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.
Well I looked up maggot therapy. The name gives me the creeps but apparently it’s safe and effective.
Probably could use some rebranding to slide past the ewww factor. Even the maggots that are sold as ice fishing bait bill themselves as ‘Euro Larva’. A chic name for grubs of some sort.
Maybe something like “Larval Defenders” or “Autonomous Biological Healing Agents”
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?
There's a subtab where it looks like it could break it down further, but it says
" Although we've detected Ashkenazi Jewish DNA in your ancestral breakdown, we have not identified more specific locations that your recent ancestors may have called home.
Match Confidence level for Belarusian Jews: Not Detected
Belarusian Jews
Not Detected..."
...and then so on for several other countries' Jews. My ancestors are from Poland and Russia, but it says Polish Jews are "not detected" and doesn't have a section for Russians.
This gets at a broader question I've always had about these kinds of tests. How do they deal with human migration? Why tell someone their DNA points to the Ukraine, but not tell them that it's a mix of Viking immigration from the Ukraine from the North, Mongol/Tartar immigration to Ukraine from the East, Byzantines from the South, etc? Or why not go back further than that? Those Byzantines and Mongols and Vikings came to those places from someplace else, after all.
Cheekily, I'm tempted to start a DNA service of my own, never bother to test any samples at all, and just instead send a form reply to all customers indicating their ancestry is 100% African!
But it just underscores the same principle. Where do these services draw the chronological line?
I don't know for sure, but I suspect they don't try to look for some long-ago urheimat. They just compare your set of genetic markers with those of currently existing populations. That probably produces a reasonable indication of where one's ancestors came from for most people. But it might produce weird results for cases where there have been recent migrations, displacements or mass-casualty events.
"Polish Jews: Not Detected" is today's grimdark meme of the day.
My dad took one that gives two results, one specific and the other vague; I think the vaguer one is from further back. He got specific places in eastern Europe, and also "European Jewish".
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.
This is probably not the type of answer you're looking for, but... I suspect that it's a lot easier for pregnant women to cause brain damage to their own fetus, than for other people. So unless there are interventions that can roughly double the intelligence of a child, mothers win.
With zero evidence, I would guess that mothers have significantly more influence in childhood, because on average they do more child-rearing, but that the gap probably narrows and may even disappear as sons age.
1) no, because of 2, and because it's an unsafe type
2) no, not even close
3) yes, as long as the fuel lasts.
This boat has a hull shape for going fast (wide, flat in the back, asymetrical). This will burn a helluva lot fuel (@880hp you can prob. imagine) . You can go slow, of course, but the hull shape and the oversize engine work against it being efficient. This boat's movement in any sort of high waves or wind will be very, very uncomfortable. Take a big wave from the side and this boat will easily capsize, not right itself again, break all those large windows, and sink quickly. This is for fishing and sunbathing along the coast or at harbour. A bloated, floating caravan.
I'm pretty sure that the answer to all those questions is "yes" at the "could" level. If what you mean to ask is "can I bet my life that it *will*", then I'm going to guess that it depends greatly on the skill of the yachtsman, and if you have to ask then it isn't you.
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.
A modern conservative would also be worried that a black employee would be more likely to sue their employer. I have no idea whether this is a reasonable thing to worry about.
Resist ink and acid bath could produce that sort of etching in metals. A ‘negative’ of the desired pattern would be applied with resist ink and the exposed metal would be etched.
Off the top of my head, nothing inexpensive and straightforward comes to mind.
If you are up for a bit of coding, there is a lot of code to generate fractal patterns that could be sent to a pen plotter. It would be possible to gerry rig a resist ink pen into the plotter.
But remember that where the ink is applied is where the acid does not etch, so you would need a ‘negative’ of the desired etch pattern.
I gather that pen plotters are now considered obsolete so it might be possible to pick up a cheap used one.
In a former life I wrote code to automatically gin up AutoCAD drawings of mechanical components. When a new printing technology came along it was hard to even give the formerly expensive stuff away. I haven’t been in that particular world for a while so I’m not sure about availability.
I looked at the Wiki pages for wood fractal burning. That seems like a pretty dangerous activity. Lots of deaths by electrocution. Daisy chaining microwave transformers probably should be left to the pros.
I was thinking about something really expensive. Start with damascene steel. What you want is something with a chaotic-- not random-- variation so the pattern from the electricity is interesting.
I don't know if it would be safe, but maybe an oil and water mixture so that you can swirl it around and get marbling? I'm assuming you don't want full randomness, you want a coherent pattern that's semi-random.
This is very well done, and spoke to me very strongly. My family background is such that I was exposed to the concept of euthanasia at a relatively early age, and this puts into words some concepts that have roamed my brain unvoiced ever since, that I had half given up on finding words for until now. In the time since, I've completed a degree in ethical philosophy and more than half of the necessary training to become a pastor, which I tell you so you can properly appreciate what it means that this is the first time I have seen some of these concepts expressed recognizably outside my own head. I don't know what else to say but to thank you for writing this, and let you know that it touched at least one other person's soul.
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.
The difference is whether you have it set to New First or Chronological. Some posts are set to one as the default, others to the other. The thing to change it is right above the uppermost comment.
I haven't studied it carefully, but my impression is that it's a setting for individual posts, that (presumably) Scott controls. I think most of the normal posts are set to Chronological, and most Open Threads are set to New First, and Hidden Open Threads used to be usually set to Chronological, but now I've seen some that are New First. (My guess is that the default is Chronological and Scott sets open threads to New First when he remembers to, and it's not worth his time to ensure that he's super-consistent about it.)
And there's some sort of preference that's remembered in the browser, about how I manually set the order, but I think that gets reset to the default if I close the tab?
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.
By "people" do you mean one person contradicting themselves, or two people contradicting each other? For the second; no it's not fixed in the military, they just tell you to follow the last order you receive.
Not sure how you would go about teaching that. Assuming good faith, it seems like a memory/attention issue; they forgot what they said before. The only easy solution is "don't let them give the orders".
That sounds like general on-the-job education, which is great if the problem is the person doesn't know their job well enough, but brings up the question of why they're giving the orders from the checklist instead of handing the checklist directly to the subordinates. Typically you want a boss to handle the stuff a checklist doesn't account for.
"A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more reciprocally conflicting messages. In some scenarios (e.g. within families or romantic relationships) this can be emotionally distressing, creating a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), such that the person responding will automatically be perceived as in the wrong, no matter how they respond. This double bind prevents the person from either resolving the underlying dilemma or opting out of the situation."
"The double bind is often misunderstood to be a simple contradictory situation, where the subject is trapped by two conflicting demands. While it is true that the core of the double bind is two conflicting demands, the difference lies in how they are imposed upon the subject, what the subject's understanding of the situation is, and who (or what) imposes these demands upon the subject. Unlike the usual no-win situation, the subject has difficulty in defining the exact nature of the paradoxical situation in which they are caught. The contradiction may be unexpressed in its immediate context and therefore invisible to external observers, only becoming evident when a prior communication is considered. Typically, a demand is imposed upon the subject by someone whom they respect (such as a parent, teacher, or doctor) but the demand itself is inherently impossible to fulfill because some broader context forbids it. For example, this situation arises when a person in a position of authority imposes two contradictory conditions but there exists an unspoken rule that one must never question authority."
It doesn't have to be incompetence; it can be the reverse, or at least an instinctual tactic. Done systematically, it means that whenever they want to criticize, there's a handy excuse.
It's a big part of legal training. For all the frustrations people have with "complex legalese," the idea behind all that language is that if your contract ever ends up in front of a judge, there will be only one reasonable interpretation of the language under dispute.
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 one thing that confuses me about this whole debate... If minors can't be trusted to self-diagnose, if parents can't be trusted to make decisions for their child, and even the medical establishment can't be trusted with anything, why are we allowing minors to receive *any* medical treatment, particularly psychological ones? It's not like most of these treatments are based on hard science. Doctors still don't know shit about how the body works, especially the brain. Why are doctors prescribing medications to children when we don't even know exactly how they work?
I think parents can generally be trusted to make medical decisions for their children, and I think the medical establishment is usually trustworthy. There are glaring counter-examples when this assumption fails, in which case the state needs to step in and intervene, but we should default to assuming that parents want what's best for their children and doctors know what they're doing.
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?
I think about my aging father, in northern Maine, which doesn't have enough doctors, nurses, etc. He's enough of a jerk to me that I've stopped helping him. He has few friends. He does not have the resources (internal or external) to maintain, let alone create, a supportive network. There are many people in his situation, lonely and struggling but lacking the resources (internal and external) to change the trajectory.
Maybe there will be situational relief when climage change makes northern Maine a paradise.
There's that kind of situation, there's also people who just don't have descendants (that's me) or so few descendants that the descendants don't have the resources to take care of the older people.
I think technological improvements can matter, including medical technology.
For science fictional fun, imagine you can be rolled back to a healthy 30 years old (at least assuming you were healthy back then), but you lose your social security and possibly your pension. Has this already been used in a story?
A lot depends on the age of the population and whether the country is dependent on labor or something like finance. A labor-intensive country with a lot of farming/industry/service is going to suffer when the population gets inverted and there are more old people than young people. A place that depends on finance (which people can do in older age and doesn't require as many people to run) will have issues but far less.
If the demographics stayed the same as during growth with equal or larger younger cohorts compared to older, then things would probably be fine. That's not how population decline works. Fewer births means fewer young people, while the older generations are still around and in need of care. Compounding this is the increased availability of medical care such that these older populations are living longer and surviving worse and worse disabilities. There's going to be a lot of soul searching in the next 50 years about how much society can afford to care for their elderly. This will likely be harder in democratic countries, since the majority may be older themselves and unlikely to vote for reduced benefits/care. Reality may hit hard.
Yeah, good luck getting old people to give up their Medicare and Social Security benefits, especially when the over-65 crowd makes up an even larger percentage of the population than they do now. The solution? Repeal minimum wage laws (or just ignore them), import more people from the third world to take care of the old people (whose children are either non-existent or live a thousand miles away), let the younger people deal with all the economic and social consequences.
The part about repealing minimum wage seems unrelated. With a declining productive population there will likely be a shortage of people to do the tasks needed. Wages are not likely to fall.
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 don't worry about it because the relevant markets are generally a tiny fraction of the total population and then if very successful will expand for use by most of the population. You start off with the capability to produce hundreds of PC's, or cell phones or ear buds, etc per year move to 1000's per year to 10,000s per year.
Even for diminishing segments there is still potential opportunity. There are about 3.6 million births in the U.S. per year. Even if that falls in half. That still leaves opportunity for somebody who thinks that have a better crib which provides health monitoring and intellectual stimulation to the baby to sell 10,000s of products.
Yet the current and older generations die off little by little every day. If the each new generation is smaller and it is not sufficiently offset by increases in lifespan (and ignoring migration), the population and number of consumers will be getting smaller year by year. This is straightforward and the case in many countries in Europe.
Perhaps reduction in demand is offset by elderly and the ever-smaller generations consuming more and-or highly valuable stuff per unit?
I don't know anybody who gets into business to sell to their parents' generation. They focus on their peers, those are the ones they understand well enough to sell to. (Or on the teenagers, since they're stupid about money.) Their peers won't die off until they do, the incentives are stable.
That's interesting because there may be untapped opportunities. I was just reading some bitter grousing about boots marketed to older women. The boots had medium heels, and weren't available in wide and large sizes.
Some older women I know want flat boots, generally in large and especially in wide sizes, with good grippy soles, and can't find them.
I'm not sure how old the typical start-up founder is.
Isn't that the OPs point, kinda? If you are getting to business to sell for either your generation or teenagers, and every generation is smaller than the previous, the opportunities to do business seem to dwindle (unless for some other mitigating factors). And the generation of their peers is increasingly reduced every day by natural causes.
If he's specifically worried about people six generations from now not being interested in investing, then I guess, but I'm sure they'll figure it out once they're there. People today will not be dissuaded from investing because there will be fewer people six generations from now, or even one generation from now. Especially since people retire like twenty years before they die. The current generation will be there for a lifetime, the incentives are stable.
You keep saying "current generation will be there for a lifetime", but I have difficulties understanding what is the point: lifetime is not a constant, but a distribution. And it is difficult to me see how the upcoming - future generations don't influence the business expectations. If your business sells only to your age-peers and it is established, the number of age-peers is constantly decreasing, thus also presumably the returns of any investment you make. At the very end of the curve, the number of investors and customers is quite small as most of your peers are dead (and strictly speaking, statistically you are likely dead too, so either your business is bankrupt or you have now investors from later generations who plan the business making profit well into *their* retirement). Original investors in Coca Cola and KFC are long dead. When the population is growing, you can expect that number of potential customers increases over time. Without anything else, eventually growth is possible only by competition and/or innovation.
In many countries it is not "six generations from now" (granted, close to the current estimations of world population peak) or "after one generation" but more like "within current generation" or "next year" if we are talking about South Korea.
Well, there's one reason to not be worried: AI. We don't need more babies if we can simply build more workers. Unlike humans, you don't need to spend over two decades training each one. You can just copy and paste as many of them as you need. And once humanity is completely obsolete, they'll kill us all for being worthless liabilities, and we won't have to worry about anything!
To respond to the first part, while AI certainly has the potential as a tool for increasing worker productivity, I'm not certain that AI workers actually solves the problem. The issue is that while AI might presumably replace laborers, it won't replace consumers. And consumers are what businesses need to drive investment.
I think the point (taken non-sarcastically) would be that if it's much cheaper to meet demand due to much lower labor costs, there's still incentive for a company to exist and expand.
The demand is at 100, your labor costs used to be 80, now they're 20 - suddenly you have 60 more net at the same demand, and have incentive to expand your offerings where and however possible.
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?
Are you including Open Threads, or just the real posts?
If it's the latter, people are just amazed and grateful that you're still writing posts at all, after you posted "In the long run, we're all dad". The timing of the new year is just a coincidence.
All I can think of is that a bunch of people switched to Chrome as their browser. At least I think that’s the browser that permits likes. Personally I’m on Safari and don’t have the option to vote Like on a post of yours even if it solved all my problems plus gave me a new Prius.
Obviously, the key question to see if this could even be true is if "this didn't happen before" means "This never happened before at all" or "This is different from what was happening right before new year".
Psychologist here. Hypnosis is not bullshit. People vary in susceptibility, and the more susceptible you are the more benefit you can get from it. For susceptible people it can def help with chronic pain, anxiety, quitting smoking. So in my opinion it is good for circumscribed problems. For larger, whole-person problems (chronic self-hatred, avoidance and isolation, inability to sustain a relationship) it is not effective alone, but is useful for gaining insight.
Best way to find a trustworthy clinician is to search at the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. I recommend also that you choose someone with an MD, PhD in psychology or MSW.
I think I know at least two people who practise hypnosis, one therapeutic and one as a stage magician.
I'm told there is no special hypnotic state - its suggestion and social compliance (the hypnotisee will play along with the game of being hypnotised, as long as they're not asked to do something they don't actually want to do)
No, I really don’t think it’s true. I have been hypnotized, and it’s at least as altered a state as being moderately high on marijuana. In that condition I could not have been induced to do something I’d strongly object to, ,like say throw my wallet out the window. But if the hypnotist had suggested that my arm was filled with helium it would have felt really light and risen upwards. And no I would not have been playing along. In fact I was in a situation where the was no inducement to play along. A colleague hypnotized a whole group and I was sitting sort of in the back where nobody could even see whether hypnotic suggestions worked on me.
But, e.g.yu you want to give up smoking and that's why you went to the hypnotherapist, you might well play along with the game of being hypnotised into doing the thing you wanted to do to begin with.
https://try.nervaibs.com/ is a hypnotherapy app for IBS that claims to be as effective as the most effective (afaict) treatment for IBS, the FODMAP diet. The same university that came up with the diet also came up with the hypnotherapy protocol which lends some credence to this as a claim but I haven't looked into their research very much.
Based on this, I think there's other hypnotherapy out there that works though I haven't messed around with it much. fwiw nerva didn't work very well for me but probably because I kept listening to it right before bed and falling asleep + not wanting to use it very much
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".
That's just frustrating the cat, for no good reason.
Though the only cat I knew who was a really good hunter would hunt to eat. He'd catch birds daily and munch them, leaving only the head and maybe some feathers. He'd eat them in his place in a covered yard at the side of the house, to the terror of the dog who also lived there. Never brought them into the house as presents. Didn't have to be fed.
I don’t let my cats out of the house because bad things happen to a lot of outdoor cats and because they *are* carnivorous predators.
When I was still living in an apartment though I came home to find a little red flower on the living room floor. Turned out to be a mouse tail and the end of a mouse butt.
Not just that, as Gwern points out, cats are inherently dysgenic and literally bred to hate / fear humans!
Friendly cats that people love and make good house pets? They're fixed by shelters / responsible owners and never breed. The only cats that breed in volume are feral cats that escape and are good at / internally incentivized to hate and avoid humans (so they're not caught by animal services).
Cats: not even once.
(Yes, I'm a non-cat-owner currently staying with friends with a cat. A total a-hole cat.)
This reminds me of a discussion I've seen of rationalists being unlikely to have dogs and more likely to have cats. Is the claim about pets true?
If so, what's the explanation? The discussion seems to rest on the difficulty of having a dog if you're living in expensive cities, renting, and moving frequently.
I'm pretty sure having a dog is just more difficult, regardless - we have cats and it only minorly impacts our life: we can easily travel, we can leave for a weekend whenever we want, and for longer trips we just need someone to come fill a food bowl and clean a litter-box every few days, which is a fairly small ask.
Meanwhile, the people I know who own dogs seem to schedule their life around them: we often have to schedule it into our tabletop board game planning because so-and-so is going to have to go leave to take care of their dog, and they have a lot harder time traveling.
If you have children, your life is probably already inconvenienced enough that adding a dog won't majorly impact you, but for people without kids, a dog seems like a major life adjustment.
Scott needs to include this on his questions the next survey round, there's probably some interesting stuff there.
I'd personally bet pet ownership overall is lower than USA baselines, and I'd bet exotic incidence is higher in the affirmative pet owners, but not sure about any dog / cat ownership split biases relative to US baselines.
Wow, really? That's interesting, I guess I've never thought of the intersection of rat-sphere and pets.
I do know it was a hit the couple of times I brought some of my puppies to ACX meetups.
And I'm personally a dog person, with a max of 5 dogs at any given time, and having raised ~7 puppies over the years - but I think I'm a pretty non-central example of rat-sphere folk.
It seems just wrong that "intersection of rat-sphere and pets", doesn't point to pet rats. Which are a thing, and surprisingly cute though I still prefer cats. Rats may be lower-maintenance, if that is going to be the deciding factor.
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?
You should be like me and use a profile picture of the 1990 Moomin series, which is technically an anime because it was animated by a Japanese studio. If you want it to be an anime girl, then I would suggest one of the female characters, perhaps Little My or the Fillyjonk.
Why is anime girl profile picture a sign that you're giving less of a shit, or a sign of anything really?
The cutest anime girl I know of - if you mean this term literally - is Anya from SpyXfamily. If you mean "Anime girl" as in "attractive adult 2D woman", that would be Anya's mother in the same series.
Kinda feels weird to want an anime girl picture without caring about anime at all, but hey you do you. Might be worth checking out an AI Art generator or two, they're pretty good at the style and gives you the option to generate something to your taste rather than just picking a character at random.
If all you want is an anime-style picture and you don't care about them coming from a particular series that you're a fan of, may I suggest https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ ?
Otherwise, I suggest finding a picture of Madoka Kaname, who is the most rationalist magical girl - she was given the opportunity to have a single wish granted, and she spent 12 episodes thinking very carefully about it before making the best use of it that she could.
Hah, Madoka as a rationalist icon is something I never knew I needed. Madoka Magica is genuinely a good series, and probably one rationalists would find interesting - I'm not 100% I'd classify it as a good "gateway anime", but I guess it worked for sfdebris: https://sfdebris.com/videos/anime/madoka1.php
(EDIT: actually, looks like that's not a network issue on my end and those videos aren't up right now; too bad)
1. request anime recs with best art in a specific genre from twitter or reddit (psych horror? family? sports?) 2. fast forward for characters with a vibe you like 3. screenshot
you will be judged for not watching the anime you based your identity on but maybe that's on theme
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).
The word "Nazi" was historically redefined by Soviet Union for propaganda purposes.
Basically, for people in the West, the historical Nazis are remembered as "violent nationalists/racists following a populist leader, wanting to kill all Jews but also anyone else who got in the way".
For people in the Soviet Union, the historical Nazis were explained as "those who attacked Soviet Union".
Both of these things are technically true, but they have widely different implications for whom you would call a "Nazi" today. For example, in the context of the war in Ukraine, if you try to convince a Western audience that "Ukrainians are Nazis", you need to talk about Stepan Bandera. This is completely unnecessary when talking to the Russian audience -- the mere fact that Ukrainians fight against the Russian army already makes them "Nazis"; any argument on top of that would only complicate an already obvious thing. More extremely, using these two definitions, Zelensky either obviously isn't or obviously is a "Nazi".
With the leftist on the West it is complicated, because they grew up with the Western definition, but there is also a strong ideological pressure on them to adopt the Soviet usage. So they basically follow the Soviet definition, but add some rationalization on top of that about why it is not actually different from the Western definition.
For example, when talking about Trump, they can correctly point out that he is a populist leader who occasionally uses a nationalist rhetoric. Of course, the same could be said about Putin, only more strongly, but you typically won't hear this from the left, because this is not the actual criterion they use, only the post-hoc justification.
Once you understand this, "banning Nazis" simply means banning anyone who opposes the left. And if someone on the left is violent, nationalist/racist (but not *white* nationalist/racist), uses a populist rhetoric, and maybe also hates Jews... of course none of that makes them a "Nazi", so there is no need to ban them.
Yeah, I've noticed I have this too - for me growing up "Nazi" meant "someone who wants to kill the Jews", but even the standard American definition focuses just as much in the other aspects.
(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 wouldn't go quite so far as calling it "well-stated": without the surrounding context, it's got some wiggle room. But yes, that's something I believe, and I was surprised not only that they agree, but also that they were willing to state it outright.
I used to donate to them, back before everything went sideways in my life and I lost the capacity to donate. I had gotten the impression that their American wing had been slowly taken over by the identitarian left, much like the ACLU. But that impression might have been wrong, or perhaps other branches of AI have been kept grounded in reality by dealing with all the horrible stuff that's always going on around the world. Whatever it is, I was too pessimistic. And now, despite the continuing bloodshed in Gaza, somehow my heart feels slightly warmer. **shakes head at self**
Hope everything in your life gets back up and straight again.
Yes, woke ideology has a way of poisoning and corrupting what used to be noble causes. That said, one of the most memorable and insightful article I read on Less Wrong is titled Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence. It posits that people who just take whatever their opponent believes in and invert it then believe it are curiously assuming that their opponent has a magical ability to know exactly what is right and what is wrong at all times. After all, the consistent ability to always pick wrong is no less impressive than (and does imply the existence of) the consistent ability to always pick right.
It's an interesting argument though not without holes and blind spots, assuming that your opponents are always wrong is sometimes a backwards way of assuming that they're always right.
What I find especially frustrating is the places where I somewhat agree with them and somewhat disagree, because then I end up arguing both sides against the middle, and there's too much reflexive hostility that ignores nuance.
Although that kind of sounds like what you've been doing here lately. :-)
Definitely shocking coming from Allah International.
> In June 2022, a 106-page independent investigation... concluded that Amnesty International UK (AIUK) exhibits institutional and systemic racism... the independent investigation found that UKAIUK "has failed to embed principles of anti-racism into its own DNA and faces bullying issues within the organisation."... the report stated... that the "press' insistence on describing Amnesty as a "leading human rights group" is furthermore problematic given the anti-Jewish racism that the NGO has displayed for years."
> In 2010 Frank Johansson, the chairman of Amnesty International-Finland, called Israel a nilkkimaa, a derogatory term variously translated as "scum state", "creep state" or "punk state". Johansson stood by his statement, saying that it was based on... his own personal experiences with Israelis
> On 11 March 2022, Paul O'Brien, the Amnesty International USA Director, stated at a private event: "We are opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people"
> In the April 2015 annual Amnesty International UK AGM, delegates voted against a motion proposing a campaign against antisemitism in the UK. The debate on the motion formed a consensus that Amnesty should fight "discrimination against all ethnic and religious groups", but were divided over the issue of an anti-racism campaign with a "single focus"... Amnesty International had previously published a report on discrimination against Muslims in Europe.
> Yasmin Hussein, then Amnesty's director of faith and human rights and previously its head of international advocacy and a prominent representative at the United Nations, had "undeclared private links to men alleged to be key players in a secretive network of global Islamists", including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas
> Hussein was alleged to have had inappropriately close relationships with the al-Qazzaz family, members of which were high-ranking government ministers in the administration of Mohammed Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood leaders at the time
> Kristyan Benedict: "Israel," he said in a 2012 interview, "is now included in the list of stupid dictatorial regimes who abuse peoples’ basic universal rights – along with Burma, North Korea, Iran and Sudan, its government has the same wanton attitude to human beings." He attributed to its current government "a feeling of 'ethnic supremacy'" and described Israelis as being afflicted by "blatant racism," comparing their attitudes to those of “the BNP members in the north of England.”
> When asked by The Jewish Chronicle newspaper if Amnesty would be urging action on behalf of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza, Benedict... changed the subject to... Palestinian prisoners
> In tweets sent out in late 2012, Benedict wrote such things as: "How soon before Israel brings out the flechettes & white phosphorus given that 'All options are on the table'?" and "Israel continues to 'defend' its apartheid state by bombing families in #Gaza. Palestinians will not sit back and receive your death wishes." NGO Monitor documented that he called Operation Pillar of Defense "Israel’s murder campaign" and advocated BDS.
> A 2011 article charging that AI has undergone a “moral decline,” and quoting Christopher Hitchens on its “degeneration and politicization,” maintained that “Amnesty's UK branch has a particular anti-Israel obsession,” and cited an AIUK event at which an audience member who writes a pro Israeli government blog who challenged a claim about a purported Israeli action was told by Benedict that he would “smack me in my little bald head.” The audience member posted an audio recording of the exchange online.
Oh my, this selection of random quotations about the UK branch of Amnesty International from unknown and obviously biased sources is definitely turning me against Amnesty International Israel.
> Allah International.
Boring and unfunny. Not plausible too, no Islamist group would ever name themselves "Allah" without any qualifiers.
Great. I'd just gotten used to reading "AI" as "artificial intelligence" (instead of Al, the name that's short for Albert etc.), and now it means Amnesty International.
The spoken form and written form of a language can be vastly different, I find this to be the case in Hebrew. Spoken Hebrew to a native Arabic speaker sounds like a weird mod of Arabic with lots of French sounds and recognizable words and familiar grammar. Written Hebrew sounds like the alien writing system in Arrival.
I know and can pronounce several words (less than 30, I estimate) in spoken Hebrew, but I haven't mustered the energy yet to learn a whole new Alphabet. I recognize most of the letters by name but some still elude me, and even after I perfectly memorize the letters reading will still be difficult because of absence of Niqqud in most Hebrew writing directed at fluent speakers (Niqqud == Vowel markings that tell you how to move your lips while pronouncing the letter, because the Hebrew Aleph Bet is a semi-Abjad with barely any vowels).
So the "LearnsHebrew" part of my username is very much aspirational and a long-term project, but it's not a lie or an unserious fling. The most difficult part of language learning, I believe, is new grammar and new sounds, none of which Hebrew presents to an Arabic speaker.
Yay to the new name! As an inventor with multiple patents it irritates me quite a bit that a patent (in the US) lasts only 17 years, and even then one has to pay maintenance fees, but copyright is forever (or bloody close enough).
I have been thinking of changing it for quite a while now, your recent comment has been the final push.
Copyright may be the most enraging and repulsive form of brain damage that IP laws propagate, but the patent law has its fair share of "Wtf is this even supposed to mean" 18th century Legalese. I binge-watched the Crash Course series (< 1 hour) on IP [1] yesterday, one of the requirements for what qualifies as a valid, new patent in US law is a description of the main innovation by the patent author such that "A Person having ordinary skill in the art"[2] can reproduce it.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? I would describe myself as a person who have "Ordinary skill" in the "Art" of Software Engineering, and I say that there is no amount of words organized in prose or poetry that can describe a particularly fiendish algorithm. The only non-runnable way of organizing words that can come close to describing an algorithm is pseudocode, and even then, it's extremely easy to gloss over and minimally describe in 2 lines what would take days to implement and debug in real honest-to-Turing executable code.
Given that you ***can*** patent algorithms, but - presumably - the patent law can't force the author to describe the algorithm any clearly than the very rough outline of the outermost for loop, did the patent author really "fulfill" his obligation to society then? Why shouldn't a reproducer of his/her work, if they got frustrated enough with the unclear prose description in the patent, simply resort to disassembling a working implementation (e.g. from the commercial product the patent author is selling) and reproduce the algorithm from the actual machine code implementing the algorithm? What good is the patent then?
I simply don't respect this entire class of laws, from copyright to patents to trademarks to trade secrets. They strike me as incredibly naive and ignorant 18th century regulators' conception of what knowledge is. Hidden under the archaic and impenetrable 18th century English verbiage is whole false epistemologies: what Science is, what a "Fact" is, how "Novelty" can be judged and quantified, what counts as a "Copy" of a "Work" vs. a mere "Transformation", etc etc etc. Those are literally some of the most fiendish and difficult issues in branches upon branches of philosophy, IP would have you believe they were all solved centuries ago, and that the solutions should be enforced with the full might and non-consensual violence of the modern state upon anyone who disagrees.
If judges and attorneys had precise notions of what counts as a "Transformation" of a piece of text, for example, that could be the start of a revolutionary new diffing algorithm that will show software engineers the most human-comprehensible view of how a file was changed in a patch, but it's widely known in the software industry and CS academia that text-diffing is a philosophical problem that computers can't solve humanely-satisfactorily in all edge cases. It's insane that people can be judged, fined, jailed and labelled criminals based on what the actual people who actually studied the problem agree to be an aesthetic hunch that can't be ever formalized or made precise.
I recognize that there are some problems that IP is supposedly trying to solve, but I don't recognize any legitimacy or good faith whatsoever to any current law that falls under this category in any jurisdiction. In the words of Nina Paley[3], I think the solution forward is not reform, although reform can be a valuable way of distracting the corporate defenders of IP laws and wasting their energy on ever longer and more Kafkaesque decade-long lawsuits (which is why I buy tons of popcorn and rub my hands together whenever someone rich and/or powerful sues a corporation because their AI model said or drew something verboten). Anarchism is the true solution; the true solution is for all of us to collectively ignore those false and unexamined epistemologies. Using torrents, tor, and cyber offensives and defenses of all kinds to intentionally and systematically and collaboratively bully and challenge those brain-dead proponents and enforcers of brain-dead laws into submission.
In particular, every Free Speech advocate has what I call the Alexandra Elbakyan Burden, which is to loot and pillage each and every one of the info-streams and info-warehouses of every corporation that doesn't have legal reach in the advocate's jurisdiction, by all means necessary, including mild physical attacks on data centers involving no harm to human personnel.
I have experienced it as an inventor, but I work with hardware, and there's a whole large body of work of people arguing that software patents are broken, and you're hitting on some of the themes as to why. But I can shed some light on some of these bizarre terms from the hardware standpoint.
"A Person having ordinary skill in the art" can reproduce it.
Let's start with what a patent is: one thing it is is a teaching tool: it must teach how to make the invention, for example, if I patent a novel amplifier, I must publish its circuit, explain its novelty, and teach how to implement it. So now you see how "ordinary skill" is relevant: I don't need to teach someone who is new to the field of analog circuit design. I don't need to explain what a transistor is, etc. I assume that the person reading the patent can design an ordinary ("prior art", i.e., something taught at college or commonly used already) amplifier. All I need to explain is what is different about my new design.
Why would I do this? Because the US government, in return, grants me a 17-year monopoly on making and selling my design, and allows me to sue in court anyone who tries to sell a copy of it. Note the key word "sell" - you can make my new amplifier all you want as long as you're not trying to profit from it.
And thus we come to the critical thing about patents. A patent is not, at its core, a technical document. It is a legal document. That's why it's written in such weird legalize, and has a structure that would have a normal engineer go crazy. It is trying to describe in words, and in words ONLY, whatever the specific NOVEL and USEFUL thing I am trying to protect from being sold by competition.
At this point I'm so used to it that when I write a new patent draft for the lawyers who will create the actual patent document for the filing, I can effortlessly fill whole paragraphs of engineering legalize, adapting normal technical explanations to the required form. Example, literally making it up as fast as I can type:
A circuit comprising a first transistor and a second transistor, the first transistor having its collector connected to the power supply, and its emitter connected to the collector of the second transistor; the second transistor having its emitter connected to a ground node via a resistor; both transistors being of bipolar junction NPN type. [and on and on and on it goes describing the circuit].
Thanks for presenting this priceless insider view!
I see that I might have been too harsh and too wide-sweeping in my conclusion, I retract the "Natural language can never be reproducible" argument against any patent in a field that has a circuit-like representation of artifacts that is rigorous and allows anyone with familiarity in reading the notation to reproduce the work. Analog Circuit Design is one such field, but probably others as well like Chemical Engineering and Civil Engineering. Indeed, if Software patents forced the author to write the code in a real executable programming language against real test cases (in addition to the mathematical proof, of course), I would retract that argument against them as well.
I have several other questions/arguments regarding this though:
(1) What is the minimal level of knowledge and/or skill to assume when you're writing a patent, and how do you force yourself to stick to that level ? It's known that people often forget that other people don't know what they know, part of being a good teacher is being able to simulate a "beginner mentality" in your non-beginner mind, it can be very difficult.
Some people are better teachers than others. So what I'm asking is : What is to prevent the patent author from skipping over important details ? This is not necessarily because they're malicious, maybe they're just not a very good teacher, or a very good teacher who is explaining a newly discovered thing they don't fully understand to a dead piece of paper, thus having no feedback or questions to know if they're doing a good job or not. Hell, maybe the patent author themself doesn't realize the significance of something in their process, maybe a (e.g.) resistance parameter that they think can range from 300 ohm to 1K ohm is actually best kept at 500 ohm, and the author does keep it at 500 ohm out of other considerations (e.g. habit, they only have 500 ohm resistors in their lab, ...) but never thought to write that down. Somebody else would "reproduce" an inferior technical achievement because the author never thought to test the range of parameters that they claim will work.
In addition, no notation captures everything, right? your Analog circuit might look quite good and unambiguous as an abstract component graph, but maybe anyone trying to actually lay it out would discover a certain capacitor has to be X mm away from all other wiring or else it will induce weird effects (and the author never says this because they either think it's too obvious or because they simply don't know, they chanced upon a working layout without realizing why any other layout would be inferior).
Where I'm going with this is: a patent - like a scientific paper - should be reproduced to be valid. The author is allowed to state the level of expertise and qualifications, listing however many prerequisites as they please (e.g. "The reproducer has to read this particular obscure scientific paper from 1964 and understand all of its terms"). Then, N reproducers who meet all of the author's conditions are double-anonymously chosen at random from a pool of reproducers, and if 50% or more of them couldn't reproduce then the patent is declared too vague and the author is forced to be more clear.
Isn't this obviously how things should work? A patent's explicit purpose is reproducibility, why cross your fingers and pray that the author is eloquent enough and the circuit is clear enough when you can simply ask reproducers to reproduce the damn thing ?
(2) Why the weird insistence that the patent author has the **exclusive** right to monetize their innovation ? Why not give the author more options:
[2]-(A) Royalties model: Anybody can monetize the innovation as they see fit, but the author must get X% of whatever net profits end up in the coffers of the monetizer(s)
[2]-(B) Social Status in return for innovation: The author can choose to have their name or face immortalized in some famous national library (e.g. the Library of Congress) or a museum, or be given some valuable medal, and in return their innovation is public domain (For rich innovators who don't need any more money, but think the social and cultural status will be worth it)
[2]-(C) other things that I didn't think of
Can those options be built on top of the existing exclusive right model ? Has anybody tried ? Has anybody asked for different options ?
(3) I still see the issue of what counts as "Innovation" as a massive elephant in the room. Let's pick your field, I barely know anything about Analog but I know that if some parameters of circuit elements are tweaked (using simulations, experiments, etc...), they can work better. So could I take an existing circuit, tweak the parameters using a massive simulation, then publish the provably-better parameter configuration as a novelty that deserves a patent? What if I take a well-known circuit and just keep adding things that don't change its operation much, an amplifier here, a resistor there, and so on. I can also falsely claim that those added things do improve its operating characteristics. At which point would the patent office be fooled by the irrelevant elements I added and declare it a worthy patent?
(4) Related to (3), how to detect and prove that someone infringed upon your IP ? Some things are downright impossible, for example, CPU designs. Some people like Ken Shirriff (https://www.righto.com/) spend incredible talent and effort reverse-engineering old CPUs from the 1980s and early 1990s, but I don't think you can do that to a late 2000s or a 2010s CPU. So you're AMD/Intel/Nvidia, and somebody stole your entire latest architecture and etched it on a chip made by the EXTREMLY-SMOL photolithography process. How do you even suspect that they did that? and once you suspect, how do you confirm? Suppose you wrongly suspected them and reverse-engineered their products but you found no infringement, but also you learned so much about **their** patents in the process. How do you then prevent yourself from using the ideas in those patents? Once you see certain things, you can't unsee them. The competitor's patents have irreversibly taught you something and made you a different brain, how do you keep track of all those new things you learned and make double sure you never use them in your commercial designs ever ? Can this happen in Analog as well ? Or do the scales never get this small ?
Also, some fields presumably have thousands of companies and for-profit organizations making things. Patents are public, right ? Google seems to agree. So what's to prevent some of them from simply sniping your designs when you have probably never heard of them and could spend your entire life not using their products? Moreover, what's to prevent a (e.g.) Chinese company from simply replicating your patents without you knowing, using VPNs and American citizens as proxies as necessary if America started blocking Chinese IPs and citizens from accessing American patents ? Even if you knew this obscure company in a country thousands of kilometers away with a name you can't even pronounce is infringing, what legal recourse do you have once you do?
Sorry for the wall of text but I'm quite curious how those laws are supposed to work. They seem to have very naive pre-globalization pre-cognitive-science pre-semiconductor mercantilist views of Knowledge and Epistemology.
You're asking excellent questions that kind of go to the heart of patent law. Let me try:
(1) Level of skill - you basically look at your colleagues and think "will they know what I'm talking about". Kind of what Nancy is hinting at. At a large company, where most patents come from (because it's really costly to file them), there is also all kinds of help for a new inventor to guide him or her. And most patents have multiple inventors these days, just the nature of the innovation within complex systems.
How do you make sure you capture everything and the patent is reproducible? - with great care! Glib answer, but this is the key difficulty in writing a patent:
-- Write too little, and the patent is too obvious (term of art), or already well-known. Example, you can't just patent a wheel, you have to have something innovative, idk, like you create a new system for attaching and tensioning spokes. Then you have to describe exactly how this new system works. But:
-- Write too much, and your patent becomes "too narrow", too easy to circumvent. Let's say in my example I describe the tensioning system using M4 threads - then a competitor can change it to M5 threads, and voila - no violation. So I would have to specify a range, or say things like,
"...in the preferred embodiment, M4 threads are used to control the spoke tension, but it should be clear to those skilled in the art that other sizes and types of threads could be used, for example, in the range of M1 to M10 threads"
This kind of language is inserted all over the place to make sure competitors don't catch you on some technicality - and they often do.
(2) - Exclusive right indeed is broad, all it means no one can profitably use the invention without my permission. I can grant a license to make my patent (happens all the time), or I can grant free use, or indeed anything else that strikes my fancy. As long as I'm asked! And after 17 years anyone can use the patent, it enters public domain.
(3) - what is innovation? Yeah, this is both vague and the key criterium for patent grant or denial. Almost every argument I've had with patent examiners is centered on this question. They would find "prior art", a previous patent or publication, and rarely it's the exact thing, often they would say that it's so close that it's obvious to anyone skilled in the art (here it is again!) to do what you propose, so there's no novelty here. Sometimes we lose, not every patent application is granted.
In the reality of modern world, almost every innovation threads all over some prior art, and if every company tried to rigorously enforce their patents the economy would grind to a halt. What happens is that only the most egregious violators get sued - like if my company discovered literally a copied design that is eating into our sales we would sue. But mostly everyone looks the other way as long as the violations aren't too brazen or costly.
(4) Infringement - oh, you are asking such excellent questions! The funny but true answer is that you only patent innovations that can be detected. For example, if we (my company) suspect that a competitor is infringing, we would purchase their product and tear it apart to see if there's something there that is covered by our patents. But imagine I invented a better way to test my amplifier, that would save significant test costs? Well, there's no way to know if the competitor uses the same test methods, so I would never apply for a patent for it, and rather keep it secret. When deciding to file for a patent, infringement detectability is a key question - if we think we won't be able to easily detect the violation, the patent doesn't get filed no matter how innovative the invention is.
Patents are indeed public. If a small company takes my patent and uses it, and I am a multibillion-dollar company, the likeliest outcome is nothing, they are not a threat. If by some accident we come across it we may send them a warning letter, and maybe demand a token reference to our IP. But it's not worth suing them, which is not to say that doesn't happen, I know of startups run out of business by this.
China is a more difficult question. Here your weapon, in the US, is the Trade Commission - you file to stop importation of the infringing products. That gets their attention! But if they do not intend to sell in the US there's actually nothing you can do, because:
Did I mention patents have jurisdiction limits? US patents are only enforceable in the US. If I want to enforce a patent in China, I have to file for a patent in China.
Anyway, hope this sheds some light on the weird and crazy world of patent law.
A patent writer who's serious about explaining how their invention may need to recruit at least one person who's skilled in the field to follow their directions. This strikes me as more conscientious than most people are likely to be.
What happens in large companies is that there's a review panel that looks at all invention submissions and evaluates them for novelty, detectability, completeness, etc. I've been on both sides of these.
For a small company or an individual inventor, it's really up to him/her to write a good patent. This is really hard, but the onus is on the patent filer, I can file a pile of junk and the patent office will happily take the application money. In the extreme case, they may even grant a patent to a total gibberish, I've seen it happen, if the gibberish looks innovative enough. Of course, this just means the "inventor" wasted all this time and money as such a patent is worthless.
Too Little Too Late. And Disney, parasites till the very end, vehemently asserts that the latest designs for Mickey are their own new IP that didn't enter the pub-dom, implicitly daring anyone to test this.
There is no reasoning with the unreasonable. Peace is not an option. They wouldn't be satisfied with an eternity. Alexandra Elbakyan - may her name be immortalized among the stars - showed us the only fruitful and effective way to deal with copyright.
>Alexandra Elbakyan - may her name be immortalized among the stars
Agreed! Her Sci-Hub is a treasure. Certainly copyright of scientific work - where the original research is usually publicly funded in the first place, is bizarre.
( _Some_ mechanism is needed for authors to get a share of the fruits of their labors. Copyright is an 18th century hack, I hope there are better ways to do this in this century. )
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?
I see one major difference been a hypothetically united India and currently united Iraq: conditional on no civil war between Muslims and Hindus, united India would probably be a wealthier and more influential country than the sum of the parts today. Would China have attacked a united India in 1962? (I give it only a 10% chance.)
By contrast, Iraq is surrounded by Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia no matter what. Its Kurdish and Sunni-Arab regions don't seem to be helping it fend off intervention by these countries, or by the US.
Sounds to me like the root of the problem is that you're expecting consistency from "sorts of people", which are actually large groups of people with diverse opinions.
There's no way to draw borders that reflect the Sunni/Shia divide in Iraq without them being massively balkanzied. You could make a Kurdistan, but Turkey has made it abundantly clear that they would not tolerate that and would respond with military action.
The fundamental problem is that geographical boundaries rarely coincide with the sort of cultural boundaries that you need to draw to form a stable political body.
Draw a boundary around a heterogenous population, and you risk internal tensions eventually arising that will tear the nation apart. Absent a very strong central government, or a strong sense of common identity, eventually something will trigger a push for devolution.
But you can't always just assume that people will live in neatly sorted bubbles. So the other model is that you displace a bunch of people all at once, as happened with India/Pakistan or Israel/Palestine. Even if this results in a stable state on at least one side of the border, it leaves a lot of tension for the future.
Yugoslavia only worked as long as there was a centralized force holding it together, backed by an even bigger force outside its borders. But the dissolution of Yugoslavia didn't result in peace.
So no, I don't buy that early partitioning is necessarily the obvious and best approach. But neither is any other approach. The truth is that nobody seems to have any idea how to build a nation - unless there's already a de facto one there you can just slap a new government on. It's easy, if you're part of an unstable heterogenous society, to say that life would be easier with a smaller set of your own countrymen - that will always have a certain appeal.
You're probably just trolling (no offense meant), but I can't resist taking the bait.
What PhtaMac said, plus this: if you move to Japan, you never really become "Japanese". If you move to Wales, you never really become "Welsh". If you move to Italy, you never really become "Italian". But if you move to America, you can absolutely become "American", and even if you don't, your kids will. Probably even if you don't want them to. (Some other places try for this, too, with varying degrees of success.)
There's a lot of "debate" over how much ideology you have to absorb before you count as "American" - can you stick with an appreciation for classical liberalism and the rule of law, or do you need to go full nominally-Christian, McDonalds and pizza, football, light lager beer? (Ditto for whatever the left-wing equivalent is.) And of course there are people who will never be satisfied, but they're mostly a fringe that can be ignored. In America, no matter who you are, some loony is always going to want to stab you just for being you.
In the 20 years after the end of the war in Vietnam the Twin Cites welcomed thousands of people from Southeast Asia. They took what jobs they could, had families, celebrated their old culture and embraced the new.
Now my Internist is second generation Hmong and my dentist is second generation Vietnamese.
My mother’s people came from Italy and my dad’s from Poland.
Become the kind of Americans that hate America for being white supremacist or whatever? Great future ahead!
"appreciation for classical liberalism"
Might have ruled out the majority of Americans as "Americans" right there. What happened to freedom of association? Oh right, diversity more important.
> Become the kind of Americans that hate America for being white supremacist or whatever? Great future ahead!
I did say "whatever the left-wing equivalent is". :-P
> What happened to freedom of association?
Look, I'll be clear, my favored form of society is me as God-Emperor and everyone else as slaves I can torture at will. But I am reluctantly willing to compromise just a little bit, and maybe, just **maybe** agree to co-exist in a classical liberal democracy. Otherwise it's the acid chainsaw pits for you.
Are you talking about America? Because yes, it definitely is one of our strengths.
But I think America is better positioned to manage it than other places. A big reason is simply how our nation came to be. Between westward expansion* and mass immigration, America was largely not formed from pre-existing groups that had to suddenly get along one day. We got to build our nation on the fly, and develop a sense of group identity along with it.
(And even then, our nation had to survive, y'know, an actual civil war.)
If America didn't exist, and instead were just a bunch of independent states & regions, there's no way you could re-create it.
You can see this pattern somewhat developing with other places, too. Nations like the UK or Germany, which saw significant immigration, saw benefits from it but continue to exist in a fairly unstable equilibrium. In the case of the UK it eventually led to Brexit.
And that's still the 'easier' case of taking an existing nation and adding new people to it. Just drawing up a new heterogenous society from scrap is a million times harder.
*(Yes, yes, I see the Native Americans in the back giving me side-eye.)
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.
Even the names King and Messiah aren't particularly "innovative" in the same sense as DeShawn, though. Heck, "King" would seem like a traditional American name in the sense that Americans have always had the odd tradition to use famous leaders' surnames as first names (ie. people with first names like Jefferson and Jackson and Hamilton).
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.
The current, nearly universal attitude in big, leftist cities like Seattle (where I live) is that there's no point in calling police or pursuing criminal charges for almost anything. Why bother? The suspect is long gone and the police don't have the resources (or the right, depending on your political leanings) to actually catch them. Why waste time filing a report with the police, especially if it isn't required for an insurance claim?
I would expect murder rates to be fairly accurate given there's objectively a murdered body to add to the count, but rape, assault and robbery? Pfft. That reporting is functionally useless.
I know this might provoke an objection that anecdotes should not be extrapolated to statistics, but, like, sorry - how statistics are reported often obscures the common sense of the demonstrably obvious. I'm not part of the firearms self-defense statistics even though I've used a gun against robbery and/or assault by strangers on TWO separate occasions in two different states. Thwarted attempts don't get reported or counted, even though they happen every day.
"Yeah but statistically if you own a gun you're way more likely to be a victim of gun violence!"
LOL, I'll take that chance. Trigger discipline and not associating with unstable people goes a long way to avoiding gun violence, not that anyone is counting how often that works.
I've lived in Seattle almost 20 years. It is not my imagination or right-wing propaganda that the buses are dangerously unusable and that certain intersections and blocks which were once part of a thriving and safe downtown shopping district must now be detoured around. I lived in L.A. before Seattle and when I visit my old haunts it's even worse.
"I would expect murder rates to be fairly accurate given there's objectively a murdered body to add to the count, but rape, assault and robbery? Pfft. That reporting is functionally useless."
Reporting of auto theft (including stealing things *from* parked cars) is fairly reliably reported, because even a smashed window is usually expensive enough to be worth filing an insurance claim. Which requires a police report even if everybody knows the police are going to ignore it.
So. homicide and auto theft. If those are increasing and everything else is "decreasing", yeah, you've got a crime problem and people have given up on your ever solving it.
"The nationwide drop also follows the roughly 30% increase in murders in 2020. That means that despite this year's drop, homicides remain slightly elevated compared to 2019."
Yeah, violent crime continues to drop. I think some of this is technological (harder to get away with that now), some of it due to robbery being lower return.
Petty property crime is a problem in places but pretty fixable if we want to make an effort.
If by "pretty fixable" you mean "you are free to move to another state or country with actual governance," I agree with you, but if you didn't intend that interpretation, what do you think the easy fix is that no big blue city can seemingly wrap their minds / budgets around?
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.
Good point, though it seems pretty hard to disentangle dispreference for minorities to dispreference for minority names. Eg Muhammad or Hassan are unusual names in the USA - but for Muslim/Arabic people they are extremely common, it's just that this population are a small minority in the USA. Maybe hirers can implicitly presume 'unusual' names to more likely be ethnic minorities.
Your particular example/impression seems wrong - Deshawn (and the alternative spelling Deshaun) isn't all that unusual, it even has its own wikipedia page of famous Deshawns. Looking at 1993 (my own birth year) babies born in the USA, Deshawn is #438th, on a par with Sheldon, Jarrod, Alfred, Ralph, Bernard, Noel and Barry for boys. You'd want to control with these names instead - though frankly I find it hard to imagine employers discriminating against those names.
It seems relatively easy to disentangle "Dispreference for specific minorities" from "dispreference for unusual names." Have some control group names. For example: Ezekiel, Eeert, etc. And yes, I'd like to add your suggestions as well, like Sheldon, Jarrod, Noel, etc.
There's the added dimension that some of these names have a higher incidence in the population or higher recognition but are 'older' names. Sylvia, for example. Ralph has pretty good name recognition due to being popular at the start of the 20th century, and I'm guessing some of that carries over. And if it does, would the age of the recruiter matter? Or would older names continue to be seen as 'usual' even long after their decline in the population?
Also, it seems worth disentangling race from culture, to the extent possible. How would a culturally assimilationist minority do compared to a non-assimilationist member of the same group? Would a person with a stereotypical Western name be more likely to have other stereotypical traits like unaccented speech? I say this as someone with an auditory processing disorder and who will experience fatigue from trying to decode heavily accented speech for long periods of time. Preference for unaccented speech is not mere bigotry.
I suspect that there are basically three typical approaches to this topic. You may have one group looking to buttress the assertion "minorities have a harder time because of racism" or some similar hypothesis. You have another group looking to buttress the notion that having an unusual name is a signal of problematic cultural fit in some way, and that it justifies discrimination. And perhaps there's a third prong that wants to put the whole topic under a microscope and figure out precisely what kind of effect is at play and who is influenced by it and how. I tend to fall into the third group.
you may have another group looking to parse very finely just what the cause of the
I don't understand how control group names help. I'm saying what if people can take into account that unusual, 'weird' names are statistically correlated with minority racial groups in general. Imagine an employer consciously or unconsciously thinking:
"Eeert, never head of it, but that sounds like some weird newfangled black name. I'll interview Steve instead."
This employer would be discriminating against black people using the signal of 'unusual name', independent of the unusual name actually being a typically black name.
It should, at least, be possible to have obviously Asian names as well. Li Wang, Hiroshi Ishikawa, etc. to test whether animus to Black names, specifically, is the issue.
There could also be some obviously minority foreign names with obviously assimilated given names. How does "Robert Ishikawa" perform compared to "Sato Ishikawa?"
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.
What non-DS areas of experience does he have? There are relatively few "pure" DS roles out there, so leaning into any domain knowledge/expertise he has (or getting some if he has none) could make the difference.
Prior to getting his masters he had a dead end job helping customers who had problems with whatever software his company made. I do not think he has substantial domain knowledge about the fields that companies hiring DS are usually end. He is extremely smart and conscientious, got straight A’s in his masters program, and could give himself a crash course in, for ex, the finance industry if he was going to apply there. What he is most interested in personally is AI, but I suppose that’s used in all industries. He’d also be happy to take an AI course like Jeremy Howard’s “Fast AI” if that would help his hireabity. Anyhow, all advice welcomed.
It may be banal by now (what with there being DS graduate programs), but I found Cassie Kozyrkov's "What on earth is data science?" (https://medium.com/@kozyrkov/what-on-earth-is-data-science-eb1237d8cb37) a good primer on three major flavors of DS work: analytics, inference, & ML/AI.
Most data science work isn't building ML models (and very few of those could be called "AI" with a straight face by anyone who isn't in marketing); there's more opportunity to apply/fine-tune existing models for particular applications.
A well-trod path is to start off in a more analytics-focused role, and build from there. N.B., job titles are very *not* standardized, and a lot of analytics openings are listed as "Data Scientist" ("Applied Scientist" is, for now, more consistently reserved for roles closer to ML).
Thank you! I will pass this info on to him. I have another question for you. (By the way, I do not work in tech -- I'm a psychologist -- so this may be a naive question.). I heard a podcast with Jeremy Howard recently. I believe he was the first person to try machine learning on language -- fed wikipedia to the computer, got something that worked surprisingly well at distinguishing between positive and negative movie reviews. He now teaches courses in something he calls Fast AI. They seem to be well thought of. What he's into, as I understand it, is sort of lean and mean ways of carrying out machine learning, some of them so lean you can do it on a home computer. It involves using lots of techniques, some that he's developed, for maximizing training effectiveness. I know that techniques of this kind are widely used so I don't know what's unique about what he's teaching, but apparently something is.
Here's a story that impressed me: A few years ago there was a contest for who could most quickly carry out ML that taught a system to do something-or-other. Howard and a group of his students entered and won, and one of the other competitors was Google.
Anyhow, his courses are online, and I was wondering if it would be useful for my friend to take a couple of them. The point of doing it would be to have a kind of cool, kind of unusual area of expertise. But, not being in the field, I have no idea whether knowing some fast AI stuff would be advantageous. Howard on the podcast came across as very smart and very likable, & maybe I'm mostly being influenced by that.
If you think the Howard Fast AI stuff would be useless, do you think there's anything like that -- something a person can learn in 6 weeks or so in their spare time -- that would give my friend an edge over other applicants?
I'm not familiar with Howard but, while that sounds like a cool contest, I doubt it would affect a hiring manager's decision-making process. Anecdotally, the much more widely known Kaggle contests used to be a significant feather in the cap of competitors who did well, but it's drifted away from straightforward ML problems to something that's reminiscent of Super Mario speedruns. Neither would be relevant for day-to-day DS work (especially entry level).
As far as something else to give an edge with some self-study, my advice should be taken with a very large grain of salt (I transitioned into the field from aerospace, not at an entry level, and at a time when nobody had DS degrees).
The places where I see candidates struggle (I only do initial phone screens, so they've already gotten past the application process & recruiter, and I don't know where the ones who get a full loop but not an offer fall short) is in being able to solve a DS coding problem in a short time. Many practice coding problems out there are targeted toward general software developers, so wouldn't really exercise the right things; SQL challenges seem likeliest to be applicable.
Thanks for taking the time to answer. I understand. You are the third person to emphasize the importance of SQL expertise, so it's gotta be true. Seems like an excellent use of my friend's spare time is to do lots of SQL problems and projects, & never mind adding frills like Jeremy Howard's class.
Does he have experience as a BID or some other SQL monkey role? We've had issues with Data Science grads, either from school or bootcamp, where they can run a few ML algorithms and make a few shiny graphs but they can't write lots of high-quality SQL quickly...which means they're dependent on other people for data munging and processing, which means they're kinda useless. I'm becoming a big believer that every data scientist should spend 2-3 in the SQL trenches writing lots of code for dashboards before we let them do the "cooler" stuff.
Also, does he have a resume or linkedin he'd be willing to share?
I called to ask hi about a resume or linkedin and learned that he's down with covid. Will probably be a few days before he's up and around. Meanwhile, I wanted to ask you what would be the most useful info for you. I don't know if his resume is polished and ready to go, but does that matter? His previous job did not involve any of the skills he needs in data science. I was thinking that what might be useful to you would be a list of courses he's taken, and projects he's done, plus maybe a paragraph about how much he has learned about SQL and what projects he's used it in. How does that sound?
I would want a guy who could knock out two 6 kyu challenges from here in an hour (https://www.codewars.com/kata/search/sql?q=&r%5B%5D=-6&beta=false&order_by=popularity%20desc). They don't have to be perfect, I find the guys who code the challenges are way too invested in catching weird edge cases, but he has to basically get the answer. Most places, or at least most places you want to work, will give you some kind of coding challenge. If you're willing to spend $160, leetcode also has ~150 interview SQL questions, those are better.
If he can pass those coding challenges, there's probably a role somewhere. There's a shocking demand for more dashboards in every organization I've been in and as long as you can read and write SQL competently, we're probably hiring. Honestly, write one resume for data analyst roles and one for data scientist roles. Might hurt the ego a bit to be an analyst but the pay is good, usually not a huge gap for good analysts, and it gets you in the door.
Having said that...man, having been job hunting and now looking down the line at building a team...opinions differ a lot on what matters. I've lost jobs because I didn't know the difference between OLAP and OLTP and, ya know, good company, that guys knows his stuff but...man, I could not care less, nobody we're serving cares so if it's not causing problems, why would I care? At the same time, ya know, lots of guys don't like you to wear a suit or blazer to an interview but I do. Doctors and lawyers and finance guys, execs, they all dress a certain way and judge you off that and if you want to have an impact, ya gotta talk to the business. Other guys might really like projects but, me, meh, dealing with funky data is 50% of the job and project data is never funky. One guy's core critical skill is another guy's irrelevant trivia.
Only other thing I can offer are references for two consultants I've used:
Total cost probably $1000. They're solid professionals but not miracle workers, think less they'll get you a job and more they'll shave 3-5 weeks off your job hunt, which should be worth $5k-$12k in wages.
Oh, and if he's got a friend in a company, have them send him posting using their automated referral system. The referrer will get about $3k and your friend will get to skip the first 2-3 rounds of interviews.
Thank you, that's all very helpful and I will pass every bit of it on to my friend. I sent him your comments about data science hires with inadequate skills, especially in SQL, and here's what he said: "For SQL, I can do everything from complex select queries to building complete database applications. I’m beyond what a SQL monkey (aka idiot) job will do for me and I wouldn’t need other people to write queries for me. "
It's evident from his tone that he's a bit cranky, LOL, but please bear in mind that he has covid and a fever.
Thanks for outerjoin.us -- looked at it and looks quite promising. He is definitely not one of those data science grads who can just run algorithms and make pretty graphs. In fact I've heard him talk with bewilderment and disgust about some people in the program who never really learned to do coding, but found workarounds to avoid it, like having other people do it for them. This guy worked his ass off in that masters program and got straight A's. I'm sure he doesn't have work experience in the things you name -- SQL-related jobs -- because he had not worked in the field prior to getting this masters degree. He had a dead end job as one of the people who take calls from customers who are having problems with the company's software. Then he finally woke up and decided to get a job that used his brains and paid decently. He may have some kind of resume that covers not his past jobs, but his courses and projects. I will ask him.
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"
I would say it would work better if you didn't have the links to the Constitution and Trump stuff in there; as a description of a general principle against buck-passing it works well, but there are too many divergences between the parable and reality to make the thing fit properly (surely killing the seven guardsmen counts as a victory for Nog and thus resolves the question in the prince's favor).
The parable leaves out proper interactions between the priests and the presi- er, king. It's roughly assumed the priests have all the power and the king is subservient to the stone and their interpretations. But reality has tools to rewrite the stone, outside the hands of the priests, and even if nobody knows how to use them anymore that's a big deal.
Otherwise, the first paragraph reads too flowery, and the one about the throne took me back to the Wheel of Time series and skipping over three paragraphs of descriptions of the curtains.
Presuming this is intended for a Democratic audience, I can't imagine any Republican finding this remotely convincing, I actually quite like the bit once the priests have stepped down and the prince is walking to the throne but...like 70% of the leadup to that is being too cute, it really should be edited down.
EDIT:
Also, it took awhile to click but, like, this conception of the law, of like, divine commandments handed down is, like, really weird to me. Do you really conceptualize them like that? That judges alone or judges and lawyers alone interpret them?
I liked it. I think a Republican would find it convincing, coming from the angle of "the Supreme Court should just say Trump can run so we can stop talking about it." This seems to be one of those scissor statements that both sides just find so obvious they can't believe anyone would disagree with them. Most of the Republicans I know find the argument for Trump's "insurrection" to be a clear political ploy, at least until he's actually convicted of some sort of treason or other serious crime, and would prefer as much as anyone that his eligibility be settled now in early 2024 rather than pop up all year and leave us still wondering in December, after he narrowly defeats Biden, whether he was even eligible after all. The argument clearly seems to be "we need a decision," not "he shouldn't be eligible." Of course 50% of the country is going to disagree with that decision almost immediately, but the point of the story is that at least then we have a decision and can move forward rather than engaging in countless hypotheticals.
The issue is that a lot of people have the position that he is eligible now, but a conviction in the January 6 trial may affect his eligibility. A Supreme Court decision doesn't close the book on this.
in a sense i'm glad the Maine secretary of state did what she did because it made for a clear example of something I'd been arguing hypothetically for weeks to people that were outraged "unelected judges" had weighed in on this question. The alternative is probably *elected* secretaries of state, which seems WORSE to me, not better.
FWIW I'm genuinely a bit on the fence on this, but mostly consider this to be a good argument for "all laws need to have a 20 year expiration date". If Trump genuinely did break a law invented in the aftermath of the civil war there's an argument that it should be enforced in the name of rule of law, but also it's kinda bad in the first place to have a law that hasn't been enforced since the civil war (and would predictably be incredibly high-profile and controversial if it ever did come up) on the books at all.
the interesting thing is that it may not really require trump "break a law", the prohibition is constitutional, not statutory. Tomorrow, congress could repeal the federal insurrection statute, or change it so it requires proof that more than 1,000,000 people participated to count...or change it so that it covers driving recklessly on the interstate. The statutory definition of insurrection as it exists now is probably irrelevant to the question of what the drafters of amendment 14 section 3 meant, and I think amendment 14 section 3 would be operative even if the insurrection statute were repealed.
Quite the opposite. As the end of the story says, nobody knows whether eg the engineers would have done a better job than the priests. I am a legal skeptic/legal realist. I believe there either is no objective answer to what "cruel and unusual punishment" is or it's so hard to figure out objectively it might as well be unknowable. In this environment, you opinion on a given legal proposition is, objectively speaking, maybe as good as a judges...judges are just the poor saps we designate as final decision-makers so we don't have endless arguments about what "probable cause" or "theft" or "due process" mean.
But the moral of the story is that if you have a rule or a law and judges *don't* interpret it, you're just passing the question on to a random person farther on in the process. This has already happened in Trump's case with the Maine secretary of state.
The priests of Nog in this story could have made a ruling that "no one in the land of Gishood may take a position on the ninety sixth commandment one way or another" but that would be the very opposite of them "staying out of it", in fact it would probably be equivalent to a ruling that the current prince was eligible
Yeah, that's what was throwing me; this line simply isn't true: "judges are just the poor saps we designate as final decision-makers." They're not the final decision-makers, just factually, and the next statement "But the moral of the story is that if you have a rule or a law and judges *don't* interpret it, you're just passing the question on to a random person farther on in the process." betrays a...misunderstanding of how government functions.
The executive and legislative branch are not dependent on the judiciary for legal interpretation and they're not helpless randos who need guidance on this. At a simple, practical level, every single state agency I've ever seen has a fully staffed "ledge" shop that does nothing but analyze new laws and provide analysis and recommendations. Senior executives are in constant conversation with the governor and legislators on what the laws are and what they should be. If a judge makes a decision based on law and that doesn't work for the execs, especially governor appointed ones, there's a decent chance that law will be changed or an understanding will be reached because, well, these guys write and change laws all the time.
"This bill requires the FTB to prepare a report on the number of taxpayers allowed a
credit by May 1, 2026, and annually thereafter. If the author’s intent is to be able to
review a report that contains complete information for the 2025 taxable year, it is
recommended that the reporting due date be extended to May of 2027. If the due
date of the report remains unchanged, the report will include the information
available as of the date when the report is prepared."
Translation: who knows when all the tax returns will get in and we're not paying overtime to find out. Give us an extra year or you're gonna get what we got, not what you want.
In criminal law it may be very top down but when you get into laws that directly affect agencies and the legislature and groups like that, law is much more of a ...collaborative enterprise. And I phrase it this way in that, if you get into this kind of game, you don't want to be ignorantly stepping on toes because you think you've got a trump card that...really won't pan out.
'Cuz, just being straight up, speaking for my former side of the shop...sometimes the State Controller talks with the old grognard engineers and decides that it's easier to change the laws than 30 year-old mission critical code. And in those situations, where thankfully I have not had to be in the room, I know everybody is on the same side and we want to reach a conclusion that works for everyone and it's no good to be accidentally offending people.
Because, in the land of Gishood, I guarantee you the engineers know the laws of Nog, they've already got a bunch of ol' grognards who decide...which laws matter more than others, and they're more than willing to accept feedback from the priests, they certainly wouldn't consider themselves subservient or helpless without priestly guidance. And engineers aren't even the biggest power players in government, not even top 5. I dunno enough "illuminati" stuff to guess what's all going on with these courts but if the other big players are staying silent, there's a reason.
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:
It seems to be fairly well established that people who are closer to the start of a ballot paper get an advantage in elections, and ballot papers are often ordered alphabetically. In local council elections in the UK there can be more than one person standing for a given party, as there are multiple seats. I have heard anecdotally that it is common for e.g. the incumbent from Party A to make sure that any other Party A candidate has a name that comes after theirs.
A Aaronson for president (even though I hear he's a bit of a gossip).
That's bizarre that they'd list candidates in alphabetical order. In Australia the order of names on the ballot paper is drawn at random for this reason.
The "donkey vote", in which preferences are simply numbered from top to bottom by lazy people, is around 1-2% of all votes in our elections, so being above or below your main opponent is often significant enough to flip the election.
I'd imagine that it's worse than 1-2% in some cases.
In Scottish Council elections Single Transferrable Vote is used to elect multiple candidates in an area. Suppose a voter prefers Party A, then Party B, then nobody. There will be some amount of voters who put a "1" beside the first Party A candidate and a "2" beside the first Party B candidate. They may not check if Party A has another candidate standing. Or they may think "I've given my vote to Party A already."
I've not given it much thought before, but of course the name orders should be randomised.
You know, I started a union job on the same day with a pal surnamed Aho. Bidding on jobs was based on seniority. Tie breaker for people hired on the same day was alphabetical order by surname.
There was at least one time when he could have avoided a crummy job by pulling alphabetical rank sending me down into Sauntry mine on rotating shifts mid Minnesota winter in his place, but friendship trumped the alphabet and he didn’t wield the tiebreaker. I’m still grateful for that bit of loyalty.
Yeah, for a bit over a decade out of high school. Mesabi Range. I started as a 32 year old freshman at the University of Mn when the unemployment rate in my home county hit 50%. My wife was also working in Minnesota Ore Operation for US Steel when I met her. She was working as a millwright apprentice and I was maintaining and building RR track.
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.
At least some Buddhist authors (e.g, Dr Nida Chenagtsang) say that it's easy to be mistaken about being enlightenment.
A) so, sure, you think you've just become enlightened. But you might, instead, be insane. Some dare needed to distinguish the two cases
B) so, sure, that guys says he's enlightened. But he might be insane, or a scammer. We have a notion of how enlightened people are expected to behave, which lets you weed out the obvious crooks. (In Christianity, in the Serrmon on the Mount, Jesus also says you can weed out the crooks this way.)
If you read Scott's blog post I link to (in the post), his point is that *almost* every Buddhist Guru in the west had a sex scandal. He says:
"These teachers were among the most accomplished of our time. Many were officially certified as enlightened by the relevant governing bodies (of course there are governing bodies that certify enlightenment, we’re not barbarians). Doubt Culudasa if you want, but it would be hard to say none of these people had achieved enlightenment – at least if you want to maintain any reason to believe in enlightenment as an achievable state at all."
Yes, I think people are finally starting to have some awareness of the complexity of the whole thing that is traditionally called enlightenment or awakening, and its uneasy relationship with emotional maturity, love, truly putting yourself in the shoes of others, and so on. The traditional figure of the guru comes from long-standing spiritual communities where it was (at least implicitly) understood that the guru took on the difficult job of accepting the God-projections of enthusiastic students as a way of helping them on the path, and the guru himself would have peers to help him (it was usually a "him", but not always) on this job when his own unresolved issues occasionally popped up.
When this was exported to the West in haste, much of these safeguards were not built or failed to work, with the results we know. Still I'd hazard a guess that it's not *almost every guru* who fails, just a substantial percent of them. The rest is probably informational bias - you just don't hear about the guy quietly doing a decent job of guiding a few dozens or hundreds of people in their corner of the world.
Then there is the fact that fame does not just come, it usually takes lots of active work to seek it. So the gurus everyone has heard about are often the ones who worked hard to make themselves known. Doing that is not necessarily a sign of narcissism or egotism; some of them might surely be doing that out of a genuine sense of serving the world and sharing the teachings and techniques that have served them well. But it's easy to fool oneself in this kind of situation.
Very good point that not all gurus have failed, but most of the "famous" ones have
I am reminded of Adyashantis guru, a quiet woman, mother of 5 children, who spent her life quietly teaching, remaining unknown to her death. And yet she was a master who changed many lives...
I'm not plugged into the US scene, being in Europe and all, but Adyashanti himself seems to be quite famous and so far no scandals have popped up as far as I know. Score one for not all gurus failing publicly, even famous ones!
Yeah, Adyashanti is also a great example. But then, he keeps a low profile. He doesn't have a big ashram in some sexy place, he doesnt appear on TV, he only has a few interviews.
adyashanti also doesnt claim to be enlightened or super consicous. In one of his interviews, he said "The only thing I can answer for sure is, am I awake in this moment? I dont know what will happen tomorrow."
I think in that interview he showed humility, and the acceptance that he wasnt perfect, and had to be aware each minute. None of the "Now I am enlighetened I can have sex with college girls" nonsense I have heard so much, including in this thread.
Indeed. And I would guess financial scandals would be as common, though not as scandalous so they don’t get much attention.
Regards overworking: it’s considered almost normal ? I once dropped out of yoga training (in uk but by a famous group) because they wanted us to do housework as well. And we were paying good money for this training , I was like I’m not paying you that much and then also washing your dishes.
Says that a person can have an enlightenment experience, but can spoil it by thinking about it too much or talking about it too much or (I think) by trying to recapture it. I haven't read the whole book, so there's probably more there.
I think "spiritual greed" would be a clearer title.
It's worth noting that Trungpa was known to have importuned some of his female students for sex. I don't think he forced himself on any of them — but these days sexual passes by people who are in the hierarchy above you would not be tolerated. Then his successor, Ösel Tendzin contracted HIV — but he knowingly continued to have unsafe sex with his students without informing them. Some later died of AIDS. Worse yet, Vajradhatu's board of directors knew that Tendzin was HIV-positive and sexually active but kept silent. Hopefully, Vajradhatu is faring better under the leadership of Trugpa's son, Sakyong Rinpoche. I had some Vajradhatu-trained teachers along the way. They were very good.
Well that didn't turn out so well either. Sakyong had his own scandal in 2018 after sexually abusing students for decades. According to his wikipedia page, "In July 2018, after more than two decades at the helm Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche agreed to temporarily step back from his administrative and teaching duties to allow space for an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct. He resumed teaching in late 2019. He legally separated from the Shambhala organization in February 2022 after an impasse in which the Shambhala Board of Directors, and the Sakyong Potrang - the organization representing the Sakyong - could not agree on a way forward together. He now resides in Nepal and gives teachings to his international sangha most weekends online."
And yet, yes, I've also met some Vajradhatu trained people and they were very good at teaching meditation.
Enlightenment doesn't mean getting rid of desires, only realizing their ultimate emptiness. So an enlightened guru can still fuck his students, as long as he is aware that the pleasure is temporary and tomorrow he will be horny again.
"Enlightenment doesn't mean getting rid of desires, only realizing their ultimate emptiness. So an enlightened guru can still fuck his students, as long as he is aware that the pleasure is temporary and tomorrow he will be horny again."
Not meaning this as a criticism of you, but I've found that when you strip away the foreign languages, the obscurantist terminology, the hymns and chanting, sacred scrolls, etc., the insights of religion are often blindly obvious statements like this one.
> "I have found that when you strip away a movie's special effects, actors' makeup, sound effects and soundtrack, etc..., a movie is just a bad novel spoken out loud"
The point, of course, being that a movie is **exactly** those things that you will strip away, so your assertion boils down to "If I strip all the interesting things about something it's no longer interesting".
(The crucial difference between a movie and a religion is that a movie is self-aware, nobody is vehemently, loudly and sometimes violently asserting that Star Wars is fun because it contains secret eternal truths from time immemorial, no it's just a very old story retold by some very talented actors over a soundtrack composed by an inhumanly talented musician. But some religions and spiritualities are explicitly self-aware and fully at peace with the idea that its truths are very self-evident and that all of its paraphernalia are just didactic tools because humans are dumb and keep forgetting the obvious.)
Mmmmm. Without getting into the question there might be different types of enlightenment, the doctrine of right conduct would seem to preclude a teacher from having sexual relations with his or her students.
If they're a monk, the vinaya (monastic rules) clearly prohibit them having sex. There's an interview with the Dalai Lama somewhere where he confirms there isn't a loophole in the vinaya that would allow monks to do tantric sex.
But ngakpas (and the devout laity) don't take vows of celibacy. But they are still bound by the rule against sexual misconduct.
Problem: it's not entirely agreed on what, exactly, is the boundary of sexual misconduct.
A thousand years ago, people had sex with their guru and people didn't think it a problem.
Now, we are influenced by present day US sexual ethics, which really disapproves of teachers having sex with students.
The branch of Buddhist I know the current answer for, Yuthok Nyinthig, would go along with disaproving teacher student sex. Probably true for pretty much all mainstream branches of vajrayana.
I am trying to think about "enlightenment" and "doctrine" as two separate things. I think it actually makes more sense that way -- if enlightenment is an *actual thing*, like some actual change about how your brain works (rather than just a metaphor for "this person follows the rules and is high-status"), then being enlightened is a thing separate from the doctrine (although following the doctrine may be an efficient way how to achieve the enlightenment).
From this perspective, once you achieve enlightenment, you can ignore the doctrine. You can probably even achieve enlightenment while ignoring (parts of) the doctrine.
Which means that being enlightened and acting against the doctrine would be nothing unusual.
As an analogy, you can probably achieve inner peace by praying to Jesus for a sufficiently long time. But you can also achieve inner peace without praying to Jesus. Or you can achieve inner peace by praying to Jesus, and then stop believing in Jesus, and keep the inner peace. -- Analogically, you can keep the change of brain that is called enlightenment, while breaking some traditional Buddhist rules.
At least in the Mahayana tradition, the whole point of the Bodhisattva vow is that one takes it to attain Buddhahood *FOR THE SAKE OF ALL SENTIENT BEINGS*. In particular, Bodhisattvas promise to practice the six perfections of *moral discipline*, giving, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom to fulfill their bodhicitta aim of attaining Buddhahood — for the sake of all sentient beings. The vow *implies* that you won't become enlightened without proper conduct toward others. From a purely practical standpoint, to gain merit, Bodhisattvas must help others. Hurting others (even sexual coercion) would load the beginning Boddhisattva with karma — and in their next life, they'd be further away from enlightenment. I think different lineages may word the vow differently, but this is an excerpt from the vow that I took...
"May I in some future time become a Tathagata, an Arhant, a perfect Buddha, proficient in knowledge and *conduct* .... Having crossed over, may I lead others across; comforted, may I comfort others; emancipated, may I emancipate others. May I become so for the benefit and welfare of mankind, out of compassion for the world, for the good of the multitude, for the welfare and benefit of devas and humans." Anyway, my understanding is that I won't reach my enlightenment by being a jerk, and that once I'm enlightened I'll be spreading compassion among all sentient beings. So sexual misconduct is a no-no for both a Bodhisattva and a Buddha.
However, karuna (compassion) does not necessarily mean one must be nice to everyone. If you can help them along the path with tough love, that still qualifies as compassion. But you have to know what you're doing. A Boddhisattva further along the path of the Bhumis is supposed to have the wisdom and to see how their current actions resonate down through the future. A sufficiently advanced Bodhisattva could see that — down the road — the results of his wagging his dick in a woman's face will help her along the path to enlightenment. I'm sure both Trungpa and Tendzin believed they were far along the path of Bodhisattvahood, but I'm not sure used this excuse for their sexual (mis)conduct.
I'm less sure about the conduct of Bodhisattvas in the Zen Tradition. The Zen branches of Mahayana Buddhism split from the Tibetan branches of Buddhism over a dispute about the meaning of enlightenment. I'm not Zen, but my understanding is that they see enlightenment as something that can be achieved in one's current lifestream. They take a different vow. I've seen it written this way...
"Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to study them.
The buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to attain it."
Nothing about being nice to people and not trying to have sex with the unwilling.
That's the kind of question that quickly gets into complicated cases. By "can", do you mean whether its ethical, or whether the desire would even arise? By bodhisattva, do you mean who has formally taken the bodhisattva vow, or someone who has actually attained some high state on the Mahayana path, such as the kind of awakening that it technically called "path of seeing"?
In practice, the answer seems to be "yes". The bodhisattva vow does not require monkhood, and sex is not inherently bad in Buddhism. The situations where it would be ethical and balanced might be rare, but I don't see any overriding reason why they would be nonexistent.
I mean someone who has taken the vow. Yes, I think there probably are occasional situations where it would not harm the student, and in fact would be good for them. Dan Savage's rule of thumb is that actual minors are off limits, but that when it comes to people who are a lot younger or less powerful than you, you can only have a sexual relationship with them if you believe the relationship will leave them in better shape than the were before they had it.
Traditionally, in vajrayana, there could be sex between teacher and student.
In present day, in the branches of vajrayana I know about: this is seriously frowned upon.
I guess the position could be summarised as, potentially ok if the teacher is actually enlightened, but conditional probability of he s enlightened given that he's just asked to have sex with you ... is not good.
Though I know Asanga mentioned tantric sex in one of the Sutras, I was told by a Western Geshe that the tantric sex wasn't supposed to be actual physical coitus, but it was visualizations of having sex with your Yidam (meditation deity, for those who aren't in the know about Buddhist terminology). Other than the sutras, I can't say I know anything about Vajrayana practices. I never took any initiations. Likewise, I know nothing about the tantric sexual practices of the Vedanta.
That has always been one of those questions that has caused controversy in Buddhist circles. One famous Rinpoche married his student. He was from a lineage that allowed marriage, but it caused some consternation among his US students.
Actually, I was talking about another Tibetan Rinponche. But it was a while back, and I don't remember all the details. So I thought I'd best not name them.
This seems pretty straightforward to me in that one of the precepts of the eightfold path that Buddhism is centered around is “right conduct” which explicit includes no sexual misconduct, which is what it’s likely to be between a high up teacher with power and a student of theirs.
I’d put this in the category of a sexual relationship between a boss and subordinate, a professor and their grad student, a minister and their parishoner.
Depends on the type of Buddhism. Theravada have a lot of common-sense rules that prohibit stuff like this, but they're no fun. Various Mahayana sects have discarded these rules, and accumulated piles of skulls of various sizes. I don't even pretend to know what the Vajrayana get up to, but some of them use tantric sex, so...
(Also, probably one wouldn't refer to one's teacher as a bodhisattva. At least not in any sect in familiar with.)
And of course, this is just Buddhism. The Hindu traditions have lots and lots of their own ideas about enlightenment and sex.
I know teachers are not referred to as bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas have taken a vow to put all other sentient beings first and keep back nothing -- part of the vow is to even refrain from attaining enlightenment until all others have achieved it. There probably are rinpoches who have not taken that vow. I was just wondering whether people thought having sex with students was compatible with the vow.
I know sometimes in the texts, everyone who's taken the vow is referred to that way, but it feels a bit presumptuous to do so in day-to-day life? It's the same reaction I get when living people are referred to as "saints", like with the Mormons.
I suppose it's theoretically compatible, but my first guess is always going to be "motivated reasoning". ;-)
I suppose for a lot of people taking the vow is just mouthing the words of another bit of Buddhist ritual. But my closest friend has been a practicing Buddhist his whole life, and at this point, getting sort of old, he is starting to glow from within. For the last few years he's taught a course in psychology at SingSing to murderers serving life sentences. Gives them Freud and other serious stuff to read. And believe me, what's going on does not have a nasty substructure of self-righteousness or wokeism. He fucking *loves* these men, and gets to know some of them really well. Some engage quite deeply with the texts, others use the class discussions as jumping off points to discuss their own aggression or shadow side or whatever. The prison only refers guys who are pretty smart and literate to the class. And they know it. One said to Mark, "do you realize, Mark, that we are the creme de la creme of murderers?" He refers to them as the adorable murderers and often gets tears in his eyes talking about things that happen in the classes.
Just hearsay here — I've heard of a couple people who went out of their way to seek sex with awakened individuals, and reported that it was nothing out of the ordinary, or enlightening in any way.
But ... you wouldn't even expect to gain anything from it unless you had already put in the work of self discipline to be at the point to gain from it.
Once did a group meditation retreat with someone high on the hierarchy in the branch of US Buddhism I was involved with. Over the course of the meditations days each of us had a few meetings with him to talk about our practice. The ones I had with him were important to me. At the end we had a party and while a bunch of us were dancing he grabbed my hand and pulled it down to feel his erection. WTF? Let's count the ways this piece of behavior sux. (a) Dumb. He hasn't learned yet that an erect penis all by itself is not a supercharged aphrodisiac for most women -- in fact it puts us in touch with the ways sex is ugly and ridiculous. (b) Rude as hell. Inconsiderate. (c) Negates for me the value of my meetings with him, because I now think of them as conversations with somebody who is rude and dumb.
Real quick: There's some old Zen story about a monk who achieved enlightenment, went down to the town, began acting in unenlightened ways, noticed this, and went back to the monastery. The conclusion, more or less, was that going back to the monastery was the right thing for him. I kinda think "access to enough of the right people to start a sex scandal" is like the town. "Lead us not into temptation", and all that.
One thing to keep in mind is that the traditional values of 1950s American Christians are not the same as the traditional values of every other society. In many societies, such as the Biblical Israelites, "adultery" only applied to sex with a married woman.
There is a simpler and more cynical explanation, which is that some very large proportion of gurus and/or people who claim enlightenment are no such thing, and are merely good at presenting themselves that way.
I have an even simpler and even more cynical interpretation. There is no such thing as a guru, because there is no such thing as enlightenment, because all religions are nonsense. I am disappointed that the rationalist community, of all people, takes these empty nonsensical claims with any seriousness.
If you claim that the psychological experiences reported by other people are false because you've never personally experienced them, isn't that the same as claiming that leptons and quarks don't exist because you've never personally observed them?
Mystical experiences spurred humanity's first engagement with empiricism. Esotericism was an attempt to systematize and reproduce the experiences certain people were having. And because their experiences were so profound, others wanted to learn how to access these psychological states. So teachers tried to use the exercises that worked for them to induce the same states in their students. Of course, consciousness is a slippery thing. Some found it easy to achieve these profound states of consciousness. Some found it difficult. And for some, the exercises didn't work at all. But esoteric exercises are perfectly rational in their methods and their aims.
And contemporary rational materialists should acknowledge their debt to mysticism. It was Nicholas of Cusa, whose mystical vision he described as "the supreme gift of the Father of Lights,” that spurred Cusa to write "On Learned Ignorance" — one of the foundational texts in the history of science. In it, Cusa suggested a method of discovering truths about nature that was based on the concept that controlled experiments could reveal more about nature than philosophical reasoning could.
It's one thing to claim that Judaism/Christianity/Islam are nonsense, which they fully are, it's another thing entirely to claim that sufficiently dissimilar religion, like Buddhism, in a foreign language you don't understand, is nonsense.
Imagine that a typical popular science article from today got transmitted for some 2500+ years and got translated and retranslated into no less than 4 major languages and dozens of less major ones, oh and the vast majority of the billions of people who transmit and translate this article are simple people with zero interest in verifying or preserving the truth or the phrasing of the article and are using the article for moral guidance. That article would be corrupted so hard its author probably wouldn't recognize it if they stared at it for years, but I would strongly argue it's still a very different kind of thing than the Quran, where we **know** it was bullshit and corrupt since the very beginning.
Buddhism is - or could be - that article.
(Some things are obviously and summarily bullshit, a popular account of the Buddha's birth is that he stood up as soon as he exited his mother's womb, walked 7 steps, and declared out loud that this is the last time he would be reborn. This, with overwhelming probability, never happened. But again, that pop science article would also be corrupted and contorted into impossible tales after its journey, doesn't mean that there **is** some kernel of truth hiding in it somewhere, even if no human can extract it and be reasonably certain.)
Well, while I don't have any personal interest in pursuing it: I think that so far as the *experience* of 'enlightenment' is concerned, it is simpler to assume that all of these people alleging or describing a very similar experience after pursuing some long course of meditation are telling the truth. Of course it's conceivable that it's a kind of weird conspiracy where they're promoting a collective lie (or delusion), but it seems unlikely.
However, so far as the effects or benefits, yes. I haven't seen much to suggest that the experience in question results in better behavior, except to the extent that such people may have more emotional self-control. The history is littered with examples of gurus who behaved as badly as anyone else with ordinary vices and a similar position of authority might. Indeed it is possible that they would behave worse, if things like 'guilt' and 'remorse' are emotions that the 'enlightened one' can simply dismiss like chattering birds.
Indeed. And in the post I talk that there is a 2nd type of person - the spiritual predator. Whose only goal is to f*ck people over, literally and figuratively. I don’t have much experience with these so I avoid talking about them in the post.
In this post I only wanted to talk about honest people who “fell”, as it were
That is definitely so, but I think that for some traditions, what is also going on is that enlightenment is becoming no longer attached. You recognise that you are not that body. So sex, like food and sleep and other such matters, is a body thing.
The body does what it does, but you are no longer shackled to it, and you aren't affected by what it does. The body wants sex? Okay, that's normal, but you're not attached to sex and hung up on it anymore, so you can have sex the same way you can have a sandwich if you're hungry. It doesn't matter any more than that, and it's not 'cheating' or anything like that. Indeed, avoiding having sex because of arbitrary rules may be as much an attachment to the snare of worldly desires as having sex out of the habit before enlightenment that sex is a big deal and you want it and the pleasure and the intimacy.
Since sex doesn't matter anymore for the enlightened, then all the hoo-ha around rules and roles and so forth doesn't matter either.
Yes that's a tough one. Why would one who has truly detached from the body behave ethically at all? They body will just do whatever it will do, and the individual will just watch it happen impassively.
One possible answer is that detachment without love is a dangerous, one-sided path. Eastern traditions seem to recognize this; Buddhism will advise you to supplement vipassana with metta, and Hinduism to balance jñana with bhakti. One of the two sides can be the main ingredient, but if the other is not developing accordingly, you might be headed straight for a case of spiritual bypass and/or self-deception.
And in the presence of strong, genuine, open-hearted love, exploitative behavior just does not happen. Hopefully.
I deliberately avoided this logic because I knew it would open a can of worms 😀
In the 1st draft of my post I had a whole section on Osho but I removed it because I knew people would ignore the rest of the post and hyper focus on him.
I don’t have the answer. Or at least a satisfactory one.
I agree with this, but the distinction is that both people have to see it the same way for it to work without becoming a scandal. If someone on the path of enlightenment, completely falls for their guru, which is not uncommon, and later in her path, really understands that he was taking advantage of his attractiveness and seeming spiritual superiority, then things get ugly. It’s not really clean so it can’t be that close to the truth can it? Sex is great, and should be free, as long as both people walk away from it clearly.
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
I can't comment on the footnotes, but in general I follow the approach you describe and I haven't found any major issues with it. The only thing I usually have to do is correctly format section headers, but that is a minor thing and may have an easy solution I haven't bothered to find.
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?
You may be interested in the book Why We Do What We Do. It builds up a theory (backed by experiment) that there's multiple distinct kinds of motivation (extrinsic vs intrinsic vs some others) that are mutually exclusive, and there's some tasks that are much more effectively performed by people who are intrinsically motivated. This has particularly obvious implications in creative domains and in education.
The most useful piece for me was their model for the ingredients necessary to sustain a state of intrinsic motivation:
- Competence: a feeling that the task at hand is within your reach
- Autonomy: some degree of control over the task or how you approach it
- Relatedness: connections to or collaboration with other people in a positive social group
From that angle, people learn badly when they lack one of the three ingredients above, or when the extrinsic motivations is overwhelming the intrinsic. I have no idea what the evo-psych reasoning for this is.
Organisms generally conserve energy unless they're convinced (via some evolved mechanism) that spending energy will produce a return on the investment. As a result some things are naturally very stimulating (e.g., the urge to seek out food when hungry is very strong in us) but others become so only if we can convince our brains the rewards will follow. Now, evolutionary it's relatively safe to react to obvious stimuli (they're so obvious because they're highly relevant, hence we evolved to recognize them as obvious) while engaging with something obscure like learning new concepts is far riskier: you might discover something splendid for your evolutionary fitness but you might also waste a lot of time gaining nothing at all. So perhaps, as with conventional risk-seeking vs risk-avoidance behaviors, some people's brains are naturally "riskier" in that they evolved to metabolically invest into a completely unknown start-up (which is how your brain must interpret a concept that's totally novel to it) while others are more conservative with their energy expenditure. Of course, this can also fluctuate within one person's lifetime based on environmental influences (such as whether the brain's risky investments tend to get rewarded).
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.
I hate to say this, but check with a lawyer. Perhaps two decades ago, my late wife and I had an above ground swimming pool in our back yard (in Poughkeepsie, New York), and the requirement for it was to have to basically make it childproof, with a locking gate on the ladder to get into the pool (and possibly other safeguards that I don't recall now). I don't recall precisely how the liability was phrased in the absence of legally sufficient safeguards. It was potentially considered something like "attractive nuisance" or "attractive hazard".
I wasn't thinking of a swimming pool or anything, just kids wandering out into the stream to play with boats and look at minnows and splash around and stuff. Are you suggesting that by making it visually more attractive (by removing dead branches, dangling vines, thorn bushes, etc.), this would increase liability even if it also makes the stream safer? I suppose I'll have to check with a lawyer, yeah.
>this would increase liability even if it also makes the stream safer?
In American law, it wouldn't surprise me :-(
Also, just the
>I appear to be in charge of sections of two small rivers/creeks.
suggests the possibility of legal responsibility :-(
In a reasonable legal system, the mere fact of sort-of being associated with a creek shouldn't carry a legal hazard - but in the USA, it is prudent to check. :-(
The sides of the above ground pool may have been high enough that, for a small child, this may not have been true. My vague memory is that, even for adults, getting into it without the ladder would have been awkward to difficult. I can't recall whether we had to put some sort of fence around the rim of the pool. After decades, my visual memory of that part of the setup is too faded.
At the risk of sounding like a pearl clutcher - Make sure the kids (or anyone swimming) wear nose clips if there's any chance they will submerge entirely or get warm pond water up their noses. I've watched a few episodes of Monsters Inside Me, and a dose of brain-eating amoebae is not nice!
I don't know much about the subject, but there is a regular stream (pun intended) of articles out there about the ecological damage that dams do, including small ones, in terms of not allowing river wildlife to move up and down, and not allowing sediment to be carried downstream. I think these days the tendency is to remove unused dams and barriers wherever possible, and there are *lots* of them blocking rivers and streams in more or less remote places.
Dams that are both permanent and fully impermeable, yes that's true -- they have significant negative impacts over time. Beaver dams on the other hand are both fun (people love watching busy beavers putter around a spot) and broadly a natural and positive part of North American stream ecosystems.
Pairs of beaver don't stay in the same place for their entire lives, they'll build a dam or lodge and raise a few annual litters there and then move on to new site. The dam they leave behind will gradually fall apart even if you don't just go ahead and remove it yourself. So if a pair of beaver does move in to one of your streams, leave them be and enjoy the show for a while. That could well happen as they have mounted a strong comeback across much of the US including in suburban and even fully-urban areas.
I second the idea of encouraging beavers. If adults are supervising children for safety, a beaver pond should bring an assortment of other interesting life forms. Beaver have begun returning to the San Pedro River in Arizona, and just recently a few have followed irrigation canals into suburban Phoenix.
French fur trappers worked the Gila River for beaver in the early nineteenth century, followed by a few Americans. Trapping was pretty good, but assaults by Western Apache and Yavapai raiders made it difficult.
I would recommend not encouraging beavers. Beavers do not build their dams where you want them to be built, and they don't care about only flooding ground you want flooded. I grew up near a beaver pond, and they were constantly trying to expand their pond by flooding the road. They're relentless.
There aren't any beavers at the moment, and probably won't be, but flooding isn't a problem in these specific ares. There's plenty of flood plain with nothing important on it, which is good because we get regular floods every few years/decades.
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 asked for feedback on my urban planning bibliography, an understandably boring subject. I can understand why people would rather talk about vactrains. I'm happy to talk about my idea for a "Linetran", but only if you have read this section of the proposal titled DESIGNING THE LINETRAN.
If you try to argue with me, but you obviously have not read the proposal, I WILL BLOCK YOU.
It's interesting. There's no reason you should try to convince me, personally, that it's feasible, but if you wanted to, I'd say the next step would be to create a computer simulation of how the linetran would work, including as many of the details and limitations as possible. (Lane changes, acceleration times, missed stops due to deceleration, etc.) To avoid having to create the entire traffic control system, I suppose some parts could be simplified to "just work", as long as they were labelled. It could be tested with different types of load, like "rush hour" or "disaster" or "Taylor Swift concert".
I thought again today about simulating the flow of passengers and pods. This problem is eminently suited to computer simulation. The individual elements are quite simple:
Riders
Stations
Destinations
Pods
Doors
Airlocks
Acceleration
Deceleration
Velocity
Cruising lane
A/D lane
Station lane
Bathroom usage
Passenger problems
Central computer
The catch is in the volume of events. I imagine 400,000 residents and 800,000 trips per day. The simulation should cover a full 24 hours.
My career was in software. I never programmed a simulation, but I suppose I could learn.
And adding one more thought: it might be a big hidden assumption how you generate demand for trips in your simulation. When you seed demand, you are in effect assuming the development pattern of the city (where do people tend to live, where do they tend to work, etc.). If you look at a bunch of trips at random times between random points in the network, you might get a very different result than if you assume a good deal of correlation. I think you can't assume you know what this would look like, so you would need to build a diverse set of demand inputs to ensure service coverage.
Well, you are quite right that how you build the city has a huge effect on the usage patterns in the linetran. The paper specifies "mixed use", which means your offices and your shops and your residences are all mixed together. If you don't do this, if you put your residences in one place and your office sector 5 mi away, like every other large city in America, the linetran will be overtaxed.
I was thinking about a simulation as well. One thing that would be particularly critical in a linear city that relied on this system would be its robustness, so you might look at what happens if one of the lines is temporarily down at various points in the system.
Quite true. Another responder asked me to address this idea. One thing became obvious: the two lines (e.g. north and south) must be capable of operating in either direction. If one line were crippled, the other line could operate for 30 minutes in one direction and then switch to the other direction. Of course this would be a huge drag, but better than nothing.
Another possibility is a fleet of buses that are held in reserve. There is a highway that parallels the city for the entire distance. The buses could operate on this highway.
(need to be strapped into a chair by an attendant. This can be done while waiting for the pod to arrive, but the attendant must lift the child strapped in the chair, enter the pod, strap the chair and child to a seat, and exit the pod.)
It would make more sense to have "circletrains" which woosh round a (say) ten mile diameter circular track, with stations at regular intervals which are on sidings off the main track and into which the trains can be diverted and slowed into and speeded out of.
I don't see much point in making the main track a vacuum, or even a partial vacuum. Provided the trains are streamlined, and there are adequate "air displacement" tunnels along the ceiling and/or sides of the main tunnel, I don't see why a train couldn't attain speeds of three or four hundred miles an hour between stations, which seems perfectly adequate.
A vacuum tunnel would make the passengers vulnerable to an accidental or malicious breach of the train's airtightness, which would presumably kill every passenger in any carriages in which it occurred!
Also, a circular arrangement of stations allows slower train or bus services, with more closely spaced stops, along radial routes. Perhaps there could be one or more a slower "inner circular" train routes as well.
Speaking of linear arrangements though, I sometimes think a lot of space is wasted over multi-lane highways, what in the UK are called motorways. If a canopy was built along the entire width of the highway, for mile after mile along the road, think how much area could be used for solar panels for example, or growing food, or warehouses, or even dwellings. Maybe a development of that could end up approximating your "linear city".
The canopies would have to be quite a way above the road, to help avoid being damaged by terrorist explosions, because a low canopy would otherwise be a tempting target, just like a tunnel They would also need to be robust, to avoid damage in high winds.
The tunnels for the vacuum transport are buried beneath the park. Invisible and silent. I think that would be hard to do with conventional high-speed rail.
Does not compute. The vacuum transport IS essentially a fancy high-speed rail, plus the nightmare of vacuum technology, plus some very elaborate lane switching, plus lots more independently moving components ("pods" instead of trains). If you can't bury regular high-speed rail in a tunnel, you sure as hell can't do it with your vacuum transport.
Also: not silent. The vacuum pumps would have to be humming all the time to maintain the vacuum in the presence of the inevitable leaks (with the electricity bill that comes with it).
This may come across as harsh, but "linear city with vacuum train" seems to be such an obviously daft idea that I have to ask "why?!?". (Apart from the fancy promo CGI from Saudi-Arabia, of course.)
To summarize why it's a daft idea: arranging the city in a line literally maximizes the distance between parts of the city. E.g., a city with the same footprint as "Neom - the Line" would fit into a square of 6 x 6 km, with a maximum distance between points of 12 km on a Manhattan metric, as opposed to 170 km for "the Line".
The main problem with vacuum trains is that they don't work, and never will, but even regular high-speed rails would need many parallel lines to handle the commuter traffic of a metropolis - no surprise, if you needlessly blow up the average travel distance.
I visualize something analogous to irresistible hydrostatic pressure building up at the midpoint of such a line city, rupturing it at the center and forcing it to evolve in to a more compact shape
Replace the vactrain in your mind with a Star Trek transporter. There is a transporter hub ever mile in the linear city. Do you care that the city is 37 miles long?
If a Star Trek transporter existed, I wouldn't expect a city 37 miles long, but scattered locations based on resources to be gathered, scenic places to live, and other criteria.
Peter, this is not... helpful... in promoting your case. I wish you every success, I really do, I grew up a voracious reader of sci-fi and still want my space hotel and fast quiet clean travel. You deserve credit for actually writing a coherent proposal and putting it up here for all to chew on. But the problem is a hard one, and folks are rising legitimate concerns about your specific proposal. If your goal is to generate interest (I remember you weren't exactly in a position to do this yourself at this point), sniping at your most articulate critics doesn't help. Bertram - we - everybody - can just walk away. And then you've achieved nothing.
Peter, I have to ask, and because the tone doesn't translate, this is really a neutral question, not an attacking one: what is the point of this thought experiment?
Any problem may have a perfect imaginary solution that works great and is practically impossible.
I briefly skimmed one of your documents and it appears from that, and your avatar showing a car with a red line through it, that you are anti-cars and pro public transport.
As I think "mass shared" public transport is a necessary evil, and I believe most people share that opinion (especially in the US!), and in most areas it is often hopelessly inadequate for peoples' needs (in both routes and timing), any proposal aiming to supplant car journeys entirely by this form of public transport is a complete non-starter.
Notice though that I said car "journeys", not "car ownership", and those are not the same thing at all. One needn't be Nostradamus these days to predict the most likely development in transport, because it is already starting to happen - Robot taxis, not personally owned but whistled up on demand at any time at and to any place.
It's obvious that most town dwellers won't need to own their own cars before long, and provided they don't damage or contaminate robotaxis while being ferried around, these will be far cheaper and more practical for general use, even for long journeys.
In my proposal, one can own and park a car outside of the city. One of the advantages of the line shape is that "outside of the city" is only a few minutes walk away.
That's not a given. Let's take "The Line", with its 170 km. You have a vacuum train that can travel from one end to the other in 20 minutes - if it doesn't stop anywhere. So it's useless for everyone who doesn't want to travel all the way. So you need stops inbetween - the more stops, the slower it becomes, because of all the acceleration and deceleration and time to get in and out (how does that work in a vacuum train, btw?). So you break it down to a couple of big stops every 30 km or so, and then regional trains and then buses. So in the worst case, a passenger has to switch four times to get to his destination, and it easily takes well over an hour. IF and ONLY IF trains actually run at a high frequency.
But isn't it similar to "if FTL travel works, then interstellar travel works" experiment, where the only response is "so what". Literally "anything" works if we're allowed to use impossible means.
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.
Purely anecdata here, but having been given the name Beowulf I can't help but think it has both negatively and positively affected my life in profound ways. It was torture having that name as a kid. The harassment factor was pretty bad. But as a teenager, I was forced to wonder if I didn't get that name for a reason deeper than it being the silly choice of my English Lit parents. The totemistic implications of wolf were unavoidable — and they spurred me off in a shamanistic direction as a teenager (which was quite useful to understanding the malleability of reality).
There's a fun quiz (https://nameberry.com/dna/quiz) on how you internally parse name-patterns/what kind of patterns you prefer. It needs registration to save results long-term, but not to take the quiz itself and get them. I get Maverick-Noble; the conclusion that I would insist on naming a child something like Midnight/Jocasta/Lazarus/Andromeda is arguably-painfully accurate. (Though all those names are probably a bit too common. Baby names in current cohorts are weirder/less concentrated than you think, and a lot of things that were *unheard of* until recently are big deals.)
That was fun, though I had to wonder "Who - apart from the father god of the Norse or Greek pantheons - names their kid Thunder or Midnight?"
I got "Leader-Noble" - names fit for 'future Supreme Court Justices'. You heard it here first, folks, so the next SC nominee will be picked on "do I like their name?" 😁
I've heard of a kid named "Amaia" and it all depends how it is pronounced, because if it's "Am-Ai-Ah" then the full name (first name plus surname) sounds like one of the Simpsons prank phone call names and I do hope they have a middle name they can use instead when they get older.
Now, I haven't *heard* the name, just read it, so it could be pronounced "Amy-ah" or "Maya" or something.
I remember a psychologist friend telling me in the 1990s that people with more popular names were more popular, I suppose he got that view from a study, but I don't know which one. This did affect me and my wife a bit when we were choosing names (so we pushed the boat out, but not that far).
People with weird names probably have weird parents, and hence be weird themselves. If you're called Moonbeam then you've probably had an early upbringing which will make it hard for you to relate to the other kids.
My experience (in remembering other people) is kind of the opposite. If someone has an unusual name, I'm more likely to remember just that they had some vaguely [ethnicity] sounding name, rather than actually remembering the specific name.
Definitely. I think it forces you to become more of an individual, to be aware of yourself as a unique person. Being more noticeable to others is definitely a cause of that.
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.
Yeah, without touching on the direct object level hiring, I'm not confident that...underprivileged African Americans understand white and/or business culture as well as they think they do.
Like, no, you don't want to wear a suit to that interview in Colorado, you want a "nerdy" graphic tee underneath a Northface jacket. And don't act like Ned Flanders, it's weird.
No, there are probably some situations where you use "white voice" but if you're working with a Pakistani and a German in Texas on an oil & gas widget, you need to use "international English". "White voice" seems affected and confusing.
No, nobody thinks you're hard or intimidating because you grew up in Detroit. This is El Paso, Juarez and the cartels are right there. And Kwame over there grew up in Eritrea, we don't even ask about that.
I was exaggerating a bit with "Ned Flanders". He doesn't have Ned's weird verbal quirks or mustache. He does, as Arbituram said, present himself as unthreatening.
People don't act like Ned Flanders out of a mistaken belief that "white people are like that". It's because Flanders is deeply unthreatening, both personally and to the wider system.
Perhaps you don't slightly tense up when a black man enters the room; great! But not universal.
I think you're right. I was first thinking that the people hiring should just make allowances for things like wearing a suit to an interview, but knowing that a suit is the wrong thing to wear is a sign of being alert and adaptable, & that's a valuable talent.
I think, in general, that it's good to learn different ways of behavior to be able to navigate different types of social context. A purely linguistic version, when used in a single context, is called "code-switching", but I think it also applies in a more general sense.
I think it's a common mistake to identify so strongly with a particular approach to life, that you reject all others. Of course, it's OK to have personal, ethical, or aesthetic preferences. Even political preferences! (Which is why we don't use "thee" and "thou" any more.) And these types of skills often become rusty without practice.
To be slightly more specific, a vital skill in modern America is to be able to interact with the professional-managerial class in a way that they recognize as "peer". If you can't do that, by generating verbal and written language, controlling body language, and dressing and grooming yourself appropriately, you're at a major disadvantage.
To perhaps be controversial, I think a major component of modern racism in America (for multiple definitions of "racism") is that people (most people, and not only in America) associate the cultural signifiers of underclass African-American culture as being the only way to be "authentically black". And there's reasons for how we got here, including white racism in the mid-20th century, and the politics of the 60s and 70s. But it's not a good place to be.
This is generally true, but let's expand on the point about African-Americans.
While it may be good for his career prospects if, say, a Chinese-American comes across as more assimilated to the US mainstream, the effect is much stronger among African-Americans because there exists such a thing as "oppositional culture", which is associated BOTH with unusual names and with a hostile attitude towards mainstream society and whites. Something you want to try your best to screen out in a multiracial workplace that strives to have a relatively harmonious culture.
One wouldn't expect an unassimilated Chinese immigrant to have an *oppositional* attitude towards mainstream US society or, say, his boss who functions as a stand-in for it. He's merely unassimilated. He's expected to miss or misunderstand a number of cues, but not intentionally.
Sure. I think "underclass African-American culture" has a very strong current of being oppositional to "mainstream culture", which is effectively synonymous in America with "white culture", especially from the black perspective. In that sense, being able to even temporarily adopt the behaviors of mainstream culture is a sign that the person is not inextricably wedded to opposing mainstream culture. (There's even what's basically a genre of African-American literature consisting of people saying, "even though I act like a white person in my public life, I also have a life and experiences that white people do not", which can be viewed as a way of trying to create an African-American identity that's compatible with mainstream culture.)
Or in another sense, it's like holding up the sign of Havel's greengrocer, saying: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." Which is exactly what a prospective employer wants to hear. Totally non-oppositional. (I'm not being sarcastic here. I'm honestly surprised that I'm using the greengrocer as a positive example.)
That would match the black bullies I saw in middle school, who picked on good students in general, but when picking on the good black students they added in the additional slur of "acting white". There's so many horrible implications of that, that I don't even know where to begin.
In adult life, I think there's also a coalition-building political aspect, leveraging social insecurity to support ones' agenda. "If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black." In a way, it's similar to how right-wing politicians talk about "real Americans", or how they used to, anyway, back in the W. Bush days.
It's just the normal phenomenon where Americans live within a very complicated class system of which they are somehow blithely unaware, and it confuses them constantly.
The British, to their credit, have a class system but they're very much consciously aware of it at all times, which means that they can adjust their biases accordingly, or at least choose to be classist with their eyes open.
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?
1. Having a positive feedback loop isn't necessary for FOOM. If it turns out that hooking up a calculator and a lot of RAM to human levels of creativity gets you to have the equivalent of Bell labs, the Renaissance, and a Manhattan project's worth of insight + invention within a month, and also allows you to actuate all robotic devices to a degree of flexibility an entire human civilization does, it doesn't matter if it would be harder to get to "the next level of intelligence".
2. From the invention of any new field of intellectual endeavor, you can almost always see a flurry of new insights happen when cognitive effort is put into it. While it is true humans have discovered things like "throwing hardware at transformer architecture" results in gains, the actual amount of effort used to figure this out is tiny next to total human brainpower. If a human or superhuman level of intelligence does come into existence, it is likely to do so without having literally all of the intelligence enhancing algorithms used on it. And once it gets intelligent enough to create a successor AI, those algorithms would then be included. It's not that "the next level of intelligence" is easier so much that a previous bottleneck "do we have enough grad students to implement this" gets replaced by a self reinforcing process. How many steps? I don't know, but "greater than zero" seems far more defensible than "zero".
3. We do not appear to live in the world where the exact next step(s) of intelligence is getting harder to achieve. From what I understand, basically anything that is tried right now appears to be improving performance. Naive extrapolation isn't a terrific prior, but it's certainly better than "well things will end up being harder for someone else at the exact point it would otherwise be inconvenient". This isn't the way wars, companies or any sort of competition are planned, why would we suppose that "things get harder when it's convenient" be a good principle for prediction? I don't know when the sigmoid would level out (other than the fact that it probably does level out) but precisely because I don't know the level, it seems unreasonable to suppose that it levels out at a cognitive level insufficient to kill all humans, when no serious cognitive effort has been spent by humans to verify that alien but powerful intelligences wouldn't wipe out humanity. (Why would alien intelligences are a threat be a prior? Because a lot of our enforcement mechanisms like laws, culture and social shame are based on all intelligences being humans. Basically no humans are fanatical AND intelligent enough to, say, shut down a large portion of first world infrastructure because there's no benefit in widespread destruction. This calculus changes if humanity in and of itself is an obstacle, and if what is obviously a bad idea (destroying things you, a human can use yourself) turns into obviously a good idea (destroying things you, an AI, see as obstructing your goals), we can no longer rely on the implicit defense mechanism of "no one smart is motivated to do this")
>If it turns out that hooking up a calculator and a lot of RAM to human levels of creativity gets you to have the equivalent of Bell labs
Yup. We've spent a huge amount of effort over the last ~60 years building up software tools that encapsulate substantial chunks of knowledge, and I've seen GPT4 using at least one of them ( https://chat.openai.com/share/6a026c6c-5f6a-4009-befb-b89e5096c8fa ) (albeit I have also seen GPT4, as it currently stands, repeatedly failing a simple question that I have been giving it ("Which inorganic compounds are gases at STP?" https://chat.openai.com/share/12040db2-5798-478d-a683-2dd2bd98fe4e ). And, as far as I know, there have been significant efforts (ongoing?) to extend LLMs to use our existing computational tools.
I have a quibble with
>From what I understand, basically anything that is tried right now appears to be improving performance.
I would expect publication bias. What works, gets discussed and published. What doesn't work, not so much.
> I would expect publication bias. What works, gets discussed and published. What doesn't work, not so much.
While that is generically true, the numerator matters far more than the denominator for claims about a human society equivalent intelligence, but not for a human level intelligence. Although your implicit point about difficulty is taken, just because things seem easy on the surface doesn't mean that that it actually is easy once you account for selection effects.
Curious, but is it your expectation that there isn't low hanging fruit in AI performance, or was your counter point just specifically about how pollyanna-ish the quoted argument I made was? I think it's the latter, but want to verify.
Many Thanks! I was _only_ quibbling about the one quoted point. My personal guess is that there probably _is_ low-hanging fruit in AI performance (in the "speed" sense of performance), and that
a) It is probably limited today by the number of bright people one can throw at that particular problem.
b) That when AI gets reliable enough to act as e.g. an advisor it will probably also be capable of digging through the decades of computer science literature to find algorithmic improvements to its own implementation.
For the "reliability" sense of performance, I'm hopeful, but agnostic. Things like "tree of thought" and prompt engineering seem to help somewhat. I'll be more confident when I get a correct answer to "What inorganic compounds are gases at standard temperature and pressure?" and when lawyers stop getting handed non-existent precedents from LLMs.
Or when LLMs stop failing basic arithmetic questions... I don't think this is a wall or anything, but perhaps the persistent difficulty of novel but simple maths flags a core issue with reliability of generalist systems (I continue to be much more impressed with Deep mind's narrower tools for protein folding and Go.)
Gwern seems to think this is because of the BPE tokenization, which is not at all central to transformers.
To vaguely summarize, GPT sees a group of characters instead individual characters, and so GPT ends up seeing 1, 10 and 100 as completely different tokens with no relationship to each other, learning concepts such as arithmetic is much slower, since GPT has to spend a lot of its training runs doing things that humans get "for free", like figuring out "1+2=3"" 1 + 2 = 3" "2 + 1 = 3" are related, since to GPT, all three have been obfuscated to look like completely different tokens, whereas no one has scrambled them for us and we can obviously see those expressions are similar and thus related.
I think the argument is that we're currently bottlenecked on the number of people who are capable of improving machine intelligence. If machine intelligence were smart enough to improve machine intelligence[*] then we could create as many machine intelligences as required in order to make machine intelligence more intelligent at whatever pace we needed. This would be an economically rational thing to do since the rewards for getting ahead of your competitors are always going to be large.
[*] Like, y'know, installing sweep.dev to help me write some code for my PhD thesis has sped up my research.
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.
I will say that in the cards world, we’re much more blasé about starting QT-prolonging meds with QTc > 500, probably because we deal with it every day. Usually we get antsy when > 550.
We get all the patients who actually develop TdP, and often they have something else going on (a combo of three different QT-prolonging meds, or an underlying channelopathy, or prior myocardial injury, etc).
Different ways of calculating QTc tends to be somewhat institution dependent, but I agree still predominantly Bazett’s. Most folks will switch to alternates for tachycardia, if it matters clinically.
Well, I just forwarded this to 4 other colleagues in psych. I worked with an old, devil-may-care psychiatrist (in the best way, to be clear) who used to work himself into a lather when the hospital pharmacist would raise concerns about a patient's QTc measured as part of their ED med clearance for BH. We're talking like 490-510 or something. While his expletive riddled stumping on this topic has certainly stuck with me, it was not, um, necessarily backed by a rigorous examination of the evidence. For your efforts, I thank you.
Sometimes I wish I could have the confidence levels of those sorts of docs, maybe when I'm not a resident anymore. I'm glad you found it good enough to share around!
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.
Here's a thing I managed a few times, admittedly for less fraught relationships.
Shortly before seeing the person, I'd notice my feeling of expecting trouble. I'd fend off the feeling. The interaction would go better.
Hypothesis: If I expected things to go badly, I was giving off signals that activated a habit pattern in the other person.
Note that I wasn't generating an expectation of things going well, or in any particular way, I was just hopefully giving the person room to behave differently.
I'm an asshole so it might not be the best advice, but for people who liked to apologize constantly I'd usually just agree with them. "I know I'm worthless." "Yep. So about laundry..."
I second this advice, which is a version of what is advised by Captain Awkward, Ask Polly, et al. if you think someone is being strategically submissive.
If you want to be very kind to this person, you could try to get ahead of this by finding a calm, conflict-free moment to say, "Can I talk to you about something that's been bothering me? Would you mind just listening and not interrupting until I'm finished? Thanks. I feel like, oftentimes when I have a simple request or minor criticism, you apologize so profusely that we never work on the actual issue. I'm hoping we can figure out a way to work through that together."
This will almost certainly trigger an apology tsunami; let it go on a few sentences and then break in with something like: "Please let me stop you there. This is sort of what I was talking about? Our conversation has shifted from an issue which is impacting our relationship to you profusely apologizing. When you do that I feel like you care more about apologizing than about how I feel. I accept that you're sorry and I'd like you to stop focusing on that now. Can we discuss how to get through this together?"
Hard to say which way it might go from there. Ideally the person is acting in good faith and has some ideas about how you can avoid triggering them and will agree to make an effort. They'll almost certainly backslide at some point and you might need to say, "Hey, let me stop you there, remember when we talked about the apologizing? I accept your apology, so let's move on to the laundry..."
However, if they attempt to double-down and apologize from an even more wounded, distraught position, I think you have every right to be dismissive. That can be Yug Gnirob's agreement, "Yep, so about the laundry," or a softer version can be, "I accept your apology. So about the laundry..."
I know how aggravating a weaponized apologizer can be. I'm sorry you're having to deal with this.
This might piss you off but it's worth asking: is this person necessarily doing this in bad faith? I recently read about markers that a person is in an abusive (typically romantic) relationship and one of the markers was "Constant Apologizing", because in the context of an abusive relationship any criticism **is** usually a preamble to a long tirade about "Why <abused person> sucks and deserves to die : a concise list of 112 reasons", and that's if the abused person is lucky, if they're unlucky the lecture will be given by the abuser's hands and other tools of physical interpersonal violence not with their mouth and words. This is not to say that **you're** the abuser, just that this person might have another abuser in her life and she internalized the habit of excessively apologizing to appease the abuser.
Related to this is an anecdote I once read about an abused dog who was lucky enough to end up in the care of a better caretaker, and whenever she heard a loud human voice or saw a long stick (e.g. a broom) she would wet herself. The likely explanation is that those markers, loud voice and long sticks, are pavlovian signals that the abuser who was once her caretaker will hit her, thus her fear and loss of control.
Hard to say what exactly is going on; they're being treated for depression with several years now, they went through several very rocky patches in their relationship, and the suicide attempt was after coming to stay with us due to 'I'm definitely breaking up with partner this time' (which has not, in fact, happened).
Due to suicide attempt, they had in-patient stay in a clinic and then follow-up out-patient appointments, which seem (to my jaundiced view of matters) to have led to nothing but a sudden discovery of a laundry list of abuse/abusive events in their past, including family of origin. I'm jaundiced about this because for several of the claims, I'm in a position to deny they happened (which doesn't make the relationship between us any smoother, since I'm denying this new identity they've built up for themselves as an abuse survivor) and for years they devoured the kind of misery porn memoirs like "A Child Called It" and I think even the suicide attempt (which was kind of half-assed) was more one of these attempts to fit in with the model of such books and make them the star of their own show. EDIT: They were a very sickly child, nearly died as an infant due to severe pneumonia, and for years were in delicate health and have become very anxious/nervous, 'living on their nerves' type as a result, plus prone to self-dramatisation.
I don't blame the therapists, by the way, since all they have to go on is what my family member has told them, and there's no way I or any one else can turn up with "yeah, this never happened". But it has made me even more sceptical about therapy business than I was before.
I am also struggling with a ton of unprocessed anger over the suicide attempt, since I'm furious about "if you wanted to kill yourself, why not do it in your own home? but no, you had to come all the way down here and dump this mess on my doorstep and leave it to us to deal with if it had worked". Not healthy, but I can't seem to let go of it.
So ever since, they've been in Weaponised Apology mode, I've been inclined to fly off the handle (which doesn't help matters) and now they're coming down to stay for a short break after going back to their home situation for the past year. I'm only doing this to oblige the third party, who is piggy-in-the-middle here between us both and isn't in the wrong, but who wants to maintain a good relationship with this person. So for the next few days, I'm going to try and just be "polite but distant" and hope some stupid row doesn't blow up over a trivial matter. I do *want* them to be better and do better, but this Martyr Act isn't helping them or me, since beneath the "I deserve to die, I deserve to be hated" layer is all this "I am an abuse survivor and all this is just more abuse and I am so heroic for suffering all this" instead of acknowledging that this isn't healthy coping strategy or that they need to get the hell out of the rut they're content to be in.
Apologies for saying the obvious, but I just *really* noticed that you're apparently being pressured to host someone who attempted suicide *in your home.*
That's wild!
I think it's incredibly reasonable for you to refuse to host, even if you already agreed! It's more than fair to (strategically!) adopt the language of victimization being used by Problem Person and say something like, "I don't feel safe allowing Problem Person to stay in my home again," or, more intensely, "Problem Person's attempted suicide was really scary and it's stressing me out to have them in my home again," or any version of that idea, the more vulnerable-sounding the better.
Problem Person and PIggy-in-the-Middle Person might interpret this as genuine fear, but you can privately know this confession of vulnerability actually means, "I am 500% pissed at Problem Person and I'm 'afraid' I'm going to show it if they stay here."
Does the Piggy-in-the-Middle Person actually live with you and thus feel entitled to host Problem Person in your home? If not, then I think you can stand firmly in how very afraid you are of having 'responsibility' for Problem Person and invite Piggy-in-the-Middle Person to host them, instead.
If Piggy-in-the-Middle lives with you and is inviting Problem Person despite your wishes (and fear! so much fear and anxiety! ignore what you look like on the outside, you're a quivering mess inside!), can you just...leave? Go to a hotel for the duration of the visit and avoid Problem Person entirely?
One of my favorite Captain Awkward sayings is, "Sometimes the cheapest way to pay for something is with money." I have no idea where you live and what hotel rates might be like there, but consider at least pricing it out. It might very well be worth a few hundred dollars to have a peaceful few days by yourself in a clean quiet room and never even see Problem Person.
I mean, their attempt was so traumatic for you, after all! Sure, you looked confident and/or calm and/or competent and/or angry, but on the inside you were DEEPLY TRAUMATIZED! It would be SO VERY WRONG to subject you to relive that HORRIBLY SCARY TRAUMA!
Mental illness puts incredible stress on family members. The worst of it is -- and friends of mine with relatively sane families don't usually get this -- there is tremendous anger and disappointment on the part of the family members who support the subject and their attempts to "get sorted", which unfortunately, usually fail -- because the subject either can't or won't actually put in the effort to really change.
This dynamic IMX almost always leads to a cycle of thinking you have a handle on it, everyone gets hopeful, Subject seems to finally be making the effort to get well, failure, reversion back to frustration, incrimination, guilt, and a general feeling of hopelessness regarding the prospects that things will ever change.
You may want to look for support groups of family/caregivers who have similar problems. It can really help take the block of anger, shame, and frustration off your shoulders.
It seems that your conversations are going to be difficult with any communication style :/ Yet my hope would be that the NVC patterns would be less strongly perceived as criticism.
Oh, I do know that I need to work on my own attitude. A lot of what is driving me is anger (overlying what, exactly? unresolved fear over the suicide attempt?) that having been as sympathetic and supportive and uncritical as I could have, they then decided that that was the perfect time to try the suicide attempt.
And that just torpedoed everything I had been trying to do for them, so thin ice ever since.
EDIT: Yeesh - I posted this then realized that I coasted right over the "I am not really asking for advice" part of your post, which is pretty lazy on my part since it was literally the first thing you wrote.
So yeah, disregard advice post - suffice to say I've experienced this behavior, it's real, and it's frustrating.
Oh no, thanks! Good, solid advice and yes, keeping my own cool and walking away is the best approach. I know by myself that I *want* to needle them because I'm feeling angry and frustrated, which is a terrible way to address this situation. So making a pre-commitment to "keep your mouth shut and walk away from possible fights" is the best strategy.
Oh crap I also excitedly leapt into advice mode without even reading the whole thread - sorry about that!
That said, here's some more advice (LOL) in tired aphorism form:
The best revenge is living well.
This person sounds extremely aggravating and selfish. I totally sympathize with why you want to show your objective superiority and contempt for them, but never forget that *getting them to do what you want* is the only really useful goal here. Of course you shouldn't *have* to employ a strategic display of empathy and diplomacy that you don't feel, but if it works to shift their behavior, it's a win for *you.*
Another way to think of it is to remember the Ultimatum Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game). Rationally, we know that getting anything is better than getting nothing, even if the reward seem 'unfair" compared to what someone else is getting.
So take your metaphorical $5 and leave this person their metaphorical $95; even if they feel like they "won," at least you have $5 more now than when you started.
My first instinct in dealing with a person like this would be to simply stay calm and ignore the apologies. Like, not ignore the person, but simply carry on the conversation as though you didn't hear the apologies. Your reaction, any reaction, is the reward that feeds their habit.
No clue if this would actually work in this particular case, of course, but it would at least be interesting to see what the result would be.
Have you tried keeping it breezy, changing the subject and getting out?
"No worries, thank you for hearing me out! Im making myself a sandwich, want one?/I'm headed to the store, need anything?/etc etc"
If they go to a third party you can be like "woha, so weird they think I'm mad at them! I thought we figured it all out, I'm definitely not mad! Let them know it's all good, you know how they can get in their own head"
Leaving a conversation in the middle is pretty rude, but so is talking nonstop and ignoring what the person is saying. If you come off looking bad anyway you might as well get what you want.
Didn't someone write a book a while ago about seeing the world in terms of conversational games? I remember something about interactions as fixed scripts, in which people choose the role they take.
So when a woman says, "Oh I'm so fat," she's starting a script, and the next line is for you to say, "Oh no, you're not!" because that's the Supportive Friend's role. If you instead say, "Yeah, I've been meaning to say something," you've declined the Supportive Friend role and instead started playing the Teasing Boyfriend script. If you say something odd like, "Ambiguously true: your weight is up 20g from yesterday but still within 1sd for women in your age range," you've broken the conversation, because there is no script that goes that way, so now she has nothing to say to that, and she'll probably avoid you because you're weird.
To me your thing sounds very much like one of these games, where A's role is to apologise for a perceived slight, and B's role is to clarify, allowing A to interpret the clarification as another slight and apologise again, ad infinitum.
Depending on how fed up you are and how much you stand to lose or gain, you could always try messing with the script.
"I'm sorry that my selfish need to breathe is costing so much of your precious air."
"Yeah, well, you should be. See that it doesn't happen again."
"I'm so worthless and you hate me and I should probably just blow my brains out."
"Okay, well try to avoid getting blood on the carpet, dear."
If you're no longer doing your part of the dance, they can't do theirs.
"What do you say after you say hello" is the book I read. weird stuff. I started calling people out on their games, gazed into mine, and almost earned myself a divorce.
I was going to suggest "Games People Play", but its the same author. The framework is called "Transactional Analysis". These are both very old books. I would have expected something more recent in a fast moving field like psychology.... even if its the same ideas presented in a more modern style. "I'm OK, you're OK" is another book in the same genre and similar vintage.
"I'm so worthless and you hate me and I should probably just blow my brains out."
"Okay, well try to avoid getting blood on the carpet, dear."
This particular person tried a suicide attempt in my sitting room, so that's part of my beef with them 😁
No blood, thankfully, but dosed themselves up on (expired) Valium and wine, passing out, leaving a rambling, maudlin, multi-page suicide letter and them to be found by another family member who came home from work.
So they're already well on board the "I know you hate me and wish I was dead" train, they've twisted something I said about a memory from when I was *three years old* about them into "you wanted me dead then and you still want it now".
This is all part of what I mean by the "weaponised" part.
> This particular person tried a suicide attempt in my sitting room
Yep, this is well outside my sphere. The only psychiatrist I know in person was telling me how he tried to bully a client into microwaving her hamster. I'm not sure how well that approach would generalise to your situation.
If I could only get my hands on a hamster... I already have a microwave... 😁
Ridiculous amounts of drama which I don't need since I'm a bit stressed myself at the moment, but sure it'll all end okay! And if it doesn't, ah well that's life!
> This particular person tried a suicide attempt in my sitting room
> they've twisted something I said about a memory from when I was three years old about them into "you wanted me dead then and you still want it now".
This sounds like someone who can't be reasoned with. :-( I was going to say other things, but this context completely changes what I'd been imagining from your original post. I got nothin' aside from your original plan of saying little and avoiding them.
I mean, to be fair, they do have real mental problems going on right now and for a while. If they could be honest about what happened, I think that therapy would help them a lot. But they've got this idea fixed in their head that they 'remember' all this abusive stuff that happened, and so now they're a survivor and victim of abuse, so that colours all their interactions with the medical professionals.
God knows what exactly they've told them, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a list of "And when I was five, X did this, and then when I was ten, Y did that to me and my brother, and then when I was only a baby, Yours Truly hated me so much they wanted me to die and I nearly did because I was so sick back then" and the likes. The doctor/therapist doesn't know our family from Adam, all they have is "this person has been referred due to suicide attempt, this patient history explains why they tried suicide" and so they believe (or not, however they judge it, but act as if they believe) the entire narrative.
When what happened was "Look, when I was three and you were one, all I knew was that you were a fussy, whiny baby crying all the time, so when they said you were going back to hospital I was glad. I had no idea you were so sick or nearly died. I was freakin' three years of age, for crying out loud!" This whole thing came up in the context of "Your lungs are weak because of that time you had pneumonia as a baby, gosh I remember at the time...." and telling them about what three year old me thought. Which they immediately spun into "you hated me and wanted me dead since I was a baby". Which is all part of their mental problems, but that doesn't do much when I hate feeling like The Wicked Witch of the West (for no reason).
"I forgive you" sometimes throws off the apologizer's train-wreck. (When I pulled that crap, successfully in my family of origin for years, then met my wife who doesn't take crap lightly, it really threw me onto some other tracks. Can't be bad to try.)
"I forgive you." "I forgive you." it's hard to keep going with the defensive apologies when you've officially wiped the slate clean.
That sounds like Transactional Analysis, or some rehash on it. Eric Berne, _Games People Play_ is the reference book, IIRC it amounts to analyzing verbal interactions in terms of three archetypal roles: Parent, Child and Adult. The interaction you describe sounds like you trying to talk from Adult to Adult, and the other guy answering from Child to Parent. The whole advice from this theory is to steadfastly refuse to play the role the other person is trying to assign to you, i.e in this case keep to your Adult and talk to theirs. But I don't know how you'd do that when their way of assigning you a role is by complaining to third persons.
In any case, to the extent that the interaction with this individual is inevitable, you have our sympathy! And to the extent that the person is depressed or troubled, you might have no better option that exercising your own powers of sympathy...
@skaladom: Games People Play sounds familiar. I probably only read the wiki summary or something, because I don't remember the Parent, Adult, Child stuff. In my headcanon the roles are smaller and more varied, and are picked up from watching other conversations or seeing scenes on TV.
@Deiseach: You can always fall back on outright breaking the script, for example by responding to provocation by listing cooking utensils in a deadly monotone, or simply emitting a loud keening wail. As long as you're having fun with it.
EDIT: Missed the third party bit. Still think you should just have fun with it.
"Teacher, teacher, Deiseach snapped me just for doing XYZ."
"Oh, how rotten of her, have some sympathy and validation."
"And then she whistled like a kettle before listing crockery items at me in a threatening way."
What pops up for me is to say that you are not upset and you don't want your friend to feel badly, but you would like a small change in behavior regarding the washing machine.
It's stupid crap that gets blown out of proportion, like "just don't run the washing machine at peak energy charge times" and I'm probably as guilty for bringing it up as a point of contention, but I would like to be able to say things like that and have the response be "Sure" or "Sorry, I can only do it then" instead of the full Martyr Act with weeping and flagellation (and no change in the complained-of behaviour).
Not a friend, but a family member, which makes it even more tangled: families are hard!
One answer to this question is "whose washing machine". If it's yours, just lay down the law about when it may be run. If it's not, put up with what it is happening and give ecological advice if you want.
I accept that sometimes there are in-between situations. But it may on occasion be best to just roll your eyes and just aim to get out of the situation ASAP. On the other hand, if you're there long term, you'll have to make some concession in exchange for your relative doing the thing that you see as proper but they don't want to.
Just to point out a vaguely related anecdote: I lost a friend because I did just what you describe and ended up angering my friend. But in my case it was just because I was depressed and anxiously underconfident. I’m sure for some it’s literally "weaponised" but for others it just seems that way and the person is unaware they’re wielding a weapon. (Iirc there was something on LessWrong which described well that, when someone apologises, it means that they put themselves below you in status, even when you don’t actually want to rise above them, you just want them to stop doing something you think is bad for them, which I found very interesting at the time. But I can’t seem to find it again now).
The other person does have depression and other problems, so I am trying to be sympathetic. It's difficult, though, when they immediately take anything you say to be an attack and go into this mode, and then spin it when re-telling it to others that I was the aggressor.
It's the telling the revised version to others that is the main problem here, I think. I'm fed-up of having to go "All I said was..." in response to "Why are you always picking on them?" That's the weaponising of it.
If they're going go tell people rumors that you were mean to them no matter what, then there isn't any incentive for you to not be mean to them. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a cautionary tale for this exact scenario.
Oh, I see. To be frank, even in my own case when I was just angering my friend, it was fair of her to get mad at me, although it felt a bit out of my control. But if the person’s then spreading "rumors" around, it’s even harder on you
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?
> Table 33: Do you support the solution of establishing one state or two states in the following formats:
> One-State Solution for Two Peoples: 5.4%
> A Palestinian state from the river to the sea: 74.7%
They were explicitly given an option for this supposed utopian democratic peaceful integrated state where everyone has rights, and they overwhelmingly denied it in favor of an Arab Muslim ethnostate resulting from the ethnic cleansing and genocide of all Israeli Jews.
Other figures from the poll:
> Table 27: How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?
> Extremely Support or Somewhat Support: 75%
> Table 29: How do you view the role of the following parties?
> Al Aqsa Brigade - Very Positive or Somewhat Positive: 79.8%
One place to look would be the fears of the Right Wingers who hate the Arabs' guts. One of those is Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon deputy leader. Wikipedia quotes him[0] (in the context of justifying why Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is necessary) sketching one possible path towards a one-state solution:
> More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.
This points in the direction that the historical path towards a one-state solution will be modeled after the 1960s civil rights law or (more violently) the 1950s-1980s struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. The situation is the same: Arabs in the West Bank are like US blacks in 1960 and South African blacks pre-1990s, arguably much worse because they're stateless. The path towards their liberation, which would be easier if they had Jewish sympathizers (not necessarily among the settlers) but not impossible without them, is the same mix of civil disobedience and quasi-military tactics (light-intensity, low on casualties and high on property damage and spectacle) that liberation movements like US black liberation and Irish freedom fighters used. Ehud's panicked sense of urgency is because he knows that this particular brand of struggle is infinitely more palatable and PR-friendly than hardcore military engagements of the kind that Hamas and Hezbollah specializes in.
> Who's in charge?
Ideally, nobody in particular. The distinction between Jew and Arab as irrelevant as the distinction between man and woman, or white Jew and black Jew.
In practice, Jewish fear from an Arab ruling majority is not unfounded, and the political machinery as well as the military can have explicit 50/50 ratio limits so that no side fears the other enough to consider a coup of their own.
As the generations that fought each other die off a new generation will hopefully abolish those ratios entirely.
> What's the structure?
No structure in particular, anything will do. For minimal disruption, the structure is exactly Israel as it currently exists, except now there are 7 million new Arab citizens who suddenly appeared in its databases.
> What can be done about Hamas? Or the violent right-wing Israelis?
If somebody had a real answer to that, they wouldn't be fucking around on the Internet.
The closest thing to an answer I can think of is about neutralizing Hamas via a Hearts-And-Minds campaign that pumps enormous amounts (trillion+ $) of investment and econ development into Gaza while simultaneously having an intense (joint?) Arab military presence in every corner and alley. This is not enough to prevent those who think of their dead children whenever they hear "Israel" from longing for an October 7th, it's just enough to prevent them from executing an October 7th. The real architects of a one-state solution are the children, the living ones at any rate. Reforming the education system to be more objective, more self-critical, and including Hebrew as a language and culture since day 1. The entire thing will probably last from 15 to 30 years, and it necessities that Islam is neutralized or subverted through moderate interpretations enough that it doesn't throw a wrench into the whole scheme.
But by the end of it, you will have a Hamas that is weakened to perhaps 10x or more of its previous size and strength, and all of its supporters are above 35 and the new generation either doesn't know of it or knows and disapproves with varying levels of vitriol. This generation knows Hebrew about as well as it knows standard textbook Arabic.
I don't know what could be done about Israeli Right Wingers, besides the natural moderating effect that should weaken them (by how much?) as their Toxoplasmotic[1] form on the Arab side is gradually weakened.
Thank you. When I asked about the structure (parliamentary? representative democracy? something else?), I was mostly hoping that someone was working on it so that rushed improvisation isn't needed.
And I agree that it might be the next generation to get people who are sick of the fighting.
which promotes a proposal that is technically (and importantly!) a two-state solution but would nonetheless have most of the practical and ethical upsides of a one-state solution. Think Schengen-style freedom of movement, trade, and employment, but with continued ethnic separation of formal sovereignty and voting rights.
You may very well think them naive, in fact I'm sure both the median Israeli and median Palestinian would indeed think them so. But they have a couple of things going for them:
1. they have a FAQ that addresses questions like the ones you raise
2. they actually live on the ground in Israel/Palestine and have skin in the game, they aren't academics safely ensconced somewhere else while holding forth on what ought to be done.
Something like that could hypothetically work after decades of deradicalization. It would not work under the current levels of hatred, and current trends aren't leading to deradicalization.
I'm mostly for that org. I think they do help push in that direction. But I think that's not enough, and don't see deradicalization happening without a two-state solution that's at least grudgingly accepted (along with giving up on the "eternal refugee" mentality) happening for a while first.
There was a single state during the British mandate, which led to fairly regular massacres. In general post-1967, there's been different degrees of strictness of separation, but stricter separation (i.e. the security fence on the west bank and increased limitations on Gazans coming into Israel) have been caused by (rather than causing) increases in terrorism.
It's worth noting that the last time large numbers of Palestinians got over the border into Israel (which was three months ago), they tortured thousands of Jews to death. Many of theple involved in this were "civilians", not trained militants.
Also: you mention "mostly Jews think it's a call for genocide". This is false. Western leftists may not think they're calling for genocide, but Muslims who shout it absolutely do (the original in Arabic is "Palestine will be Arab", not "free").
I guess in theory it's possible that, after a few decades, Palestinians would chill out and decide to stop murdering Jews if they shared a country with them. I don't think anyone in Israel would be willing to risk it.
The official revised number is ~1200 including military and security personnel in uniform, so it's just a single thousand.
> It's worth noting that the last time large numbers of Palestinians got over the border into Israel
That's about as meaningful as noting that the last time large numbers of Israelis got over the border into Palestine (which is ongoing) they murdered 300+ Palestinians and burned the homes and trees of unarmed farmers.
They are called "Cycles of violence" for a reason.
I mean isn't that basically what is already happening? At the very least a one state solution would reduce the probability of Arabic or Israeli would-be genocidaires winning the majority. If (say) 60% of Palestine and 60% of Israel would vote to murder all the members of the other side given the chance, then when they're two states they're doomed to war and when they're one state the biggest bloc is the (net) 40% who don't want to murder the other side.
Tribalism is a thing. In your hypothetical, the kill-all-the-Jews candidate wins the Palestinian Party Primary, the kill-all-the-Arabs candidate wins the Zionist Party Primary, then all the Arabs vote for the first and all the Jews vote for the second, and the winner has a mandate for genocide. Tweak as necessary for your particular choice of voting laws; it won't change much.
If there's an asymmetry where e.g. only 30% of the Jewish Israelis would vote to murder all the Arabs *and* the Jews have a clear majority in the State Between The River And The Sea, this could be stable.
This might be a reasonable place to check. I've heard that the Israelis who want an idealistic solution are generally Ashkenazi , while Jews who were expelled from Arab countries are hard-liners. Is this true?
"From the river to the sea" is a whole lot more vague than "all lives matter", so I think the arguments against the 2nd should work even better against the 1st.
Regarding a single state, those are great questions, and I have never, not once, heard any good solution to them. The "best" (i.e., least genocidal) has been Israel annexing Palestine and having a permanent disenfranchised underclass (e.g., the current Israeli Palestinians), which is kind of a huge problem if you like democracy and human rights. Most other plans appear to be thinly-veiled preparations for future genocide.
I dunno about what to do about the genocidal tendencies on both sides. Maybe Ireland has some good lessons here? I don't know what happened there, but for a while they had a diaspora that was feeding the violent conflict with rhetoric and money and weapons, and then it gradually faded away. Maybe Deiseach has some ideas?
Israelis haven't tried to genocide palestinians (with the exception of a few high profile examples, like the infamous Baruch Goldstein). They could succeed pretty easily if they did want to. Israeli's primary goals really are mostly just wanting to be able to live safely.
I think this is a point that gets missed in western discourse - yes Israel has settler types, but their main argument in domestic politics is "when we pulled out of Gaza we got Hamas". If you had a way to convince Israelis they don't need to fear for their lives, they wouldn't actually want more fighting.
Ah yes, the infamous and very condemned Baruch Goldstein, which the minister of National Security in the current Israeli government used to have a portrait of in his living room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir.
So, I'm not talking about all Israelis, and I do think that the percentage of Israelis in favor of this is less than the percentage of Gazans in favor of this. Also, the impression I've gotten is that the attitude is less "kill them" and more "get rid of them, I don't care how", which is perhaps less bad? Although as the cycle of violence continues, there's probably more "kill them".
Anyway, my impression is that the Israeli "settler types" have been largely biding their time and nudging policy towards conflict, because up until Oct 7th they thought they were safely winning. And that most of them realize that individually emulating Goldstein is going to be counterproductive, because it won't kill enough Palestinians to do any good, and it will cause blowback from other Israelis and the rest of the world. Like, whenever I read stuff about on-the-ground interactions, even in sympathetic Jewish media, there's usually at least one place where I start shaking my head because some Israelis are acting like, pardon my language, **total dicks**. It reminds me of stories of the American South in the Jim Crow era, where there was usually some white person who would delight in humiliating any black people they came across, with an attitude of "I can do this to you and you have to take it, because you know what will happen if you even look at me the wrong way".
TBH I strongly dislike settlers and if palestinians exclusively targets actual settlers (ideally just actual armed people, but even just settlers) and didn't consider everyone in Israel to be a settler, or had an explicit goal of controlling the land outside the 67 borders, I'd be a hell of a lot more sympathetic. If I were in charge of Israel I actually would force them back over the border wall unilaterally. I wouldn't expect any deal or concessions from the palestinians for it, I just think they make everything worse and shouldn't be there.
That said, I think "genuinely enjoys doing bad things to arabs just because" is a minority even among settlers (as in "people living on the other side of the green line", not "anyone who identifies as a settler", which is more selected to be bad).
I'm not sure what meets the legal definition of genocide, but Israeli bombardment of Gaza and blocking aid at least counts as mass murder. I'm tempted to count Egypt as complicit.
According to the Hague, genocide is "a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part." So it all comes down to whether you think Israel's intent is to destroy Palestinians for being Palestinians. Given that they gave ample warning before their invasion, encouraged Palestinians to evacuate to safer zones, and have allowed aid supplies to enter Palestine (despite the fact that they know some or all of the aid will be taken by Hamas), it seems that their goal in this war is not to wipe out Palestinians as a people (naturally, there's over a million Palestinian citizens in Israel and they aren't being rounded up into death camps), or Gazan Palestinians particularly as a people.
If you count all urban warfare as mass murder then I guess, but then so is every other country. This isn't a useful definition to have.
(This is also avoiding the question of why Egypt would be complicit - unless you're assuming they, an arab country, also want to murder arabs for ethnic grounds, you have to accept that this is all motivated by genuine security concerns).
(Israel also isn't blocking aid, except for examining it for weapons, which is reasonable given that they keep finding people trying to smuggle them in).
"Baruch Kopel Goldstein (Hebrew: ברוך קופל גולדשטיין; born Benjamin Carl Goldstein;[2] December 9, 1956 – February 25, 1994) was an Israeli-American mass murderer, religious extremist, and physician who perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, an incident of Jewish terrorism.[3][4][5] Goldstein was a supporter of the Kach, a religious Zionist party that the United States, the European Union and other countries designate as a terrorist organization.[6]
On February 25, 1994, Goldstein, a resident of the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba near Hebron, entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs that was serving as a mosque. Dressed in Israeli military uniform, he opened fire on the 800 Palestinian Muslim worshippers praying during the month of Ramadan, killing 29 and wounding 125 worshippers, until he was beaten to death by survivors.[7]"
Let's distinguish between Israeli's in general and the Israeli government. (And also between Palestinians in general and Hamas, of course.)
Statements made by ministers from the top to the bottom of the current Israeli government (per LearnsHebrewHatesIP's link to the ICC case against Israel) have made explicit calls to depopulate the land of Gaza and annex the land for Israel. This is not consistent with claims of a "two-state" solution, nor of claims that all they're doing is "fighting Hamas" that are often made in the English-speaking press.
We know how to do counter-insurgency. The US military taught the world from its experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan how to do counter-insurgency (and how NOT to do it). What's happening in Gaza right now bears no resemblance to a military campaign aimed at rooting Hamas out of the Palestinian population. It looks exactly like it's a campaign at mass removal of the resident population from the land (which I guess would 'technically' also remove Hamas from Gaza). Given that 1.) military strategy supports interpreting this as a mass-depopulation campaign and not as an attempt at targeted destruction of Hamas, and 2.) direct statements from countless officials at every level of Israeli command confirm this is a mass-depopulation campaign; we should probably conclude that this is a mass depopulation campaign.
The counter-signaling from intelligence agencies that have been routinely wrong about such things in the past should not be relied upon now as a barometer to judge the actions of the current Israeli government as somehow the "only" way to root out Hamas. Experience dictates that there are almost certainly MORE Hamas fighters as a result of the Israeli military response than have been reportedly destroyed by that response. (Again, we need to distinguish the Israeli government from the people, who would presumably NOT support an explicit campaign of mass displacement and land seizure.)
As to the statement that "yes Israel has settler types", this feels entirely dismissive of the reporting (and constant complaints of Palestinians) on this issue. Every year, scores of thousands of Israelis forcibly remove Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank, and they do so with direct funding from their government. It's to the point where fully 40% of the population of East Jerusalem is made up of Israelis, who won't allow Palestinians to "trespass" on "their" land. By design, this sometimes creates situations where Palestinians are surrounded by Israeli settlements such that they can't even get to the market without entering "Israeli" land, for which sins they are forcibly removed from their land.
(This is partly why Palestinians don't see claims that Israel is offering a two-state solution as credible. Instead it looks like stalling for time until Israel can gradually expel everyone left in the West Bank. Israel is already unwilling to respect territorial boundaries they nominally 'agree' should be part of the West Bank. Permanently displacing and resettling massive numbers of people every year isn't how you signal intent to respect territorial integrity.)
Hundreds of Palestinians die every year because they oppose being forcibly displaced from their homes by what has been official Israeli government policy for decades. This has resulted in millions of Palestinians being displaced, and millions of Israelis building communities on land they literally stole at the point of an IDF gun. That's not "settler types". That's a systematic effort to drive off an entire population and replace them with Israelis. Call it what you will.
> LearnsHebrewHatesIP's link to the ICC case against Israel
Minor nitpick: What I linked is a case against Israel in the ICJ, International Court of Justice, which has authority against Israel because Israel is signatory to the treaty that establishes the court and gives it its power to prosecute Genocide.
The ICC, Interntaional Criminal Court, is a different court that Israel mostly doesn't recognize on basis of "Pro-Palestinian bias", and Netanyahu have thrown a temper tantrum in November (as far as I can remember) declaring that the ICC is not welcomed in Israel. Despite this, the ICC is conducting investigations into war crimes claims against both sides.
My idea is that it's very very hard and the situation seems to be at about the point the North was in the 70s, so there's a lot more blood to be spilled before either side are willing to finally sit down and hammer something out.
Plus, Israel is the independent nation here, there isn't an exterior 'Great Britain' that they are part of which can bring them to the negotiating table (the USA isn't playing that part for them).
I have come across a fair number of Irish (1st/2nd gen immigrants) and have listened to some fascinating stories told over a pint. The Good Friday accords, leveraging the EU borderless travel framework, featured prominently in allowing both sides pretend they got what they wanted.
Hello Brexit!
It's astonishing that this issue didn't feature prominently on the Remainers campaign trail. But then they didn't campaign much, I guess thinking their case was so self-evident it needed to public campaign in support. If there were one country that should have never left the EU it is the UK. We're still in early stages of this farce, which I fully expect to end in the UK being in the EU de-facto, but without a voice. The alternative is hard to contemplate: the kids who lived through the Troubles are now in their 50's and still remember the shotguns and the bombs.
It's never even occurred to me that 'from the river to sea' might mean a democratic, peaceful state including both Israelis and Palestinians. I can't imagine anybody on either side wanting that?! Those Arabs who wanted to stay in the Israeli Partition in 1948 have integrated as a (reasonably successful?) minority, but surely that ship has sailed for the 'refugee' Palestinians.
Whether it's possible or not *in this case* - there are powerful arguments that it isn't - there have in fact been many conflicts in the world solved by implementing a solution that neither side *wants* but both have to *live with*. Ie the Bosnian war ended with a solution that gave Serbs too much power from the Bosniak/Croat perspective and too little (ie. not full independence) from the Serbian side, and the resulting state is a mess, but it has still kept the peace for almost 30 years now.
Indeed, one might argue that the whole point of democracy is that it helps find compromises that intractable enemies can barely live with, at least for a time, and that liberal norms (like our understanding of freedom of religion) have developed from precisely such compromises.
The case has been made that a two-state isn't possible, and that Hamas must be 'eliminated' -- and not just in Gaza. Egypt and Jordan verbally defend Palestinians, but keep them at arms' length -- due to their toxicity. Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon would likely need to be partners in a peaceful resolution, but they won't be opening their borders to Palestinians betrayed by Hamas any time soon.
These are two different things. Hamas must indeed be eliminated, at least in Gaza. But Hamas is ~3% of Gaza Palestinians and <1% in the West Bank, so when Hamas is eliminated there will still be an awful lot of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
It is at least plausible that, without Hamas, the remaining Palestinians could coexist in a two-state solution w/Israel. Germany, without the Nazis, had no trouble coexisting in a many-state solution with the rest of Europe. The biggest problem I think would be finding a legitimate not-hopelessly-corrupt government for the Palestinian state, and that may be a dealbreaker.
>The biggest problem I think would be finding a legitimate not-hopelessly-corrupt government for the Palestinian state, and that may be a dealbreaker.
One possibility might be to, at least temporarily, have the Palestinians ruled by someone other than either the Israelis or themselves. Perhaps one of the Muslim states in the region that is on at least "frenemies" terms with Israel? Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia? After WWII neither Japan nor Germany was fully autonomous again for quite a few years.
There is no Arab state that will sign on for this. They'd get way too much blowback domestically, and from the rest of the world, and from the Palestinians themselves for being insufficiently vigorous in supporting the Palestinian cause in their new role as rulers of Palestine.
And "being sufficiently" vigorous in supporting the Palestinian cause would lead very promptly to being at war with Israel, with no assurance that the war would be limited to their security forces deployed in Palestine, so they're not signing up for that one either.
That's a pity. The problem is unfortunately even a bit worse than finding a legitimate not-too-corrupt government for the Palestinian state. It _also_ has to not present a threat of yet more October 7ths to Israel.
To mangle a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle, when you have eliminated the humane, whatever remains, no matter how inhumane, must be the outcome :-(
I think it's important to understand exactly what the concern is from states that refuse to allow in Palestinian refugees. When you're a Hashemite monarchy set up by the British it's probably not a good idea to let in a massive influx of people who have been agitating for an independent Arab state for their whole lives.
People have been handwringing about why Hamas would perpetrate 10/7, when the Israeli response was entirely predictable. But Hamas' audience was never Israel. They want to make the case to the Arab community that they're fighting to establish an independent Arab state - something many in the region have dreamed of since the fall of the Ottoman empire, and what Arabs thought had been promised by the British during Mandate Palestine. In other words, Hamas' 'message' of 10/7 was to the people of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Of course those rulers aren't going to let people from Gaza in. They don't want to foment the overthrow of their own governments.
Does anyone happen to know whether Palestinian attacks on nearby Arab governments was criticized as a violation of hospitality? (Is that the word I want? I mean that guests have obligations to not attack their hosts.)
Have you been listening to Ezra Klein's podcast (or reading the transcripts)? He's been talking to a lot of Israeli and Palestinian people about this topic. So far I think the general consensus is that a one state solution is impossible.
I think both a one-state solution and a two-state solution are impossible. This leaves us with two possible solutions that would bring about a state of peace. One is to kill all the Palestinians. You might call this the "final solution".
The second is for the Palestinians to go somewhere else which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants. But this must be done ethically.
I propose that a coalition of countries buy territory equal in land mass to greater Israel. For instance carve out this amount of land from Sudan which is in the same general geographic area, and pay Sudan 10 times their GDP. The US would permanently divert ALL OF THE MONEY that we currently gift to Israel to pay for the purchase and the construction of a new Palestine.
"I propose that a coalition of countries buy territory equal in land mass to greater Israel."
You can buy land, but you can't buy sovereignty, generally speaking
We live in a world where ethnic cleansing is considered to be so horrible that it's considered to better to keep people trapped under governments that hate them.
Some number of Palestinians don't want to leave, though I don't know how they'd choose if there were a functioning Palestinian country somewhere else.
Clearly, this idea of a new country would only work if the Palestinians embraced it completely.
Israel will not let them return to to their collapsed homes in Gaza. Israel will keep them cooped up around Rafah until they can drive them into the Sinai.
Given that reality, I can't help but imagine that a country with area equal to Israel would look pretty good.
I think Israel will absolutely let them return to Gaza eventually. If they didn't, they would lose all US support immediately, no question. I can't imagine they would risk that.
It seems to me that it's really important to distinguish between Gaza and the West Bank here.
The range of possible solutions fans out to:
1. One big state with Israelis & Arabs.
2. Israel + one Palestinian state in two pieces.
3. Israel + Palestinian state in the West Bank + Gaza continuing to be a sore spot.
4. Israel takes over Gaza (what happens to the Gazans? that's the question) and the Palestinians have a state in the West Bank.
5. Israel takes over both and a lot of Palestinians just disappear.
This is where Israel's treatment of the West Bank seems particularly counterproductive to me. Let's accept that nobody knows what the fuck to do with Gaza. The only solutions we even seem to have a reasonable path to center on a stable West Bank state. Israel has a chance to do a good cop/bad cop and let the West Bank get some legitimacy, which would strengthen their options in Gaza. Either (a) let the West Bank manage it and make it their problem or (b) work out some kind of resettlement regime, possibly involving land swaps.
Instead, Israel seems to have lost faith in _any_ stable Palestinian state coming into existence, and just hoping that they can eventually make the problem go away with enough violence and land grabs. Israel's in a really tough spot but I think they're hurting their own cause.
Are you aware that Netanyahu supported the formation of Hamas because he knew that it would split the Palestinians and prevent a stable Palestinian state from forming.
I view that as being similar to America's left-wing media supporting Donald Trump's candidacy in the 2016 Republican primaries. It was stupid and mean-spirited and backfired horribly, but in the big picture they only bear a small amount of the blame.
I'm aware of the allegations, yes, and without diving into their merit, it certainly helps explain why Israel is acting the way it is in the short term.
The "Palestinians go somewhere else" even if it could be done and would benefit all sides, is something Palestinians would never accept because they value land too much (we're talking about people who still call their neighborhoods "refugee camps" because their great great grandparents lived there during WW2). The rest of the world would also never accept it, labeling it as ethnic cleansing. (And, of course, we've never found a country willing to take in large numbers of Palestinians - Egypt flat out said they'd shoot anyone coming over the border from Gaza if they tried).
It's entirely possible it would be the best solution for everyone involved (especially the Palestinians). But it's unworkable, which Israelis have on the whole accepted.
I think only the first and the last are actually possible.
The status quo would mean that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians die, but it has the upside that the Israelis are driven insane and eventually shunned by the world.
I don't know enough about you to tell if that last comment is a joke or genuine hardcore antisemitism.
I think status quo vs two state solution is not that clear of a divide. Aside from the Sudan option (which I don't believe is realistic for the reasons mentioned above), the most likely long term solution seems to be "Palestinians get their own land with civilian and economic control but Israel maintains security control".
Iran is a bad baseline here - Palestinians are sunni arabs, which is a pretty different culture. Even if you ignore the entirety of Israeli history, you can count how many Jews are left in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan.
I mean, I'd be fine with calling Israel a US client. They're a pretty important US ally in the region, buy a lot of weapons from us, we have some amount of influence over their foreign policy, etc. Is there some more specific relationship that "client" implies in your book?
(1) No secrets from the patron state: a client state cannot hide secrets from its patron state, and there are severe consequences if they try and fail
(2) Clients cannot set their own foreign policy and/or military goals, the patron state sets them for it
I don't think Hamas or Israel satisfy any of those conditions unambiguously with their respective patrons (Iran and USA). Maybe at certain times their leadership is weak and (1) and (2) might be satisfied temporarily, but it's not a permanent feature of the 2 relationships.
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.
What's interesting is that three out of the cited studies were done in the UK:
Racial Discrimination and White-collar Workers in Britain
Roger Jowell and Patricia Prescott-Clarke (1970)
Half a chance?: A report on job discrimination against young blacks in Nottingham
Jim Hubbuck, S. Carter
(Published 1980)
"The Policy Studies Institute (PEP’s successor) then conducted their third field experiment (Brown and Gay 1985)."
The most recent one is US-based, and again interesting because isn't Chicago majority black today?
"We study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers.
Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2004. "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." American Economic Review, 94 (4): 991-1013."
Okay, not majority black, and the population for all races has been declining steadily, but still a good proportion of black inhabitants:
So, given that I certainly have the impression that a lot of the local government is black, the idea that there is still noticeable racial discrimination if you have a 'black' name is startling:
"Chicago is now 31.4% white, 29.9% Latino, 28.7% Black and 6.9% Asian. In the City Council, Latinos hold 12 seats, while white and Black aldermen each hold 19 seats." (plus the mayor is black)
So I do have to ask - is it having a black name, or is it having what is perceived as a 'lower-class' black name? How would a résumé from a white applicant named Cletus Bubba Lee fare?
> So I do have to ask - is it having a black name, or is it having what is perceived as a 'lower-class' black name? How would a résumé from a white applicant named Cletus Bubba Lee fare?
I'm fairly confident someone did this exact study (comparing black and white names with similar implied socio economic status), but can't for the life of me actually find it or remember the results.
"Some of the common white names used were Emily or Greg, he says, and distinctively Black names used include Jamal or Lakisha. The study’s authors used these names as a way of trying to understand discrimination in the employment application process."
Well, uh, Emily and Greg are not the equivalent of Lakisha and Jamal for a start (was it First Lady Michelle or Lakisha Obama, hmmm?). I don't think there's even a Greg anywhere in my family, and we're milk-bottle white 😀
Any social scientists on here, there's a prompt for your next study! "Are Emily and Greg more employable than Tammy-Lynn and Billy-Bob?"
I must bow down to your superior All-American Whiteness. Clearly we Paddies still have a long way to go to assimilate completely to the superior Anglo-Saxon culture, as Disraeli would have it:
"Benjamin Disraeli, Letter to The Times
‘[The Irish] hate our free and fertile isle. They hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty, and our pure religion. The wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their fair ideal of human felicity is an alteration of clannish brawls and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.’ (Quoted in C. L. Innes, Through The Looking Glass: African and Irish Nationalist Writing, 12; cited in Margaret Greene, UG Diss., UU 2007.)"
If the effect is small and being measured in a way that's very noisy (and/or otherwise prone to error), then their explanation could account for the bulk of what is measurable, and anything left over is too small to distinguish from 0.
(Also keep in mind that the screener and reviewer, even if different, are not likely to be wholly unrelated in how they assess candidates.)
In my, anecdotal but N>>1, high-tech experience the screener only screens and then is out of the way for the hiring process, with the decision pretty much in the hands of the hiring manager. So being kicked out by the screener is always the end, but not otherwise. I cannot emphasize enough how far away the authors' explanation is from my N>>1 experience.
Well, I do think that many businesses operate differently from that. I think tech is more likely to have a lot more regimented hiring process that involves multiple people. In many other industries, I think it is common for the same person to review resumes and conduct interviews. The smaller the company, as well, the more likely you are to have a process like that, since there just aren't enough people to have them specialize like that.
Yes, you're right, my experience is likely heavily skewed by being in high-tech, where the screener simply doesn't have enough expertise in the highly-technical field to contribute to the interviewing process.
Yeah I'm with you. Screener being a different person is common. Moreover. "racist" isn't a binary condition. Someone may look at a "black" name and go "ah, I'll pass", but it may be a different story when actual competent candidate shows up. So the paper authors argument seems to be of a "spherical cow" variety.
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.
> The BMI men generally prefer is about 18-20 which again is typical for girls about 14.
...today. Go back, say, 70 years or more, and a lot more adult women fell into that BMI range.
> 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.
While my wife was pregnant, she had even softer, smoother skin than before. I suspect that a soft, smooth skin is at least partially an indicator for favorable hormone levels, and not just for age.
> Small perky boobs with soft unused nipples are more attractive than big heavy ones [...]
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 .
The point being what, their right to discuss the coke and hookers of last night or their marital problems or their investment strategies without being recorded? Most of us manage to keep it professional, during professional hours.
This is a pretty good test of government capacity. it's now out in public that the FAA has allowed airlines to avoid paying for an upgrade which is obviously long overcdue. will we see action. How soon? or will some litigous lawyer (I know, redundant), get there first with some class action suit?
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.
yeah, you really need to wait a few days before posting a lot.
Ive had a reddit account for 7+ years, I get blocked from posting on my own subreddit (that I created and moderate), saying Im posting too much. And Im talking about 2-3 posts in a few minutes, so its not like Im spamming
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.
I asked about that a while back and was pointed to this which seems useful (although I haven't actually gotten around to following all the steps so I can't say for sure that it works):
Has anyone one else here looked into Flat Earth? I’m sure the world isn’t flat but they do a good job of challenging a lot of what I have always taken for granted. Anyway I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This would not be bannable on its own, but this poster has a habit of posting things exactly like this to a degree that make me think he's a troll. Banned.
One minute into the video, they talk about how all historical cultures agreed that Polaris is the unmoving star above the North Pole (the center of the flat Earth).
I would be more interested in a "flat spacetimer" troll. Someone who at least understands the concept of matter causing spacetime to be curved, but, nevertheless, denies that it happens.
It's completely optional to think of gravity as bending spacetime, or as a force that operates equally on all mass-energy in a flat spacetime. I think the latter is more consistent, myself. My opinion is that thermodynamics ultimately requires a flat 'consensus' spacetime.
I thought that, on a cosmological scale, the current best estimates were that it averages to flat (not intending to deny gravitational lensing or the measured deflection of starlight by the Sun or gravitational waves.)
There is a whole ecosystem on youtube of people proposing flat-Earth models and others tearing them apart. None of the flat-Earth models survive even the smallest bit of critical probing, like "how come the sun appears to be the same size everywhere?" and "how come international flights work as advertised?"
The really interesting aspects are psychological IMO: how can people who are not stupid in the conventional sense fall into such a rabbit hole?
I'm not a flat-Earther, but I don't really understand your objections. The sun in most flat-Earther theories is still a light far away up in the sky, so it always appears the same size for the same reason the sun does in real life. (That theory of course raises the question of how night happens, and the flat-Earthers have some complicated explanation for that.) International flights work more or less the same way they do in real life, with planes going between cities on a disc, with the main difference being that the parallels are usually concentric circles in their maps. Planes that appear to be travelling in straight lines over long distances are actually curving very gradually, and even the pilots may not be aware of this because their GPS and other instruments are designed for this curved coordinate system. Although I guess that's not so different than what happens with a round Earth: straight lines on a sphere are really curves.
Well the reality that the curvature of the earth is unobservable pretty compelling. Also the way they argue against Aristotles idea that ships sink beyond the horizon is interesting enough to travel a little further down the rabbit hole. Then when you realize all images of the earth are photoshopped it makes all the more interesting. You got to admit it’s Offaly convenient that the sun and moon appear the same size because the sun is 400 times larger but also happens to be 400 times further away.
An obvious question is where does the Sun go at night? Then you ask, do people to the east or west of you have a different experience of the Sun? If the answer is no, apply symmetry.
Obviously that only indicates roundness in one dimension, but there is probably enough evidence to apply symmetry again...
[P.S. even if you doubt that ships sink below the horizon, how can you doubt it of the Sun? It being a light source that disappears, and all...]
They basically believe the sun is much more local. So it moves across the sky and moves beyond the vanishing point of our perspective so it looks like it’s going down.
Where's the vanishing point in your flat earth geometry, my dude? Vanishing points are nominally at infinity. How does the Sun get there? Does it move slowly over our head, then accelerate exponentially away? Again, asking someone slightly to the east or west should cast doubt on that hypothesis...
I'm not going to argue against your other "I'm only asking questions" bogus claims, because you're probably just trolling. I just want to address this claim:
> Offaly convenient that the sun and moon appear the same size because the sun is 400 times larger but also happens to be 400 times further away.
The apparent size of the moon varies by about 12% over its orbit, so it doesn't even make sense to say "the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size, this is too unlikely to be a coincidence", because they don't actually always appear to be the same size (only about once every two weeks).
>Well the reality that the curvature of the earth is unobservable pretty compelling.
I don't understand. Your very next sentence is the evidence that this isn't true. You can sincerely, verifiably see the curvature of the earth at sea. You can watch objects whose size you can personally verify sink below the horizon.
>You got to admit it’s Offaly convenient that the sun and moon appear the same size because the sun is 400 times larger but also happens to be 400 times further away.
I don't understand this either. They don't appear to be the same size. They're somewhat close, that's all. It's not even a very interesting (minor) coincidence.
They claim ship sinking below the horizon is an illusion. You can just zoom in with a telescope or high powered camera and the objects come back in to view. Watch the video I posted it’s all very interesting. The only really fatal flaw from what I can tell is their denial of gravity. They claim it’s just bouncy, density and electrostatics. It’s a fascinating video of you can suspend your disbelief for an hour or so.
>You can just zoom in with a telescope or high powered camera and the objects come back in to view.
No, they don't. If they do come back into view, they, by definition, haven't disappeared beyond the horizon yet.
>Watch the video I posted it’s all very interesting.
I am definitely not going to do that. I'm absolutely certain it is not very interesting, because I've read all of your comments here, and none of them are interesting.
>It’s a fascinating video of you can suspend your disbelief for an hour or so.
Suspension of disbelief is for art and fiction, and this is just mental illness or trolling. Not fun or interesting.
" If they do come back into view, they, by definition, haven't disappeared beyond the horizon yet."
Yes this was the most compelling argument for the 5 or 6 y.o. me asking about it (this is the level at which these "pretty compelling arguments" are): if the Earth were flat, you could see Europe from Boston with a powerful enough telescope. But youtube didn't exist back then, so there was no place for so much dumb shit being promoted to so many for so much money to be made by all.
I tend to agree but if you watch the video they do a pretty interesting job challenging the way we usually prove the earth is round. I’m fascinated by the whole idea of a flat earth it’s really a lot of fun imagining an alternative understanding of the world.
The rotation of the earth causes apparent forces. One, the centrifugal force, would be effectively indistinguishable from gravity to a flat-earther (and to us, since we can't easily perceive that the earth is not perfectly round). The other, the coriolis force, depends on motion and AFAIK is unexplainable on a flat earth.
It's the reason the winds over the oceans blow with low pressure to the left (facing downwind) in the Northern Hemisphere and to the right in the Southern Hemisphere. The Earth's rotation is causing an apparent force to the right in the NH and to the left in the SH and the pressure force is balancing it. Likewise, the closer you are to the equator, a weaker pressure force is enough to balance the coriolis force for a given wind speed.
I’ve some heard good arguments from them against the Coriolis force, but you’re right weather patterns are a still mystery I haven’t heard them try to explain.
I personally think that there isn't one. Disappearing ships is a good one but I haven't observed it and there is confusion with optical properties of moist air.
I think the theory of round earth were first proposed by ancient Greeks. I don't exactly remember how they did this but something about noticing that at noon when sun is at its highest, it is different time according to the location. How could they measure it if they had no mechanical clocks?
Anyway, my point is that even simple scientific facts are rarely easily observable. Instead, they were concluded by many different measurements and logical guesswork that allowed us to select the theory that makes most sense. Round earth, existence of atoms, oxygen or flogiston, does ivermectin treats covid, are masks effective in reducing spread of covid – all these different theories cannot be proved by one simple observation. We need multiple observations from different sources and rigorous thinking what this evidence means and it all fits together. In medicine it is called metareview or systemic reviews or whatever.
We rarely do it from scratch. Instead, we accept things and continue building from there. I guess that video is very instructive how hard it was for ancients. But they did all the hard work and we should be grateful to them. Today people are lazy, they want to see an easy proof which is not possible. One has to study hard for many years to understand basics and then he would be able to “see” how everything fits together and make good predictions based on this theory.
Thanks for the thorough response. The video does address the ancient Greeks and how they came to believe in a round globe. I think the video is interesting because it calls into question the assumption that all of this hangs together. Very few people question the scientific consensus.
We can’t images from space depicting a curve are shot with a wide-angle or fish eye lens. Compare NASA with Chinese images. The Chinese images from lower earth orbit show a totally flat horizon.
I don’t see the harm in exploring basic science concepts in an open thread on a rationalist blog. I think I’m being respectful and in good faith. I’m just sharing something I find fascinating.
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 went through a phase where I kept feeling bugs on my body in bed. Turns out that I had become attuned to the disturbances of body hairs, particularly on my legs. I would feel a little tickle and freak out that there were bugs under the sheets. Once I recognized that it was my body hair, I was able to learn to tolerate the feeling.
In retrospect, I believe my sensitivity had to do with the reduction in "noise" signals in bed. When I'm up and about, my sensory inputs are busy with lights and sounds and the feeling of clothes. But when I go to bed, the noise is reduced, and I can focus on things like the shifting of hairs on my body.
I wonder whether you're sensing a boulder because there's not enough noise to diminish the relative intensity of the pebble/pea.
_Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight_ is about "sensory defensiveness". It isn't autism or neuroticism, it's having a sensory system that doesn't fit well with mainstream society. There are methods carefully hidden away in occupational therapy that might help. As I recall, it involves giving the person time off from the stressful stimulus and then gradually introducing it.
There's a reason we have the phrase "wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers" as a strong endorsement of attractiveness. I wonder if there's an evolutionary bit warning us about bugs.
At only 3500 hits in Google, I wouldn't really cite that phrase as evidence of anything. From hits, it's unclear if it's even supposed to be a high or low threshold.
I'm chuckling now. It's a joke phrase precisely because of the ambiguity. Is it damning with faint praise? Is it a one-night stand with the promise of changing the sheets in the morning? Are we talking about an ongoing relationship that will ensure one's bed is always filled with crumbs? How many crackers does this woman eat?
The more subtle layer of humor is that it sometimes introduces a note of physical discomfort into an otherwise perhaps crass conversation about a woman's appearance, and is thus subversive. Alternately, if the conversation weren't about her appearance it introduces the bed in a nonsexual way (she's eating crackers in there -- are we reading books? what's going on?).
The only thing it's evidence of is that the experience of finding sharp-edged crumbs in the bed is noteworthy enough to be a common referent. Nobody hit with this phrase for the first time will be confused about why crackers in bed could be a problem.
It isn't damning with faint praise. I think it is mostly supposed to be hyperbole. It doesn't even say the crackers must be eaten in bed. The question is, how bad of an irritant must something be before you decide you DON'T want them in bed?
Personally, I think that the humour is primarily because of the euphemism, and partly because of the understatement. Other things one might not kick an attractive person out of the bed for is farting.
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.
Well I looked up maggot therapy. The name gives me the creeps but apparently it’s safe and effective.
Probably could use some rebranding to slide past the ewww factor. Even the maggots that are sold as ice fishing bait bill themselves as ‘Euro Larva’. A chic name for grubs of some sort.
Maybe something like “Larval Defenders” or “Autonomous Biological Healing Agents”
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?
On 23andme and ancestry it just lumps all Askenazi Jews as Askenazi and doesn't elaborate further.
Based on Jews who have submitted their results on this subreddit I frequent that uses ancient DNA samples: https://old.reddit.com/r/illustrativeDNA/search?q=Jew&restrict_sr=on
Looks like for Askenazi Jews I'd divvy them up approximately like the following depending on what time period the ancient remains are from as:
Compared to the oldest remains(circa 1000 BCE):
30-45% Levantine
25-35% European Farming
10-20% Western Steppe
0-10% Bronze age Caucasian
0-10% Bronze Age Anatolian
0-5% North Africa
-------------------------------------
For circa 500 BCE:
Phoenician: 35-45%
Greek: 15-25%
Germanic: 10-15%
Italic:5-15%
-------------------------------------
For Roman times(circa 100 CE):
Roman Italy: 40-50%
Roman Levant: 35-45%
Slavic: 0-10%
Germanic: 0-10%
-------------------------------------
And after that, 95-100% European Jewish.
Mine (23andMe) says "99.5% Ashkenazi Jewish".
There's a subtab where it looks like it could break it down further, but it says
" Although we've detected Ashkenazi Jewish DNA in your ancestral breakdown, we have not identified more specific locations that your recent ancestors may have called home.
Match Confidence level for Belarusian Jews: Not Detected
Belarusian Jews
Not Detected..."
...and then so on for several other countries' Jews. My ancestors are from Poland and Russia, but it says Polish Jews are "not detected" and doesn't have a section for Russians.
This gets at a broader question I've always had about these kinds of tests. How do they deal with human migration? Why tell someone their DNA points to the Ukraine, but not tell them that it's a mix of Viking immigration from the Ukraine from the North, Mongol/Tartar immigration to Ukraine from the East, Byzantines from the South, etc? Or why not go back further than that? Those Byzantines and Mongols and Vikings came to those places from someplace else, after all.
Cheekily, I'm tempted to start a DNA service of my own, never bother to test any samples at all, and just instead send a form reply to all customers indicating their ancestry is 100% African!
But it just underscores the same principle. Where do these services draw the chronological line?
I don't know for sure, but I suspect they don't try to look for some long-ago urheimat. They just compare your set of genetic markers with those of currently existing populations. That probably produces a reasonable indication of where one's ancestors came from for most people. But it might produce weird results for cases where there have been recent migrations, displacements or mass-casualty events.
"Polish Jews: Not Detected" is today's grimdark meme of the day.
My dad took one that gives two results, one specific and the other vague; I think the vaguer one is from further back. He got specific places in eastern Europe, and also "European Jewish".
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.
This is probably not the type of answer you're looking for, but... I suspect that it's a lot easier for pregnant women to cause brain damage to their own fetus, than for other people. So unless there are interventions that can roughly double the intelligence of a child, mothers win.
With zero evidence, I would guess that mothers have significantly more influence in childhood, because on average they do more child-rearing, but that the gap probably narrows and may even disappear as sons age.
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
1) no, because of 2, and because it's an unsafe type
2) no, not even close
3) yes, as long as the fuel lasts.
This boat has a hull shape for going fast (wide, flat in the back, asymetrical). This will burn a helluva lot fuel (@880hp you can prob. imagine) . You can go slow, of course, but the hull shape and the oversize engine work against it being efficient. This boat's movement in any sort of high waves or wind will be very, very uncomfortable. Take a big wave from the side and this boat will easily capsize, not right itself again, break all those large windows, and sink quickly. This is for fishing and sunbathing along the coast or at harbour. A bloated, floating caravan.
I'm pretty sure that the answer to all those questions is "yes" at the "could" level. If what you mean to ask is "can I bet my life that it *will*", then I'm going to guess that it depends greatly on the skill of the yachtsman, and if you have to ask then it isn't you.
Yeah.
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.
A modern conservative would also be worried that a black employee would be more likely to sue their employer. I have no idea whether this is a reasonable thing to worry about.
Is there a "fractal wood burning" technique that works in metal? Like, something resulting in similar patterns.
Resist ink and acid bath could produce that sort of etching in metals. A ‘negative’ of the desired pattern would be applied with resist ink and the exposed metal would be etched.
Sounds like you would have to draw the pattern beforehand. Is there a way to make a semi-random pattern?
...I guess you could just splash the ink around willy-nilly.
Off the top of my head, nothing inexpensive and straightforward comes to mind.
If you are up for a bit of coding, there is a lot of code to generate fractal patterns that could be sent to a pen plotter. It would be possible to gerry rig a resist ink pen into the plotter.
But remember that where the ink is applied is where the acid does not etch, so you would need a ‘negative’ of the desired etch pattern.
I gather that pen plotters are now considered obsolete so it might be possible to pick up a cheap used one.
In a former life I wrote code to automatically gin up AutoCAD drawings of mechanical components. When a new printing technology came along it was hard to even give the formerly expensive stuff away. I haven’t been in that particular world for a while so I’m not sure about availability.
Fractal code example
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/38514/The-beauty-of-fractals-A-simple-fractal-rendering
Pen plotter art
https://www.generativehut.com/
I’m familiar with resist ink / acid bath etching from drawing circuits on copper clad printed circuit boards for one off custom stuff.
PC board etching
https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Etch-a-PCB/?amp_page=true
I'm not planning to actually do it, so expense, complexity, or safety are no issues. Just an idle curiosity.
I looked at the Wiki pages for wood fractal burning. That seems like a pretty dangerous activity. Lots of deaths by electrocution. Daisy chaining microwave transformers probably should be left to the pros.
I was thinking about something really expensive. Start with damascene steel. What you want is something with a chaotic-- not random-- variation so the pattern from the electricity is interesting.
I don't know if it would be safe, but maybe an oil and water mixture so that you can swirl it around and get marbling? I'm assuming you don't want full randomness, you want a coherent pattern that's semi-random.
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
This is very well done, and spoke to me very strongly. My family background is such that I was exposed to the concept of euthanasia at a relatively early age, and this puts into words some concepts that have roamed my brain unvoiced ever since, that I had half given up on finding words for until now. In the time since, I've completed a degree in ethical philosophy and more than half of the necessary training to become a pastor, which I tell you so you can properly appreciate what it means that this is the first time I have seen some of these concepts expressed recognizably outside my own head. I don't know what else to say but to thank you for writing this, and let you know that it touched at least one other person's soul.
That means a lot. Thanks for the kind words.
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.
The difference is whether you have it set to New First or Chronological. Some posts are set to one as the default, others to the other. The thing to change it is right above the uppermost comment.
I've got it set to New First. I haven't reset it. Maybe it reset itself-- it used to offering only one setting.
I haven't studied it carefully, but my impression is that it's a setting for individual posts, that (presumably) Scott controls. I think most of the normal posts are set to Chronological, and most Open Threads are set to New First, and Hidden Open Threads used to be usually set to Chronological, but now I've seen some that are New First. (My guess is that the default is Chronological and Scott sets open threads to New First when he remembers to, and it's not worth his time to ensure that he's super-consistent about it.)
And there's some sort of preference that's remembered in the browser, about how I manually set the order, but I think that gets reset to the default if I close the tab?
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.
By "people" do you mean one person contradicting themselves, or two people contradicting each other? For the second; no it's not fixed in the military, they just tell you to follow the last order you receive.
I meant one person contradicting themselves.
Not sure how you would go about teaching that. Assuming good faith, it seems like a memory/attention issue; they forgot what they said before. The only easy solution is "don't let them give the orders".
Perhaps there could be a checklist for what each order requires, and train it enough so it becomes a habit. This is just a guess.
That sounds like general on-the-job education, which is great if the problem is the person doesn't know their job well enough, but brings up the question of why they're giving the orders from the checklist instead of handing the checklist directly to the subordinates. Typically you want a boss to handle the stuff a checklist doesn't account for.
No, I mean a checklist for asking yourself questions like "How long will each thing I'm asking for take?" "What have I already asked for?", etc.
Contradictory orders are also common in abusive relationships. No matter what the person does, there's always a reason to criticize them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
"A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more reciprocally conflicting messages. In some scenarios (e.g. within families or romantic relationships) this can be emotionally distressing, creating a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), such that the person responding will automatically be perceived as in the wrong, no matter how they respond. This double bind prevents the person from either resolving the underlying dilemma or opting out of the situation."
"The double bind is often misunderstood to be a simple contradictory situation, where the subject is trapped by two conflicting demands. While it is true that the core of the double bind is two conflicting demands, the difference lies in how they are imposed upon the subject, what the subject's understanding of the situation is, and who (or what) imposes these demands upon the subject. Unlike the usual no-win situation, the subject has difficulty in defining the exact nature of the paradoxical situation in which they are caught. The contradiction may be unexpressed in its immediate context and therefore invisible to external observers, only becoming evident when a prior communication is considered. Typically, a demand is imposed upon the subject by someone whom they respect (such as a parent, teacher, or doctor) but the demand itself is inherently impossible to fulfill because some broader context forbids it. For example, this situation arises when a person in a position of authority imposes two contradictory conditions but there exists an unspoken rule that one must never question authority."
Indeed. I expect there's some incompetence on the part of the abuser, but also a compulsion to punish.
It doesn't have to be incompetence; it can be the reverse, or at least an instinctual tactic. Done systematically, it means that whenever they want to criticize, there's a handy excuse.
It's a big part of legal training. For all the frustrations people have with "complex legalese," the idea behind all that language is that if your contract ever ends up in front of a judge, there will be only one reasonable interpretation of the language under dispute.
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 one thing that confuses me about this whole debate... If minors can't be trusted to self-diagnose, if parents can't be trusted to make decisions for their child, and even the medical establishment can't be trusted with anything, why are we allowing minors to receive *any* medical treatment, particularly psychological ones? It's not like most of these treatments are based on hard science. Doctors still don't know shit about how the body works, especially the brain. Why are doctors prescribing medications to children when we don't even know exactly how they work?
I think parents can generally be trusted to make medical decisions for their children, and I think the medical establishment is usually trustworthy. There are glaring counter-examples when this assumption fails, in which case the state needs to step in and intervene, but we should default to assuming that parents want what's best for their children and doctors know what they're doing.
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?
I think about my aging father, in northern Maine, which doesn't have enough doctors, nurses, etc. He's enough of a jerk to me that I've stopped helping him. He has few friends. He does not have the resources (internal or external) to maintain, let alone create, a supportive network. There are many people in his situation, lonely and struggling but lacking the resources (internal and external) to change the trajectory.
Maybe there will be situational relief when climage change makes northern Maine a paradise.
There's that kind of situation, there's also people who just don't have descendants (that's me) or so few descendants that the descendants don't have the resources to take care of the older people.
I think technological improvements can matter, including medical technology.
For science fictional fun, imagine you can be rolled back to a healthy 30 years old (at least assuming you were healthy back then), but you lose your social security and possibly your pension. Has this already been used in a story?
A lot depends on the age of the population and whether the country is dependent on labor or something like finance. A labor-intensive country with a lot of farming/industry/service is going to suffer when the population gets inverted and there are more old people than young people. A place that depends on finance (which people can do in older age and doesn't require as many people to run) will have issues but far less.
If the demographics stayed the same as during growth with equal or larger younger cohorts compared to older, then things would probably be fine. That's not how population decline works. Fewer births means fewer young people, while the older generations are still around and in need of care. Compounding this is the increased availability of medical care such that these older populations are living longer and surviving worse and worse disabilities. There's going to be a lot of soul searching in the next 50 years about how much society can afford to care for their elderly. This will likely be harder in democratic countries, since the majority may be older themselves and unlikely to vote for reduced benefits/care. Reality may hit hard.
Yeah, good luck getting old people to give up their Medicare and Social Security benefits, especially when the over-65 crowd makes up an even larger percentage of the population than they do now. The solution? Repeal minimum wage laws (or just ignore them), import more people from the third world to take care of the old people (whose children are either non-existent or live a thousand miles away), let the younger people deal with all the economic and social consequences.
The part about repealing minimum wage seems unrelated. With a declining productive population there will likely be a shortage of people to do the tasks needed. Wages are not likely to fall.
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.
Ah nice to see this posted here. Visa is great, love his twitter
There is a book arguing that fun is really learning: https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210 - I think it is mostly right.
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 don't worry about it because the relevant markets are generally a tiny fraction of the total population and then if very successful will expand for use by most of the population. You start off with the capability to produce hundreds of PC's, or cell phones or ear buds, etc per year move to 1000's per year to 10,000s per year.
Even for diminishing segments there is still potential opportunity. There are about 3.6 million births in the U.S. per year. Even if that falls in half. That still leaves opportunity for somebody who thinks that have a better crib which provides health monitoring and intellectual stimulation to the baby to sell 10,000s of products.
>due to the expected decline in demand that will accompany population decline.
...that wouldn't take effect until after the investors die. The current generation will be there for a lifetime.
Yet the current and older generations die off little by little every day. If the each new generation is smaller and it is not sufficiently offset by increases in lifespan (and ignoring migration), the population and number of consumers will be getting smaller year by year. This is straightforward and the case in many countries in Europe.
Perhaps reduction in demand is offset by elderly and the ever-smaller generations consuming more and-or highly valuable stuff per unit?
I don't know anybody who gets into business to sell to their parents' generation. They focus on their peers, those are the ones they understand well enough to sell to. (Or on the teenagers, since they're stupid about money.) Their peers won't die off until they do, the incentives are stable.
That's interesting because there may be untapped opportunities. I was just reading some bitter grousing about boots marketed to older women. The boots had medium heels, and weren't available in wide and large sizes.
Some older women I know want flat boots, generally in large and especially in wide sizes, with good grippy soles, and can't find them.
I'm not sure how old the typical start-up founder is.
Isn't that the OPs point, kinda? If you are getting to business to sell for either your generation or teenagers, and every generation is smaller than the previous, the opportunities to do business seem to dwindle (unless for some other mitigating factors). And the generation of their peers is increasingly reduced every day by natural causes.
If he's specifically worried about people six generations from now not being interested in investing, then I guess, but I'm sure they'll figure it out once they're there. People today will not be dissuaded from investing because there will be fewer people six generations from now, or even one generation from now. Especially since people retire like twenty years before they die. The current generation will be there for a lifetime, the incentives are stable.
You keep saying "current generation will be there for a lifetime", but I have difficulties understanding what is the point: lifetime is not a constant, but a distribution. And it is difficult to me see how the upcoming - future generations don't influence the business expectations. If your business sells only to your age-peers and it is established, the number of age-peers is constantly decreasing, thus also presumably the returns of any investment you make. At the very end of the curve, the number of investors and customers is quite small as most of your peers are dead (and strictly speaking, statistically you are likely dead too, so either your business is bankrupt or you have now investors from later generations who plan the business making profit well into *their* retirement). Original investors in Coca Cola and KFC are long dead. When the population is growing, you can expect that number of potential customers increases over time. Without anything else, eventually growth is possible only by competition and/or innovation.
In many countries it is not "six generations from now" (granted, close to the current estimations of world population peak) or "after one generation" but more like "within current generation" or "next year" if we are talking about South Korea.
Well, there's one reason to not be worried: AI. We don't need more babies if we can simply build more workers. Unlike humans, you don't need to spend over two decades training each one. You can just copy and paste as many of them as you need. And once humanity is completely obsolete, they'll kill us all for being worthless liabilities, and we won't have to worry about anything!
You had me going there, I will admit.
To respond to the first part, while AI certainly has the potential as a tool for increasing worker productivity, I'm not certain that AI workers actually solves the problem. The issue is that while AI might presumably replace laborers, it won't replace consumers. And consumers are what businesses need to drive investment.
I think the point (taken non-sarcastically) would be that if it's much cheaper to meet demand due to much lower labor costs, there's still incentive for a company to exist and expand.
The demand is at 100, your labor costs used to be 80, now they're 20 - suddenly you have 60 more net at the same demand, and have incentive to expand your offerings where and however possible.
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?
Are you including Open Threads, or just the real posts?
If it's the latter, people are just amazed and grateful that you're still writing posts at all, after you posted "In the long run, we're all dad". The timing of the new year is just a coincidence.
Hang in there!
All I can think of is that a bunch of people switched to Chrome as their browser. At least I think that’s the browser that permits likes. Personally I’m on Safari and don’t have the option to vote Like on a post of yours even if it solved all my problems plus gave me a new Prius.
Maybe the "immediately after new year" period is slow for business, so people have more free time to be constantly refreshing ACT for new content?
Obviously, the key question to see if this could even be true is if "this didn't happen before" means "This never happened before at all" or "This is different from what was happening right before new year".
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?
Psychologist here. Hypnosis is not bullshit. People vary in susceptibility, and the more susceptible you are the more benefit you can get from it. For susceptible people it can def help with chronic pain, anxiety, quitting smoking. So in my opinion it is good for circumscribed problems. For larger, whole-person problems (chronic self-hatred, avoidance and isolation, inability to sustain a relationship) it is not effective alone, but is useful for gaining insight.
Best way to find a trustworthy clinician is to search at the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. I recommend also that you choose someone with an MD, PhD in psychology or MSW.
I think I know at least two people who practise hypnosis, one therapeutic and one as a stage magician.
I'm told there is no special hypnotic state - its suggestion and social compliance (the hypnotisee will play along with the game of being hypnotised, as long as they're not asked to do something they don't actually want to do)
No, I really don’t think it’s true. I have been hypnotized, and it’s at least as altered a state as being moderately high on marijuana. In that condition I could not have been induced to do something I’d strongly object to, ,like say throw my wallet out the window. But if the hypnotist had suggested that my arm was filled with helium it would have felt really light and risen upwards. And no I would not have been playing along. In fact I was in a situation where the was no inducement to play along. A colleague hypnotized a whole group and I was sitting sort of in the back where nobody could even see whether hypnotic suggestions worked on me.
But, e.g.yu you want to give up smoking and that's why you went to the hypnotherapist, you might well play along with the game of being hypnotised into doing the thing you wanted to do to begin with.
https://try.nervaibs.com/ is a hypnotherapy app for IBS that claims to be as effective as the most effective (afaict) treatment for IBS, the FODMAP diet. The same university that came up with the diet also came up with the hypnotherapy protocol which lends some credence to this as a claim but I haven't looked into their research very much.
Based on this, I think there's other hypnotherapy out there that works though I haven't messed around with it much. fwiw nerva didn't work very well for me but probably because I kept listening to it right before bed and falling asleep + not wanting to use it very much
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".
Rules for self-promotion:
* max twice per year
* in Open Thread, rather than under an unrelated article (though a related article would be ok, I think)
So you are perfectly within the rules.
And a link with description is preferred to mere link, so even better.
Thanks! Where are these rules documented BTW? I couldn't find them.
No idea, I it was mentioned at some moment somewhere. (Perhaps I am wrong, but no one has contradicted me, so probably I am not.)
I just remembered that there is also a ~trimonthly classifieds thread; the last one was four months ago, so maybe it's time for the next one. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-classifieds-923
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!
Brits call a domestic cat a moggy? I like that. It was new to me.
That's just frustrating the cat, for no good reason.
Though the only cat I knew who was a really good hunter would hunt to eat. He'd catch birds daily and munch them, leaving only the head and maybe some feathers. He'd eat them in his place in a covered yard at the side of the house, to the terror of the dog who also lived there. Never brought them into the house as presents. Didn't have to be fed.
I don’t let my cats out of the house because bad things happen to a lot of outdoor cats and because they *are* carnivorous predators.
When I was still living in an apartment though I came home to find a little red flower on the living room floor. Turned out to be a mouse tail and the end of a mouse butt.
> That's just frustrating the cat, for no good reason.
Isn't it believed that cat brings home prey because they think their owners are incompetent hunters? So it's just payback
Relatedly, domestic cats are the number 1 predator of small birds worldwide, and has been the primary cause of extinction for dozens of species. See for instance: https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/#:~:text=Cats%20%231%20Threat%20to%20Birds,2.4%20billion%20birds%20every%20year.https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/#:~:text=Cats%20%231%20Threat%20to%20Birds,2.4%20billion%20birds%20every%20year.
This was the first reference that came to mind, but I can provide more rigorous ones of anyone is interested.
Not just that, as Gwern points out, cats are inherently dysgenic and literally bred to hate / fear humans!
Friendly cats that people love and make good house pets? They're fixed by shelters / responsible owners and never breed. The only cats that breed in volume are feral cats that escape and are good at / internally incentivized to hate and avoid humans (so they're not caught by animal services).
Cats: not even once.
(Yes, I'm a non-cat-owner currently staying with friends with a cat. A total a-hole cat.)
This reminds me of a discussion I've seen of rationalists being unlikely to have dogs and more likely to have cats. Is the claim about pets true?
If so, what's the explanation? The discussion seems to rest on the difficulty of having a dog if you're living in expensive cities, renting, and moving frequently.
I'm pretty sure having a dog is just more difficult, regardless - we have cats and it only minorly impacts our life: we can easily travel, we can leave for a weekend whenever we want, and for longer trips we just need someone to come fill a food bowl and clean a litter-box every few days, which is a fairly small ask.
Meanwhile, the people I know who own dogs seem to schedule their life around them: we often have to schedule it into our tabletop board game planning because so-and-so is going to have to go leave to take care of their dog, and they have a lot harder time traveling.
If you have children, your life is probably already inconvenienced enough that adding a dog won't majorly impact you, but for people without kids, a dog seems like a major life adjustment.
Scott needs to include this on his questions the next survey round, there's probably some interesting stuff there.
I'd personally bet pet ownership overall is lower than USA baselines, and I'd bet exotic incidence is higher in the affirmative pet owners, but not sure about any dog / cat ownership split biases relative to US baselines.
Wow, really? That's interesting, I guess I've never thought of the intersection of rat-sphere and pets.
I do know it was a hit the couple of times I brought some of my puppies to ACX meetups.
And I'm personally a dog person, with a max of 5 dogs at any given time, and having raised ~7 puppies over the years - but I think I'm a pretty non-central example of rat-sphere folk.
It seems just wrong that "intersection of rat-sphere and pets", doesn't point to pet rats. Which are a thing, and surprisingly cute though I still prefer cats. Rats may be lower-maintenance, if that is going to be the deciding factor.
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?
Looking at your blog, why not just put up Samus?
If you want to troll people Nina from Code Geass is roundly hated.
My blog has a reader? Whoa.
You should be like me and use a profile picture of the 1990 Moomin series, which is technically an anime because it was animated by a Japanese studio. If you want it to be an anime girl, then I would suggest one of the female characters, perhaps Little My or the Fillyjonk.
Why is anime girl profile picture a sign that you're giving less of a shit, or a sign of anything really?
The cutest anime girl I know of - if you mean this term literally - is Anya from SpyXfamily. If you mean "Anime girl" as in "attractive adult 2D woman", that would be Anya's mother in the same series.
Kinda feels weird to want an anime girl picture without caring about anime at all, but hey you do you. Might be worth checking out an AI Art generator or two, they're pretty good at the style and gives you the option to generate something to your taste rather than just picking a character at random.
> [...] giving less of a shit [...] anime girl profile picture [...] I don't watch anime [...]
It sounds like this is less about "not giving a shit" and more about "getting a reaction out of people for the lulz".
If all you want is an anime-style picture and you don't care about them coming from a particular series that you're a fan of, may I suggest https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ ?
Otherwise, I suggest finding a picture of Madoka Kaname, who is the most rationalist magical girl - she was given the opportunity to have a single wish granted, and she spent 12 episodes thinking very carefully about it before making the best use of it that she could.
Hah, Madoka as a rationalist icon is something I never knew I needed. Madoka Magica is genuinely a good series, and probably one rationalists would find interesting - I'm not 100% I'd classify it as a good "gateway anime", but I guess it worked for sfdebris: https://sfdebris.com/videos/anime/madoka1.php
(EDIT: actually, looks like that's not a network issue on my end and those videos aren't up right now; too bad)
> Is there an online guide
Yes, just Google "hentai".
More seriously, Boogiepop Phantom got me into anime, but I would skip straight over Boogiepop and the whole "girl" part and instead recommend Poom Poom. https://boogiepop.fandom.com/wiki/Poom_Poom_(Boogiepop_Phantom)
1. request anime recs with best art in a specific genre from twitter or reddit (psych horror? family? sports?) 2. fast forward for characters with a vibe you like 3. screenshot
you will be judged for not watching the anime you based your identity on but maybe that's on theme
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).
The word "Nazi" was historically redefined by Soviet Union for propaganda purposes.
Basically, for people in the West, the historical Nazis are remembered as "violent nationalists/racists following a populist leader, wanting to kill all Jews but also anyone else who got in the way".
For people in the Soviet Union, the historical Nazis were explained as "those who attacked Soviet Union".
Both of these things are technically true, but they have widely different implications for whom you would call a "Nazi" today. For example, in the context of the war in Ukraine, if you try to convince a Western audience that "Ukrainians are Nazis", you need to talk about Stepan Bandera. This is completely unnecessary when talking to the Russian audience -- the mere fact that Ukrainians fight against the Russian army already makes them "Nazis"; any argument on top of that would only complicate an already obvious thing. More extremely, using these two definitions, Zelensky either obviously isn't or obviously is a "Nazi".
With the leftist on the West it is complicated, because they grew up with the Western definition, but there is also a strong ideological pressure on them to adopt the Soviet usage. So they basically follow the Soviet definition, but add some rationalization on top of that about why it is not actually different from the Western definition.
For example, when talking about Trump, they can correctly point out that he is a populist leader who occasionally uses a nationalist rhetoric. Of course, the same could be said about Putin, only more strongly, but you typically won't hear this from the left, because this is not the actual criterion they use, only the post-hoc justification.
Once you understand this, "banning Nazis" simply means banning anyone who opposes the left. And if someone on the left is violent, nationalist/racist (but not *white* nationalist/racist), uses a populist rhetoric, and maybe also hates Jews... of course none of that makes them a "Nazi", so there is no need to ban them.
Yeah, I've noticed I have this too - for me growing up "Nazi" meant "someone who wants to kill the Jews", but even the standard American definition focuses just as much in the other aspects.
> you can't really ban Trump in states where he's genuinely likely to lose
Is that a typo? I'd agree with the reverse.
yeah, should be the reverse, thanks.
(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
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(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
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(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)
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(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
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(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
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Listening to a song doesn't constitute agreement with the (not-so) implicit messaging.
I also hate intellectual-property law. USC title 35 is the most boring book I've ever thumbed through.
Many Thanks!
That AI declaration is really good. Especially this part:
> A person is not merely a representation of a collective identity, history, events, or political orientation.
I was shocked to see that in writing.
Why is that shocking? you mean it's a particularly well-stated expression of something you agree with so it surprised you?
I wouldn't go quite so far as calling it "well-stated": without the surrounding context, it's got some wiggle room. But yes, that's something I believe, and I was surprised not only that they agree, but also that they were willing to state it outright.
I used to donate to them, back before everything went sideways in my life and I lost the capacity to donate. I had gotten the impression that their American wing had been slowly taken over by the identitarian left, much like the ACLU. But that impression might have been wrong, or perhaps other branches of AI have been kept grounded in reality by dealing with all the horrible stuff that's always going on around the world. Whatever it is, I was too pessimistic. And now, despite the continuing bloodshed in Gaza, somehow my heart feels slightly warmer. **shakes head at self**
Hope everything in your life gets back up and straight again.
Yes, woke ideology has a way of poisoning and corrupting what used to be noble causes. That said, one of the most memorable and insightful article I read on Less Wrong is titled Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence. It posits that people who just take whatever their opponent believes in and invert it then believe it are curiously assuming that their opponent has a magical ability to know exactly what is right and what is wrong at all times. After all, the consistent ability to always pick wrong is no less impressive than (and does imply the existence of) the consistent ability to always pick right.
It's an interesting argument though not without holes and blind spots, assuming that your opponents are always wrong is sometimes a backwards way of assuming that they're always right.
Thanks.
What I find especially frustrating is the places where I somewhat agree with them and somewhat disagree, because then I end up arguing both sides against the middle, and there's too much reflexive hostility that ignores nuance.
Although that kind of sounds like what you've been doing here lately. :-)
Definitely shocking coming from Allah International.
> In June 2022, a 106-page independent investigation... concluded that Amnesty International UK (AIUK) exhibits institutional and systemic racism... the independent investigation found that UKAIUK "has failed to embed principles of anti-racism into its own DNA and faces bullying issues within the organisation."... the report stated... that the "press' insistence on describing Amnesty as a "leading human rights group" is furthermore problematic given the anti-Jewish racism that the NGO has displayed for years."
> In 2010 Frank Johansson, the chairman of Amnesty International-Finland, called Israel a nilkkimaa, a derogatory term variously translated as "scum state", "creep state" or "punk state". Johansson stood by his statement, saying that it was based on... his own personal experiences with Israelis
> On 11 March 2022, Paul O'Brien, the Amnesty International USA Director, stated at a private event: "We are opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people"
> In the April 2015 annual Amnesty International UK AGM, delegates voted against a motion proposing a campaign against antisemitism in the UK. The debate on the motion formed a consensus that Amnesty should fight "discrimination against all ethnic and religious groups", but were divided over the issue of an anti-racism campaign with a "single focus"... Amnesty International had previously published a report on discrimination against Muslims in Europe.
> Yasmin Hussein, then Amnesty's director of faith and human rights and previously its head of international advocacy and a prominent representative at the United Nations, had "undeclared private links to men alleged to be key players in a secretive network of global Islamists", including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas
> Hussein was alleged to have had inappropriately close relationships with the al-Qazzaz family, members of which were high-ranking government ministers in the administration of Mohammed Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood leaders at the time
> Kristyan Benedict: "Israel," he said in a 2012 interview, "is now included in the list of stupid dictatorial regimes who abuse peoples’ basic universal rights – along with Burma, North Korea, Iran and Sudan, its government has the same wanton attitude to human beings." He attributed to its current government "a feeling of 'ethnic supremacy'" and described Israelis as being afflicted by "blatant racism," comparing their attitudes to those of “the BNP members in the north of England.”
> When asked by The Jewish Chronicle newspaper if Amnesty would be urging action on behalf of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza, Benedict... changed the subject to... Palestinian prisoners
> In tweets sent out in late 2012, Benedict wrote such things as: "How soon before Israel brings out the flechettes & white phosphorus given that 'All options are on the table'?" and "Israel continues to 'defend' its apartheid state by bombing families in #Gaza. Palestinians will not sit back and receive your death wishes." NGO Monitor documented that he called Operation Pillar of Defense "Israel’s murder campaign" and advocated BDS.
> A 2011 article charging that AI has undergone a “moral decline,” and quoting Christopher Hitchens on its “degeneration and politicization,” maintained that “Amnesty's UK branch has a particular anti-Israel obsession,” and cited an AIUK event at which an audience member who writes a pro Israeli government blog who challenged a claim about a purported Israeli action was told by Benedict that he would “smack me in my little bald head.” The audience member posted an audio recording of the exchange online.
Oh my, this selection of random quotations about the UK branch of Amnesty International from unknown and obviously biased sources is definitely turning me against Amnesty International Israel.
> Allah International.
Boring and unfunny. Not plausible too, no Islamist group would ever name themselves "Allah" without any qualifiers.
Great. I'd just gotten used to reading "AI" as "artificial intelligence" (instead of Al, the name that's short for Albert etc.), and now it means Amnesty International.
They've been around since 1961, which I suppose is shortly after the term "artificial intelligence" was coined.
> nothing against the Hebrew version, I just don't understand a single word in it. Yet
Hmm, sounds like you haven't learned any Hebrew yet. Are you sure your previous username was not wrong?
The spoken form and written form of a language can be vastly different, I find this to be the case in Hebrew. Spoken Hebrew to a native Arabic speaker sounds like a weird mod of Arabic with lots of French sounds and recognizable words and familiar grammar. Written Hebrew sounds like the alien writing system in Arrival.
I know and can pronounce several words (less than 30, I estimate) in spoken Hebrew, but I haven't mustered the energy yet to learn a whole new Alphabet. I recognize most of the letters by name but some still elude me, and even after I perfectly memorize the letters reading will still be difficult because of absence of Niqqud in most Hebrew writing directed at fluent speakers (Niqqud == Vowel markings that tell you how to move your lips while pronouncing the letter, because the Hebrew Aleph Bet is a semi-Abjad with barely any vowels).
So the "LearnsHebrew" part of my username is very much aspirational and a long-term project, but it's not a lie or an unserious fling. The most difficult part of language learning, I believe, is new grammar and new sounds, none of which Hebrew presents to an Arabic speaker.
Yay to the new name! As an inventor with multiple patents it irritates me quite a bit that a patent (in the US) lasts only 17 years, and even then one has to pay maintenance fees, but copyright is forever (or bloody close enough).
> Yay to the new name
I have been thinking of changing it for quite a while now, your recent comment has been the final push.
Copyright may be the most enraging and repulsive form of brain damage that IP laws propagate, but the patent law has its fair share of "Wtf is this even supposed to mean" 18th century Legalese. I binge-watched the Crash Course series (< 1 hour) on IP [1] yesterday, one of the requirements for what qualifies as a valid, new patent in US law is a description of the main innovation by the patent author such that "A Person having ordinary skill in the art"[2] can reproduce it.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? I would describe myself as a person who have "Ordinary skill" in the "Art" of Software Engineering, and I say that there is no amount of words organized in prose or poetry that can describe a particularly fiendish algorithm. The only non-runnable way of organizing words that can come close to describing an algorithm is pseudocode, and even then, it's extremely easy to gloss over and minimally describe in 2 lines what would take days to implement and debug in real honest-to-Turing executable code.
Given that you ***can*** patent algorithms, but - presumably - the patent law can't force the author to describe the algorithm any clearly than the very rough outline of the outermost for loop, did the patent author really "fulfill" his obligation to society then? Why shouldn't a reproducer of his/her work, if they got frustrated enough with the unclear prose description in the patent, simply resort to disassembling a working implementation (e.g. from the commercial product the patent author is selling) and reproduce the algorithm from the actual machine code implementing the algorithm? What good is the patent then?
I simply don't respect this entire class of laws, from copyright to patents to trademarks to trade secrets. They strike me as incredibly naive and ignorant 18th century regulators' conception of what knowledge is. Hidden under the archaic and impenetrable 18th century English verbiage is whole false epistemologies: what Science is, what a "Fact" is, how "Novelty" can be judged and quantified, what counts as a "Copy" of a "Work" vs. a mere "Transformation", etc etc etc. Those are literally some of the most fiendish and difficult issues in branches upon branches of philosophy, IP would have you believe they were all solved centuries ago, and that the solutions should be enforced with the full might and non-consensual violence of the modern state upon anyone who disagrees.
If judges and attorneys had precise notions of what counts as a "Transformation" of a piece of text, for example, that could be the start of a revolutionary new diffing algorithm that will show software engineers the most human-comprehensible view of how a file was changed in a patch, but it's widely known in the software industry and CS academia that text-diffing is a philosophical problem that computers can't solve humanely-satisfactorily in all edge cases. It's insane that people can be judged, fined, jailed and labelled criminals based on what the actual people who actually studied the problem agree to be an aesthetic hunch that can't be ever formalized or made precise.
I recognize that there are some problems that IP is supposedly trying to solve, but I don't recognize any legitimacy or good faith whatsoever to any current law that falls under this category in any jurisdiction. In the words of Nina Paley[3], I think the solution forward is not reform, although reform can be a valuable way of distracting the corporate defenders of IP laws and wasting their energy on ever longer and more Kafkaesque decade-long lawsuits (which is why I buy tons of popcorn and rub my hands together whenever someone rich and/or powerful sues a corporation because their AI model said or drew something verboten). Anarchism is the true solution; the true solution is for all of us to collectively ignore those false and unexamined epistemologies. Using torrents, tor, and cyber offensives and defenses of all kinds to intentionally and systematically and collaboratively bully and challenge those brain-dead proponents and enforcers of brain-dead laws into submission.
In particular, every Free Speech advocate has what I call the Alexandra Elbakyan Burden, which is to loot and pillage each and every one of the info-streams and info-warehouses of every corporation that doesn't have legal reach in the advocate's jurisdiction, by all means necessary, including mild physical attacks on data centers involving no harm to human personnel.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwV2btpcij8S3YohW9gUGN
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_in_the_art
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc
Patent law!
I have experienced it as an inventor, but I work with hardware, and there's a whole large body of work of people arguing that software patents are broken, and you're hitting on some of the themes as to why. But I can shed some light on some of these bizarre terms from the hardware standpoint.
"A Person having ordinary skill in the art" can reproduce it.
Let's start with what a patent is: one thing it is is a teaching tool: it must teach how to make the invention, for example, if I patent a novel amplifier, I must publish its circuit, explain its novelty, and teach how to implement it. So now you see how "ordinary skill" is relevant: I don't need to teach someone who is new to the field of analog circuit design. I don't need to explain what a transistor is, etc. I assume that the person reading the patent can design an ordinary ("prior art", i.e., something taught at college or commonly used already) amplifier. All I need to explain is what is different about my new design.
Why would I do this? Because the US government, in return, grants me a 17-year monopoly on making and selling my design, and allows me to sue in court anyone who tries to sell a copy of it. Note the key word "sell" - you can make my new amplifier all you want as long as you're not trying to profit from it.
And thus we come to the critical thing about patents. A patent is not, at its core, a technical document. It is a legal document. That's why it's written in such weird legalize, and has a structure that would have a normal engineer go crazy. It is trying to describe in words, and in words ONLY, whatever the specific NOVEL and USEFUL thing I am trying to protect from being sold by competition.
At this point I'm so used to it that when I write a new patent draft for the lawyers who will create the actual patent document for the filing, I can effortlessly fill whole paragraphs of engineering legalize, adapting normal technical explanations to the required form. Example, literally making it up as fast as I can type:
A circuit comprising a first transistor and a second transistor, the first transistor having its collector connected to the power supply, and its emitter connected to the collector of the second transistor; the second transistor having its emitter connected to a ground node via a resistor; both transistors being of bipolar junction NPN type. [and on and on and on it goes describing the circuit].
Thanks for presenting this priceless insider view!
I see that I might have been too harsh and too wide-sweeping in my conclusion, I retract the "Natural language can never be reproducible" argument against any patent in a field that has a circuit-like representation of artifacts that is rigorous and allows anyone with familiarity in reading the notation to reproduce the work. Analog Circuit Design is one such field, but probably others as well like Chemical Engineering and Civil Engineering. Indeed, if Software patents forced the author to write the code in a real executable programming language against real test cases (in addition to the mathematical proof, of course), I would retract that argument against them as well.
I have several other questions/arguments regarding this though:
(1) What is the minimal level of knowledge and/or skill to assume when you're writing a patent, and how do you force yourself to stick to that level ? It's known that people often forget that other people don't know what they know, part of being a good teacher is being able to simulate a "beginner mentality" in your non-beginner mind, it can be very difficult.
Some people are better teachers than others. So what I'm asking is : What is to prevent the patent author from skipping over important details ? This is not necessarily because they're malicious, maybe they're just not a very good teacher, or a very good teacher who is explaining a newly discovered thing they don't fully understand to a dead piece of paper, thus having no feedback or questions to know if they're doing a good job or not. Hell, maybe the patent author themself doesn't realize the significance of something in their process, maybe a (e.g.) resistance parameter that they think can range from 300 ohm to 1K ohm is actually best kept at 500 ohm, and the author does keep it at 500 ohm out of other considerations (e.g. habit, they only have 500 ohm resistors in their lab, ...) but never thought to write that down. Somebody else would "reproduce" an inferior technical achievement because the author never thought to test the range of parameters that they claim will work.
In addition, no notation captures everything, right? your Analog circuit might look quite good and unambiguous as an abstract component graph, but maybe anyone trying to actually lay it out would discover a certain capacitor has to be X mm away from all other wiring or else it will induce weird effects (and the author never says this because they either think it's too obvious or because they simply don't know, they chanced upon a working layout without realizing why any other layout would be inferior).
Where I'm going with this is: a patent - like a scientific paper - should be reproduced to be valid. The author is allowed to state the level of expertise and qualifications, listing however many prerequisites as they please (e.g. "The reproducer has to read this particular obscure scientific paper from 1964 and understand all of its terms"). Then, N reproducers who meet all of the author's conditions are double-anonymously chosen at random from a pool of reproducers, and if 50% or more of them couldn't reproduce then the patent is declared too vague and the author is forced to be more clear.
Isn't this obviously how things should work? A patent's explicit purpose is reproducibility, why cross your fingers and pray that the author is eloquent enough and the circuit is clear enough when you can simply ask reproducers to reproduce the damn thing ?
(2) Why the weird insistence that the patent author has the **exclusive** right to monetize their innovation ? Why not give the author more options:
[2]-(A) Royalties model: Anybody can monetize the innovation as they see fit, but the author must get X% of whatever net profits end up in the coffers of the monetizer(s)
[2]-(B) Social Status in return for innovation: The author can choose to have their name or face immortalized in some famous national library (e.g. the Library of Congress) or a museum, or be given some valuable medal, and in return their innovation is public domain (For rich innovators who don't need any more money, but think the social and cultural status will be worth it)
[2]-(C) other things that I didn't think of
Can those options be built on top of the existing exclusive right model ? Has anybody tried ? Has anybody asked for different options ?
(3) I still see the issue of what counts as "Innovation" as a massive elephant in the room. Let's pick your field, I barely know anything about Analog but I know that if some parameters of circuit elements are tweaked (using simulations, experiments, etc...), they can work better. So could I take an existing circuit, tweak the parameters using a massive simulation, then publish the provably-better parameter configuration as a novelty that deserves a patent? What if I take a well-known circuit and just keep adding things that don't change its operation much, an amplifier here, a resistor there, and so on. I can also falsely claim that those added things do improve its operating characteristics. At which point would the patent office be fooled by the irrelevant elements I added and declare it a worthy patent?
(4) Related to (3), how to detect and prove that someone infringed upon your IP ? Some things are downright impossible, for example, CPU designs. Some people like Ken Shirriff (https://www.righto.com/) spend incredible talent and effort reverse-engineering old CPUs from the 1980s and early 1990s, but I don't think you can do that to a late 2000s or a 2010s CPU. So you're AMD/Intel/Nvidia, and somebody stole your entire latest architecture and etched it on a chip made by the EXTREMLY-SMOL photolithography process. How do you even suspect that they did that? and once you suspect, how do you confirm? Suppose you wrongly suspected them and reverse-engineered their products but you found no infringement, but also you learned so much about **their** patents in the process. How do you then prevent yourself from using the ideas in those patents? Once you see certain things, you can't unsee them. The competitor's patents have irreversibly taught you something and made you a different brain, how do you keep track of all those new things you learned and make double sure you never use them in your commercial designs ever ? Can this happen in Analog as well ? Or do the scales never get this small ?
Also, some fields presumably have thousands of companies and for-profit organizations making things. Patents are public, right ? Google seems to agree. So what's to prevent some of them from simply sniping your designs when you have probably never heard of them and could spend your entire life not using their products? Moreover, what's to prevent a (e.g.) Chinese company from simply replicating your patents without you knowing, using VPNs and American citizens as proxies as necessary if America started blocking Chinese IPs and citizens from accessing American patents ? Even if you knew this obscure company in a country thousands of kilometers away with a name you can't even pronounce is infringing, what legal recourse do you have once you do?
Sorry for the wall of text but I'm quite curious how those laws are supposed to work. They seem to have very naive pre-globalization pre-cognitive-science pre-semiconductor mercantilist views of Knowledge and Epistemology.
You're asking excellent questions that kind of go to the heart of patent law. Let me try:
(1) Level of skill - you basically look at your colleagues and think "will they know what I'm talking about". Kind of what Nancy is hinting at. At a large company, where most patents come from (because it's really costly to file them), there is also all kinds of help for a new inventor to guide him or her. And most patents have multiple inventors these days, just the nature of the innovation within complex systems.
How do you make sure you capture everything and the patent is reproducible? - with great care! Glib answer, but this is the key difficulty in writing a patent:
-- Write too little, and the patent is too obvious (term of art), or already well-known. Example, you can't just patent a wheel, you have to have something innovative, idk, like you create a new system for attaching and tensioning spokes. Then you have to describe exactly how this new system works. But:
-- Write too much, and your patent becomes "too narrow", too easy to circumvent. Let's say in my example I describe the tensioning system using M4 threads - then a competitor can change it to M5 threads, and voila - no violation. So I would have to specify a range, or say things like,
"...in the preferred embodiment, M4 threads are used to control the spoke tension, but it should be clear to those skilled in the art that other sizes and types of threads could be used, for example, in the range of M1 to M10 threads"
This kind of language is inserted all over the place to make sure competitors don't catch you on some technicality - and they often do.
(2) - Exclusive right indeed is broad, all it means no one can profitably use the invention without my permission. I can grant a license to make my patent (happens all the time), or I can grant free use, or indeed anything else that strikes my fancy. As long as I'm asked! And after 17 years anyone can use the patent, it enters public domain.
(3) - what is innovation? Yeah, this is both vague and the key criterium for patent grant or denial. Almost every argument I've had with patent examiners is centered on this question. They would find "prior art", a previous patent or publication, and rarely it's the exact thing, often they would say that it's so close that it's obvious to anyone skilled in the art (here it is again!) to do what you propose, so there's no novelty here. Sometimes we lose, not every patent application is granted.
In the reality of modern world, almost every innovation threads all over some prior art, and if every company tried to rigorously enforce their patents the economy would grind to a halt. What happens is that only the most egregious violators get sued - like if my company discovered literally a copied design that is eating into our sales we would sue. But mostly everyone looks the other way as long as the violations aren't too brazen or costly.
(4) Infringement - oh, you are asking such excellent questions! The funny but true answer is that you only patent innovations that can be detected. For example, if we (my company) suspect that a competitor is infringing, we would purchase their product and tear it apart to see if there's something there that is covered by our patents. But imagine I invented a better way to test my amplifier, that would save significant test costs? Well, there's no way to know if the competitor uses the same test methods, so I would never apply for a patent for it, and rather keep it secret. When deciding to file for a patent, infringement detectability is a key question - if we think we won't be able to easily detect the violation, the patent doesn't get filed no matter how innovative the invention is.
Patents are indeed public. If a small company takes my patent and uses it, and I am a multibillion-dollar company, the likeliest outcome is nothing, they are not a threat. If by some accident we come across it we may send them a warning letter, and maybe demand a token reference to our IP. But it's not worth suing them, which is not to say that doesn't happen, I know of startups run out of business by this.
China is a more difficult question. Here your weapon, in the US, is the Trade Commission - you file to stop importation of the infringing products. That gets their attention! But if they do not intend to sell in the US there's actually nothing you can do, because:
Did I mention patents have jurisdiction limits? US patents are only enforceable in the US. If I want to enforce a patent in China, I have to file for a patent in China.
Anyway, hope this sheds some light on the weird and crazy world of patent law.
A patent writer who's serious about explaining how their invention may need to recruit at least one person who's skilled in the field to follow their directions. This strikes me as more conscientious than most people are likely to be.
What happens in large companies is that there's a review panel that looks at all invention submissions and evaluates them for novelty, detectability, completeness, etc. I've been on both sides of these.
For a small company or an individual inventor, it's really up to him/her to write a good patent. This is really hard, but the onus is on the patent filer, I can file a pile of junk and the patent office will happily take the application money. In the extreme case, they may even grant a patent to a total gibberish, I've seen it happen, if the gibberish looks innovative enough. Of course, this just means the "inventor" wasted all this time and money as such a patent is worthless.
As a hater of IP, what are your thoughts on the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts entering public domain?
Too Little Too Late. And Disney, parasites till the very end, vehemently asserts that the latest designs for Mickey are their own new IP that didn't enter the pub-dom, implicitly daring anyone to test this.
There is no reasoning with the unreasonable. Peace is not an option. They wouldn't be satisfied with an eternity. Alexandra Elbakyan - may her name be immortalized among the stars - showed us the only fruitful and effective way to deal with copyright.
>Alexandra Elbakyan - may her name be immortalized among the stars
Agreed! Her Sci-Hub is a treasure. Certainly copyright of scientific work - where the original research is usually publicly funded in the first place, is bizarre.
( _Some_ mechanism is needed for authors to get a share of the fruits of their labors. Copyright is an 18th century hack, I hope there are better ways to do this in this century. )
I appreciated your previous username. It let people know straightup what you were about instead of having to read one of your weird rants.
You're welcome.
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 see one major difference been a hypothetically united India and currently united Iraq: conditional on no civil war between Muslims and Hindus, united India would probably be a wealthier and more influential country than the sum of the parts today. Would China have attacked a united India in 1962? (I give it only a 10% chance.)
You can read snippets of this perspective if you ctrl+f for 'power' in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Partition_of_India. Altaf Hussain, an exiled Pakistani politician/gangster, has said similar things.
By contrast, Iraq is surrounded by Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia no matter what. Its Kurdish and Sunni-Arab regions don't seem to be helping it fend off intervention by these countries, or by the US.
Sounds to me like the root of the problem is that you're expecting consistency from "sorts of people", which are actually large groups of people with diverse opinions.
There's no way to draw borders that reflect the Sunni/Shia divide in Iraq without them being massively balkanzied. You could make a Kurdistan, but Turkey has made it abundantly clear that they would not tolerate that and would respond with military action.
The fundamental problem is that geographical boundaries rarely coincide with the sort of cultural boundaries that you need to draw to form a stable political body.
Draw a boundary around a heterogenous population, and you risk internal tensions eventually arising that will tear the nation apart. Absent a very strong central government, or a strong sense of common identity, eventually something will trigger a push for devolution.
But you can't always just assume that people will live in neatly sorted bubbles. So the other model is that you displace a bunch of people all at once, as happened with India/Pakistan or Israel/Palestine. Even if this results in a stable state on at least one side of the border, it leaves a lot of tension for the future.
Yugoslavia only worked as long as there was a centralized force holding it together, backed by an even bigger force outside its borders. But the dissolution of Yugoslavia didn't result in peace.
So no, I don't buy that early partitioning is necessarily the obvious and best approach. But neither is any other approach. The truth is that nobody seems to have any idea how to build a nation - unless there's already a de facto one there you can just slap a new government on. It's easy, if you're part of an unstable heterogenous society, to say that life would be easier with a smaller set of your own countrymen - that will always have a certain appeal.
Basically agree. Noema magazine had a good article on the topic recently: https://www.noemamag.com/who-gets-a-nation/
But I thought diversity was our strength?
You're probably just trolling (no offense meant), but I can't resist taking the bait.
What PhtaMac said, plus this: if you move to Japan, you never really become "Japanese". If you move to Wales, you never really become "Welsh". If you move to Italy, you never really become "Italian". But if you move to America, you can absolutely become "American", and even if you don't, your kids will. Probably even if you don't want them to. (Some other places try for this, too, with varying degrees of success.)
There's a lot of "debate" over how much ideology you have to absorb before you count as "American" - can you stick with an appreciation for classical liberalism and the rule of law, or do you need to go full nominally-Christian, McDonalds and pizza, football, light lager beer? (Ditto for whatever the left-wing equivalent is.) And of course there are people who will never be satisfied, but they're mostly a fringe that can be ignored. In America, no matter who you are, some loony is always going to want to stab you just for being you.
In the 20 years after the end of the war in Vietnam the Twin Cites welcomed thousands of people from Southeast Asia. They took what jobs they could, had families, celebrated their old culture and embraced the new.
Now my Internist is second generation Hmong and my dentist is second generation Vietnamese.
My mother’s people came from Italy and my dad’s from Poland.
This is how the US works at its best.
"your kids will"
Become the kind of Americans that hate America for being white supremacist or whatever? Great future ahead!
"appreciation for classical liberalism"
Might have ruled out the majority of Americans as "Americans" right there. What happened to freedom of association? Oh right, diversity more important.
> Become the kind of Americans that hate America for being white supremacist or whatever? Great future ahead!
I did say "whatever the left-wing equivalent is". :-P
> What happened to freedom of association?
Look, I'll be clear, my favored form of society is me as God-Emperor and everyone else as slaves I can torture at will. But I am reluctantly willing to compromise just a little bit, and maybe, just **maybe** agree to co-exist in a classical liberal democracy. Otherwise it's the acid chainsaw pits for you.
Are you talking about America? Because yes, it definitely is one of our strengths.
But I think America is better positioned to manage it than other places. A big reason is simply how our nation came to be. Between westward expansion* and mass immigration, America was largely not formed from pre-existing groups that had to suddenly get along one day. We got to build our nation on the fly, and develop a sense of group identity along with it.
(And even then, our nation had to survive, y'know, an actual civil war.)
If America didn't exist, and instead were just a bunch of independent states & regions, there's no way you could re-create it.
You can see this pattern somewhat developing with other places, too. Nations like the UK or Germany, which saw significant immigration, saw benefits from it but continue to exist in a fairly unstable equilibrium. In the case of the UK it eventually led to Brexit.
And that's still the 'easier' case of taking an existing nation and adding new people to it. Just drawing up a new heterogenous society from scrap is a million times harder.
*(Yes, yes, I see the Native Americans in the back giving me side-eye.)
I think that's a common post-colonial argument in which problems can be laid at the feet of the former colonizer.
Sounds like the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics ( https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QXpxioWSQcNuNnNTy/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics)
Yeah, one of my favorite concepts. I was jolted when Tracing Woodgrains, who typically seems reasonable, endorsed it.
https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1711050089282621789
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.
I'm not sure to what extent this list of top black baby names can be taken seriously (it's based on some unspecified massaging of data), but... https://nameberry.com/blog/black-american-baby-name-trends
If those are true, then the top black baby names right now range from perfectly normal (Zoe, Liam) to the horrifying (King, Messiah).
King Gillette and King Vidor, among others, would differ on the "horrifying".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_(given_name)
Even the names King and Messiah aren't particularly "innovative" in the same sense as DeShawn, though. Heck, "King" would seem like a traditional American name in the sense that Americans have always had the odd tradition to use famous leaders' surnames as first names (ie. people with first names like Jefferson and Jackson and Hamilton).
I dunno, DeShawn seems like a perfectly fine name to me. _/(O_o)\_
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
The current, nearly universal attitude in big, leftist cities like Seattle (where I live) is that there's no point in calling police or pursuing criminal charges for almost anything. Why bother? The suspect is long gone and the police don't have the resources (or the right, depending on your political leanings) to actually catch them. Why waste time filing a report with the police, especially if it isn't required for an insurance claim?
I would expect murder rates to be fairly accurate given there's objectively a murdered body to add to the count, but rape, assault and robbery? Pfft. That reporting is functionally useless.
I know this might provoke an objection that anecdotes should not be extrapolated to statistics, but, like, sorry - how statistics are reported often obscures the common sense of the demonstrably obvious. I'm not part of the firearms self-defense statistics even though I've used a gun against robbery and/or assault by strangers on TWO separate occasions in two different states. Thwarted attempts don't get reported or counted, even though they happen every day.
"Yeah but statistically if you own a gun you're way more likely to be a victim of gun violence!"
LOL, I'll take that chance. Trigger discipline and not associating with unstable people goes a long way to avoiding gun violence, not that anyone is counting how often that works.
I've lived in Seattle almost 20 years. It is not my imagination or right-wing propaganda that the buses are dangerously unusable and that certain intersections and blocks which were once part of a thriving and safe downtown shopping district must now be detoured around. I lived in L.A. before Seattle and when I visit my old haunts it's even worse.
Some things can be directly observed.
"I would expect murder rates to be fairly accurate given there's objectively a murdered body to add to the count, but rape, assault and robbery? Pfft. That reporting is functionally useless."
Reporting of auto theft (including stealing things *from* parked cars) is fairly reliably reported, because even a smashed window is usually expensive enough to be worth filing an insurance claim. Which requires a police report even if everybody knows the police are going to ignore it.
So. homicide and auto theft. If those are increasing and everything else is "decreasing", yeah, you've got a crime problem and people have given up on your ever solving it.
You mean the spike of violent crime surrounding Black Lives Matter, right?
"2023 had the fewest homicides since 1966"
Did you look at the graph? This is clearly not true, unless I've missed something critical...
The article claims that the year-to-year -drop- in homicides is nearing the max since the 60s.
Thats a very different thing.
We're not even back at the pre-Floyd levels yet.
"The nationwide drop also follows the roughly 30% increase in murders in 2020. That means that despite this year's drop, homicides remain slightly elevated compared to 2019."
Yeah, violent crime continues to drop. I think some of this is technological (harder to get away with that now), some of it due to robbery being lower return.
Petty property crime is a problem in places but pretty fixable if we want to make an effort.
If by "pretty fixable" you mean "you are free to move to another state or country with actual governance," I agree with you, but if you didn't intend that interpretation, what do you think the easy fix is that no big blue city can seemingly wrap their minds / budgets around?
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.
Good point, though it seems pretty hard to disentangle dispreference for minorities to dispreference for minority names. Eg Muhammad or Hassan are unusual names in the USA - but for Muslim/Arabic people they are extremely common, it's just that this population are a small minority in the USA. Maybe hirers can implicitly presume 'unusual' names to more likely be ethnic minorities.
Your particular example/impression seems wrong - Deshawn (and the alternative spelling Deshaun) isn't all that unusual, it even has its own wikipedia page of famous Deshawns. Looking at 1993 (my own birth year) babies born in the USA, Deshawn is #438th, on a par with Sheldon, Jarrod, Alfred, Ralph, Bernard, Noel and Barry for boys. You'd want to control with these names instead - though frankly I find it hard to imagine employers discriminating against those names.
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/popularnames.cgi
It seems relatively easy to disentangle "Dispreference for specific minorities" from "dispreference for unusual names." Have some control group names. For example: Ezekiel, Eeert, etc. And yes, I'd like to add your suggestions as well, like Sheldon, Jarrod, Noel, etc.
There's the added dimension that some of these names have a higher incidence in the population or higher recognition but are 'older' names. Sylvia, for example. Ralph has pretty good name recognition due to being popular at the start of the 20th century, and I'm guessing some of that carries over. And if it does, would the age of the recruiter matter? Or would older names continue to be seen as 'usual' even long after their decline in the population?
Also, it seems worth disentangling race from culture, to the extent possible. How would a culturally assimilationist minority do compared to a non-assimilationist member of the same group? Would a person with a stereotypical Western name be more likely to have other stereotypical traits like unaccented speech? I say this as someone with an auditory processing disorder and who will experience fatigue from trying to decode heavily accented speech for long periods of time. Preference for unaccented speech is not mere bigotry.
I suspect that there are basically three typical approaches to this topic. You may have one group looking to buttress the assertion "minorities have a harder time because of racism" or some similar hypothesis. You have another group looking to buttress the notion that having an unusual name is a signal of problematic cultural fit in some way, and that it justifies discrimination. And perhaps there's a third prong that wants to put the whole topic under a microscope and figure out precisely what kind of effect is at play and who is influenced by it and how. I tend to fall into the third group.
you may have another group looking to parse very finely just what the cause of the
I don't understand how control group names help. I'm saying what if people can take into account that unusual, 'weird' names are statistically correlated with minority racial groups in general. Imagine an employer consciously or unconsciously thinking:
"Eeert, never head of it, but that sounds like some weird newfangled black name. I'll interview Steve instead."
This employer would be discriminating against black people using the signal of 'unusual name', independent of the unusual name actually being a typically black name.
It should, at least, be possible to have obviously Asian names as well. Li Wang, Hiroshi Ishikawa, etc. to test whether animus to Black names, specifically, is the issue.
There could also be some obviously minority foreign names with obviously assimilated given names. How does "Robert Ishikawa" perform compared to "Sato Ishikawa?"
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.
What non-DS areas of experience does he have? There are relatively few "pure" DS roles out there, so leaning into any domain knowledge/expertise he has (or getting some if he has none) could make the difference.
Prior to getting his masters he had a dead end job helping customers who had problems with whatever software his company made. I do not think he has substantial domain knowledge about the fields that companies hiring DS are usually end. He is extremely smart and conscientious, got straight A’s in his masters program, and could give himself a crash course in, for ex, the finance industry if he was going to apply there. What he is most interested in personally is AI, but I suppose that’s used in all industries. He’d also be happy to take an AI course like Jeremy Howard’s “Fast AI” if that would help his hireabity. Anyhow, all advice welcomed.
It may be banal by now (what with there being DS graduate programs), but I found Cassie Kozyrkov's "What on earth is data science?" (https://medium.com/@kozyrkov/what-on-earth-is-data-science-eb1237d8cb37) a good primer on three major flavors of DS work: analytics, inference, & ML/AI.
Most data science work isn't building ML models (and very few of those could be called "AI" with a straight face by anyone who isn't in marketing); there's more opportunity to apply/fine-tune existing models for particular applications.
A well-trod path is to start off in a more analytics-focused role, and build from there. N.B., job titles are very *not* standardized, and a lot of analytics openings are listed as "Data Scientist" ("Applied Scientist" is, for now, more consistently reserved for roles closer to ML).
Thank you! I will pass this info on to him. I have another question for you. (By the way, I do not work in tech -- I'm a psychologist -- so this may be a naive question.). I heard a podcast with Jeremy Howard recently. I believe he was the first person to try machine learning on language -- fed wikipedia to the computer, got something that worked surprisingly well at distinguishing between positive and negative movie reviews. He now teaches courses in something he calls Fast AI. They seem to be well thought of. What he's into, as I understand it, is sort of lean and mean ways of carrying out machine learning, some of them so lean you can do it on a home computer. It involves using lots of techniques, some that he's developed, for maximizing training effectiveness. I know that techniques of this kind are widely used so I don't know what's unique about what he's teaching, but apparently something is.
Here's a story that impressed me: A few years ago there was a contest for who could most quickly carry out ML that taught a system to do something-or-other. Howard and a group of his students entered and won, and one of the other competitors was Google.
Anyhow, his courses are online, and I was wondering if it would be useful for my friend to take a couple of them. The point of doing it would be to have a kind of cool, kind of unusual area of expertise. But, not being in the field, I have no idea whether knowing some fast AI stuff would be advantageous. Howard on the podcast came across as very smart and very likable, & maybe I'm mostly being influenced by that.
If you think the Howard Fast AI stuff would be useless, do you think there's anything like that -- something a person can learn in 6 weeks or so in their spare time -- that would give my friend an edge over other applicants?
I'm not familiar with Howard but, while that sounds like a cool contest, I doubt it would affect a hiring manager's decision-making process. Anecdotally, the much more widely known Kaggle contests used to be a significant feather in the cap of competitors who did well, but it's drifted away from straightforward ML problems to something that's reminiscent of Super Mario speedruns. Neither would be relevant for day-to-day DS work (especially entry level).
As far as something else to give an edge with some self-study, my advice should be taken with a very large grain of salt (I transitioned into the field from aerospace, not at an entry level, and at a time when nobody had DS degrees).
The places where I see candidates struggle (I only do initial phone screens, so they've already gotten past the application process & recruiter, and I don't know where the ones who get a full loop but not an offer fall short) is in being able to solve a DS coding problem in a short time. Many practice coding problems out there are targeted toward general software developers, so wouldn't really exercise the right things; SQL challenges seem likeliest to be applicable.
Thanks for taking the time to answer. I understand. You are the third person to emphasize the importance of SQL expertise, so it's gotta be true. Seems like an excellent use of my friend's spare time is to do lots of SQL problems and projects, & never mind adding frills like Jeremy Howard's class.
I have found outerjoin.us to be helpful.
Does he have experience as a BID or some other SQL monkey role? We've had issues with Data Science grads, either from school or bootcamp, where they can run a few ML algorithms and make a few shiny graphs but they can't write lots of high-quality SQL quickly...which means they're dependent on other people for data munging and processing, which means they're kinda useless. I'm becoming a big believer that every data scientist should spend 2-3 in the SQL trenches writing lots of code for dashboards before we let them do the "cooler" stuff.
Also, does he have a resume or linkedin he'd be willing to share?
I called to ask hi about a resume or linkedin and learned that he's down with covid. Will probably be a few days before he's up and around. Meanwhile, I wanted to ask you what would be the most useful info for you. I don't know if his resume is polished and ready to go, but does that matter? His previous job did not involve any of the skills he needs in data science. I was thinking that what might be useful to you would be a list of courses he's taken, and projects he's done, plus maybe a paragraph about how much he has learned about SQL and what projects he's used it in. How does that sound?
Mmmm, what would I want?
I would want a guy who could knock out two 6 kyu challenges from here in an hour (https://www.codewars.com/kata/search/sql?q=&r%5B%5D=-6&beta=false&order_by=popularity%20desc). They don't have to be perfect, I find the guys who code the challenges are way too invested in catching weird edge cases, but he has to basically get the answer. Most places, or at least most places you want to work, will give you some kind of coding challenge. If you're willing to spend $160, leetcode also has ~150 interview SQL questions, those are better.
If he can pass those coding challenges, there's probably a role somewhere. There's a shocking demand for more dashboards in every organization I've been in and as long as you can read and write SQL competently, we're probably hiring. Honestly, write one resume for data analyst roles and one for data scientist roles. Might hurt the ego a bit to be an analyst but the pay is good, usually not a huge gap for good analysts, and it gets you in the door.
Having said that...man, having been job hunting and now looking down the line at building a team...opinions differ a lot on what matters. I've lost jobs because I didn't know the difference between OLAP and OLTP and, ya know, good company, that guys knows his stuff but...man, I could not care less, nobody we're serving cares so if it's not causing problems, why would I care? At the same time, ya know, lots of guys don't like you to wear a suit or blazer to an interview but I do. Doctors and lawyers and finance guys, execs, they all dress a certain way and judge you off that and if you want to have an impact, ya gotta talk to the business. Other guys might really like projects but, me, meh, dealing with funky data is 50% of the job and project data is never funky. One guy's core critical skill is another guy's irrelevant trivia.
Only other thing I can offer are references for two consultants I've used:
Andrew Smith does interview coaching (https://www.smithinterviewcoaching.com/)
Kate Williamson does resume writing and polishing (https://scientechresumes.com/)
Total cost probably $1000. They're solid professionals but not miracle workers, think less they'll get you a job and more they'll shave 3-5 weeks off your job hunt, which should be worth $5k-$12k in wages.
Oh, and if he's got a friend in a company, have them send him posting using their automated referral system. The referrer will get about $3k and your friend will get to skip the first 2-3 rounds of interviews.
Hope that helps!
Thank you, that's all very helpful and I will pass every bit of it on to my friend. I sent him your comments about data science hires with inadequate skills, especially in SQL, and here's what he said: "For SQL, I can do everything from complex select queries to building complete database applications. I’m beyond what a SQL monkey (aka idiot) job will do for me and I wouldn’t need other people to write queries for me. "
It's evident from his tone that he's a bit cranky, LOL, but please bear in mind that he has covid and a fever.
Thanks for outerjoin.us -- looked at it and looks quite promising. He is definitely not one of those data science grads who can just run algorithms and make pretty graphs. In fact I've heard him talk with bewilderment and disgust about some people in the program who never really learned to do coding, but found workarounds to avoid it, like having other people do it for them. This guy worked his ass off in that masters program and got straight A's. I'm sure he doesn't have work experience in the things you name -- SQL-related jobs -- because he had not worked in the field prior to getting this masters degree. He had a dead end job as one of the people who take calls from customers who are having problems with the company's software. Then he finally woke up and decided to get a job that used his brains and paid decently. He may have some kind of resume that covers not his past jobs, but his courses and projects. I will ask him.
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
I enjoyed this - thanks!
I would say it would work better if you didn't have the links to the Constitution and Trump stuff in there; as a description of a general principle against buck-passing it works well, but there are too many divergences between the parable and reality to make the thing fit properly (surely killing the seven guardsmen counts as a victory for Nog and thus resolves the question in the prince's favor).
The parable leaves out proper interactions between the priests and the presi- er, king. It's roughly assumed the priests have all the power and the king is subservient to the stone and their interpretations. But reality has tools to rewrite the stone, outside the hands of the priests, and even if nobody knows how to use them anymore that's a big deal.
Otherwise, the first paragraph reads too flowery, and the one about the throne took me back to the Wheel of Time series and skipping over three paragraphs of descriptions of the curtains.
But it's fun.
Alright, I read the whole thing.
Presuming this is intended for a Democratic audience, I can't imagine any Republican finding this remotely convincing, I actually quite like the bit once the priests have stepped down and the prince is walking to the throne but...like 70% of the leadup to that is being too cute, it really should be edited down.
EDIT:
Also, it took awhile to click but, like, this conception of the law, of like, divine commandments handed down is, like, really weird to me. Do you really conceptualize them like that? That judges alone or judges and lawyers alone interpret them?
I liked it. I think a Republican would find it convincing, coming from the angle of "the Supreme Court should just say Trump can run so we can stop talking about it." This seems to be one of those scissor statements that both sides just find so obvious they can't believe anyone would disagree with them. Most of the Republicans I know find the argument for Trump's "insurrection" to be a clear political ploy, at least until he's actually convicted of some sort of treason or other serious crime, and would prefer as much as anyone that his eligibility be settled now in early 2024 rather than pop up all year and leave us still wondering in December, after he narrowly defeats Biden, whether he was even eligible after all. The argument clearly seems to be "we need a decision," not "he shouldn't be eligible." Of course 50% of the country is going to disagree with that decision almost immediately, but the point of the story is that at least then we have a decision and can move forward rather than engaging in countless hypotheticals.
The issue is that a lot of people have the position that he is eligible now, but a conviction in the January 6 trial may affect his eligibility. A Supreme Court decision doesn't close the book on this.
in a sense i'm glad the Maine secretary of state did what she did because it made for a clear example of something I'd been arguing hypothetically for weeks to people that were outraged "unelected judges" had weighed in on this question. The alternative is probably *elected* secretaries of state, which seems WORSE to me, not better.
The sensible alternative is, federal judges following a conviction for a crime that meets the common-law definition of "insurrection".
FWIW I'm genuinely a bit on the fence on this, but mostly consider this to be a good argument for "all laws need to have a 20 year expiration date". If Trump genuinely did break a law invented in the aftermath of the civil war there's an argument that it should be enforced in the name of rule of law, but also it's kinda bad in the first place to have a law that hasn't been enforced since the civil war (and would predictably be incredibly high-profile and controversial if it ever did come up) on the books at all.
the interesting thing is that it may not really require trump "break a law", the prohibition is constitutional, not statutory. Tomorrow, congress could repeal the federal insurrection statute, or change it so it requires proof that more than 1,000,000 people participated to count...or change it so that it covers driving recklessly on the interstate. The statutory definition of insurrection as it exists now is probably irrelevant to the question of what the drafters of amendment 14 section 3 meant, and I think amendment 14 section 3 would be operative even if the insurrection statute were repealed.
Quite the opposite. As the end of the story says, nobody knows whether eg the engineers would have done a better job than the priests. I am a legal skeptic/legal realist. I believe there either is no objective answer to what "cruel and unusual punishment" is or it's so hard to figure out objectively it might as well be unknowable. In this environment, you opinion on a given legal proposition is, objectively speaking, maybe as good as a judges...judges are just the poor saps we designate as final decision-makers so we don't have endless arguments about what "probable cause" or "theft" or "due process" mean.
But the moral of the story is that if you have a rule or a law and judges *don't* interpret it, you're just passing the question on to a random person farther on in the process. This has already happened in Trump's case with the Maine secretary of state.
The priests of Nog in this story could have made a ruling that "no one in the land of Gishood may take a position on the ninety sixth commandment one way or another" but that would be the very opposite of them "staying out of it", in fact it would probably be equivalent to a ruling that the current prince was eligible
Yeah, that's what was throwing me; this line simply isn't true: "judges are just the poor saps we designate as final decision-makers." They're not the final decision-makers, just factually, and the next statement "But the moral of the story is that if you have a rule or a law and judges *don't* interpret it, you're just passing the question on to a random person farther on in the process." betrays a...misunderstanding of how government functions.
The executive and legislative branch are not dependent on the judiciary for legal interpretation and they're not helpless randos who need guidance on this. At a simple, practical level, every single state agency I've ever seen has a fully staffed "ledge" shop that does nothing but analyze new laws and provide analysis and recommendations. Senior executives are in constant conversation with the governor and legislators on what the laws are and what they should be. If a judge makes a decision based on law and that doesn't work for the execs, especially governor appointed ones, there's a decent chance that law will be changed or an understanding will be reached because, well, these guys write and change laws all the time.
For an example, go over to California's Franchise Tax Board and read their ledge shop's stuff (https://www.ftb.ca.gov/tax-pros/law/legislation/assembly-bill-analyses.html). These aren't guys who consider laws to be sacred, inscrutable tablets; these are guys who are in the minutiae of the law all the time. For example, for AB 514 (https://www.ftb.ca.gov/tax-pros/law/legislation/2023-2024/AB514-020723.pdf) under "Implementation Considerations":
"This bill requires the FTB to prepare a report on the number of taxpayers allowed a
credit by May 1, 2026, and annually thereafter. If the author’s intent is to be able to
review a report that contains complete information for the 2025 taxable year, it is
recommended that the reporting due date be extended to May of 2027. If the due
date of the report remains unchanged, the report will include the information
available as of the date when the report is prepared."
Translation: who knows when all the tax returns will get in and we're not paying overtime to find out. Give us an extra year or you're gonna get what we got, not what you want.
In criminal law it may be very top down but when you get into laws that directly affect agencies and the legislature and groups like that, law is much more of a ...collaborative enterprise. And I phrase it this way in that, if you get into this kind of game, you don't want to be ignorantly stepping on toes because you think you've got a trump card that...really won't pan out.
'Cuz, just being straight up, speaking for my former side of the shop...sometimes the State Controller talks with the old grognard engineers and decides that it's easier to change the laws than 30 year-old mission critical code. And in those situations, where thankfully I have not had to be in the room, I know everybody is on the same side and we want to reach a conclusion that works for everyone and it's no good to be accidentally offending people.
Because, in the land of Gishood, I guarantee you the engineers know the laws of Nog, they've already got a bunch of ol' grognards who decide...which laws matter more than others, and they're more than willing to accept feedback from the priests, they certainly wouldn't consider themselves subservient or helpless without priestly guidance. And engineers aren't even the biggest power players in government, not even top 5. I dunno enough "illuminati" stuff to guess what's all going on with these courts but if the other big players are staying silent, there's a reason.
I don't really want to be in the business of explaining my fable.
I understand how state agency law works.
The term "cruel and unusual punishment" makes more sense as a legal term of art referring to novel punishments.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1015344
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.
It seems to be fairly well established that people who are closer to the start of a ballot paper get an advantage in elections, and ballot papers are often ordered alphabetically. In local council elections in the UK there can be more than one person standing for a given party, as there are multiple seats. I have heard anecdotally that it is common for e.g. the incumbent from Party A to make sure that any other Party A candidate has a name that comes after theirs.
A Aaronson for president (even though I hear he's a bit of a gossip).
That's bizarre that they'd list candidates in alphabetical order. In Australia the order of names on the ballot paper is drawn at random for this reason.
The "donkey vote", in which preferences are simply numbered from top to bottom by lazy people, is around 1-2% of all votes in our elections, so being above or below your main opponent is often significant enough to flip the election.
I'd imagine that it's worse than 1-2% in some cases.
In Scottish Council elections Single Transferrable Vote is used to elect multiple candidates in an area. Suppose a voter prefers Party A, then Party B, then nobody. There will be some amount of voters who put a "1" beside the first Party A candidate and a "2" beside the first Party B candidate. They may not check if Party A has another candidate standing. Or they may think "I've given my vote to Party A already."
I've not given it much thought before, but of course the name orders should be randomised.
As a person who would benefit from this, I am naturally disinclined to favor this theory.
You know, I started a union job on the same day with a pal surnamed Aho. Bidding on jobs was based on seniority. Tie breaker for people hired on the same day was alphabetical order by surname.
There was at least one time when he could have avoided a crummy job by pulling alphabetical rank sending me down into Sauntry mine on rotating shifts mid Minnesota winter in his place, but friendship trumped the alphabet and he didn’t wield the tiebreaker. I’m still grateful for that bit of loyalty.
Yeah, that's a nice bit of friendship, there.
... You worked in a literal iron mine?
Yeah, for a bit over a decade out of high school. Mesabi Range. I started as a 32 year old freshman at the University of Mn when the unemployment rate in my home county hit 50%. My wife was also working in Minnesota Ore Operation for US Steel when I met her. She was working as a millwright apprentice and I was maintaining and building RR track.
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
This is really funny!
Yes, that's pretty hilarious, but I can't help but feel that it expresses a profound sense of melancholy.
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/
At least some Buddhist authors (e.g, Dr Nida Chenagtsang) say that it's easy to be mistaken about being enlightenment.
A) so, sure, you think you've just become enlightened. But you might, instead, be insane. Some dare needed to distinguish the two cases
B) so, sure, that guys says he's enlightened. But he might be insane, or a scammer. We have a notion of how enlightened people are expected to behave, which lets you weed out the obvious crooks. (In Christianity, in the Serrmon on the Mount, Jesus also says you can weed out the crooks this way.)
If you read Scott's blog post I link to (in the post), his point is that *almost* every Buddhist Guru in the west had a sex scandal. He says:
"These teachers were among the most accomplished of our time. Many were officially certified as enlightened by the relevant governing bodies (of course there are governing bodies that certify enlightenment, we’re not barbarians). Doubt Culudasa if you want, but it would be hard to say none of these people had achieved enlightenment – at least if you want to maintain any reason to believe in enlightenment as an achievable state at all."
Yes, I think people are finally starting to have some awareness of the complexity of the whole thing that is traditionally called enlightenment or awakening, and its uneasy relationship with emotional maturity, love, truly putting yourself in the shoes of others, and so on. The traditional figure of the guru comes from long-standing spiritual communities where it was (at least implicitly) understood that the guru took on the difficult job of accepting the God-projections of enthusiastic students as a way of helping them on the path, and the guru himself would have peers to help him (it was usually a "him", but not always) on this job when his own unresolved issues occasionally popped up.
When this was exported to the West in haste, much of these safeguards were not built or failed to work, with the results we know. Still I'd hazard a guess that it's not *almost every guru* who fails, just a substantial percent of them. The rest is probably informational bias - you just don't hear about the guy quietly doing a decent job of guiding a few dozens or hundreds of people in their corner of the world.
Then there is the fact that fame does not just come, it usually takes lots of active work to seek it. So the gurus everyone has heard about are often the ones who worked hard to make themselves known. Doing that is not necessarily a sign of narcissism or egotism; some of them might surely be doing that out of a genuine sense of serving the world and sharing the teachings and techniques that have served them well. But it's easy to fool oneself in this kind of situation.
Very good point that not all gurus have failed, but most of the "famous" ones have
I am reminded of Adyashantis guru, a quiet woman, mother of 5 children, who spent her life quietly teaching, remaining unknown to her death. And yet she was a master who changed many lives...
I'm not plugged into the US scene, being in Europe and all, but Adyashanti himself seems to be quite famous and so far no scandals have popped up as far as I know. Score one for not all gurus failing publicly, even famous ones!
Yeah, Adyashanti is also a great example. But then, he keeps a low profile. He doesn't have a big ashram in some sexy place, he doesnt appear on TV, he only has a few interviews.
adyashanti also doesnt claim to be enlightened or super consicous. In one of his interviews, he said "The only thing I can answer for sure is, am I awake in this moment? I dont know what will happen tomorrow."
I think in that interview he showed humility, and the acceptance that he wasnt perfect, and had to be aware each minute. None of the "Now I am enlighetened I can have sex with college girls" nonsense I have heard so much, including in this thread.
I'm reasonably sure that while the sexual scandals are more fun to talk about, financial scandals and overworking followers are at least as common.
Indeed. And I would guess financial scandals would be as common, though not as scandalous so they don’t get much attention.
Regards overworking: it’s considered almost normal ? I once dropped out of yoga training (in uk but by a famous group) because they wanted us to do housework as well. And we were paying good money for this training , I was like I’m not paying you that much and then also washing your dishes.
But it seemed I was the only one who complained
_Cutting through Spiritual Materialism_ by Chongyam Trungpa
https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Through-Spiritual-Materialism-Chogyam/dp/1570629579
Says that a person can have an enlightenment experience, but can spoil it by thinking about it too much or talking about it too much or (I think) by trying to recapture it. I haven't read the whole book, so there's probably more there.
I think "spiritual greed" would be a clearer title.
It's worth noting that Trungpa was known to have importuned some of his female students for sex. I don't think he forced himself on any of them — but these days sexual passes by people who are in the hierarchy above you would not be tolerated. Then his successor, Ösel Tendzin contracted HIV — but he knowingly continued to have unsafe sex with his students without informing them. Some later died of AIDS. Worse yet, Vajradhatu's board of directors knew that Tendzin was HIV-positive and sexually active but kept silent. Hopefully, Vajradhatu is faring better under the leadership of Trugpa's son, Sakyong Rinpoche. I had some Vajradhatu-trained teachers along the way. They were very good.
Well that didn't turn out so well either. Sakyong had his own scandal in 2018 after sexually abusing students for decades. According to his wikipedia page, "In July 2018, after more than two decades at the helm Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche agreed to temporarily step back from his administrative and teaching duties to allow space for an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct. He resumed teaching in late 2019. He legally separated from the Shambhala organization in February 2022 after an impasse in which the Shambhala Board of Directors, and the Sakyong Potrang - the organization representing the Sakyong - could not agree on a way forward together. He now resides in Nepal and gives teachings to his international sangha most weekends online."
And yet, yes, I've also met some Vajradhatu trained people and they were very good at teaching meditation.
I have tried to read that book a few times but never managed to finish it.
And if you look at the authors history and sex scandals , it seems he knew a thing or two about spiritual materialism
Enlightenment doesn't mean getting rid of desires, only realizing their ultimate emptiness. So an enlightened guru can still fuck his students, as long as he is aware that the pleasure is temporary and tomorrow he will be horny again.
"Enlightenment doesn't mean getting rid of desires, only realizing their ultimate emptiness. So an enlightened guru can still fuck his students, as long as he is aware that the pleasure is temporary and tomorrow he will be horny again."
Not meaning this as a criticism of you, but I've found that when you strip away the foreign languages, the obscurantist terminology, the hymns and chanting, sacred scrolls, etc., the insights of religion are often blindly obvious statements like this one.
The steelman against this would be something like
> "I have found that when you strip away a movie's special effects, actors' makeup, sound effects and soundtrack, etc..., a movie is just a bad novel spoken out loud"
The point, of course, being that a movie is **exactly** those things that you will strip away, so your assertion boils down to "If I strip all the interesting things about something it's no longer interesting".
(The crucial difference between a movie and a religion is that a movie is self-aware, nobody is vehemently, loudly and sometimes violently asserting that Star Wars is fun because it contains secret eternal truths from time immemorial, no it's just a very old story retold by some very talented actors over a soundtrack composed by an inhumanly talented musician. But some religions and spiritualities are explicitly self-aware and fully at peace with the idea that its truths are very self-evident and that all of its paraphernalia are just didactic tools because humans are dumb and keep forgetting the obvious.)
Mmmmm. Without getting into the question there might be different types of enlightenment, the doctrine of right conduct would seem to preclude a teacher from having sexual relations with his or her students.
If they're a monk, the vinaya (monastic rules) clearly prohibit them having sex. There's an interview with the Dalai Lama somewhere where he confirms there isn't a loophole in the vinaya that would allow monks to do tantric sex.
But ngakpas (and the devout laity) don't take vows of celibacy. But they are still bound by the rule against sexual misconduct.
Problem: it's not entirely agreed on what, exactly, is the boundary of sexual misconduct.
A thousand years ago, people had sex with their guru and people didn't think it a problem.
Now, we are influenced by present day US sexual ethics, which really disapproves of teachers having sex with students.
The branch of Buddhist I know the current answer for, Yuthok Nyinthig, would go along with disaproving teacher student sex. Probably true for pretty much all mainstream branches of vajrayana.
I am trying to think about "enlightenment" and "doctrine" as two separate things. I think it actually makes more sense that way -- if enlightenment is an *actual thing*, like some actual change about how your brain works (rather than just a metaphor for "this person follows the rules and is high-status"), then being enlightened is a thing separate from the doctrine (although following the doctrine may be an efficient way how to achieve the enlightenment).
From this perspective, once you achieve enlightenment, you can ignore the doctrine. You can probably even achieve enlightenment while ignoring (parts of) the doctrine.
Which means that being enlightened and acting against the doctrine would be nothing unusual.
As an analogy, you can probably achieve inner peace by praying to Jesus for a sufficiently long time. But you can also achieve inner peace without praying to Jesus. Or you can achieve inner peace by praying to Jesus, and then stop believing in Jesus, and keep the inner peace. -- Analogically, you can keep the change of brain that is called enlightenment, while breaking some traditional Buddhist rules.
At least in the Mahayana tradition, the whole point of the Bodhisattva vow is that one takes it to attain Buddhahood *FOR THE SAKE OF ALL SENTIENT BEINGS*. In particular, Bodhisattvas promise to practice the six perfections of *moral discipline*, giving, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom to fulfill their bodhicitta aim of attaining Buddhahood — for the sake of all sentient beings. The vow *implies* that you won't become enlightened without proper conduct toward others. From a purely practical standpoint, to gain merit, Bodhisattvas must help others. Hurting others (even sexual coercion) would load the beginning Boddhisattva with karma — and in their next life, they'd be further away from enlightenment. I think different lineages may word the vow differently, but this is an excerpt from the vow that I took...
"May I in some future time become a Tathagata, an Arhant, a perfect Buddha, proficient in knowledge and *conduct* .... Having crossed over, may I lead others across; comforted, may I comfort others; emancipated, may I emancipate others. May I become so for the benefit and welfare of mankind, out of compassion for the world, for the good of the multitude, for the welfare and benefit of devas and humans." Anyway, my understanding is that I won't reach my enlightenment by being a jerk, and that once I'm enlightened I'll be spreading compassion among all sentient beings. So sexual misconduct is a no-no for both a Bodhisattva and a Buddha.
However, karuna (compassion) does not necessarily mean one must be nice to everyone. If you can help them along the path with tough love, that still qualifies as compassion. But you have to know what you're doing. A Boddhisattva further along the path of the Bhumis is supposed to have the wisdom and to see how their current actions resonate down through the future. A sufficiently advanced Bodhisattva could see that — down the road — the results of his wagging his dick in a woman's face will help her along the path to enlightenment. I'm sure both Trungpa and Tendzin believed they were far along the path of Bodhisattvahood, but I'm not sure used this excuse for their sexual (mis)conduct.
I'm less sure about the conduct of Bodhisattvas in the Zen Tradition. The Zen branches of Mahayana Buddhism split from the Tibetan branches of Buddhism over a dispute about the meaning of enlightenment. I'm not Zen, but my understanding is that they see enlightenment as something that can be achieved in one's current lifestream. They take a different vow. I've seen it written this way...
"Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to study them.
The buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to attain it."
Nothing about being nice to people and not trying to have sex with the unwilling.
But can a bodhisattva fuck his students? I'm not joking around here, actually wondering what people think.
That's the kind of question that quickly gets into complicated cases. By "can", do you mean whether its ethical, or whether the desire would even arise? By bodhisattva, do you mean who has formally taken the bodhisattva vow, or someone who has actually attained some high state on the Mahayana path, such as the kind of awakening that it technically called "path of seeing"?
In practice, the answer seems to be "yes". The bodhisattva vow does not require monkhood, and sex is not inherently bad in Buddhism. The situations where it would be ethical and balanced might be rare, but I don't see any overriding reason why they would be nonexistent.
I mean someone who has taken the vow. Yes, I think there probably are occasional situations where it would not harm the student, and in fact would be good for them. Dan Savage's rule of thumb is that actual minors are off limits, but that when it comes to people who are a lot younger or less powerful than you, you can only have a sexual relationship with them if you believe the relationship will leave them in better shape than the were before they had it.
He needs to make sure his partners come first.
Good one! I'm sitting here grinning and giggling.
Traditionally, in vajrayana, there could be sex between teacher and student.
In present day, in the branches of vajrayana I know about: this is seriously frowned upon.
I guess the position could be summarised as, potentially ok if the teacher is actually enlightened, but conditional probability of he s enlightened given that he's just asked to have sex with you ... is not good.
Though I know Asanga mentioned tantric sex in one of the Sutras, I was told by a Western Geshe that the tantric sex wasn't supposed to be actual physical coitus, but it was visualizations of having sex with your Yidam (meditation deity, for those who aren't in the know about Buddhist terminology). Other than the sutras, I can't say I know anything about Vajrayana practices. I never took any initiations. Likewise, I know nothing about the tantric sexual practices of the Vedanta.
Like, about a thousand years ago Machig Labdron, had sex with her guru, and it "acceptable at the time",
Drukpa Kunley, another historic figure, had a lot of sex.
That has always been one of those questions that has caused controversy in Buddhist circles. One famous Rinpoche married his student. He was from a lineage that allowed marriage, but it caused some consternation among his US students.
Oh, are you talking about Ryoshin? I actually know quite a lot about what happened there, and in fact met Ryoshin.
Actually, I was talking about another Tibetan Rinponche. But it was a while back, and I don't remember all the details. So I thought I'd best not name them.
This seems pretty straightforward to me in that one of the precepts of the eightfold path that Buddhism is centered around is “right conduct” which explicit includes no sexual misconduct, which is what it’s likely to be between a high up teacher with power and a student of theirs.
I’d put this in the category of a sexual relationship between a boss and subordinate, a professor and their grad student, a minister and their parishoner.
Depends on the type of Buddhism. Theravada have a lot of common-sense rules that prohibit stuff like this, but they're no fun. Various Mahayana sects have discarded these rules, and accumulated piles of skulls of various sizes. I don't even pretend to know what the Vajrayana get up to, but some of them use tantric sex, so...
(Also, probably one wouldn't refer to one's teacher as a bodhisattva. At least not in any sect in familiar with.)
And of course, this is just Buddhism. The Hindu traditions have lots and lots of their own ideas about enlightenment and sex.
I know teachers are not referred to as bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas have taken a vow to put all other sentient beings first and keep back nothing -- part of the vow is to even refrain from attaining enlightenment until all others have achieved it. There probably are rinpoches who have not taken that vow. I was just wondering whether people thought having sex with students was compatible with the vow.
I know sometimes in the texts, everyone who's taken the vow is referred to that way, but it feels a bit presumptuous to do so in day-to-day life? It's the same reaction I get when living people are referred to as "saints", like with the Mormons.
I suppose it's theoretically compatible, but my first guess is always going to be "motivated reasoning". ;-)
I suppose for a lot of people taking the vow is just mouthing the words of another bit of Buddhist ritual. But my closest friend has been a practicing Buddhist his whole life, and at this point, getting sort of old, he is starting to glow from within. For the last few years he's taught a course in psychology at SingSing to murderers serving life sentences. Gives them Freud and other serious stuff to read. And believe me, what's going on does not have a nasty substructure of self-righteousness or wokeism. He fucking *loves* these men, and gets to know some of them really well. Some engage quite deeply with the texts, others use the class discussions as jumping off points to discuss their own aggression or shadow side or whatever. The prison only refers guys who are pretty smart and literate to the class. And they know it. One said to Mark, "do you realize, Mark, that we are the creme de la creme of murderers?" He refers to them as the adorable murderers and often gets tears in his eyes talking about things that happen in the classes.
There *might* be a gift of help with enlightenment during sex, but from accounts from disillusioned followers, that isn't the way to bet.
Just hearsay here — I've heard of a couple people who went out of their way to seek sex with awakened individuals, and reported that it was nothing out of the ordinary, or enlightening in any way.
But ... you wouldn't even expect to gain anything from it unless you had already put in the work of self discipline to be at the point to gain from it.
Once did a group meditation retreat with someone high on the hierarchy in the branch of US Buddhism I was involved with. Over the course of the meditations days each of us had a few meetings with him to talk about our practice. The ones I had with him were important to me. At the end we had a party and while a bunch of us were dancing he grabbed my hand and pulled it down to feel his erection. WTF? Let's count the ways this piece of behavior sux. (a) Dumb. He hasn't learned yet that an erect penis all by itself is not a supercharged aphrodisiac for most women -- in fact it puts us in touch with the ways sex is ugly and ridiculous. (b) Rude as hell. Inconsiderate. (c) Negates for me the value of my meetings with him, because I now think of them as conversations with somebody who is rude and dumb.
Ugh. ... This wouldn't be the place where they referred to the teacher as a bodhisattva?
Could be, yeah.
Real quick: There's some old Zen story about a monk who achieved enlightenment, went down to the town, began acting in unenlightened ways, noticed this, and went back to the monastery. The conclusion, more or less, was that going back to the monastery was the right thing for him. I kinda think "access to enough of the right people to start a sex scandal" is like the town. "Lead us not into temptation", and all that.
One thing to keep in mind is that the traditional values of 1950s American Christians are not the same as the traditional values of every other society. In many societies, such as the Biblical Israelites, "adultery" only applied to sex with a married woman.
Of course, it should be added that sex among traditional Israelites potentially *was* a form of marriage.
The TLDR is enough for me. Thank you for this post. I completely agree with what it says. By the way if that’s not obvious already.
There is a simpler and more cynical explanation, which is that some very large proportion of gurus and/or people who claim enlightenment are no such thing, and are merely good at presenting themselves that way.
I have an even simpler and even more cynical interpretation. There is no such thing as a guru, because there is no such thing as enlightenment, because all religions are nonsense. I am disappointed that the rationalist community, of all people, takes these empty nonsensical claims with any seriousness.
If you claim that the psychological experiences reported by other people are false because you've never personally experienced them, isn't that the same as claiming that leptons and quarks don't exist because you've never personally observed them?
Mystical experiences spurred humanity's first engagement with empiricism. Esotericism was an attempt to systematize and reproduce the experiences certain people were having. And because their experiences were so profound, others wanted to learn how to access these psychological states. So teachers tried to use the exercises that worked for them to induce the same states in their students. Of course, consciousness is a slippery thing. Some found it easy to achieve these profound states of consciousness. Some found it difficult. And for some, the exercises didn't work at all. But esoteric exercises are perfectly rational in their methods and their aims.
And contemporary rational materialists should acknowledge their debt to mysticism. It was Nicholas of Cusa, whose mystical vision he described as "the supreme gift of the Father of Lights,” that spurred Cusa to write "On Learned Ignorance" — one of the foundational texts in the history of science. In it, Cusa suggested a method of discovering truths about nature that was based on the concept that controlled experiments could reveal more about nature than philosophical reasoning could.
It's one thing to claim that Judaism/Christianity/Islam are nonsense, which they fully are, it's another thing entirely to claim that sufficiently dissimilar religion, like Buddhism, in a foreign language you don't understand, is nonsense.
Imagine that a typical popular science article from today got transmitted for some 2500+ years and got translated and retranslated into no less than 4 major languages and dozens of less major ones, oh and the vast majority of the billions of people who transmit and translate this article are simple people with zero interest in verifying or preserving the truth or the phrasing of the article and are using the article for moral guidance. That article would be corrupted so hard its author probably wouldn't recognize it if they stared at it for years, but I would strongly argue it's still a very different kind of thing than the Quran, where we **know** it was bullshit and corrupt since the very beginning.
Buddhism is - or could be - that article.
(Some things are obviously and summarily bullshit, a popular account of the Buddha's birth is that he stood up as soon as he exited his mother's womb, walked 7 steps, and declared out loud that this is the last time he would be reborn. This, with overwhelming probability, never happened. But again, that pop science article would also be corrupted and contorted into impossible tales after its journey, doesn't mean that there **is** some kernel of truth hiding in it somewhere, even if no human can extract it and be reasonably certain.)
Well, while I don't have any personal interest in pursuing it: I think that so far as the *experience* of 'enlightenment' is concerned, it is simpler to assume that all of these people alleging or describing a very similar experience after pursuing some long course of meditation are telling the truth. Of course it's conceivable that it's a kind of weird conspiracy where they're promoting a collective lie (or delusion), but it seems unlikely.
However, so far as the effects or benefits, yes. I haven't seen much to suggest that the experience in question results in better behavior, except to the extent that such people may have more emotional self-control. The history is littered with examples of gurus who behaved as badly as anyone else with ordinary vices and a similar position of authority might. Indeed it is possible that they would behave worse, if things like 'guilt' and 'remorse' are emotions that the 'enlightened one' can simply dismiss like chattering birds.
Indeed. And in the post I talk that there is a 2nd type of person - the spiritual predator. Whose only goal is to f*ck people over, literally and figuratively. I don’t have much experience with these so I avoid talking about them in the post.
In this post I only wanted to talk about honest people who “fell”, as it were
That is definitely so, but I think that for some traditions, what is also going on is that enlightenment is becoming no longer attached. You recognise that you are not that body. So sex, like food and sleep and other such matters, is a body thing.
The body does what it does, but you are no longer shackled to it, and you aren't affected by what it does. The body wants sex? Okay, that's normal, but you're not attached to sex and hung up on it anymore, so you can have sex the same way you can have a sandwich if you're hungry. It doesn't matter any more than that, and it's not 'cheating' or anything like that. Indeed, avoiding having sex because of arbitrary rules may be as much an attachment to the snare of worldly desires as having sex out of the habit before enlightenment that sex is a big deal and you want it and the pleasure and the intimacy.
Since sex doesn't matter anymore for the enlightened, then all the hoo-ha around rules and roles and so forth doesn't matter either.
Yes that's a tough one. Why would one who has truly detached from the body behave ethically at all? They body will just do whatever it will do, and the individual will just watch it happen impassively.
One possible answer is that detachment without love is a dangerous, one-sided path. Eastern traditions seem to recognize this; Buddhism will advise you to supplement vipassana with metta, and Hinduism to balance jñana with bhakti. One of the two sides can be the main ingredient, but if the other is not developing accordingly, you might be headed straight for a case of spiritual bypass and/or self-deception.
And in the presence of strong, genuine, open-hearted love, exploitative behavior just does not happen. Hopefully.
I think that every “fallen” guru has told himself and devotee with whom he wants to have sec this very thing.
I deliberately avoided this logic because I knew it would open a can of worms 😀
In the 1st draft of my post I had a whole section on Osho but I removed it because I knew people would ignore the rest of the post and hyper focus on him.
I don’t have the answer. Or at least a satisfactory one.
I agree with this, but the distinction is that both people have to see it the same way for it to work without becoming a scandal. If someone on the path of enlightenment, completely falls for their guru, which is not uncommon, and later in her path, really understands that he was taking advantage of his attractiveness and seeming spiritual superiority, then things get ugly. It’s not really clean so it can’t be that close to the truth can it? Sex is great, and should be free, as long as both people walk away from it clearly.
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
Which text processor?
Emacs
I can't comment on the footnotes, but in general I follow the approach you describe and I haven't found any major issues with it. The only thing I usually have to do is correctly format section headers, but that is a minor thing and may have an easy solution I haven't bothered to find.
Thank you!
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?
You may be interested in the book Why We Do What We Do. It builds up a theory (backed by experiment) that there's multiple distinct kinds of motivation (extrinsic vs intrinsic vs some others) that are mutually exclusive, and there's some tasks that are much more effectively performed by people who are intrinsically motivated. This has particularly obvious implications in creative domains and in education.
The most useful piece for me was their model for the ingredients necessary to sustain a state of intrinsic motivation:
- Competence: a feeling that the task at hand is within your reach
- Autonomy: some degree of control over the task or how you approach it
- Relatedness: connections to or collaboration with other people in a positive social group
From that angle, people learn badly when they lack one of the three ingredients above, or when the extrinsic motivations is overwhelming the intrinsic. I have no idea what the evo-psych reasoning for this is.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/683539
Organisms generally conserve energy unless they're convinced (via some evolved mechanism) that spending energy will produce a return on the investment. As a result some things are naturally very stimulating (e.g., the urge to seek out food when hungry is very strong in us) but others become so only if we can convince our brains the rewards will follow. Now, evolutionary it's relatively safe to react to obvious stimuli (they're so obvious because they're highly relevant, hence we evolved to recognize them as obvious) while engaging with something obscure like learning new concepts is far riskier: you might discover something splendid for your evolutionary fitness but you might also waste a lot of time gaining nothing at all. So perhaps, as with conventional risk-seeking vs risk-avoidance behaviors, some people's brains are naturally "riskier" in that they evolved to metabolically invest into a completely unknown start-up (which is how your brain must interpret a concept that's totally novel to it) while others are more conservative with their energy expenditure. Of course, this can also fluctuate within one person's lifetime based on environmental influences (such as whether the brain's risky investments tend to get rewarded).
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?
It's #34 here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2023
Thanks!
It should be in the most recent "links" post
The reason you can't find it is the December links post is gone. @Scott Alexander, what's going on?
Oh well at least I'm not crazy. I wonder what is going on?
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
If you don't have a googleable name, just make your own. Working under your real name is soooo 20th century.
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.
>and suitable for small children to wade in
I hate to say this, but check with a lawyer. Perhaps two decades ago, my late wife and I had an above ground swimming pool in our back yard (in Poughkeepsie, New York), and the requirement for it was to have to basically make it childproof, with a locking gate on the ladder to get into the pool (and possibly other safeguards that I don't recall now). I don't recall precisely how the liability was phrased in the absence of legally sufficient safeguards. It was potentially considered something like "attractive nuisance" or "attractive hazard".
I wasn't thinking of a swimming pool or anything, just kids wandering out into the stream to play with boats and look at minnows and splash around and stuff. Are you suggesting that by making it visually more attractive (by removing dead branches, dangling vines, thorn bushes, etc.), this would increase liability even if it also makes the stream safer? I suppose I'll have to check with a lawyer, yeah.
Many Thanks!
>this would increase liability even if it also makes the stream safer?
In American law, it wouldn't surprise me :-(
Also, just the
>I appear to be in charge of sections of two small rivers/creeks.
suggests the possibility of legal responsibility :-(
In a reasonable legal system, the mere fact of sort-of being associated with a creek shouldn't carry a legal hazard - but in the USA, it is prudent to check. :-(
A locking gate *on the ladder*? No one needs a ladder to get into a pool, but some people need one to get out.
Many Thanks!
>No one needs a ladder to get into a pool
The sides of the above ground pool may have been high enough that, for a small child, this may not have been true. My vague memory is that, even for adults, getting into it without the ladder would have been awkward to difficult. I can't recall whether we had to put some sort of fence around the rim of the pool. After decades, my visual memory of that part of the setup is too faded.
Oh, I missed the part about it being above ground.
Many Thanks! No problem.
Where, broadly, is this? I have some points-of-contact on stream restoration on either coast.
Middle of east coast, North America?
Build a dam! Make a little pool where kids can play. If anyone hassles you about it, tell them beavers did it
Ideally there'd be enough loose stones that the kids could make temporary dams of their own, when they show up. :-)
At the risk of sounding like a pearl clutcher - Make sure the kids (or anyone swimming) wear nose clips if there's any chance they will submerge entirely or get warm pond water up their noses. I've watched a few episodes of Monsters Inside Me, and a dose of brain-eating amoebae is not nice!
Yow!
I don't know much about the subject, but there is a regular stream (pun intended) of articles out there about the ecological damage that dams do, including small ones, in terms of not allowing river wildlife to move up and down, and not allowing sediment to be carried downstream. I think these days the tendency is to remove unused dams and barriers wherever possible, and there are *lots* of them blocking rivers and streams in more or less remote places.
Dams that are both permanent and fully impermeable, yes that's true -- they have significant negative impacts over time. Beaver dams on the other hand are both fun (people love watching busy beavers putter around a spot) and broadly a natural and positive part of North American stream ecosystems.
Pairs of beaver don't stay in the same place for their entire lives, they'll build a dam or lodge and raise a few annual litters there and then move on to new site. The dam they leave behind will gradually fall apart even if you don't just go ahead and remove it yourself. So if a pair of beaver does move in to one of your streams, leave them be and enjoy the show for a while. That could well happen as they have mounted a strong comeback across much of the US including in suburban and even fully-urban areas.
Huh. We've got groundhogs and rabbits and deer, but no beavers, yet.
I second the idea of encouraging beavers. If adults are supervising children for safety, a beaver pond should bring an assortment of other interesting life forms. Beaver have begun returning to the San Pedro River in Arizona, and just recently a few have followed irrigation canals into suburban Phoenix.
French fur trappers worked the Gila River for beaver in the early nineteenth century, followed by a few Americans. Trapping was pretty good, but assaults by Western Apache and Yavapai raiders made it difficult.
I would recommend not encouraging beavers. Beavers do not build their dams where you want them to be built, and they don't care about only flooding ground you want flooded. I grew up near a beaver pond, and they were constantly trying to expand their pond by flooding the road. They're relentless.
There aren't any beavers at the moment, and probably won't be, but flooding isn't a problem in these specific ares. There's plenty of flood plain with nothing important on it, which is good because we get regular floods every few years/decades.
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!
NOTE:
I asked for feedback on my urban planning bibliography, an understandably boring subject. I can understand why people would rather talk about vactrains. I'm happy to talk about my idea for a "Linetran", but only if you have read this section of the proposal titled DESIGNING THE LINETRAN.
If you try to argue with me, but you obviously have not read the proposal, I WILL BLOCK YOU.
Rodes.pub/LineTran
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oSzoLWTgx1udLmLTC1U1moCFzdIYB2tWP-i4f9W21ns/
It's interesting. There's no reason you should try to convince me, personally, that it's feasible, but if you wanted to, I'd say the next step would be to create a computer simulation of how the linetran would work, including as many of the details and limitations as possible. (Lane changes, acceleration times, missed stops due to deceleration, etc.) To avoid having to create the entire traffic control system, I suppose some parts could be simplified to "just work", as long as they were labelled. It could be tested with different types of load, like "rush hour" or "disaster" or "Taylor Swift concert".
https://www.anylogic.com/
Yeah, you are right. I need to make a simulation.
I thought again today about simulating the flow of passengers and pods. This problem is eminently suited to computer simulation. The individual elements are quite simple:
Riders
Stations
Destinations
Pods
Doors
Airlocks
Acceleration
Deceleration
Velocity
Cruising lane
A/D lane
Station lane
Bathroom usage
Passenger problems
Central computer
The catch is in the volume of events. I imagine 400,000 residents and 800,000 trips per day. The simulation should cover a full 24 hours.
My career was in software. I never programmed a simulation, but I suppose I could learn.
And adding one more thought: it might be a big hidden assumption how you generate demand for trips in your simulation. When you seed demand, you are in effect assuming the development pattern of the city (where do people tend to live, where do they tend to work, etc.). If you look at a bunch of trips at random times between random points in the network, you might get a very different result than if you assume a good deal of correlation. I think you can't assume you know what this would look like, so you would need to build a diverse set of demand inputs to ensure service coverage.
Well, you are quite right that how you build the city has a huge effect on the usage patterns in the linetran. The paper specifies "mixed use", which means your offices and your shops and your residences are all mixed together. If you don't do this, if you put your residences in one place and your office sector 5 mi away, like every other large city in America, the linetran will be overtaxed.
But I don't need a simulation to tell me this.
I was thinking about a simulation as well. One thing that would be particularly critical in a linear city that relied on this system would be its robustness, so you might look at what happens if one of the lines is temporarily down at various points in the system.
Quite true. Another responder asked me to address this idea. One thing became obvious: the two lines (e.g. north and south) must be capable of operating in either direction. If one line were crippled, the other line could operate for 30 minutes in one direction and then switch to the other direction. Of course this would be a huge drag, but better than nothing.
Another possibility is a fleet of buses that are held in reserve. There is a highway that parallels the city for the entire distance. The buses could operate on this highway.
Add Groups
(riders who want to be seated together)
Add Infants
(need to be strapped into a chair by an attendant. This can be done while waiting for the pod to arrive, but the attendant must lift the child strapped in the chair, enter the pod, strap the chair and child to a seat, and exit the pod.)
Add Convoys
It would make more sense to have "circletrains" which woosh round a (say) ten mile diameter circular track, with stations at regular intervals which are on sidings off the main track and into which the trains can be diverted and slowed into and speeded out of.
I don't see much point in making the main track a vacuum, or even a partial vacuum. Provided the trains are streamlined, and there are adequate "air displacement" tunnels along the ceiling and/or sides of the main tunnel, I don't see why a train couldn't attain speeds of three or four hundred miles an hour between stations, which seems perfectly adequate.
A vacuum tunnel would make the passengers vulnerable to an accidental or malicious breach of the train's airtightness, which would presumably kill every passenger in any carriages in which it occurred!
Also, a circular arrangement of stations allows slower train or bus services, with more closely spaced stops, along radial routes. Perhaps there could be one or more a slower "inner circular" train routes as well.
Speaking of linear arrangements though, I sometimes think a lot of space is wasted over multi-lane highways, what in the UK are called motorways. If a canopy was built along the entire width of the highway, for mile after mile along the road, think how much area could be used for solar panels for example, or growing food, or warehouses, or even dwellings. Maybe a development of that could end up approximating your "linear city".
The canopies would have to be quite a way above the road, to help avoid being damaged by terrorist explosions, because a low canopy would otherwise be a tempting target, just like a tunnel They would also need to be robust, to avoid damage in high winds.
The tunnels for the vacuum transport are buried beneath the park. Invisible and silent. I think that would be hard to do with conventional high-speed rail.
Does not compute. The vacuum transport IS essentially a fancy high-speed rail, plus the nightmare of vacuum technology, plus some very elaborate lane switching, plus lots more independently moving components ("pods" instead of trains). If you can't bury regular high-speed rail in a tunnel, you sure as hell can't do it with your vacuum transport.
Also: not silent. The vacuum pumps would have to be humming all the time to maintain the vacuum in the presence of the inevitable leaks (with the electricity bill that comes with it).
Can someone explain to me why personal URLs don't work in Substack?
Here is the raw URL.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11OQg4w5jYmI1N4JN8T0zhtc7VMFwe8gRlnFA-zvSBJI/
This may come across as harsh, but "linear city with vacuum train" seems to be such an obviously daft idea that I have to ask "why?!?". (Apart from the fancy promo CGI from Saudi-Arabia, of course.)
To summarize why it's a daft idea: arranging the city in a line literally maximizes the distance between parts of the city. E.g., a city with the same footprint as "Neom - the Line" would fit into a square of 6 x 6 km, with a maximum distance between points of 12 km on a Manhattan metric, as opposed to 170 km for "the Line".
The main problem with vacuum trains is that they don't work, and never will, but even regular high-speed rails would need many parallel lines to handle the commuter traffic of a metropolis - no surprise, if you needlessly blow up the average travel distance.
I visualize something analogous to irresistible hydrostatic pressure building up at the midpoint of such a line city, rupturing it at the center and forcing it to evolve in to a more compact shape
A little thought experiment.
Replace the vactrain in your mind with a Star Trek transporter. There is a transporter hub ever mile in the linear city. Do you care that the city is 37 miles long?
If a Star Trek transporter existed, I wouldn't expect a city 37 miles long, but scattered locations based on resources to be gathered, scenic places to live, and other criteria.
Apparently the point of the thought experiment is oblivious to you.
Peter, this is not... helpful... in promoting your case. I wish you every success, I really do, I grew up a voracious reader of sci-fi and still want my space hotel and fast quiet clean travel. You deserve credit for actually writing a coherent proposal and putting it up here for all to chew on. But the problem is a hard one, and folks are rising legitimate concerns about your specific proposal. If your goal is to generate interest (I remember you weren't exactly in a position to do this yourself at this point), sniping at your most articulate critics doesn't help. Bertram - we - everybody - can just walk away. And then you've achieved nothing.
I didn't snipe at you or Deiseach or John!
>>Folks are raising legitimate concerns about your specific proposal<<
They didn't read the proposal.
I'm not actually trying to spread the word on the idea at this point. I'm trying to make it better. I'm looking for pertinent criticisms.
I'M FASCINATED BY PERTINENT CRITICISMS!
Like how long will it take to pump the air out of the tubes. Of course over 37 miles of tube, you can have as many pumps as you can pay for.
Depends how long the queue in front of the transporter is. If it's an hour's wait. I'd rather take the bus (which only works if the city is compact).
Also, I'd prefer to live in a city that doesn't depend on tech that doesn't exist.
Peter, I have to ask, and because the tone doesn't translate, this is really a neutral question, not an attacking one: what is the point of this thought experiment?
Any problem may have a perfect imaginary solution that works great and is practically impossible.
Since the discussion immediately detours to the Linetran proposal rather than the bibliography (which is independent), here are the links.
Rodes.pub/LineTran
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oSzoLWTgx1udLmLTC1U1moCFzdIYB2tWP-i4f9W21ns/
I won't duscuss Linetran further with anyone unless they tell me that they have read at least a portion of the proposal.
I briefly skimmed one of your documents and it appears from that, and your avatar showing a car with a red line through it, that you are anti-cars and pro public transport.
As I think "mass shared" public transport is a necessary evil, and I believe most people share that opinion (especially in the US!), and in most areas it is often hopelessly inadequate for peoples' needs (in both routes and timing), any proposal aiming to supplant car journeys entirely by this form of public transport is a complete non-starter.
Notice though that I said car "journeys", not "car ownership", and those are not the same thing at all. One needn't be Nostradamus these days to predict the most likely development in transport, because it is already starting to happen - Robot taxis, not personally owned but whistled up on demand at any time at and to any place.
It's obvious that most town dwellers won't need to own their own cars before long, and provided they don't damage or contaminate robotaxis while being ferried around, these will be far cheaper and more practical for general use, even for long journeys.
In my proposal, one can own and park a car outside of the city. One of the advantages of the line shape is that "outside of the city" is only a few minutes walk away.
The point of the gedankenexperiment is to clarify that if the vactrain works, then the linear city works.
That's not a given. Let's take "The Line", with its 170 km. You have a vacuum train that can travel from one end to the other in 20 minutes - if it doesn't stop anywhere. So it's useless for everyone who doesn't want to travel all the way. So you need stops inbetween - the more stops, the slower it becomes, because of all the acceleration and deceleration and time to get in and out (how does that work in a vacuum train, btw?). So you break it down to a couple of big stops every 30 km or so, and then regional trains and then buses. So in the worst case, a passenger has to switch four times to get to his destination, and it easily takes well over an hour. IF and ONLY IF trains actually run at a high frequency.
Again: WHY?
But isn't it similar to "if FTL travel works, then interstellar travel works" experiment, where the only response is "so what". Literally "anything" works if we're allowed to use impossible means.
Why do you think moving a pod through an evacuated tube at 200 mph is impossible?
Is that a fair analogy? Sending a pod through an ecacuated tube and FTL?
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.
Purely anecdata here, but having been given the name Beowulf I can't help but think it has both negatively and positively affected my life in profound ways. It was torture having that name as a kid. The harassment factor was pretty bad. But as a teenager, I was forced to wonder if I didn't get that name for a reason deeper than it being the silly choice of my English Lit parents. The totemistic implications of wolf were unavoidable — and they spurred me off in a shamanistic direction as a teenager (which was quite useful to understanding the malleability of reality).
Correlates with how weird your parents are :)
There's a fun quiz (https://nameberry.com/dna/quiz) on how you internally parse name-patterns/what kind of patterns you prefer. It needs registration to save results long-term, but not to take the quiz itself and get them. I get Maverick-Noble; the conclusion that I would insist on naming a child something like Midnight/Jocasta/Lazarus/Andromeda is arguably-painfully accurate. (Though all those names are probably a bit too common. Baby names in current cohorts are weirder/less concentrated than you think, and a lot of things that were *unheard of* until recently are big deals.)
That was fun, though I had to wonder "Who - apart from the father god of the Norse or Greek pantheons - names their kid Thunder or Midnight?"
I got "Leader-Noble" - names fit for 'future Supreme Court Justices'. You heard it here first, folks, so the next SC nominee will be picked on "do I like their name?" 😁
I had a friend name his son Hammer. But now I wish he’d made Hammer his middle name and Thunder his first name so he’d be Thunder Hammer.
I've heard of a kid named "Amaia" and it all depends how it is pronounced, because if it's "Am-Ai-Ah" then the full name (first name plus surname) sounds like one of the Simpsons prank phone call names and I do hope they have a middle name they can use instead when they get older.
Now, I haven't *heard* the name, just read it, so it could be pronounced "Amy-ah" or "Maya" or something.
Amaya or Amaia is a regular Spanish name... they might have got it from there.
I remember a psychologist friend telling me in the 1990s that people with more popular names were more popular, I suppose he got that view from a study, but I don't know which one. This did affect me and my wife a bit when we were choosing names (so we pushed the boat out, but not that far).
People with weird names probably have weird parents, and hence be weird themselves. If you're called Moonbeam then you've probably had an early upbringing which will make it hard for you to relate to the other kids.
Might it also make you easier to remember?
My experience (in remembering other people) is kind of the opposite. If someone has an unusual name, I'm more likely to remember just that they had some vaguely [ethnicity] sounding name, rather than actually remembering the specific name.
Definitely. I think it forces you to become more of an individual, to be aware of yourself as a unique person. Being more noticeable to others is definitely a cause of that.
Move to Germany an you'll be even more unique: Kiefer means jaw bone or pine tree in German
Yes I’m aware. It’s a fairly common last name in Germany
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.
Yeah, without touching on the direct object level hiring, I'm not confident that...underprivileged African Americans understand white and/or business culture as well as they think they do.
Like, no, you don't want to wear a suit to that interview in Colorado, you want a "nerdy" graphic tee underneath a Northface jacket. And don't act like Ned Flanders, it's weird.
No, there are probably some situations where you use "white voice" but if you're working with a Pakistani and a German in Texas on an oil & gas widget, you need to use "international English". "White voice" seems affected and confusing.
No, nobody thinks you're hard or intimidating because you grew up in Detroit. This is El Paso, Juarez and the cartels are right there. And Kwame over there grew up in Eritrea, we don't even ask about that.
I was exaggerating a bit with "Ned Flanders". He doesn't have Ned's weird verbal quirks or mustache. He does, as Arbituram said, present himself as unthreatening.
People don't act like Ned Flanders out of a mistaken belief that "white people are like that". It's because Flanders is deeply unthreatening, both personally and to the wider system.
Perhaps you don't slightly tense up when a black man enters the room; great! But not universal.
I think you're right. I was first thinking that the people hiring should just make allowances for things like wearing a suit to an interview, but knowing that a suit is the wrong thing to wear is a sign of being alert and adaptable, & that's a valuable talent.
I think, in general, that it's good to learn different ways of behavior to be able to navigate different types of social context. A purely linguistic version, when used in a single context, is called "code-switching", but I think it also applies in a more general sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
I think it's a common mistake to identify so strongly with a particular approach to life, that you reject all others. Of course, it's OK to have personal, ethical, or aesthetic preferences. Even political preferences! (Which is why we don't use "thee" and "thou" any more.) And these types of skills often become rusty without practice.
To be slightly more specific, a vital skill in modern America is to be able to interact with the professional-managerial class in a way that they recognize as "peer". If you can't do that, by generating verbal and written language, controlling body language, and dressing and grooming yourself appropriately, you're at a major disadvantage.
To perhaps be controversial, I think a major component of modern racism in America (for multiple definitions of "racism") is that people (most people, and not only in America) associate the cultural signifiers of underclass African-American culture as being the only way to be "authentically black". And there's reasons for how we got here, including white racism in the mid-20th century, and the politics of the 60s and 70s. But it's not a good place to be.
This is generally true, but let's expand on the point about African-Americans.
While it may be good for his career prospects if, say, a Chinese-American comes across as more assimilated to the US mainstream, the effect is much stronger among African-Americans because there exists such a thing as "oppositional culture", which is associated BOTH with unusual names and with a hostile attitude towards mainstream society and whites. Something you want to try your best to screen out in a multiracial workplace that strives to have a relatively harmonious culture.
One wouldn't expect an unassimilated Chinese immigrant to have an *oppositional* attitude towards mainstream US society or, say, his boss who functions as a stand-in for it. He's merely unassimilated. He's expected to miss or misunderstand a number of cues, but not intentionally.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/conservatism-as-an-oppositional-culture
Sure. I think "underclass African-American culture" has a very strong current of being oppositional to "mainstream culture", which is effectively synonymous in America with "white culture", especially from the black perspective. In that sense, being able to even temporarily adopt the behaviors of mainstream culture is a sign that the person is not inextricably wedded to opposing mainstream culture. (There's even what's basically a genre of African-American literature consisting of people saying, "even though I act like a white person in my public life, I also have a life and experiences that white people do not", which can be viewed as a way of trying to create an African-American identity that's compatible with mainstream culture.)
Or in another sense, it's like holding up the sign of Havel's greengrocer, saying: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." Which is exactly what a prospective employer wants to hear. Totally non-oppositional. (I'm not being sarcastic here. I'm honestly surprised that I'm using the greengrocer as a positive example.)
> I'm honestly surprised that I'm using the greengrocer as a positive example.
Well, there are some similarities between living in an oppressive regime, and needing your job to survive.
Yeah. It feels very strange to use Havel to make a point that Marxists would agree with :-)
I've heard and it seems plausible that demands for "authenticity" are a status grab. "Match my imagined version of who you are".
That would match the black bullies I saw in middle school, who picked on good students in general, but when picking on the good black students they added in the additional slur of "acting white". There's so many horrible implications of that, that I don't even know where to begin.
In adult life, I think there's also a coalition-building political aspect, leveraging social insecurity to support ones' agenda. "If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black." In a way, it's similar to how right-wing politicians talk about "real Americans", or how they used to, anyway, back in the W. Bush days.
This sounds like using identity-based categories to reinvent the word "class."
It's just the normal phenomenon where Americans live within a very complicated class system of which they are somehow blithely unaware, and it confuses them constantly.
The British, to their credit, have a class system but they're very much consciously aware of it at all times, which means that they can adjust their biases accordingly, or at least choose to be classist with their eyes open.
"Sorry to Bother You" (worth watching) has a theme of "using your white voice":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8o0dMePYFU
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?
Several points:
1. Having a positive feedback loop isn't necessary for FOOM. If it turns out that hooking up a calculator and a lot of RAM to human levels of creativity gets you to have the equivalent of Bell labs, the Renaissance, and a Manhattan project's worth of insight + invention within a month, and also allows you to actuate all robotic devices to a degree of flexibility an entire human civilization does, it doesn't matter if it would be harder to get to "the next level of intelligence".
2. From the invention of any new field of intellectual endeavor, you can almost always see a flurry of new insights happen when cognitive effort is put into it. While it is true humans have discovered things like "throwing hardware at transformer architecture" results in gains, the actual amount of effort used to figure this out is tiny next to total human brainpower. If a human or superhuman level of intelligence does come into existence, it is likely to do so without having literally all of the intelligence enhancing algorithms used on it. And once it gets intelligent enough to create a successor AI, those algorithms would then be included. It's not that "the next level of intelligence" is easier so much that a previous bottleneck "do we have enough grad students to implement this" gets replaced by a self reinforcing process. How many steps? I don't know, but "greater than zero" seems far more defensible than "zero".
3. We do not appear to live in the world where the exact next step(s) of intelligence is getting harder to achieve. From what I understand, basically anything that is tried right now appears to be improving performance. Naive extrapolation isn't a terrific prior, but it's certainly better than "well things will end up being harder for someone else at the exact point it would otherwise be inconvenient". This isn't the way wars, companies or any sort of competition are planned, why would we suppose that "things get harder when it's convenient" be a good principle for prediction? I don't know when the sigmoid would level out (other than the fact that it probably does level out) but precisely because I don't know the level, it seems unreasonable to suppose that it levels out at a cognitive level insufficient to kill all humans, when no serious cognitive effort has been spent by humans to verify that alien but powerful intelligences wouldn't wipe out humanity. (Why would alien intelligences are a threat be a prior? Because a lot of our enforcement mechanisms like laws, culture and social shame are based on all intelligences being humans. Basically no humans are fanatical AND intelligent enough to, say, shut down a large portion of first world infrastructure because there's no benefit in widespread destruction. This calculus changes if humanity in and of itself is an obstacle, and if what is obviously a bad idea (destroying things you, a human can use yourself) turns into obviously a good idea (destroying things you, an AI, see as obstructing your goals), we can no longer rely on the implicit defense mechanism of "no one smart is motivated to do this")
Good points.
>If it turns out that hooking up a calculator and a lot of RAM to human levels of creativity gets you to have the equivalent of Bell labs
Yup. We've spent a huge amount of effort over the last ~60 years building up software tools that encapsulate substantial chunks of knowledge, and I've seen GPT4 using at least one of them ( https://chat.openai.com/share/6a026c6c-5f6a-4009-befb-b89e5096c8fa ) (albeit I have also seen GPT4, as it currently stands, repeatedly failing a simple question that I have been giving it ("Which inorganic compounds are gases at STP?" https://chat.openai.com/share/12040db2-5798-478d-a683-2dd2bd98fe4e ). And, as far as I know, there have been significant efforts (ongoing?) to extend LLMs to use our existing computational tools.
I have a quibble with
>From what I understand, basically anything that is tried right now appears to be improving performance.
I would expect publication bias. What works, gets discussed and published. What doesn't work, not so much.
> I would expect publication bias. What works, gets discussed and published. What doesn't work, not so much.
While that is generically true, the numerator matters far more than the denominator for claims about a human society equivalent intelligence, but not for a human level intelligence. Although your implicit point about difficulty is taken, just because things seem easy on the surface doesn't mean that that it actually is easy once you account for selection effects.
Curious, but is it your expectation that there isn't low hanging fruit in AI performance, or was your counter point just specifically about how pollyanna-ish the quoted argument I made was? I think it's the latter, but want to verify.
Many Thanks! I was _only_ quibbling about the one quoted point. My personal guess is that there probably _is_ low-hanging fruit in AI performance (in the "speed" sense of performance), and that
a) It is probably limited today by the number of bright people one can throw at that particular problem.
b) That when AI gets reliable enough to act as e.g. an advisor it will probably also be capable of digging through the decades of computer science literature to find algorithmic improvements to its own implementation.
For the "reliability" sense of performance, I'm hopeful, but agnostic. Things like "tree of thought" and prompt engineering seem to help somewhat. I'll be more confident when I get a correct answer to "What inorganic compounds are gases at standard temperature and pressure?" and when lawyers stop getting handed non-existent precedents from LLMs.
Or when LLMs stop failing basic arithmetic questions... I don't think this is a wall or anything, but perhaps the persistent difficulty of novel but simple maths flags a core issue with reliability of generalist systems (I continue to be much more impressed with Deep mind's narrower tools for protein folding and Go.)
Many Thanks! Interesting point, and MicaiahC's response is also interesting.
Gwern seems to think this is because of the BPE tokenization, which is not at all central to transformers.
To vaguely summarize, GPT sees a group of characters instead individual characters, and so GPT ends up seeing 1, 10 and 100 as completely different tokens with no relationship to each other, learning concepts such as arithmetic is much slower, since GPT has to spend a lot of its training runs doing things that humans get "for free", like figuring out "1+2=3"" 1 + 2 = 3" "2 + 1 = 3" are related, since to GPT, all three have been obfuscated to look like completely different tokens, whereas no one has scrambled them for us and we can obviously see those expressions are similar and thus related.
I think the argument is that we're currently bottlenecked on the number of people who are capable of improving machine intelligence. If machine intelligence were smart enough to improve machine intelligence[*] then we could create as many machine intelligences as required in order to make machine intelligence more intelligent at whatever pace we needed. This would be an economically rational thing to do since the rewards for getting ahead of your competitors are always going to be large.
[*] Like, y'know, installing sweep.dev to help me write some code for my PhD thesis has sped up my research.
Just responding as a placeholder to see if there's any good answers on follow-up. I myself am curious about the answer.
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
Thank you for writing this! As FM I really appreciated someone putting out the math so I can really see when I should be worried.
This was great! Thanks for writing.
I will say that in the cards world, we’re much more blasé about starting QT-prolonging meds with QTc > 500, probably because we deal with it every day. Usually we get antsy when > 550.
We get all the patients who actually develop TdP, and often they have something else going on (a combo of three different QT-prolonging meds, or an underlying channelopathy, or prior myocardial injury, etc).
Different ways of calculating QTc tends to be somewhat institution dependent, but I agree still predominantly Bazett’s. Most folks will switch to alternates for tachycardia, if it matters clinically.
Take care!
Well, I just forwarded this to 4 other colleagues in psych. I worked with an old, devil-may-care psychiatrist (in the best way, to be clear) who used to work himself into a lather when the hospital pharmacist would raise concerns about a patient's QTc measured as part of their ED med clearance for BH. We're talking like 490-510 or something. While his expletive riddled stumping on this topic has certainly stuck with me, it was not, um, necessarily backed by a rigorous examination of the evidence. For your efforts, I thank you.
Sometimes I wish I could have the confidence levels of those sorts of docs, maybe when I'm not a resident anymore. I'm glad you found it good enough to share around!
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.
Here's a thing I managed a few times, admittedly for less fraught relationships.
Shortly before seeing the person, I'd notice my feeling of expecting trouble. I'd fend off the feeling. The interaction would go better.
Hypothesis: If I expected things to go badly, I was giving off signals that activated a habit pattern in the other person.
Note that I wasn't generating an expectation of things going well, or in any particular way, I was just hopefully giving the person room to behave differently.
I'm an asshole so it might not be the best advice, but for people who liked to apologize constantly I'd usually just agree with them. "I know I'm worthless." "Yep. So about laundry..."
I second this advice, which is a version of what is advised by Captain Awkward, Ask Polly, et al. if you think someone is being strategically submissive.
If you want to be very kind to this person, you could try to get ahead of this by finding a calm, conflict-free moment to say, "Can I talk to you about something that's been bothering me? Would you mind just listening and not interrupting until I'm finished? Thanks. I feel like, oftentimes when I have a simple request or minor criticism, you apologize so profusely that we never work on the actual issue. I'm hoping we can figure out a way to work through that together."
This will almost certainly trigger an apology tsunami; let it go on a few sentences and then break in with something like: "Please let me stop you there. This is sort of what I was talking about? Our conversation has shifted from an issue which is impacting our relationship to you profusely apologizing. When you do that I feel like you care more about apologizing than about how I feel. I accept that you're sorry and I'd like you to stop focusing on that now. Can we discuss how to get through this together?"
Hard to say which way it might go from there. Ideally the person is acting in good faith and has some ideas about how you can avoid triggering them and will agree to make an effort. They'll almost certainly backslide at some point and you might need to say, "Hey, let me stop you there, remember when we talked about the apologizing? I accept your apology, so let's move on to the laundry..."
However, if they attempt to double-down and apologize from an even more wounded, distraught position, I think you have every right to be dismissive. That can be Yug Gnirob's agreement, "Yep, so about the laundry," or a softer version can be, "I accept your apology. So about the laundry..."
I know how aggravating a weaponized apologizer can be. I'm sorry you're having to deal with this.
This might piss you off but it's worth asking: is this person necessarily doing this in bad faith? I recently read about markers that a person is in an abusive (typically romantic) relationship and one of the markers was "Constant Apologizing", because in the context of an abusive relationship any criticism **is** usually a preamble to a long tirade about "Why <abused person> sucks and deserves to die : a concise list of 112 reasons", and that's if the abused person is lucky, if they're unlucky the lecture will be given by the abuser's hands and other tools of physical interpersonal violence not with their mouth and words. This is not to say that **you're** the abuser, just that this person might have another abuser in her life and she internalized the habit of excessively apologizing to appease the abuser.
Related to this is an anecdote I once read about an abused dog who was lucky enough to end up in the care of a better caretaker, and whenever she heard a loud human voice or saw a long stick (e.g. a broom) she would wet herself. The likely explanation is that those markers, loud voice and long sticks, are pavlovian signals that the abuser who was once her caretaker will hit her, thus her fear and loss of control.
Hard to say what exactly is going on; they're being treated for depression with several years now, they went through several very rocky patches in their relationship, and the suicide attempt was after coming to stay with us due to 'I'm definitely breaking up with partner this time' (which has not, in fact, happened).
Due to suicide attempt, they had in-patient stay in a clinic and then follow-up out-patient appointments, which seem (to my jaundiced view of matters) to have led to nothing but a sudden discovery of a laundry list of abuse/abusive events in their past, including family of origin. I'm jaundiced about this because for several of the claims, I'm in a position to deny they happened (which doesn't make the relationship between us any smoother, since I'm denying this new identity they've built up for themselves as an abuse survivor) and for years they devoured the kind of misery porn memoirs like "A Child Called It" and I think even the suicide attempt (which was kind of half-assed) was more one of these attempts to fit in with the model of such books and make them the star of their own show. EDIT: They were a very sickly child, nearly died as an infant due to severe pneumonia, and for years were in delicate health and have become very anxious/nervous, 'living on their nerves' type as a result, plus prone to self-dramatisation.
I don't blame the therapists, by the way, since all they have to go on is what my family member has told them, and there's no way I or any one else can turn up with "yeah, this never happened". But it has made me even more sceptical about therapy business than I was before.
I am also struggling with a ton of unprocessed anger over the suicide attempt, since I'm furious about "if you wanted to kill yourself, why not do it in your own home? but no, you had to come all the way down here and dump this mess on my doorstep and leave it to us to deal with if it had worked". Not healthy, but I can't seem to let go of it.
So ever since, they've been in Weaponised Apology mode, I've been inclined to fly off the handle (which doesn't help matters) and now they're coming down to stay for a short break after going back to their home situation for the past year. I'm only doing this to oblige the third party, who is piggy-in-the-middle here between us both and isn't in the wrong, but who wants to maintain a good relationship with this person. So for the next few days, I'm going to try and just be "polite but distant" and hope some stupid row doesn't blow up over a trivial matter. I do *want* them to be better and do better, but this Martyr Act isn't helping them or me, since beneath the "I deserve to die, I deserve to be hated" layer is all this "I am an abuse survivor and all this is just more abuse and I am so heroic for suffering all this" instead of acknowledging that this isn't healthy coping strategy or that they need to get the hell out of the rut they're content to be in.
Wish me luck!
Apologies for saying the obvious, but I just *really* noticed that you're apparently being pressured to host someone who attempted suicide *in your home.*
That's wild!
I think it's incredibly reasonable for you to refuse to host, even if you already agreed! It's more than fair to (strategically!) adopt the language of victimization being used by Problem Person and say something like, "I don't feel safe allowing Problem Person to stay in my home again," or, more intensely, "Problem Person's attempted suicide was really scary and it's stressing me out to have them in my home again," or any version of that idea, the more vulnerable-sounding the better.
Problem Person and PIggy-in-the-Middle Person might interpret this as genuine fear, but you can privately know this confession of vulnerability actually means, "I am 500% pissed at Problem Person and I'm 'afraid' I'm going to show it if they stay here."
Does the Piggy-in-the-Middle Person actually live with you and thus feel entitled to host Problem Person in your home? If not, then I think you can stand firmly in how very afraid you are of having 'responsibility' for Problem Person and invite Piggy-in-the-Middle Person to host them, instead.
If Piggy-in-the-Middle lives with you and is inviting Problem Person despite your wishes (and fear! so much fear and anxiety! ignore what you look like on the outside, you're a quivering mess inside!), can you just...leave? Go to a hotel for the duration of the visit and avoid Problem Person entirely?
One of my favorite Captain Awkward sayings is, "Sometimes the cheapest way to pay for something is with money." I have no idea where you live and what hotel rates might be like there, but consider at least pricing it out. It might very well be worth a few hundred dollars to have a peaceful few days by yourself in a clean quiet room and never even see Problem Person.
I mean, their attempt was so traumatic for you, after all! Sure, you looked confident and/or calm and/or competent and/or angry, but on the inside you were DEEPLY TRAUMATIZED! It would be SO VERY WRONG to subject you to relive that HORRIBLY SCARY TRAUMA!
Mental illness puts incredible stress on family members. The worst of it is -- and friends of mine with relatively sane families don't usually get this -- there is tremendous anger and disappointment on the part of the family members who support the subject and their attempts to "get sorted", which unfortunately, usually fail -- because the subject either can't or won't actually put in the effort to really change.
This dynamic IMX almost always leads to a cycle of thinking you have a handle on it, everyone gets hopeful, Subject seems to finally be making the effort to get well, failure, reversion back to frustration, incrimination, guilt, and a general feeling of hopelessness regarding the prospects that things will ever change.
You may want to look for support groups of family/caregivers who have similar problems. It can really help take the block of anger, shame, and frustration off your shoulders.
Best of luck!
Good luck Deiseach, you don't deserve this drama.
I've had good experiences with nonviolent communication (NVC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
It seems that your conversations are going to be difficult with any communication style :/ Yet my hope would be that the NVC patterns would be less strongly perceived as criticism.
Oh, I do know that I need to work on my own attitude. A lot of what is driving me is anger (overlying what, exactly? unresolved fear over the suicide attempt?) that having been as sympathetic and supportive and uncritical as I could have, they then decided that that was the perfect time to try the suicide attempt.
And that just torpedoed everything I had been trying to do for them, so thin ice ever since.
EDIT: Yeesh - I posted this then realized that I coasted right over the "I am not really asking for advice" part of your post, which is pretty lazy on my part since it was literally the first thing you wrote.
So yeah, disregard advice post - suffice to say I've experienced this behavior, it's real, and it's frustrating.
Oh no, thanks! Good, solid advice and yes, keeping my own cool and walking away is the best approach. I know by myself that I *want* to needle them because I'm feeling angry and frustrated, which is a terrible way to address this situation. So making a pre-commitment to "keep your mouth shut and walk away from possible fights" is the best strategy.
Oh crap I also excitedly leapt into advice mode without even reading the whole thread - sorry about that!
That said, here's some more advice (LOL) in tired aphorism form:
The best revenge is living well.
This person sounds extremely aggravating and selfish. I totally sympathize with why you want to show your objective superiority and contempt for them, but never forget that *getting them to do what you want* is the only really useful goal here. Of course you shouldn't *have* to employ a strategic display of empathy and diplomacy that you don't feel, but if it works to shift their behavior, it's a win for *you.*
Another way to think of it is to remember the Ultimatum Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game). Rationally, we know that getting anything is better than getting nothing, even if the reward seem 'unfair" compared to what someone else is getting.
So take your metaphorical $5 and leave this person their metaphorical $95; even if they feel like they "won," at least you have $5 more now than when you started.
My first instinct in dealing with a person like this would be to simply stay calm and ignore the apologies. Like, not ignore the person, but simply carry on the conversation as though you didn't hear the apologies. Your reaction, any reaction, is the reward that feeds their habit.
No clue if this would actually work in this particular case, of course, but it would at least be interesting to see what the result would be.
Good luck.
Have you tried keeping it breezy, changing the subject and getting out?
"No worries, thank you for hearing me out! Im making myself a sandwich, want one?/I'm headed to the store, need anything?/etc etc"
If they go to a third party you can be like "woha, so weird they think I'm mad at them! I thought we figured it all out, I'm definitely not mad! Let them know it's all good, you know how they can get in their own head"
Leaving a conversation in the middle is pretty rude, but so is talking nonstop and ignoring what the person is saying. If you come off looking bad anyway you might as well get what you want.
"Have you tried keeping it breezy, changing the subject and getting out?"
Doesn't work, because then that's *more* proof I hate them and want them to die, if I can't even stand to be in their presence for five minutes 🙁
I am trying to be patient, so this time round I'll give the "polite distance" bit a go, see if that helps avoid any pitfalls.
God, that sucks! Polite distance sounds like the best plan for this kind of person, good luck!
Didn't someone write a book a while ago about seeing the world in terms of conversational games? I remember something about interactions as fixed scripts, in which people choose the role they take.
So when a woman says, "Oh I'm so fat," she's starting a script, and the next line is for you to say, "Oh no, you're not!" because that's the Supportive Friend's role. If you instead say, "Yeah, I've been meaning to say something," you've declined the Supportive Friend role and instead started playing the Teasing Boyfriend script. If you say something odd like, "Ambiguously true: your weight is up 20g from yesterday but still within 1sd for women in your age range," you've broken the conversation, because there is no script that goes that way, so now she has nothing to say to that, and she'll probably avoid you because you're weird.
To me your thing sounds very much like one of these games, where A's role is to apologise for a perceived slight, and B's role is to clarify, allowing A to interpret the clarification as another slight and apologise again, ad infinitum.
Depending on how fed up you are and how much you stand to lose or gain, you could always try messing with the script.
"I'm sorry that my selfish need to breathe is costing so much of your precious air."
"Yeah, well, you should be. See that it doesn't happen again."
"I'm so worthless and you hate me and I should probably just blow my brains out."
"Okay, well try to avoid getting blood on the carpet, dear."
If you're no longer doing your part of the dance, they can't do theirs.
"What do you say after you say hello" is the book I read. weird stuff. I started calling people out on their games, gazed into mine, and almost earned myself a divorce.
I was going to suggest "Games People Play", but its the same author. The framework is called "Transactional Analysis". These are both very old books. I would have expected something more recent in a fast moving field like psychology.... even if its the same ideas presented in a more modern style. "I'm OK, you're OK" is another book in the same genre and similar vintage.
"I'm so worthless and you hate me and I should probably just blow my brains out."
"Okay, well try to avoid getting blood on the carpet, dear."
This particular person tried a suicide attempt in my sitting room, so that's part of my beef with them 😁
No blood, thankfully, but dosed themselves up on (expired) Valium and wine, passing out, leaving a rambling, maudlin, multi-page suicide letter and them to be found by another family member who came home from work.
So they're already well on board the "I know you hate me and wish I was dead" train, they've twisted something I said about a memory from when I was *three years old* about them into "you wanted me dead then and you still want it now".
This is all part of what I mean by the "weaponised" part.
> This particular person tried a suicide attempt in my sitting room
Yep, this is well outside my sphere. The only psychiatrist I know in person was telling me how he tried to bully a client into microwaving her hamster. I'm not sure how well that approach would generalise to your situation.
Good luck!
If I could only get my hands on a hamster... I already have a microwave... 😁
Ridiculous amounts of drama which I don't need since I'm a bit stressed myself at the moment, but sure it'll all end okay! And if it doesn't, ah well that's life!
>If I could only get my hands on a hamster... I already have a microwave... 😁
There is an interesting Tom Scott YouTube video about James Lovelock using a microwave to revive hamsters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y .
My mother told me how she put her dying cat in the oven overnight in an attempt to revive him. This would have been around 1950.
It did not work.
> This particular person tried a suicide attempt in my sitting room
> they've twisted something I said about a memory from when I was three years old about them into "you wanted me dead then and you still want it now".
This sounds like someone who can't be reasoned with. :-( I was going to say other things, but this context completely changes what I'd been imagining from your original post. I got nothin' aside from your original plan of saying little and avoiding them.
Yeah, same, I gave some suggestions upthread but I was assuming someone highly annoying or even disturbed, but capable of reason.
I mean, to be fair, they do have real mental problems going on right now and for a while. If they could be honest about what happened, I think that therapy would help them a lot. But they've got this idea fixed in their head that they 'remember' all this abusive stuff that happened, and so now they're a survivor and victim of abuse, so that colours all their interactions with the medical professionals.
God knows what exactly they've told them, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a list of "And when I was five, X did this, and then when I was ten, Y did that to me and my brother, and then when I was only a baby, Yours Truly hated me so much they wanted me to die and I nearly did because I was so sick back then" and the likes. The doctor/therapist doesn't know our family from Adam, all they have is "this person has been referred due to suicide attempt, this patient history explains why they tried suicide" and so they believe (or not, however they judge it, but act as if they believe) the entire narrative.
When what happened was "Look, when I was three and you were one, all I knew was that you were a fussy, whiny baby crying all the time, so when they said you were going back to hospital I was glad. I had no idea you were so sick or nearly died. I was freakin' three years of age, for crying out loud!" This whole thing came up in the context of "Your lungs are weak because of that time you had pneumonia as a baby, gosh I remember at the time...." and telling them about what three year old me thought. Which they immediately spun into "you hated me and wanted me dead since I was a baby". Which is all part of their mental problems, but that doesn't do much when I hate feeling like The Wicked Witch of the West (for no reason).
"I forgive you" sometimes throws off the apologizer's train-wreck. (When I pulled that crap, successfully in my family of origin for years, then met my wife who doesn't take crap lightly, it really threw me onto some other tracks. Can't be bad to try.)
"I forgive you." "I forgive you." it's hard to keep going with the defensive apologies when you've officially wiped the slate clean.
At least it sounds like they're sincere, and not deliberately doing this to mess with you? **crosses fingers**
That sounds like Transactional Analysis, or some rehash on it. Eric Berne, _Games People Play_ is the reference book, IIRC it amounts to analyzing verbal interactions in terms of three archetypal roles: Parent, Child and Adult. The interaction you describe sounds like you trying to talk from Adult to Adult, and the other guy answering from Child to Parent. The whole advice from this theory is to steadfastly refuse to play the role the other person is trying to assign to you, i.e in this case keep to your Adult and talk to theirs. But I don't know how you'd do that when their way of assigning you a role is by complaining to third persons.
In any case, to the extent that the interaction with this individual is inevitable, you have our sympathy! And to the extent that the person is depressed or troubled, you might have no better option that exercising your own powers of sympathy...
@skaladom: Games People Play sounds familiar. I probably only read the wiki summary or something, because I don't remember the Parent, Adult, Child stuff. In my headcanon the roles are smaller and more varied, and are picked up from watching other conversations or seeing scenes on TV.
@Deiseach: You can always fall back on outright breaking the script, for example by responding to provocation by listing cooking utensils in a deadly monotone, or simply emitting a loud keening wail. As long as you're having fun with it.
EDIT: Missed the third party bit. Still think you should just have fun with it.
"Teacher, teacher, Deiseach snapped me just for doing XYZ."
"Oh, how rotten of her, have some sympathy and validation."
"And then she whistled like a kettle before listing crockery items at me in a threatening way."
".... Are you feeling okay?"
What pops up for me is to say that you are not upset and you don't want your friend to feel badly, but you would like a small change in behavior regarding the washing machine.
It's stupid crap that gets blown out of proportion, like "just don't run the washing machine at peak energy charge times" and I'm probably as guilty for bringing it up as a point of contention, but I would like to be able to say things like that and have the response be "Sure" or "Sorry, I can only do it then" instead of the full Martyr Act with weeping and flagellation (and no change in the complained-of behaviour).
Not a friend, but a family member, which makes it even more tangled: families are hard!
One answer to this question is "whose washing machine". If it's yours, just lay down the law about when it may be run. If it's not, put up with what it is happening and give ecological advice if you want.
I accept that sometimes there are in-between situations. But it may on occasion be best to just roll your eyes and just aim to get out of the situation ASAP. On the other hand, if you're there long term, you'll have to make some concession in exchange for your relative doing the thing that you see as proper but they don't want to.
Just to point out a vaguely related anecdote: I lost a friend because I did just what you describe and ended up angering my friend. But in my case it was just because I was depressed and anxiously underconfident. I’m sure for some it’s literally "weaponised" but for others it just seems that way and the person is unaware they’re wielding a weapon. (Iirc there was something on LessWrong which described well that, when someone apologises, it means that they put themselves below you in status, even when you don’t actually want to rise above them, you just want them to stop doing something you think is bad for them, which I found very interesting at the time. But I can’t seem to find it again now).
The other person does have depression and other problems, so I am trying to be sympathetic. It's difficult, though, when they immediately take anything you say to be an attack and go into this mode, and then spin it when re-telling it to others that I was the aggressor.
It's the telling the revised version to others that is the main problem here, I think. I'm fed-up of having to go "All I said was..." in response to "Why are you always picking on them?" That's the weaponising of it.
If they're going go tell people rumors that you were mean to them no matter what, then there isn't any incentive for you to not be mean to them. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a cautionary tale for this exact scenario.
Oh, I see. To be frank, even in my own case when I was just angering my friend, it was fair of her to get mad at me, although it felt a bit out of my control. But if the person’s then spreading "rumors" around, it’s even harder on you
And here’s the LW post I was talking about (just a description of what goes on in that sort of situation, not actually particularly useful to know how to deal with them, but still): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TZzdSwhADqdG5bGuz/avoiding-emotional-dominance-spirals
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?
We don’t have to ponder what “from the river to the sea” means, we can just ask Palestinians:
https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023%20-%20Tables%20of%20Results.pdf
> Table 33: Do you support the solution of establishing one state or two states in the following formats:
> One-State Solution for Two Peoples: 5.4%
> A Palestinian state from the river to the sea: 74.7%
They were explicitly given an option for this supposed utopian democratic peaceful integrated state where everyone has rights, and they overwhelmingly denied it in favor of an Arab Muslim ethnostate resulting from the ethnic cleansing and genocide of all Israeli Jews.
Other figures from the poll:
> Table 27: How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?
> Extremely Support or Somewhat Support: 75%
> Table 29: How do you view the role of the following parties?
> Al Aqsa Brigade - Very Positive or Somewhat Positive: 79.8%
One place to look would be the fears of the Right Wingers who hate the Arabs' guts. One of those is Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon deputy leader. Wikipedia quotes him[0] (in the context of justifying why Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is necessary) sketching one possible path towards a one-state solution:
> More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.
This points in the direction that the historical path towards a one-state solution will be modeled after the 1960s civil rights law or (more violently) the 1950s-1980s struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. The situation is the same: Arabs in the West Bank are like US blacks in 1960 and South African blacks pre-1990s, arguably much worse because they're stateless. The path towards their liberation, which would be easier if they had Jewish sympathizers (not necessarily among the settlers) but not impossible without them, is the same mix of civil disobedience and quasi-military tactics (light-intensity, low on casualties and high on property damage and spectacle) that liberation movements like US black liberation and Irish freedom fighters used. Ehud's panicked sense of urgency is because he knows that this particular brand of struggle is infinitely more palatable and PR-friendly than hardcore military engagements of the kind that Hamas and Hezbollah specializes in.
> Who's in charge?
Ideally, nobody in particular. The distinction between Jew and Arab as irrelevant as the distinction between man and woman, or white Jew and black Jew.
In practice, Jewish fear from an Arab ruling majority is not unfounded, and the political machinery as well as the military can have explicit 50/50 ratio limits so that no side fears the other enough to consider a coup of their own.
As the generations that fought each other die off a new generation will hopefully abolish those ratios entirely.
> What's the structure?
No structure in particular, anything will do. For minimal disruption, the structure is exactly Israel as it currently exists, except now there are 7 million new Arab citizens who suddenly appeared in its databases.
> What can be done about Hamas? Or the violent right-wing Israelis?
If somebody had a real answer to that, they wouldn't be fucking around on the Internet.
The closest thing to an answer I can think of is about neutralizing Hamas via a Hearts-And-Minds campaign that pumps enormous amounts (trillion+ $) of investment and econ development into Gaza while simultaneously having an intense (joint?) Arab military presence in every corner and alley. This is not enough to prevent those who think of their dead children whenever they hear "Israel" from longing for an October 7th, it's just enough to prevent them from executing an October 7th. The real architects of a one-state solution are the children, the living ones at any rate. Reforming the education system to be more objective, more self-critical, and including Hebrew as a language and culture since day 1. The entire thing will probably last from 15 to 30 years, and it necessities that Islam is neutralized or subverted through moderate interpretations enough that it doesn't throw a wrench into the whole scheme.
But by the end of it, you will have a Hamas that is weakened to perhaps 10x or more of its previous size and strength, and all of its supporters are above 35 and the new generation either doesn't know of it or knows and disapproves with varying levels of vitriol. This generation knows Hebrew about as well as it knows standard textbook Arabic.
I don't know what could be done about Israeli Right Wingers, besides the natural moderating effect that should weaken them (by how much?) as their Toxoplasmotic[1] form on the Arab side is gradually weakened.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza#Rationale_and_development_of_the_policy
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
I don't think a majority of Palestinians actually are interested in the South African approach.
Thank you. When I asked about the structure (parliamentary? representative democracy? something else?), I was mostly hoping that someone was working on it so that rushed improvisation isn't needed.
And I agree that it might be the next generation to get people who are sick of the fighting.
There is at least one joint Jewish/Arab organization based in Israel, https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr
which promotes a proposal that is technically (and importantly!) a two-state solution but would nonetheless have most of the practical and ethical upsides of a one-state solution. Think Schengen-style freedom of movement, trade, and employment, but with continued ethnic separation of formal sovereignty and voting rights.
You may very well think them naive, in fact I'm sure both the median Israeli and median Palestinian would indeed think them so. But they have a couple of things going for them:
1. they have a FAQ that addresses questions like the ones you raise
2. they actually live on the ground in Israel/Palestine and have skin in the game, they aren't academics safely ensconced somewhere else while holding forth on what ought to be done.
Something like that could hypothetically work after decades of deradicalization. It would not work under the current levels of hatred, and current trends aren't leading to deradicalization.
I'm mostly for that org. I think they do help push in that direction. But I think that's not enough, and don't see deradicalization happening without a two-state solution that's at least grudgingly accepted (along with giving up on the "eternal refugee" mentality) happening for a while first.
That seems like one of those wonderful ideas, the only flaw of which is literally that not everyone thinks it's a wonderful idea. :-(
There was a single state during the British mandate, which led to fairly regular massacres. In general post-1967, there's been different degrees of strictness of separation, but stricter separation (i.e. the security fence on the west bank and increased limitations on Gazans coming into Israel) have been caused by (rather than causing) increases in terrorism.
It's worth noting that the last time large numbers of Palestinians got over the border into Israel (which was three months ago), they tortured thousands of Jews to death. Many of theple involved in this were "civilians", not trained militants.
Also: you mention "mostly Jews think it's a call for genocide". This is false. Western leftists may not think they're calling for genocide, but Muslims who shout it absolutely do (the original in Arabic is "Palestine will be Arab", not "free").
I guess in theory it's possible that, after a few decades, Palestinians would chill out and decide to stop murdering Jews if they shared a country with them. I don't think anyone in Israel would be willing to risk it.
> they tortured thousands of Jews to death
The official revised number is ~1200 including military and security personnel in uniform, so it's just a single thousand.
> It's worth noting that the last time large numbers of Palestinians got over the border into Israel
That's about as meaningful as noting that the last time large numbers of Israelis got over the border into Palestine (which is ongoing) they murdered 300+ Palestinians and burned the homes and trees of unarmed farmers.
They are called "Cycles of violence" for a reason.
(I've heard that there are three versions, ending in "Arab", "Islamic", and "free", but only the last one gets translated into English?)
>”a democratic, peaceful state which includes what are now Israelis and Palestinians”
Isn’t the obvious follow-up question “what happens if one of the groups in this hypothetical state votes for genocide?”?
I mean isn't that basically what is already happening? At the very least a one state solution would reduce the probability of Arabic or Israeli would-be genocidaires winning the majority. If (say) 60% of Palestine and 60% of Israel would vote to murder all the members of the other side given the chance, then when they're two states they're doomed to war and when they're one state the biggest bloc is the (net) 40% who don't want to murder the other side.
Tribalism is a thing. In your hypothetical, the kill-all-the-Jews candidate wins the Palestinian Party Primary, the kill-all-the-Arabs candidate wins the Zionist Party Primary, then all the Arabs vote for the first and all the Jews vote for the second, and the winner has a mandate for genocide. Tweak as necessary for your particular choice of voting laws; it won't change much.
If there's an asymmetry where e.g. only 30% of the Jewish Israelis would vote to murder all the Arabs *and* the Jews have a clear majority in the State Between The River And The Sea, this could be stable.
This might be a reasonable place to check. I've heard that the Israelis who want an idealistic solution are generally Ashkenazi , while Jews who were expelled from Arab countries are hard-liners. Is this true?
One would think so.
"From the river to the sea" is a whole lot more vague than "all lives matter", so I think the arguments against the 2nd should work even better against the 1st.
Regarding a single state, those are great questions, and I have never, not once, heard any good solution to them. The "best" (i.e., least genocidal) has been Israel annexing Palestine and having a permanent disenfranchised underclass (e.g., the current Israeli Palestinians), which is kind of a huge problem if you like democracy and human rights. Most other plans appear to be thinly-veiled preparations for future genocide.
I dunno about what to do about the genocidal tendencies on both sides. Maybe Ireland has some good lessons here? I don't know what happened there, but for a while they had a diaspora that was feeding the violent conflict with rhetoric and money and weapons, and then it gradually faded away. Maybe Deiseach has some ideas?
https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023%20-%20Tables%20of%20Results.pdf
> Table 33: Do you support the solution of establishing one state or two states in the following formats:
> One-State Solution for Two Peoples: 5.4%
> A Palestinian state from the river to the sea: 74.7%
> I dunno about what to do about the genocidal tendencies on both sides
I don't think there's really a both sides here (well not since Baruch Goldstein died).
(Would you mind clarifying? I am genuinely unclear on what you are implying here.)
Israelis haven't tried to genocide palestinians (with the exception of a few high profile examples, like the infamous Baruch Goldstein). They could succeed pretty easily if they did want to. Israeli's primary goals really are mostly just wanting to be able to live safely.
I think this is a point that gets missed in western discourse - yes Israel has settler types, but their main argument in domestic politics is "when we pulled out of Gaza we got Hamas". If you had a way to convince Israelis they don't need to fear for their lives, they wouldn't actually want more fighting.
> like the infamous Baruch Goldstein
Ah yes, the infamous and very condemned Baruch Goldstein, which the minister of National Security in the current Israeli government used to have a portrait of in his living room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir.
Very unrepresentative indeed.
So, I'm not talking about all Israelis, and I do think that the percentage of Israelis in favor of this is less than the percentage of Gazans in favor of this. Also, the impression I've gotten is that the attitude is less "kill them" and more "get rid of them, I don't care how", which is perhaps less bad? Although as the cycle of violence continues, there's probably more "kill them".
Anyway, my impression is that the Israeli "settler types" have been largely biding their time and nudging policy towards conflict, because up until Oct 7th they thought they were safely winning. And that most of them realize that individually emulating Goldstein is going to be counterproductive, because it won't kill enough Palestinians to do any good, and it will cause blowback from other Israelis and the rest of the world. Like, whenever I read stuff about on-the-ground interactions, even in sympathetic Jewish media, there's usually at least one place where I start shaking my head because some Israelis are acting like, pardon my language, **total dicks**. It reminds me of stories of the American South in the Jim Crow era, where there was usually some white person who would delight in humiliating any black people they came across, with an attitude of "I can do this to you and you have to take it, because you know what will happen if you even look at me the wrong way".
TBH I strongly dislike settlers and if palestinians exclusively targets actual settlers (ideally just actual armed people, but even just settlers) and didn't consider everyone in Israel to be a settler, or had an explicit goal of controlling the land outside the 67 borders, I'd be a hell of a lot more sympathetic. If I were in charge of Israel I actually would force them back over the border wall unilaterally. I wouldn't expect any deal or concessions from the palestinians for it, I just think they make everything worse and shouldn't be there.
That said, I think "genuinely enjoys doing bad things to arabs just because" is a minority even among settlers (as in "people living on the other side of the green line", not "anyone who identifies as a settler", which is more selected to be bad).
I'm not sure what meets the legal definition of genocide, but Israeli bombardment of Gaza and blocking aid at least counts as mass murder. I'm tempted to count Egypt as complicit.
Genocide means:
Genos: Greek for "race"
-cide: killing.
According to the Hague, genocide is "a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part." So it all comes down to whether you think Israel's intent is to destroy Palestinians for being Palestinians. Given that they gave ample warning before their invasion, encouraged Palestinians to evacuate to safer zones, and have allowed aid supplies to enter Palestine (despite the fact that they know some or all of the aid will be taken by Hamas), it seems that their goal in this war is not to wipe out Palestinians as a people (naturally, there's over a million Palestinian citizens in Israel and they aren't being rounded up into death camps), or Gazan Palestinians particularly as a people.
If you count all urban warfare as mass murder then I guess, but then so is every other country. This isn't a useful definition to have.
(This is also avoiding the question of why Egypt would be complicit - unless you're assuming they, an arab country, also want to murder arabs for ethnic grounds, you have to accept that this is all motivated by genuine security concerns).
(Israel also isn't blocking aid, except for examining it for weapons, which is reasonable given that they keep finding people trying to smuggle them in).
Wikipedia link offered as a public service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein
"Baruch Kopel Goldstein (Hebrew: ברוך קופל גולדשטיין; born Benjamin Carl Goldstein;[2] December 9, 1956 – February 25, 1994) was an Israeli-American mass murderer, religious extremist, and physician who perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, an incident of Jewish terrorism.[3][4][5] Goldstein was a supporter of the Kach, a religious Zionist party that the United States, the European Union and other countries designate as a terrorist organization.[6]
On February 25, 1994, Goldstein, a resident of the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba near Hebron, entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs that was serving as a mosque. Dressed in Israeli military uniform, he opened fire on the 800 Palestinian Muslim worshippers praying during the month of Ramadan, killing 29 and wounding 125 worshippers, until he was beaten to death by survivors.[7]"
Let's distinguish between Israeli's in general and the Israeli government. (And also between Palestinians in general and Hamas, of course.)
Statements made by ministers from the top to the bottom of the current Israeli government (per LearnsHebrewHatesIP's link to the ICC case against Israel) have made explicit calls to depopulate the land of Gaza and annex the land for Israel. This is not consistent with claims of a "two-state" solution, nor of claims that all they're doing is "fighting Hamas" that are often made in the English-speaking press.
We know how to do counter-insurgency. The US military taught the world from its experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan how to do counter-insurgency (and how NOT to do it). What's happening in Gaza right now bears no resemblance to a military campaign aimed at rooting Hamas out of the Palestinian population. It looks exactly like it's a campaign at mass removal of the resident population from the land (which I guess would 'technically' also remove Hamas from Gaza). Given that 1.) military strategy supports interpreting this as a mass-depopulation campaign and not as an attempt at targeted destruction of Hamas, and 2.) direct statements from countless officials at every level of Israeli command confirm this is a mass-depopulation campaign; we should probably conclude that this is a mass depopulation campaign.
The counter-signaling from intelligence agencies that have been routinely wrong about such things in the past should not be relied upon now as a barometer to judge the actions of the current Israeli government as somehow the "only" way to root out Hamas. Experience dictates that there are almost certainly MORE Hamas fighters as a result of the Israeli military response than have been reportedly destroyed by that response. (Again, we need to distinguish the Israeli government from the people, who would presumably NOT support an explicit campaign of mass displacement and land seizure.)
As to the statement that "yes Israel has settler types", this feels entirely dismissive of the reporting (and constant complaints of Palestinians) on this issue. Every year, scores of thousands of Israelis forcibly remove Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank, and they do so with direct funding from their government. It's to the point where fully 40% of the population of East Jerusalem is made up of Israelis, who won't allow Palestinians to "trespass" on "their" land. By design, this sometimes creates situations where Palestinians are surrounded by Israeli settlements such that they can't even get to the market without entering "Israeli" land, for which sins they are forcibly removed from their land.
(This is partly why Palestinians don't see claims that Israel is offering a two-state solution as credible. Instead it looks like stalling for time until Israel can gradually expel everyone left in the West Bank. Israel is already unwilling to respect territorial boundaries they nominally 'agree' should be part of the West Bank. Permanently displacing and resettling massive numbers of people every year isn't how you signal intent to respect territorial integrity.)
Hundreds of Palestinians die every year because they oppose being forcibly displaced from their homes by what has been official Israeli government policy for decades. This has resulted in millions of Palestinians being displaced, and millions of Israelis building communities on land they literally stole at the point of an IDF gun. That's not "settler types". That's a systematic effort to drive off an entire population and replace them with Israelis. Call it what you will.
> LearnsHebrewHatesIP's link to the ICC case against Israel
Minor nitpick: What I linked is a case against Israel in the ICJ, International Court of Justice, which has authority against Israel because Israel is signatory to the treaty that establishes the court and gives it its power to prosecute Genocide.
The ICC, Interntaional Criminal Court, is a different court that Israel mostly doesn't recognize on basis of "Pro-Palestinian bias", and Netanyahu have thrown a temper tantrum in November (as far as I can remember) declaring that the ICC is not welcomed in Israel. Despite this, the ICC is conducting investigations into war crimes claims against both sides.
> Israelis haven't tried to genocide Palestinians
https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf
I thought your plan was to wait until *after* a verdict is pronounced before you start using the ICJ case in place of an actual argument?
I'd been thinking of "Defund the police" as a vague slogan that leads to a lot of contention.
My idea is that it's very very hard and the situation seems to be at about the point the North was in the 70s, so there's a lot more blood to be spilled before either side are willing to finally sit down and hammer something out.
Plus, Israel is the independent nation here, there isn't an exterior 'Great Britain' that they are part of which can bring them to the negotiating table (the USA isn't playing that part for them).
I have come across a fair number of Irish (1st/2nd gen immigrants) and have listened to some fascinating stories told over a pint. The Good Friday accords, leveraging the EU borderless travel framework, featured prominently in allowing both sides pretend they got what they wanted.
Hello Brexit!
It's astonishing that this issue didn't feature prominently on the Remainers campaign trail. But then they didn't campaign much, I guess thinking their case was so self-evident it needed to public campaign in support. If there were one country that should have never left the EU it is the UK. We're still in early stages of this farce, which I fully expect to end in the UK being in the EU de-facto, but without a voice. The alternative is hard to contemplate: the kids who lived through the Troubles are now in their 50's and still remember the shotguns and the bombs.
It's never even occurred to me that 'from the river to sea' might mean a democratic, peaceful state including both Israelis and Palestinians. I can't imagine anybody on either side wanting that?! Those Arabs who wanted to stay in the Israeli Partition in 1948 have integrated as a (reasonably successful?) minority, but surely that ship has sailed for the 'refugee' Palestinians.
Whether it's possible or not *in this case* - there are powerful arguments that it isn't - there have in fact been many conflicts in the world solved by implementing a solution that neither side *wants* but both have to *live with*. Ie the Bosnian war ended with a solution that gave Serbs too much power from the Bosniak/Croat perspective and too little (ie. not full independence) from the Serbian side, and the resulting state is a mess, but it has still kept the peace for almost 30 years now.
Indeed, one might argue that the whole point of democracy is that it helps find compromises that intractable enemies can barely live with, at least for a time, and that liberal norms (like our understanding of freedom of religion) have developed from precisely such compromises.
The case has been made that a two-state isn't possible, and that Hamas must be 'eliminated' -- and not just in Gaza. Egypt and Jordan verbally defend Palestinians, but keep them at arms' length -- due to their toxicity. Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon would likely need to be partners in a peaceful resolution, but they won't be opening their borders to Palestinians betrayed by Hamas any time soon.
These are two different things. Hamas must indeed be eliminated, at least in Gaza. But Hamas is ~3% of Gaza Palestinians and <1% in the West Bank, so when Hamas is eliminated there will still be an awful lot of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
It is at least plausible that, without Hamas, the remaining Palestinians could coexist in a two-state solution w/Israel. Germany, without the Nazis, had no trouble coexisting in a many-state solution with the rest of Europe. The biggest problem I think would be finding a legitimate not-hopelessly-corrupt government for the Palestinian state, and that may be a dealbreaker.
>The biggest problem I think would be finding a legitimate not-hopelessly-corrupt government for the Palestinian state, and that may be a dealbreaker.
One possibility might be to, at least temporarily, have the Palestinians ruled by someone other than either the Israelis or themselves. Perhaps one of the Muslim states in the region that is on at least "frenemies" terms with Israel? Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia? After WWII neither Japan nor Germany was fully autonomous again for quite a few years.
There is no Arab state that will sign on for this. They'd get way too much blowback domestically, and from the rest of the world, and from the Palestinians themselves for being insufficiently vigorous in supporting the Palestinian cause in their new role as rulers of Palestine.
And "being sufficiently" vigorous in supporting the Palestinian cause would lead very promptly to being at war with Israel, with no assurance that the war would be limited to their security forces deployed in Palestine, so they're not signing up for that one either.
That's a pity. The problem is unfortunately even a bit worse than finding a legitimate not-too-corrupt government for the Palestinian state. It _also_ has to not present a threat of yet more October 7ths to Israel.
To mangle a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle, when you have eliminated the humane, whatever remains, no matter how inhumane, must be the outcome :-(
I think it's important to understand exactly what the concern is from states that refuse to allow in Palestinian refugees. When you're a Hashemite monarchy set up by the British it's probably not a good idea to let in a massive influx of people who have been agitating for an independent Arab state for their whole lives.
People have been handwringing about why Hamas would perpetrate 10/7, when the Israeli response was entirely predictable. But Hamas' audience was never Israel. They want to make the case to the Arab community that they're fighting to establish an independent Arab state - something many in the region have dreamed of since the fall of the Ottoman empire, and what Arabs thought had been promised by the British during Mandate Palestine. In other words, Hamas' 'message' of 10/7 was to the people of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Of course those rulers aren't going to let people from Gaza in. They don't want to foment the overthrow of their own governments.
Does anyone happen to know whether Palestinian attacks on nearby Arab governments was criticized as a violation of hospitality? (Is that the word I want? I mean that guests have obligations to not attack their hosts.)
Have you been listening to Ezra Klein's podcast (or reading the transcripts)? He's been talking to a lot of Israeli and Palestinian people about this topic. So far I think the general consensus is that a one state solution is impossible.
Does he think a two state solution is possible?
He thinks it's essential, but increasingly hard to achieve as the war continues and feelings on all sides harden.
I think both a one-state solution and a two-state solution are impossible. This leaves us with two possible solutions that would bring about a state of peace. One is to kill all the Palestinians. You might call this the "final solution".
The second is for the Palestinians to go somewhere else which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants. But this must be done ethically.
I propose that a coalition of countries buy territory equal in land mass to greater Israel. For instance carve out this amount of land from Sudan which is in the same general geographic area, and pay Sudan 10 times their GDP. The US would permanently divert ALL OF THE MONEY that we currently gift to Israel to pay for the purchase and the construction of a new Palestine.
"I propose that a coalition of countries buy territory equal in land mass to greater Israel."
You can buy land, but you can't buy sovereignty, generally speaking
We live in a world where ethnic cleansing is considered to be so horrible that it's considered to better to keep people trapped under governments that hate them.
Some number of Palestinians don't want to leave, though I don't know how they'd choose if there were a functioning Palestinian country somewhere else.
Clearly, this idea of a new country would only work if the Palestinians embraced it completely.
Israel will not let them return to to their collapsed homes in Gaza. Israel will keep them cooped up around Rafah until they can drive them into the Sinai.
Given that reality, I can't help but imagine that a country with area equal to Israel would look pretty good.
I think Israel will absolutely let them return to Gaza eventually. If they didn't, they would lose all US support immediately, no question. I can't imagine they would risk that.
It seems to me that it's really important to distinguish between Gaza and the West Bank here.
The range of possible solutions fans out to:
1. One big state with Israelis & Arabs.
2. Israel + one Palestinian state in two pieces.
3. Israel + Palestinian state in the West Bank + Gaza continuing to be a sore spot.
4. Israel takes over Gaza (what happens to the Gazans? that's the question) and the Palestinians have a state in the West Bank.
5. Israel takes over both and a lot of Palestinians just disappear.
This is where Israel's treatment of the West Bank seems particularly counterproductive to me. Let's accept that nobody knows what the fuck to do with Gaza. The only solutions we even seem to have a reasonable path to center on a stable West Bank state. Israel has a chance to do a good cop/bad cop and let the West Bank get some legitimacy, which would strengthen their options in Gaza. Either (a) let the West Bank manage it and make it their problem or (b) work out some kind of resettlement regime, possibly involving land swaps.
Instead, Israel seems to have lost faith in _any_ stable Palestinian state coming into existence, and just hoping that they can eventually make the problem go away with enough violence and land grabs. Israel's in a really tough spot but I think they're hurting their own cause.
Are you aware that Netanyahu supported the formation of Hamas because he knew that it would split the Palestinians and prevent a stable Palestinian state from forming.
I view that as being similar to America's left-wing media supporting Donald Trump's candidacy in the 2016 Republican primaries. It was stupid and mean-spirited and backfired horribly, but in the big picture they only bear a small amount of the blame.
I'm aware of the allegations, yes, and without diving into their merit, it certainly helps explain why Israel is acting the way it is in the short term.
The "Palestinians go somewhere else" even if it could be done and would benefit all sides, is something Palestinians would never accept because they value land too much (we're talking about people who still call their neighborhoods "refugee camps" because their great great grandparents lived there during WW2). The rest of the world would also never accept it, labeling it as ethnic cleansing. (And, of course, we've never found a country willing to take in large numbers of Palestinians - Egypt flat out said they'd shoot anyone coming over the border from Gaza if they tried).
It's entirely possible it would be the best solution for everyone involved (especially the Palestinians). But it's unworkable, which Israelis have on the whole accepted.
I believe Sudan would seriously consider an offer of ten times GDP for about 10% of their land.
There are roughly six imaginable futures:
Status quo (perpetual violence)
One-state solution
Two-state solution
Kill all the Palestinians
Palestinians are driven into Sinai
Buy a country for the Palestinians
I think only the first and the last are actually possible.
The status quo would mean that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians die, but it has the upside that the Israelis are driven insane and eventually shunned by the world.
I don't know enough about you to tell if that last comment is a joke or genuine hardcore antisemitism.
I think status quo vs two state solution is not that clear of a divide. Aside from the Sudan option (which I don't believe is realistic for the reasons mentioned above), the most likely long term solution seems to be "Palestinians get their own land with civilian and economic control but Israel maintains security control".
Iran is a bad baseline here - Palestinians are sunni arabs, which is a pretty different culture. Even if you ignore the entirety of Israeli history, you can count how many Jews are left in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan.
Hamas is not an Iranian client, they have much more independence than that. If they're Iranian clients then Israel is a US client.
I mean, I'd be fine with calling Israel a US client. They're a pretty important US ally in the region, buy a lot of weapons from us, we have some amount of influence over their foreign policy, etc. Is there some more specific relationship that "client" implies in your book?
I was thinking of the concept of Client State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_state.
The Golden Tests for me are:
(1) No secrets from the patron state: a client state cannot hide secrets from its patron state, and there are severe consequences if they try and fail
(2) Clients cannot set their own foreign policy and/or military goals, the patron state sets them for it
I don't think Hamas or Israel satisfy any of those conditions unambiguously with their respective patrons (Iran and USA). Maybe at certain times their leadership is weak and (1) and (2) might be satisfied temporarily, but it's not a permanent feature of the 2 relationships.
Expel all the Jews would be bad, too-- and they wouldn't just go, which could transition into kill all the Jews.
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.
What's interesting is that three out of the cited studies were done in the UK:
Racial Discrimination and White-collar Workers in Britain
Roger Jowell and Patricia Prescott-Clarke (1970)
Half a chance?: A report on job discrimination against young blacks in Nottingham
Jim Hubbuck, S. Carter
(Published 1980)
"The Policy Studies Institute (PEP’s successor) then conducted their third field experiment (Brown and Gay 1985)."
The most recent one is US-based, and again interesting because isn't Chicago majority black today?
"We study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers.
Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2004. "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." American Economic Review, 94 (4): 991-1013."
Okay, not majority black, and the population for all races has been declining steadily, but still a good proportion of black inhabitants:
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/chicagocityillinois/PST045222
"White alone, percent 42.4%
Black or African American alone, percent 28.8%"
So, given that I certainly have the impression that a lot of the local government is black, the idea that there is still noticeable racial discrimination if you have a 'black' name is startling:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/9/17/22675534/chicago-diversity-census-aldermen-city-council-editorial
"Chicago is now 31.4% white, 29.9% Latino, 28.7% Black and 6.9% Asian. In the City Council, Latinos hold 12 seats, while white and Black aldermen each hold 19 seats." (plus the mayor is black)
So I do have to ask - is it having a black name, or is it having what is perceived as a 'lower-class' black name? How would a résumé from a white applicant named Cletus Bubba Lee fare?
Gee those are all hopelessly out of date. It is very easy to imagine less discrimination now than then.
> So I do have to ask - is it having a black name, or is it having what is perceived as a 'lower-class' black name? How would a résumé from a white applicant named Cletus Bubba Lee fare?
I'm fairly confident someone did this exact study (comparing black and white names with similar implied socio economic status), but can't for the life of me actually find it or remember the results.
Yeah, trying to look it up just brings up the same kind of studies:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discrimination-jobs
"Some of the common white names used were Emily or Greg, he says, and distinctively Black names used include Jamal or Lakisha. The study’s authors used these names as a way of trying to understand discrimination in the employment application process."
Well, uh, Emily and Greg are not the equivalent of Lakisha and Jamal for a start (was it First Lady Michelle or Lakisha Obama, hmmm?). I don't think there's even a Greg anywhere in my family, and we're milk-bottle white 😀
Any social scientists on here, there's a prompt for your next study! "Are Emily and Greg more employable than Tammy-Lynn and Billy-Bob?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yeleycqt1Dw
Well, you're not American. I have two Gregs and an Emily in my family.
I must bow down to your superior All-American Whiteness. Clearly we Paddies still have a long way to go to assimilate completely to the superior Anglo-Saxon culture, as Disraeli would have it:
"Benjamin Disraeli, Letter to The Times
‘[The Irish] hate our free and fertile isle. They hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty, and our pure religion. The wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their fair ideal of human felicity is an alteration of clannish brawls and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.’ (Quoted in C. L. Innes, Through The Looking Glass: African and Irish Nationalist Writing, 12; cited in Margaret Greene, UG Diss., UU 2007.)"
I've lost the plot somewhere here. What does Ireland have to do with American race relations?
If the effect is small and being measured in a way that's very noisy (and/or otherwise prone to error), then their explanation could account for the bulk of what is measurable, and anything left over is too small to distinguish from 0.
(Also keep in mind that the screener and reviewer, even if different, are not likely to be wholly unrelated in how they assess candidates.)
In my, anecdotal but N>>1, high-tech experience the screener only screens and then is out of the way for the hiring process, with the decision pretty much in the hands of the hiring manager. So being kicked out by the screener is always the end, but not otherwise. I cannot emphasize enough how far away the authors' explanation is from my N>>1 experience.
Well, I do think that many businesses operate differently from that. I think tech is more likely to have a lot more regimented hiring process that involves multiple people. In many other industries, I think it is common for the same person to review resumes and conduct interviews. The smaller the company, as well, the more likely you are to have a process like that, since there just aren't enough people to have them specialize like that.
Yes, you're right, my experience is likely heavily skewed by being in high-tech, where the screener simply doesn't have enough expertise in the highly-technical field to contribute to the interviewing process.
Yeah I'm with you. Screener being a different person is common. Moreover. "racist" isn't a binary condition. Someone may look at a "black" name and go "ah, I'll pass", but it may be a different story when actual competent candidate shows up. So the paper authors argument seems to be of a "spherical cow" variety.
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.
Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. How you conduct yourself is very important for this, too, and can override many physical "flaws".
It's a common myth that Marilyn Monroe was "plus-sized." It's not true: https://themarilynmonroecollection.com/marilyn-monroe-true-size/
> The BMI men generally prefer is about 18-20 which again is typical for girls about 14.
...today. Go back, say, 70 years or more, and a lot more adult women fell into that BMI range.
> 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.
While my wife was pregnant, she had even softer, smoother skin than before. I suspect that a soft, smooth skin is at least partially an indicator for favorable hormone levels, and not just for age.
> Small perky boobs with soft unused nipples are more attractive than big heavy ones [...]
Speak for yourself :-)
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 .
Can't remember why I know this but it is nothing to do with technology. It's privacy for the pilots, stipulated by their union.
Yeah its all due to the pilot union: https://viewfromthewing.com/exposed-the-fierce-battle-over-cockpit-privacy-unveiling-pilot-unions-resistance-to-key-safety-reforms/
The point being what, their right to discuss the coke and hookers of last night or their marital problems or their investment strategies without being recorded? Most of us manage to keep it professional, during professional hours.
This is a pretty good test of government capacity. it's now out in public that the FAA has allowed airlines to avoid paying for an upgrade which is obviously long overcdue. will we see action. How soon? or will some litigous lawyer (I know, redundant), get there first with some class action suit?
FAA is now proposing a 25-hr limit. We shall see.
25 hours is the European regulatory requirement, and it would seem sensible to standardize on that. Agree that some pilots will push back.
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.
Clever bots are extra common now
yeah, you really need to wait a few days before posting a lot.
Ive had a reddit account for 7+ years, I get blocked from posting on my own subreddit (that I created and moderate), saying Im posting too much. And Im talking about 2-3 posts in a few minutes, so its not like Im spamming
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.
I asked about that a while back and was pointed to this which seems useful (although I haven't actually gotten around to following all the steps so I can't say for sure that it works):
https://freethoughtblogs.com/gruntled/2014/05/12/the-s-guide-to-getting-a-therapist-masterpost/
Didn’t Scott recently update his psychiat-list of mental health professionals in the Bay? (See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-306 )
Research types that have their own certifications and check their websites. E.g. EMDR, IFS, ISTDP, etc.
Has anyone one else here looked into Flat Earth? I’m sure the world isn’t flat but they do a good job of challenging a lot of what I have always taken for granted. Anyway I’d love to hear your thoughts.
https://youtu.be/OQCXT2pkans?feature=shared
This would not be bannable on its own, but this poster has a habit of posting things exactly like this to a degree that make me think he's a troll. Banned.
One minute into the video, they talk about how all historical cultures agreed that Polaris is the unmoving star above the North Pole (the center of the flat Earth).
Actually... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star
Also, the Southern Hemisphere is a thing. (I mean, supposedly.)
If the earth is flat, how come we never see a side-view of mars or venus?
I would be more interested in a "flat spacetimer" troll. Someone who at least understands the concept of matter causing spacetime to be curved, but, nevertheless, denies that it happens.
It's completely optional to think of gravity as bending spacetime, or as a force that operates equally on all mass-energy in a flat spacetime. I think the latter is more consistent, myself. My opinion is that thermodynamics ultimately requires a flat 'consensus' spacetime.
I thought that, on a cosmological scale, the current best estimates were that it averages to flat (not intending to deny gravitational lensing or the measured deflection of starlight by the Sun or gravitational waves.)
There is a whole ecosystem on youtube of people proposing flat-Earth models and others tearing them apart. None of the flat-Earth models survive even the smallest bit of critical probing, like "how come the sun appears to be the same size everywhere?" and "how come international flights work as advertised?"
The really interesting aspects are psychological IMO: how can people who are not stupid in the conventional sense fall into such a rabbit hole?
I'm not a flat-Earther, but I don't really understand your objections. The sun in most flat-Earther theories is still a light far away up in the sky, so it always appears the same size for the same reason the sun does in real life. (That theory of course raises the question of how night happens, and the flat-Earthers have some complicated explanation for that.) International flights work more or less the same way they do in real life, with planes going between cities on a disc, with the main difference being that the parallels are usually concentric circles in their maps. Planes that appear to be travelling in straight lines over long distances are actually curving very gradually, and even the pilots may not be aware of this because their GPS and other instruments are designed for this curved coordinate system. Although I guess that's not so different than what happens with a round Earth: straight lines on a sphere are really curves.
Well the reality that the curvature of the earth is unobservable pretty compelling. Also the way they argue against Aristotles idea that ships sink beyond the horizon is interesting enough to travel a little further down the rabbit hole. Then when you realize all images of the earth are photoshopped it makes all the more interesting. You got to admit it’s Offaly convenient that the sun and moon appear the same size because the sun is 400 times larger but also happens to be 400 times further away.
Your name says it all. Do you really enjoy this abject waste of time?
An obvious question is where does the Sun go at night? Then you ask, do people to the east or west of you have a different experience of the Sun? If the answer is no, apply symmetry.
Obviously that only indicates roundness in one dimension, but there is probably enough evidence to apply symmetry again...
[P.S. even if you doubt that ships sink below the horizon, how can you doubt it of the Sun? It being a light source that disappears, and all...]
The video above does a good job of describing how the sun and moon work on a flat earth. But here is a quick 5 min video if you’re interested
https://youtu.be/fqr02ZmqRbQ?feature=shared
They basically believe the sun is much more local. So it moves across the sky and moves beyond the vanishing point of our perspective so it looks like it’s going down.
Where's the vanishing point in your flat earth geometry, my dude? Vanishing points are nominally at infinity. How does the Sun get there? Does it move slowly over our head, then accelerate exponentially away? Again, asking someone slightly to the east or west should cast doubt on that hypothesis...
I'm not going to argue against your other "I'm only asking questions" bogus claims, because you're probably just trolling. I just want to address this claim:
> Offaly convenient that the sun and moon appear the same size because the sun is 400 times larger but also happens to be 400 times further away.
The apparent size of the moon varies by about 12% over its orbit, so it doesn't even make sense to say "the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size, this is too unlikely to be a coincidence", because they don't actually always appear to be the same size (only about once every two weeks).
Thanks!
>Well the reality that the curvature of the earth is unobservable pretty compelling.
I don't understand. Your very next sentence is the evidence that this isn't true. You can sincerely, verifiably see the curvature of the earth at sea. You can watch objects whose size you can personally verify sink below the horizon.
>You got to admit it’s Offaly convenient that the sun and moon appear the same size because the sun is 400 times larger but also happens to be 400 times further away.
I don't understand this either. They don't appear to be the same size. They're somewhat close, that's all. It's not even a very interesting (minor) coincidence.
They claim ship sinking below the horizon is an illusion. You can just zoom in with a telescope or high powered camera and the objects come back in to view. Watch the video I posted it’s all very interesting. The only really fatal flaw from what I can tell is their denial of gravity. They claim it’s just bouncy, density and electrostatics. It’s a fascinating video of you can suspend your disbelief for an hour or so.
>You can just zoom in with a telescope or high powered camera and the objects come back in to view.
No, they don't. If they do come back into view, they, by definition, haven't disappeared beyond the horizon yet.
>Watch the video I posted it’s all very interesting.
I am definitely not going to do that. I'm absolutely certain it is not very interesting, because I've read all of your comments here, and none of them are interesting.
>It’s a fascinating video of you can suspend your disbelief for an hour or so.
Suspension of disbelief is for art and fiction, and this is just mental illness or trolling. Not fun or interesting.
" If they do come back into view, they, by definition, haven't disappeared beyond the horizon yet."
Yes this was the most compelling argument for the 5 or 6 y.o. me asking about it (this is the level at which these "pretty compelling arguments" are): if the Earth were flat, you could see Europe from Boston with a powerful enough telescope. But youtube didn't exist back then, so there was no place for so much dumb shit being promoted to so many for so much money to be made by all.
The Earth is round.
Nice glowpost, fed.
I tend to agree but if you watch the video they do a pretty interesting job challenging the way we usually prove the earth is round. I’m fascinated by the whole idea of a flat earth it’s really a lot of fun imagining an alternative understanding of the world.
The rotation of the earth causes apparent forces. One, the centrifugal force, would be effectively indistinguishable from gravity to a flat-earther (and to us, since we can't easily perceive that the earth is not perfectly round). The other, the coriolis force, depends on motion and AFAIK is unexplainable on a flat earth.
It's the reason the winds over the oceans blow with low pressure to the left (facing downwind) in the Northern Hemisphere and to the right in the Southern Hemisphere. The Earth's rotation is causing an apparent force to the right in the NH and to the left in the SH and the pressure force is balancing it. Likewise, the closer you are to the equator, a weaker pressure force is enough to balance the coriolis force for a given wind speed.
I’ve some heard good arguments from them against the Coriolis force, but you’re right weather patterns are a still mystery I haven’t heard them try to explain.
Here’s a quick 5 min video on the Coriolis force.
https://youtu.be/x4Zge7YgON4?feature=shared
Humans are very good at constructing fascinating smart-sounding arguments defending the silliest things. Round nonetheless.
What do you think is the strongest argument for a round earth?
I personally think that there isn't one. Disappearing ships is a good one but I haven't observed it and there is confusion with optical properties of moist air.
I think the theory of round earth were first proposed by ancient Greeks. I don't exactly remember how they did this but something about noticing that at noon when sun is at its highest, it is different time according to the location. How could they measure it if they had no mechanical clocks?
Anyway, my point is that even simple scientific facts are rarely easily observable. Instead, they were concluded by many different measurements and logical guesswork that allowed us to select the theory that makes most sense. Round earth, existence of atoms, oxygen or flogiston, does ivermectin treats covid, are masks effective in reducing spread of covid – all these different theories cannot be proved by one simple observation. We need multiple observations from different sources and rigorous thinking what this evidence means and it all fits together. In medicine it is called metareview or systemic reviews or whatever.
We rarely do it from scratch. Instead, we accept things and continue building from there. I guess that video is very instructive how hard it was for ancients. But they did all the hard work and we should be grateful to them. Today people are lazy, they want to see an easy proof which is not possible. One has to study hard for many years to understand basics and then he would be able to “see” how everything fits together and make good predictions based on this theory.
Thanks for the thorough response. The video does address the ancient Greeks and how they came to believe in a round globe. I think the video is interesting because it calls into question the assumption that all of this hangs together. Very few people question the scientific consensus.
That we can see it from space.
We can’t images from space depicting a curve are shot with a wide-angle or fish eye lens. Compare NASA with Chinese images. The Chinese images from lower earth orbit show a totally flat horizon.
Look. I know where this is going. The earth is round. I have 0 interest in "proving" it, debating arguments "for it".
That’s fine you were commenting so I thought maybe you were interested in engaging.
I don’t see the harm in exploring basic science concepts in an open thread on a rationalist blog. I think I’m being respectful and in good faith. I’m just sharing something I find fascinating.
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 went through a phase where I kept feeling bugs on my body in bed. Turns out that I had become attuned to the disturbances of body hairs, particularly on my legs. I would feel a little tickle and freak out that there were bugs under the sheets. Once I recognized that it was my body hair, I was able to learn to tolerate the feeling.
In retrospect, I believe my sensitivity had to do with the reduction in "noise" signals in bed. When I'm up and about, my sensory inputs are busy with lights and sounds and the feeling of clothes. But when I go to bed, the noise is reduced, and I can focus on things like the shifting of hairs on my body.
I wonder whether you're sensing a boulder because there's not enough noise to diminish the relative intensity of the pebble/pea.
Interesting! Like my tinnitus. Insufficient external sound causes greater tinnitus sound.
Per Scott's old post, "The Precision Of Sensory Evidence," if sensory evidence gets a high weight, is the brain less likely to defer to its prior?
If so, what would be the implications? Is your mood more responsive to your situation than is typical? Do you prefer happy music to sad music? etc...
link- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence
_Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight_ is about "sensory defensiveness". It isn't autism or neuroticism, it's having a sensory system that doesn't fit well with mainstream society. There are methods carefully hidden away in occupational therapy that might help. As I recall, it involves giving the person time off from the stressful stimulus and then gradually introducing it.
For some reason, I am a bit like this, but only when I am going sleep, and not at other times.
I think Scott has mentioned in various posts in the past that this is associated with autism? E.g., in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-up/
There's a reason we have the phrase "wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers" as a strong endorsement of attractiveness. I wonder if there's an evolutionary bit warning us about bugs.
At only 3500 hits in Google, I wouldn't really cite that phrase as evidence of anything. From hits, it's unclear if it's even supposed to be a high or low threshold.
I'm chuckling now. It's a joke phrase precisely because of the ambiguity. Is it damning with faint praise? Is it a one-night stand with the promise of changing the sheets in the morning? Are we talking about an ongoing relationship that will ensure one's bed is always filled with crumbs? How many crackers does this woman eat?
The more subtle layer of humor is that it sometimes introduces a note of physical discomfort into an otherwise perhaps crass conversation about a woman's appearance, and is thus subversive. Alternately, if the conversation weren't about her appearance it introduces the bed in a nonsexual way (she's eating crackers in there -- are we reading books? what's going on?).
The only thing it's evidence of is that the experience of finding sharp-edged crumbs in the bed is noteworthy enough to be a common referent. Nobody hit with this phrase for the first time will be confused about why crackers in bed could be a problem.
It isn't damning with faint praise. I think it is mostly supposed to be hyperbole. It doesn't even say the crackers must be eaten in bed. The question is, how bad of an irritant must something be before you decide you DON'T want them in bed?
Personally, I think that the humour is primarily because of the euphemism, and partly because of the understatement. Other things one might not kick an attractive person out of the bed for is farting.
I get "About 3,050 results".
If you didn't enclose the search query in quotes the number will be greatly inflated.
Okay yeah, just tried it without the enclosing quotes and got, "About 438,000 results".