, we must fight apartheid and oppression. However, this should not involve demonizing the civilians who are associated with the stronger side, and such a struggle certainly must not condone the massacre and atrocities committed against Israeli civilians and other nationals on October 7.
> [However] the widespread support among the Israeli public for the nature of the Israeli retaliation in Gaza — a retaliation which in itself resulted in a horrific extent of killing and suffering — together with the calls by prominent public figures (as well as parts of the Israeli public) for ethnic cleansing and population transfer, are cause for deep concern. [i.e. fucking nuts]
> In the West, a disturbing trend has emerged among some young people of dehumanizing Israelis, and, sometimes, Jews. This serves to rationalize killing them or violating their rights by reducing them to proxies of Israeli oppression.
> The dehumanization of Israelis and Jews, as well as Palestinians and Muslims, is unacceptable. A person is not merely a representation of a collective identity, history, events, or political orientation. A consistent humanistic approach must address all these [fucking nuts] developments.
> we must oppose any rationalization of crimes against civilians, regardless of their identity or location.
Square brackets mine, inserted whenever I find the original phrasing too soft.
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(3) I noticed that a relatively disproportionate number of the music I hear is due to the recent flaring of the conflict and my recent interest in Hebrew, Judaism, and the history of the conflict in general.
A selection from my YouTube history:
(A) Louis Armstrong - Go Down Moses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf6jBP4YXwo
Language, Artist Origin: English, American.
Topic: The Jewish Exodus from Ancient Egypt, as told by the Bible
Sentiment: Pro-Jewish
==================
(B) Victoria Hanna - The Aleph-bet song/Hosha'ana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl1epz3tSSA
Language, Artist Origin: Biblical Hebrew and a bit of Aramaic, Israeli
Topic: Kabbalistic, Jewish prayer
Sentiment: Religious, Pro-Hebrew
==================
(C) Unknown singer, written by Umberto Fiori - Rossa Palestina (== Red Palestine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_ZiTkASS4M
Language, Artist Origin: Italian, Italy
Topic: Communism, Palestinian struggle
Sentiment: Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionist, Revolutionary Communist
==================
(D) Pat Boone - The Exodus Song (This Land Is Mine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY
Language, Artist Origin: English, American
Topic: Zionism, Biblical promise of Palestine/Judea to Jews
Sentiment: Pro-Israel, Zionist
Note: The linked version is a parody by artist Nina Paley, which flips the original sentiment on its head and critiques the Zionist project by the choice of visuals alone
==================
(E) A-WA - Habib Galbi (== love of my heart): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3bjZlmsb4A
Language, Artists Origin: Arabic of the Yemeni dialect, Israeli band of sisters descended from Yemeni, Ukrainian and Moroccan origins
Topic: Romantic
Sentiment: Longing and Sorrow
==================
(F) Hadag Nahash- Shirat Ha'Sticker (== Sticker Song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QflL6R2-k-8
Language, Artists Origin: Hebrew, Israeli band
Topic: Various
Sentiment: Various, mostly Anti-Arab and Pro-Israel (but not unironically, see the song's Wikipedia page)
==================
(G) Kofia - Leve Palestina (== Long Live Palestine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc-2lqvm-nM
Language, Artists Origin: Swedish, mixed Swedish and Palestinian band
Topic: Palestinian armed resistance
Sentiment: Anti-Zionist, Revolutionary Communist
==================
(H) Cairokee - Telk Qadeya (== That's [one] Issue): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVZDOUMAZXI
Language, Artist Origin: Standard Arabic mixed with Egyptian dialect, Egyptian band
Topic: Perceived double standards and Pro-Israeli bias by international organizations and US and EU governments
Sentiment: Pro-Palestinian, Anti-Israel
==================
Listening to a song doesn't constitute agreement with the (not-so) implicit messaging.
I’ve started a health and healthcare Q&A on my substack in the hopes of improving health literacy and understanding of how to navigate the healthcare system; Evidence-based and inspired by reader questions. The clinical trial essays turned out to be really helpful for people so I wanted to write more and reach more folks than I can in a shift. No questions too weird, complex or basic. Would love to start strong with ACX reader questions and get some feedback if anyone’s interested?
https://open.substack.com/pub/bessstillman/p/pulse-check-the-guide-to-healthcare?r=16l8ek&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Sometimes you hear people saying that Iraq should have been partitioned into three vague ethnostates and that this would have solved a whole lot of problems. Sometimes you also hear the same sorts of people complaining about the partitioning of India, and saying that India/Pakistan/Bangladesh should _not_ have been partitioned, and that not partioning it would have solved a whole bunch of problems. Is there any way to win this?
Is "India shouldn't have been partitioned" just a Hindu nationalist belief anyway?
I was recently, on another 'stack, discussing this classic SSC post:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
and my interlocutor predicted that Scott would have significantly updated his take by now to downrate the power, robustness, and sustainability of "universal culture".
So:
1. Scott, if you're reading this, have you in fact updated and if so to what extent?
2. Others, have you updated on the issue since 2016?
Personally, I have updated against the short-term monotonicity, but not (much) against the long-term inevitability, of the triumph of universal culture. I'm biased, because I'm a convinced militant Anywhere and thus natural cheerleader for that triumph. But two things seem in its favor:
(a) much of the current apparent resistance to universal culture is cosplaying; many fewer people want to actually return to pre-universal mores and lifeways than to symbolically raise those mores and lifeways in status.
(b) the long-term trend is still positive: the world is arguably still more universal-cultured than 20 years ago, and certainly than 50 years ago, and it's too early to tell (insert obvious Zhou En-Lai reference) whether present-day ructions indicate a lasting shift against that or only, as I would bet, a temporary hiccup.
I don't remember ewhere I saw it but I recently saw someone indicate that the distinctly black "creative" names are currently way less popular among African-Americans than previously, making them a generational trend that is not being repeated among the currently born babies. I'm not sure how to measure that, though - popular name lists would be a bad way to see this effect, since the whole point of unique names is that they're not popular.
In the US, It looks like the spike of violent crime surrounding Covid has faded, and we are now back on the general downward trend we've been on for the last thirty some years. 2023 had the fewest homicides (edit: per hundred thousand people) since 1966. Whatever the cause, we live in a dramatically safer society than our parents grew up in.
There seems to be a lot of people who want you to believe otherwise, I've noticed.
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/28/us-murder-violent-crime-rates-drop
I question the assumption that a Dispreference for unusual names is racism, specifically. There's no clear evidence that Deshawn does worse as a name than Ng or Blart. Dispreference for unusual names does not target a specific race and most studies are not controlled with the addition of random names not associated with a particular ethnicity. I also question whether it can be assumed that preferences in vetting resumes correlates perfectly with vetting in hiring practices within an organization. Early stages of interviews are sometimes even outsourced.
Maybe you should add the correction directly to the original Dad article in the form of a footnote, since people who read the article might not read this open thread.
A friend is about to get his masters in data science, and is starting to job hunt. How does he find good into about which industries are doing the most hiring of people in that field? I asked in a google and got a bunch of places that want to give you advice and get you to pay for their seminars. I want some trustworthy site that just summarizes the actual info.
Hello, I'm a criminal defense attorney and I've written a little legal parable about the recent trump disqualification in Colorado and the attitude that courts should just "stay out of it"
https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/p/the-parable-of-the-greatest-commandment
There is a second story about names, that students with names closer to the beginning of the alphabet (ie, near the top of lexically ordered lists) do better in school. This "alphabetism" has been attributed to these students recieving more and more favorable attention from their teachers. Here's a paper which finds a boost that persists until people are in their 30s:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3272556
Interestingly, I recall hearing about this since I was a kid, but can't find anything than this 2017 paper.
No need to speculate on the names. Cremieux already posted sibling control studies, which show no effects of names on anything worth caring about. It's a standard story of selection bias: low human capital Black parents give their children low status names. When you look at siblings in the same family, the children with Blacker names don't fare any worse than their siblings with less Black names.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/whats-in-a-black-name
I've built psst, a pen&paper implementation of Shamir's Secret Sharing: https://github.com/Sjlver/psst
psst is great for people who want to deeply understand what they do and verify every step, and for anyone who has fun with information theory and cryptography. And for fools like me who want to implement their own crypto ;-)
psst is also very new. I welcome any feedback, particularly if you tried psst, or if you find a security flaw.
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). This is the 2nd time I posted this here and I won't post this any more:
https://open.substack.com/pub/themahchegancandidate/p/causes-of-anxiety-for-people-named?r=ofm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I was reading Scott's post "Is Enlightenment Compatible With Sex Scandals?" again, it is one of my favorite posts.
Ive always wanted to explore why this is, and wrote a post to expand on this "Why Do Gurus Have so Many Scandals?".
The tldr is: We think enlightenment is a one shot affair, you're either enlighented or you're not. But it would be better to think of it as a spectrum with people falling all over the line. People can be spiritually awake in some areas of their life but completely asleep in others.
Which means just because someone had a spiritual awakening, doesnt mean they have dealt with their sexual shame/obsession, or their anger or any other vice.
In fact, all these vices become supercharged and rush to the surface, and if the Guru engages in spiritual bypassing (which most traditional paths do), they try to ignore their issues, until one day they can't. And that's why Gurus keep having scandals.
A related thing is we treat gurus like celebrities, and like with celebrities, there is a tendency to either lift them into the sky or try to tear them down. There is no "middle" ground, where we accept flawed humans who nonetheless have something useful to say.
Read the whole post: https://shant.nu/why-do-gurus-have-so-many-scandals/
For my Substack writing I've been using an old school text-processor, which meant that each time I turned to publish on the platform I had to go through the rigmarole of manually, point-and-click, edit in the italics, headings and so on. It occurred to me only now —better late than never— that I could first export my texts to .docx (or equivalent), then copy paste the result into the Substack interface. A quick testing showed me it works.
I direct my question to those who have been doing something similar or directly composing in Word: Are footnotes also correctly copy-pasted? Are there any limitations to this? Does this fail in any aspect?v
Usually when you don’t want to do a rote task like folding laundry or memorizing flash cards, you can just force yourself to do it and get pretty much the same result as if you were intensely interested in the outcome. But for tasks like learning complicated new conceptual information, I think we have some kind of defense mechanism that prevents us from actually changing our understanding of the world to adopt new facts / concepts / procedures. It’s a much higher metabolic expense too.
Why does extreme loss of interest / extreme apathy happen? We know it exists decoupled from just procrastination or aversion because of how it changes our ability to absorb information, even the kind we are told to learn (like when you get depressed or unusually apathetic in school, not only is it harder to start a reading assignment, the retention and understanding seem much lower too). If our behavior and meta-learning are so optimized for inclusive fitness / survival, it’s very strange that we have some kind of behavioral encoding for this. I used to think that super-stimuli and a very novel world to our ancestral situation would account for this, but most people are functional and not depressed, and humans seem pretty goal rational at all times. If it’s a nutritional or very specific environmental thing, how would we know what to look for?
I have a memory that sometime last year, Scott posted a link to a Twitter/X thread about keywords to use when searching FB marketplace for antiques and stuff, but I can't find the link! Am I crazy or is the link somewhere and I'm not finding it?
I wouldn't be surprised if there is some effect of having a uniquely googleable name, but it hasn't shown up in any studies because it's too recent
I'm guessing you're very busy nowadays, but I missed the traditional yearly survey :)
I appear to be in charge of sections of two small rivers/creeks. Does anyone have any tips on "land" management of such things?
I'm generally aiming to keep them clean, and suitable for small children to wade in, and reduce erosion, while also making them look nice (i.e. not overgrown jungles that you need a machete to get through). The current setup looks pretty good on the erosion front, with the banks covered with small trees, shrubs, vines, and other things, except for a few small openings here and there which tend to have rocks around them. I've got access to a few decent-sized tree rounds (~2 foot diameter, about 1.5 foot high) and a never-ending supply of moderate sized sticks and branches.
Previously I posted a link to my imaginative paper on combining a linear city with a vactrain (vacuum transport). I received some helpful feedback.
I decided in December to greatly enlarge my personal goal of explicating this concept. I decided to read some of the classic books (or synopses) on urban planning and consider in depth how my concept would stand up according to the principles and critiques explained in these books.
The following link leeds to my bibliography which includes my attempt to create overarching categories that would serve as a chapter outline for the book that I hope to create.
Anyone with a casual or serious interest in urban planning would benefit from clicking on the link.
Rodes.pub/LinetranBooks
This is my chapter outline.
CHAPTER CODES
BN–BASIC NEEDS
CC–CONNECTIONS & COMMUNITY
DD–DENSITY & DIVERSITY
ED–ETHICAL DESIGN
EE–ENVIRONMENT & ECOLOGY
HS–HOUSING SOLUTIONS
LG–LEGS NOT CARS
NL–NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE
PP–PARKS & PUBLIC SPACE
TT–TRANSPORTATION & TRANSIT
EC–ECONOMIC STRENGTH
FL–FAILURES & LESSONS
IC–INVENTING CITIES
MG–MARKETS & GROWTH
UP–URBAN DESIGN PRINCIPLES
ZR–ZONING, REGS, & LAND POLICY
All feedback is greatly appreciated!
I have a pretty unique first name and I definitely think it’s been formative in terms of my personality and way of relating to others. I think others with unique names probably have a similar experience of feeling different or somehow Other, compared to folks named Mike or Dave.
It would be interesting to see if rarity of first name correlates to anything in particular.
Regarding distinctively black names and hiring:
I think that, with racism in its current form, a black person who seems culturally white has a better shot than one who doesn't. And I think black people think that too. I overheard a coworker tell someone that he grew up in the ghetto, but you'd never know it from how he presents himself. He's like a black Ned Flanders. I've heard of other black people doing the same thing.
Re: AI take-off, what are the arguments that intelligence progression is likely to be explosive/increasing rate, instead of each step getting harder faster than the agent gets smarter? Yes the AI can at some point do its own research, but what is the argument for the next step of intelligence getting progressively easier relative to the existing step of intelligence?
I wrote another essay, this time it's on QTc prolongation and psychotropic drugs. It's primarily for a medical audience, but I think it will be interesting for anyone who wants to refine how they think about medical risk systematically.
https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/stop-twisting-yourself-into-knots
This is more venting than asking advice, because I know I'm just going to have to put up with it, but here goes.
I will shortly be interacting once again with a family member I don't want to interact with, because we're on bad terms, because they like to use weaponised apologising.
By which I mean, any time they perceive something you say as criticism (and they perceive everything out of your damn mouth as criticism), they start in on the "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" bit.
And if you try stopping them, they take that as "I've angered you more! I'm sorry, I know I'm worthless, I know you hate me, I know I should be dead" - well, you can probably imagine for yourself the litany that results.
All of which ends up with "I just wanted you not to run the washing machine 24/7" being forgotten and instead now *I* am the Big Bad who is angry and abusive to the mentally fragile martyr.
(You can tell I'm disgruntled from the above).
But I think that this kind of weaponised apologising must go on with other people and in real life elsewhere as well, because it seems like a useful weapon: when faced with being called out on poor behaviour, or even mildly requested not to do something, you can turn it about to make the other person the Bad Guy by going into full-on self-flagellation mode, especially when you then go running to a third party about how terrible you are and how bad you feel about upsetting Original Person, and then third party gets onto Original Person about "look, can't you just get along with this person, why do you have to be constantly picking on them?"
So, yeah. Not sure how I'm going to deal with it apart from saying as little as possible as I can get away with and avoiding this person as much as I can for the next few days.
Speaking of the dadpost and names: I'm not sure if the call on name rankings was controlling for gender and age variance in what a given ranking means. The 50th percentile marker for SSA rank/real-world popularity has dropped precipitously over the decades (I think it's somewhere in the 500s these days, while would've been hundreds of ranks higher when most readers were born), and always been slightly lower for girls than boys.
Another tricky part of directly translating ranking to IRL 'popularity' is that a large chunk of nominally unpopular names are variant spellings of more popular ones, so the names you 'hear' are a smaller group than all listed names. This kind of counters the earlier effect a little, as the difference between Sophia, Sofia, Sophiya, Sophiah, and Sofeeah doesn't matter to someone who is not named any sort of Sophia, and thus the non-Sophia names come across as rarer than they might technically be. I know the /r/namenerds guys had a list of "adjusted SSA rankings" at one point, which showed that Sophia and Jackson retained 'first place' years after they both nominally lost it. (Descriptively that should be Jaxon, as it's the more popular spelling by a noticeable margin. Some people shudder at this. I don't -- name spellings are descriptive, not prescriptive. I do, however, reserve the right to object to Jaxson.)
One more complication is that what names are 'normal' or 'abnormal' varies a lot by region/culture, too. There's really no regional unity in US baby names these days, if there ever was. The archive of Baby Name Wizard has a bit on this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170526074532/http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2008/9/of-names-and-politics-the-palin-story
https://web.archive.org/web/20150420164659/http://www.babynamewizard.com/map.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20181101115217/http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/1/red-and-blue-baby-naming-inauguration-2009-edition
The names there are a touch "outdated", in that they describe more of a late zoomer/early postzoomer cohort, but the sensibilities are clear enough. I particularly like the last one, re. Red/Blue Tribes, because it shows the unintuitive-to-most-people fact that conservative names are "liberal" and liberal names are "conservative" (e.g. conservative parents really dig unisex names). Unisex names are kind of their own rabbit hole down naming forces -- most people's intuitions about them are wrong (e.g. the pattern of names being "irrevocably" feminized isn't real) -- but that's a particularly interesting intuition to poke at, because people tend to assume a sort of political or ideological reason behind unisex names.
What actually keeps fascinatingly showing up about names is that they're based on some sort of ineffable Vibe, but this Vibe is *shared*, in a way you can't call anything but "collective unconsciousness". It's consistently very funny to get people to look up the patterns of "names they thought sounded really cool and unique as a kid", and see how they're always starting to creep up the list indelibly. The classic WaitButWhy post on baby names alludes to this -- everyone comes up with the same "unusual-but-not-too-weird creative name to call my kid", without cross-referencing it, and all the kids end up with the same name. This cohort it's Luna. There are more Lunas than you think. More than that. It's the tenth most popular name right now. "Well, there's always my backup unusual-but-not-weird creative name, Evelyn." That's the ninth.
I argued with a progressive/communist about Israel and Palestine last night, probably not my smartest choice. He's convinced that Israel doing a lot of killing and destruction is simply bad, and he's doing his bit (going to demonstrations) to try to get the US government to pressure Israel.
A lot turns on what "From the river to the sea" means, and there's a rather sharp divide between people (mostly not Jewish) who think it means a democratic, peaceful state which includes what are now Israelis and Palestinians and people (mostly Jewish) who think it means expelling or killing all the Jews in the region.
Of course, there might be a difference between what's in a lot of people's heads and what policies actually happen.
So, after some intellectual and emotional effort (I was very angry), I concluded it's worth looking at how much thought has gone into how a peaceful one state solution might work. Who's in charge? What's the structure? What can be done about Hamas? Or the violent right-wing Israelis?
I don't know what's going on there with the interviewer. What proportion of jobs have the same person screening resumes and doing the interview? Seems like in many cases they're different people, and so if you have a name signalling a discriminated-against identity, you get two opportunities for adverse prejudice: the screener and the interviewer, whereas if your name doesn't signal your identity, only the interviewer's prejudice matters.
Perhaps I'm over-indexing on tech and big corporate jobs. They'll have separate people doing screening vs. interviewing. But perhaps most jobs aren't like that.
For anyone working in Data Science/AI in the US, how's the job market at the moment? My partner and I have been discussing emigrating to the US from Canada, but I'm not sure how tough the process is/how competitive my profile is. I have an MA in Econ (+ some PhD years but didn't complete) and work experience, but nothing too incredible. I'm not necessarily trying to work at tier 1 companies, but I would prefer to live in one of NY/LA/SF
Is WHR (waist-to-hip-ratio) overrated? It always makes me cringe a bit when I hear psychologists mention that the optimal WHR is 0.7 as if it's something super scientific. I think psychologists make a big fuss of WHR because it's such an easy thing to measure. Just measure across the hips, then the waist, divide one by the other and you're done!
Looking at WHR in isolation, if you show men silhouettes of female figures with varying WHR they pick 0.7 as the most attractive, but this is an unrealistic situation. In the real world it's not that important. When a man checks a girl out he doesn't pay mention attention to her WHR. Face, BMI, boob and butt shape are much more important. As long as a girl has a general hourglass figure it's fine. The precise ratio whether it's 0.7 or 0.8 just isn't very important. I've heard psychologists claim that the WHR is the most important thing of all when it comes to female attractiveness and all I can do is laugh.
According to this study WHR only accounts for something like 2% of a girls bodily attractiveness. Over 80% was determined by just BMI.
https://i.imgur.com/YA2TDNR.jpg
The two most important things when it comes to a female attractiveness are face and BMI. The facial proportions men find most attractive are those typical of girls about 14. The BMI men generally prefer is about 18-20 which again is typical for girls about 14. A cute face and slim petite body is what men like. Adult women are generally a bit chunkier than what most men prefer. Maybe not so coincidentally about 14 is also the age women report receiving the most sexual harrasment and are most likely to be sexually assaulted.
https://i.imgur.com/YNpu84l.png
https://i.imgur.com/Gp8oI4a.jpg
A further coincidence is that girls of this age that would have been just prior the beginning of their reproductive lifespan in ancestral times is exactly what biology predicts men would be most interested in, but we're not allowed to talk about this. We can talk about the adaptive value of rape, murder, kidnap, wife-beating and genocide but the possible adaptive value of attraction to minors is taboo and off limits. Strange.
https://i.imgur.com/CuD0dYK.png
Boob size is probably overrated too. Breast pertness is more important than size. Small perky boobs with soft unused nipples are more attractive than big heavy ones, because they signal youth and nulliparity. When women have boobjobs they make them both big and pert giving them a kind of super-pubescent look.
Skin texture is something that hasn't been studied much to my knowledge but is very important in determining attractiveness. Much more important than WHR at least. Imagine a girl with a cute face, nice slim petite body and perky boobs... but the grey wrinkly skin of an 80yo. Gross. If it's ever studied I'm confident it will turn out that the soft smooth skin texture of young teen and preteen girls is what men find most attractive.
Be particularly careful with EEG, the field is full of grifters hiding just how noisy and low bitrate the only method is. I'd even advise ignoring it completely, yes, even the startups saying they can use AI to get magic patterns from mathematically opaque datasets.
The thing that really irked me re. the 737 door blowout incident is the 2-hr limit on the cabin voice recorder. I don't know anything about designing planes, but I do know a lot about recording technology, and this 2-hr limit feels like something from the 70's. At least they are not using cassette tapes, I checked: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/Pages/cvr_fdr.aspx .
It seems reddit is very, very unfriendly to unverified accounts.
I made an account to post in a subreddit I read a lot, and commented too quickly and got shadow banned. Perhaps they deliberately make drive-by commenting like that difficult to impossible for new accounts to prevent spam, but it's also annoying and I guess I will use reddit all the less.
Related to the recent post on “donating to capitalism”, here's an EA Forum post on donating to economic growth as a cause area, including suggestions from me and others: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oTuNw6MqXxhDK3Mdz/economic-growth-donation-suggestions-and-ideas
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.
There's something I don't understand about my body. I'm the princess in the story "The Princess and the Pea"! Even the smallest bit of debris underneath me is intolerable. Even a spec 1mm in diameter feels like a boulder. Is anybody else a princess in this way?