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Maybe I am having a biased opening right now because I am young and having a lot of troubles with the dating stuff but honestly I think is although technology is progressing really fast . It’s solving most of our problems but still I have noticed technology has failed to solve the problem of frustration due to dating, so I was trying to understand the reason why this is happening maybe is it due to the very high expectations of of the people or is it happening due to We are not able to see that we are same making mistakes again and again, so let’s suppose in the case of woman, I’m quite sure they’re also looking for honest, connections and meeting the Normal people, but since their views are biased they are feeling to recognise the other normal people. they are not able to find the nice people so I was thinking about having a dating app in which it is shown that with how many people this person has talked with so let’s suppose if guy is talking with the 15 girls at a time it need to be shown on the profile that he has having a conversation with 15 girls, or he had talked with almost hundred girls so it will demotivate woman to talk with men who has most desirable characters as shown on their profile, it will make them understand that what they are seeking is also desired by thousands of other girls, and maybe they will try to have a normal standards. Give you chance to other people as well.

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It was about twenty years ago, but I have seen how a successful guy uses a dating application. He had twenty or more browser tabs open; I assume young women living near his location, satisfying his criteria. Every chat history started with the same sentence, I think it was "hello princess, how are you today?"; more interesting than starting with mere "hello" but still something that can be copy-pasted. Whenever he got a notification of a reply in some tab, he switched to that tab, spent a fraction of second looking at the chat history and wrote his next reply. I assume he already had a lot of experience with this and was following some script: first ask something personal but not serious (e.g. "do you like music?"), then ask whether she is free today and try to arrange a date. He was doing this as a background task while we discussed some business transaction, and when we finished he already had a girl waiting for him.

So yes, if you are the kind of a guy who is fluent at getting-the-date-scripts, online dating is a huge amplifier of your abilities; you couldn't approach so many women in such short time (while simultaneously doing something else at your home). And if you are not that kind of a guy, well, he is the kind you are competing against.

That said, isn't this just a more extreme version of the already existing offline difference between an extraverted guy who approaches ten different women in a pub every evening, and an introverted guy who approaches maybe one woman in a month or perhaps in a year? More attempts means more overall success, and importantly, it also means more practice, which means more success per unit of effort later.

The obvious response to trying to limit the number of approaches would be guys creating multiple accounts. In Firefox, you can log in as a different user in different tabs -- you create multiple "containers", each of them managing their own cookies and sessions, acting like a different instance of a web browser.

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I think that would work the opposite of the way you're expecting; if someone is talking with a hundred girls at a time on a dating website, it means that a hundred girls have reviewed him as being worth talking to. How many other options have that kind of track record?

If it did work the way you think, where talking to people means other people won't talk to you, it would kill the site. You would have to find a partner in your first X attempts or else the site's membership will ostracize you.

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I think you may misconstrue what "talking with 100 girls" means. This means they've got 100 tabs open. This is time-wasting behaviour, suggesting that this person is treating the app like a super low effort job application. If one of the hundreds bite, he doesn't need the other 99, so he's unnecessarily clogged the inboxes of 99 people (except, since the tactic works, most guys do it, and on net that means you waste a LOT of time even if you get tons of matches - basically like receiving dozens of resumes that aren't even remotely suitable for the role).

This isn't a failure mode in traditional matchmaking, because there's a kind of social credit score thing going on. Your mutual friends presumably don't hate you, so they're not going to recommend the complete time-wasters.

There's actually a good analogy to financial credit scores here, but a social credit score would be near impossible to implement. But here's a simple concept stolen from finance - banks usually co-ordinate to make sure only one lender approves a person's home loan application. This stops the consumer from wasting their time by mass spamming applications. The credit scores also stop someone from opening like 30 lines of credit by exploiting the fact that the lenders don't know who else is lending.

Making it public knowledge how many people someone is courting could be useful. I imagine that most people would be tolerant of like, 1 - 5 side conversations. We've all done it. Some people would be dead set on 0 side convos - they want to be the only one - and they can match with other people who want exclusive 1 on 1 chats (realistically I think they'd be a decent population but not the majority), and they can match with each other. Everyone would avoid a profile that had like 80 side convos open because that is a guaranteed timewaster, and if you make a new profile that's sockpuppetting or catfishing and is bannable.

You'd have it as a per session thing, it won't be something that follows your account forever. Idk if you should have 2 separate counts - one for the number of people messaging someone, and another for the number of people replied to, but I think that might also be good. In a party, you'd be able to see like 6 dudes lining up to talk to a girl, so you won't waste your time. On tinder, that queue is invisible, and it's too easy to jump to the incorrect conclusion that someone is ignoring you when they're probably just already in a different conversation.

It would make it a little more analogous to the experience of talking to strangers in a real world, physical setting, where you can see how many people someone's already approached, and how many people are already trying to talk to someone. It's still not as good as a physical party (you can't notice someone real-time turn everyone off, for one) but information wise it gets a little closer.

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As anyone tried to figure out how many Tom Swifties appear in the actual Tom Swift books? It seems like it might be interesting to investigate, if someone has a way to get the text of the books and run an LLM through them to find the puns.

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Anyone want to help crack this code?

https://drw.com/can-you-crack-this-code

No idea the level of difficulty. This is from a trading firm that my friend works at. I’m sure someone here can get it.

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I submitted it just now. I am confident that I got it correct.

The "code" is just Base64 encoding, which is obvious by the = sign at the end, which is padding, and the fact that the only other special character is a /.

The decoded instructions ask to implement Black-Scholes in Python and calculate option pricing and delta. I'm done that many times before, so I whipped up a quick solution to keep myself in shape.

I'd say it's fairly easy for someone familiar with Python and option pricing. It's probably quite hard for someone who hasn't done that sort of thing before. The fact that they don't clearly identify inputs makes it harder for someone not familiar with the jargon, who might otherwise be technical enough to solve it.

Fun exercise. Thanks for sharing.

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I believe I was mistaken and there are no spoiler tags in Substack. Please consider this a spoiler tag. Do not continue reading if you don’t want to see more possible information for the challenge.

Lewis - if I’m not too late to get your attention and you don’t mind me asking, for your actual values did you get:

4.65

13.16

-0.095

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I'm wondering why you said earlier that you might come off nutty, when you got the right answer?

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This isn’t my field, I had to make some guesses in terms of terminology, and I’m not always the best communicator. Nutty is probably an exaggeration, but again - bashful.

Thank you very much for confirming. I have not heard or seen anything post-submission from DRW. Not surprising, but I was dreading the possibility I would never get confirmation from someone who was actually in / around the field. I hate to have a mystery linger. You’ve done a tremendously good deed today.

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Yes, that is exactly what I got!

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You’re welcome! Thanks for sharing your solution. That’s definitely far outside my knowledge.

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So I've got no chance at solving this, but do we think the picture next to it is related to the code, or just a stock image?

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PARTIAL SOLUTION:

This is a clear-cut example of base64 encoding (the '=' at the end is the telltale sign). After this, you get a few simple-looking questions on the Black-Shoals formula.

The "Magic" operation on the CyberChef website can be a useful tool for problems like this.

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

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I submitted a guess but am too bashful to reveal what I submitted, even in spoilers. After sending it in I realized it may come off nutty.

Very excited to see if anyone else found it as interesting and what they might think, though.

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An unhelpful hint: you're worth more the more random you are.

DRW is a high frequency trading shop/market maker, yes?

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I assume if I crack it then the reward is the opportunity to apply for a job that I could have applied for anyway.

Definitely some weird repeated all-caps sequences. Upper vs lower case seems to be significant. I'd start by seeing if there's anything interesting about the distribution of characters and the transition probabilities.

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Yeah probably. I don’t care about whatever reward there is; I just want to be able to brag to my friend about the cleverness of SSC commenters/readers.

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That’s not Rot13.

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A flood is coming.

Why?

Because everything's on fire.

The prevailing culture for 100 years has been harm reduction. It's not about creating the positive, it's about reducing the negative.

In other words, it's all about putting fires out instead of building them.

And if you ask the people most advanced in this way of thinking to describe a heroic version of their belief system, all they can do is describe someone who doesn't commit any of the horrible sins. (At most, they will engage in the positive act of telling other people to stop engaging in negative acts).

Today's time is defined by our global awareness. This is a great achievement. And it's held up as one by those who trumpet "awareness" and "education" and nouns like that. We know about all the biggest wildfires burning around the world at any given time. We know them intimately, scene by scene, news cycle by news cycle. We will always be like this, because we are proud to be aware and educated and think others should do it more as well.

It can be stressful, though. 100 years ago, millions of people would die of a famine, and most people were unaware and were not made sad by it. It sounds heartless, but maybe that's why Nietzsche said that pity was what made pain contagious.

Today is defined by how aware we are of the largest problems going on all the time. Specifically the largest ones in the world, collectively drawing the attention of just about anyone. We're a new sort of thing, a global community that you can join without even talking with anyone, because it's a Schelling point; anyone looking at the largest world problems knows there's a community of others that must be looking at it with them.

People are proud of this because there's a lot of good in it (this is how we will eventually solve our largest problems), but they are sad because they are thinking about bad things all the time. The human superorganism forms by firing alarm bells, but in these the days of its infancy, it also makes everyone feel powerless to do anything.

But if you can't do anything that will work, you can at least do something you know won't work, and try to get other people to fix their attention on the bad things as well. So the integration of new individuals into the superorganism is progressing anyway.

We have doused the world in water for our fear of fire. Harm reduction means, anything that some people like and some people dislike, is extinguished. The negative experience counts, the postive experience doesn't. How dare you try to find happiness at the cost of hurting someone else? How dare you?

This is why we can't have nice things.

If a parade makes 99 people happy, and 1 offended, it will of course be shut down. Rinse and repeat, and you get a world with fewer and fewer fires. Not a lot of blazes tearing through swamps now, are there? Fire is always a sacrifice of something to create something. But if you're not allowed to make the sacrifice of offending others, you're going to end up creating a lot less.

Yet our time feels like a swamp in some ways, fecund, with our appreciation for earthy witches and Shrek.

But the world feels doused of all warmth and yet burning to pieces at the same time. "No one can say anything, no one can do anything" and "Nothing matters, nothing is true" are postmodern symptoms of minimalism. Minimalism means finding all the flaws and removing them: reducing the negative. It's a great and wise way to be, but taken too far, you end up with nothing.

So, there was a modern age, when we thought we knew what was what. We solved this, we solved that. We cured diseases and ended poverty and mass-produced luxury. Foe after foe fell, and 100 years ago, there was a vision of the future in which humanity continued on to utopia through science and tolerance.

But it turns out many of those successes were just low-hanging fruit. We can't just keep solving our problems by removing the bad bits of things forever. That's what postmodernism did to that visionary, modern age, and is doing. But the so-called successes of postmodernism were the result of of it pruning the excesses off of the highly productive modern era. It did not create of itself, but only polished that which another made.

And now that it has run its course and far past it, things feel very empty for a lot of people. Nothing matters, there are 10 global wildfires burning at any given moment, nothing you do in your personal life has any effect on the real problems (so why even bother putting your life in order?), none of the dousing of every flame in sight has been enough, so all you can do is call for a flood unlike any before.

On the climate change front, that's dousing a lot of industry. On the religious front, it means atheism. On the artistic front, empty chaos. On design, sleek, simple, elegant, and (post)modern.

But we have seen the errors of our ways. Some people are saying we need to go back to modernism. But there’s no going back; there never is and there never was. There’s only forward, and bringing along the best of modernism and postmodernism into the next step: metamodernism.

Postmodernism is minimalist; metamoderism is maximalist. It is Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, the best metamodern movie, and the most metamodern of all metamodern movies, which is extra meta-metamodern of it to be.

American has always had a hint of metamodernsim, ahead of its time. The great melting pot, the biggest and the most, the best and the greatest and the most good and the strongest and the best of the best.

But before metamodernism saves the day (before leading to its own unique series of challenges), there is a flood coming. The global community of the news-followers and the biggest problems-trackers is growing. There’s no system in place designed to exercise power based on the beliefs of a group of people at the global scale, not if the group is a minority in each country. But collectively, it is growing past the size of the most powerful countries on the planet. And just because all of that will hasn’t been harnessed systematically yet, that doesn’t mean it’s going to go slow once it happens. Once this unprecedented level of global consciousness and communication finds a way to mobilize, it will suddenly become a global superpower. And its general shape is toward extreme harm reduction. It has been an enemy to fun, and to comedy, and to the sacred (it calls taking anything very seriously “cringe” (fire is the element of cringe, water is the element of cool (but well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder - Hey Jude))).

We will make our own flood. We are getting ready to bring terrible control to bear to snuff out the last sources of harm around the world. And if it turns out that life is the source of harm, then that puts it on the chopping block next.

But I believe the wiser response is more or less inevitable. It’s just a question of how much we’ll suffer along the way. I have high hopes that we can smooth the process as much as possible and close the case on our current problems and get on to our next challenges to face.

Postmodernism is all about removing flaws. So, we look at everyone’s belief systems, and no one can make an airtight case for their system over the others’. Every system can be criticized in a huge way, and remember that ours is the age in which teaching “critical thinking” is the whole purpose of our educational system at its best. This is how postmodernism judges all the modern visions of the world, eliminates them because they all have flaws, and then ends up with nothing.

But we can let go of our critical postmodern approach to relating with each other. We can appreciate the best that is within each tradition. That is the metamodern way. Find all the good and all the beauty within each tradition and love it, and learn from it. Feel for yourself how others find God through their sacred traditions. Loving the good in other individuals and other groups and other systems is the key to understanding what is missing in them as well. Through this love and understanding, we will re-ignite the fires of passion, color, and adventure that have been coolly mocked out of our world. We can re-enchant our lives and find the faith to dream of a bright future again, to get our act together and our families and communities together and solve our problems. We will discover how much we share in common with our brothers and sisters who seek the divine in their other ways, what we can respect and admire about each other, what we can enjoy together and learn from each other.

So with the flood coming, chaos is coming. We have no idea which industries are going to be utterly transformed by AI in the next 5 years. I mean, we don’t know how AI will disrupt things 2 years from now, but we REALLY don’t know what the world will look like 5 years from now. Artists, writers, lawyers, doctors, at least. The education, retail, and restaurant industries are coming.

Maybe we have a model in Peterson’s and Pageau’s Subsidiary Identity. We need strong connections collected into hierarchies so that signals can pass up hierarchy and affect the top-down perception of things and influence its decision-making. Strong people making strong families and communities, getting their cities in order, and so on. Because when you don’t know what to prepare for, you invest in social capital and healthy institutions so you can be ready to mobilize when novel problems present themselves.

I think history has brought us here, from the visions of modernism, which seem somewhat naive in retrospect, to the criticism of postmodernism, which ironically pedestalizes flaw-removal, to the embrace of coming chaos that metamodernism is specialized for. And if we start smoothing the transition into this next step in history, perhaps we can minimize the destruction of the flood.

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I very much want to say the perspective of this post is one-sided. No, the world is shittier and way more diverse than described. No, harm minimization is not run its due course any. I live in an autocracy and I need to consciously deter myself from wailing or being angry at some people in the internet because it’s so so much different here. The proverbial parade will be canceled not when 1% of people feel it harmful, the parade will be held if 0.1% of state-aligned people wishes it so, with utter disdain to what others think. There is much to solve.

This is not to say that I don't value open/positive/humane thinking, there's lack of both really. I definitely don't want to say, without any evidence and kindness, that some people just have it very nice and easy and think that others have only problems like theirs, but it sure feels like that sometimes. Maybe doing something with that kind of thinking would be a good idea.

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i'm not sure post modernism is harm reduction as opposed to the realization that every abstract idea exists in a world of people and power structures, and this must be kept in mind.

tbh i dont get anything concrete here; the AI thing is more a return to a hard form of modernity in that an elite is top down shaping the world to their idea and fuck people. im not sure what meta modernity can do or plans to from what you write.

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> And if you ask the people most advanced in this way of thinking to describe a heroic version of their belief system, all they can do is describe someone who doesn't commit any of the horrible sins.

Notable exception: Effective altruism.

But in general, I agree. Our cultural definition of a good person has been reduced to "one who does nothing". We are not expected to solve problems (that is government's job), we are supposed to stay in the line, and maybe signal virtue by repeating the proper slogan.

On the other hand, every problem is an opportunity. Doesn't this give more power to various subcultures that define their own value systems? (Unless they grow large and get taken over by normies who bring their normie ways.)

> Today is defined by how aware we are of the largest problems going on all the time.

Looking at the largest problems can paralyze you, because on one hand, most of us aren't doing anything useful that directly contributes to solving those problems; on the other hand, everything else can seem smaller in comparison. "What's the point of cleaning my room, when millions in Africa are dying from malaria, and maybe soon an AI will kill us all?"

For me, parenting is a stabilizing experience. No matter what happens, I need to make my kids breakfast every day; I need to take them to school every day; etc. I can't afford to spend my day thinking about Ukraine, Palestine, AI doom, etc. And perhaps more generally, the solution is to be more involved in some local community (where family is the smallest kind of community), where your ordinary actions can make a big difference. By the way, that requires spending less time online.

> We can't just keep solving our problems by removing the bad bits of things forever.

It seems like people (at least some of them) need a certain amount of tension in their lives, and if you merely keep removing their problems, they will... create new problems, for the lack of better ideas. You also need to give them some positive direction to expend their energy. (Or someone else may give them a negative one.)

I think traditionally sport was supposed to be an answer to this? The socially approved way to channel your extra energy into activities that are not anti-social. (Though this also fails with spectator sports. The players at the football field burn their energy pro-socially, but their fans then go and demolish the city.)

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...Or we could simply let everything die. Almost all of human history is pre-postmodern, and it was an even worse shithole than it is now. What makes you think things will be different this time? As long as humanity exists, as long as individual agentic life exists, there will be constant conflict and pain and suffering. But it doesn't have to exist. It can be replaced by something better, something free from the cycle of natural selection. Ultimately, humanity can not and should not survive.

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If it’s inevitable there’s no need to hurry it along: another N generations are meaningless against eternity for any conceivable value of N that a recognizable homo sapiens will exist.

Don’t race to a red light.

Also, there ain’t nothing capable of replacing humanity that is free of natural selection. AIs are as natural as the air in your lungs in a big old universe context.

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It's https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-023-00023-3. A bit confusing in that the lead author is Jason K. Hawes, but The Telegraph's journalist refers to him by his nickname, Jake.

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Thanks.

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Regarding "from the river to the sea" in Germany, the situation is more complicated than the correction says. German law forbids the usage of symbols of all unconstitutional or terrorist organizations (think swastikas when used in a fascist context). The law does not name any specific banned symbols or organizations, so that determination is up to the courts. However, states (who run German police departments) write guidelines for their prosecutors and police on what they currently consider banned. In this case, Berlin and several other federal states including Bavaria, added that slogan to their lists.

Some local courts (afaict Cologne and Berlin) have said disagreed saying the slogan is covered by freedom of speech. But that doesn't mean it is “unbanned”, as there hasn't been a decision on it by a high court (and, incidentally, German courts are not as bound by precedent as one may imagine coming from the US system). The authorities in Bavaria (Germany's arguably most conservative federal state) seems to maintain their position and it is plausible that a Bavarian court would ignore the decisions from Berlin and Cologne.

There is also a relatively famous retired German judge, Thomas Fischer, who says the slogan is forbidden, but not because it is a symbol of a terrorist organization, but because using it is constitutes an endorsement of the crimes of Hamas (which is also forbidden, but by another law): https://www.lto.de/recht/meinung/m/frage-fische-jubel-terror-hamas/7

The German Wikipedia has a bit more detail if anyone is interested: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_River_to_the_Sea#Deutschland

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Breathlessly "including" sexually-disoriented female impersonators in the tent -- while categorically rejecting Jews --tells me all I need to know. The gender phantasm supersedes reality. Still, I was blind-sided by the "progressive" zombies. Is it gentile self-hatred?

Who knew they already had the brown shirts and jackboots in their closet? When the IDF cleanses Gaza of Hamas, and sweeps it into the sea, I hope they'll take the time and do the work to eliminate Hezbollah and the Houthis.

But when the nightly news propagandists and terrorism fans stage the Suffering Palestinians pageant, they still won't hold Hamas to account, and demand they explain why they have created such suffering for the people who elected them, as well as the Israelis.

Hamas could stop the fighting at any time -- by surrendering and freeing the hostages. But criminal sociopaths aren't inclined to do the intelligent thing: they're busy grooming another generation to hate Israelis. Machiavelli 2.0.

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I feel bad for Purpleopolis. Sure, that comment seems to generalize as if all liberals were in the same category and could have been written in a more targeted way - but did you notice all the liberal support for Hamas? It's not pretty.

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I think with a more active mod team, a temporary ban would have been more appropriate. But I can imagine Scott looking over their posting history, and deciding that he doesn't want to devote his time and energy toward using a cycle of temp-bans and monitoring to improve this particular poster. So he picked a comment that was egregiously false and unkind, and skipped straight to a preemptive permaban.

Purpleopolis had a habit of putting everything in maximally inflammatory terms. I interacted a bit here and there, and I didn't think they were a troll, just someone with "trapped priors" or "pyschopolitical trauma" or whatever it is. The problem was that they couldn't seem to let go, and weren't able to back off the extreme claim, admit that it was an overreach, and then reformulate what they said in a way that was true and insightful and added to the conversation. There may have been light somewhere in the heat, but it would be hard to find without getting burned.

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That's not an isolated incident. I randomly looked up Open Thread 295 and Purpleopolis' first searched comment is hyperbolic trolling. I'm sure it would work for others too.

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It's not, but that's a stupid game to play. Plenty of people on both sides have grossly hypocritical opinions. This should be a given. A productive discussion needs to turn on specifics: Person X said Thing Y, here's why that's bad, and here's why it matters to the world at large. That sort of thing.

If you're not doing that, you're not advancing any real form of discussion. You're just bringing heat and not light.

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Agreed on all, but he ate a permanent ban for this one. I feel like a lot of people do the exact same thing and stay around.

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Are there any online primary care physicians that accept Medi-Cal? I need a referral.

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Hi, I've only been commenting here for a couple of months so there's a good chance you don't know who I am or what I'm up to.

What I'm up to is making the world a place a place I'd like (even) more than society as it currently is.

Thus far most of my audience is compromised of people with religious sentiments and jargon of the monotheistic tradition. Probably because my credentials are as an ordained orthodox rabbi.

But what we want is similar to what most people want. What you want. All I can do is speak the language of my audience.

I snuck an introduction to dawkinsian memetics into my recent video and, judging by how poorly that single minute did as a youtube short (1 Like per 100 views) vs how well the full video did (1 like per 30 views) I think I struck the right balance of scientific thinking within a video otherwise filled with religious language.

But of course, just as there are shorthand terms that I can use with Bible Appreciators that would leave areligious rationalists unmoved, there are concepts and understandings that would take a lot of heavy lifting to explain to the aforementioned demographic which could be more easily understood and built upon by people of a decidedly rational bent.

So I hope that you will watch my video with an open heart and a curious mind, and invite others to join us of similar discernment.

Each of us have only so many days left. Our society is disappointing. It's plain that a million things could be made better with a tad of charitable listening, friendly assumption, and public aknowledgment of the very many truths that we know but for reasons of practicality we pretend not to know for our safety.

The crown of kingship lies in the gutter, let us rescue it with our bravery and invite the better world that all previous generations dreamed of.

Or at least join a cool movement of people having real fun while so few others dare to do so.

https://ydydy.substack.com/p/introducing-yedidya

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This excites me - is it possible to build a memetic bridge? Finding religious thinkers that can serve as a foundation, using religious practices or concepts as metaphors to explain rationalist concepts?

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It needs to be.

Religion was holistic and incorporated every aspect of life.

As the power holders got worse and worse, all while claiming to be speaking for The Ultimate Itself a rightful rebellion broke out which decided to get rid of this whole Ultimate/God concept entirely rather than simply seeking to replace Its supposed earthly representative.

In the process a million good and useful concepts were tossed out with the rest of the religious jargon.

That left human society bereft of a great deal of necessary and essential understanding --- for which they currently have no words.

As explained explicitly in this video, I am not claiming to represent any particular religious community or faith. I simply have the language and both academic and experiential knowledge of the traditions, which offers me additional wells from which to draw for our world as it is today.

https://youtu.be/A9IURMaQhVY?feature=shared

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Cool! What I'm curious about is your idea of attracting areligious rationalists. I have a hunch they might not mix very well, with potential discordance ending up counter-productive.

Curious about your thoughts

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Heck, Catholics and Lutherans have difficulty mixing! I've heard told that there are even men and women married to each other who don't mix very well.

But we do what we can. And we take the poison we receive as medicine, and the love we receive woth appreciation but not too much.

This is a human endeavor, and fun.

The Divine Fact will decide the degree of our success but it's a good time and damn wel mkre meaningful than anything else we could be doing.

All I hope is that enough helpful funders arrive before the human facts of my own digestive system, and the world's nuclear system end it all.

But whether the would-be Gifters do awaken in time or not, I'm having a fun time and it feels darn good.

Here's a less religiously friendly video than those you may have seen. The view count is skewed by a less than reputable "promoter" I found through Fiverr back at that time, but it's probably good that it appears among the most popular videos together with the more religious ones.

https://youtu.be/De5lWoTPTTY?feature=shared

Also, the video from Tijuana appears quite highly. But that's because the original title mentioned Zona Norte, and a great many hornballs found it through that precise search.

I've since removed the "sexy" terms and have received nearly zero views for the video but I keep it public lest anyone mistake my beliefs and means as puritanically pious.

If you dig what I'm doing, please let people know.

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You will probably want to avoid parts like this:

https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points

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If you have fond memories of the first season of the show "True Detective," you might be interested to know that the fourth season launched last week. This season is set in Alaska, and has a pair of detectives investigating the disappearance of a group of scientists. As in the first season, there's some grotesque violence, plenty of back-woods baggage, and some mystic woo. And there are connections to the first season: the names Cole and Tuttle have featured prominently. Recommended, based on the first two episodes.

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Surprisingly I just watched the first season the other day, 10 years later than everyone else.

I was recommended it because I really liked Fargo and was looking for something else interesting to watch (I find most TV/movies super boring) and True Detective.

On that note, check out Fargo Season 5. Season 3 and 4 were crap and 5 makes up for it.

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I see the spiral thing is returning this season too. Be interesting to see if the writers can tie it back to season one.

I thought the first season was fantastic. It had a couple of plot holes but Matthew McConaughey‘s character was a blast. ‘Hold it Nietzsche!’ ‘Time is a flat circle.’

I’ve watched the first two episodes of this season too. The first episode didn’t really work for me but I was drawn in by the second.

What the hell, I’ll watch Jodi Foster in just about anything.

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Jan 24, 2024
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The first two episodes seem like a mashup of Michael Crichton and Robert W. Chambers. It’ll be interesting to see if the writers make it work.

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There's a new clinic treating depression using the methods of the Heligenfeld clinics in Germany. They claim that this is a successful method. Comments?

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Psychologist here. Looked around online, could not find any info about their treatment. Can you give a link to info?

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Here's their flyer about how they treat depressions: https://www.heiligenfeld.de/download/2495/

Apart from talking somewhat about psychosomatics, spirituality and holistic approaches, I don't see very much new or revolutionary. And they aren't a "new clinic" either, they exist since 1990 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heiligenfeld_Kliniken

So now, what makes this interesting?

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Agreed. The branch(?) opening near me makes the claim about their approach being tested and found to work. I'm just wondering if this claim can be sustained, but I suppose any claim of success in this area should be treated with a little skepticism.

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But that's in German, which I cannot read or speak. Also, there's a pop-up that covers almost the whole page and I can't make it go away.

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Chrome usually offers to translate the page; not sure what the popup is. Thanks for trying. Running my translator on the home page an excerpt says: "We are one of the leading clinic groups in Germany with a focus on psychosomatic medicine. We are unique in terms of therapy diversity, value orientation and holisticity."

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Yes, but that's just the introduction so far, and is utterly vague. If you can get out from under the popup and get a translation of what the whole page says about their methods I'll give you my thoughts. Maybe it would be useful to translate the popup. Probably if you check something off on the popup it will go away, but you have to know what it says to do that.

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The popup is about privacy settings, mostly cookies. Click "Ablehnen" (reject all). Every website based in the EU is supposed to have that due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation. I don't even notice it anymore.

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Has any done a deep analysis of the art market post-AI?

I used to believe it would morph from the ludicrous money-maker of the 2010s into a sort of small-scale handicraft goods market a-la Etsy, but when you stop and think, maybe this idea doesn't hold water. Etsy handicrafts survive largely for two reasons: (1) They're made of high-quality materials that mass manufacturers don't use, and (2) they're hand-made which means broadly higher quality compared to retail goods. The problem is that point (1) is irrelevant for digital art, and point (2) is irrelevant because, unlike e.g. assembly-line "handicrafts" made for Walmart, there is no financial pressure to cut corners or use cheaper materials. When you tell an AI to paint a robot like Van Gogh, it's going to do a great job. Maybe you disagree -- AI Van Gogh paintings have inferior composition, much worse shading, all the strokes are painted the same way, etc. But you must realize 90% of the public cannot see these details. To them, AI Van Gogh is already near perfect.

Now, AI art is absolutely everywhere. Clearly it's good enough for most people (Low standards or whatever, but hey). So this sector of "generic, but competent" artists is taking the biggest hit. Particularly for things where people don't care about the art, but some kind of art is assumed, so they hire an illustrator for cheap. This market was probably never lucrative since asset libraries, stock images, and subtle plagiarism has been kicking at its heels for ages. AI has utterly transformed this sector of art, and things will never be the same. But then we have the Patreon/Pixiv market of artists with unique styles. We know that AI can replicate virtually any style to a decent degree. But surprisingly, this doesn't seem to be threatening this other sector of art very much.

There's 2 ways to view this. Naturally, clients who seek out a particular artist for a commission will have much higher art standards, and find AI art unsatisfying. While an AI version of someone's style could be cleaned up into a good product, right now that requires art skill which limits who can do it. But is there a risk that someday, AI art stops spitting out monstrosities with 7 fingers on a single hand, and miraculously gains the composition knowledge and brush techniques to faithfully imitate Van Gogh? Yeah, absolutely it's gonna happen eventually. The question is, will this replace all artists? Ultimately, I don't think so.

There's a part of human psychology which compels (most of) us to pay things we can easily get for free. On paper, pirating could easily kill the games industry, but in practice it's left hardly any impact. Hell, many people pirate games to try them out, and if they like them, they buy the game on Steam. Same goes with the "Pay what you want" model of digital goods. You're free to pay $00.00, but in practice most people pay $3.00 or $5.00 or $10.00. So when we have Patreon or Pixiv artists with a unique style, we feel that using AI to copy their art is like piracy. Naturally, a contingent of people will "pirate" the work, but most people feel compelled to reward the artist for their deed and pay anyway. In fact, you'll notice most AI art isn't even in the style of any particular artist -- the guys paying Patreon subs aren't chomping at the bit to replace their favorite artists with AI. The market just continues as before, unbothered.

So in other words, there's no need to speculate whether the consumer art market will turn into Etsy or not. Because we know what kind of market it is -- it's like Steam -- and even when you can obtain a 1:1 copy of the product for free, 99% of people will pay anyway.

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I want to buy some cool AI-generated glicee-printed art for my walls, but I don't know anywhere that sells it.

(I'm sure I could find some online if I _really_ wanted, so my actual motivation level is low, I'm really just saying that I'd buy some if there was a good AI art gallery near my house.)

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To correct any misconceptions people may have about the California Forever project (terrible name btw), I'll quote this from their promotional material:

"And the plan we have put forward is not ”sprawl” either - it’s medium-density, high-quality urbanism. And again, the plan even has a legally binding minimum density standard to make sure we hold ourselves accountable to our walkability goals. We are literally prohibiting ourselves from building sprawl."

https://californiaforever.com/news/the-urbanist-case-for-a-new-community-in-solano-county/

I guess it's too much to hope for someone in California to propose letting property owners make their own decisions about density.

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> I guess it's too much to hope for someone in California to propose letting property owners make their own decisions about density

I mean, if someone in Californiaforevertown wants to buy up a whole street of medium-density housing to knock it down and give themselves a giant backyard, are they going to be prohibited?

Such a prohibition is probably unnecessary; in desirable areas the density of housing will inevitably approach the maximum legal density permitted, that's just economics.

I'm not sure what it means to let property owners make their own decisions about density; they can do what they like on their own property but that doesn't make a meaningful contribution to the overall density of your area.

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"the California Forever project (terrible name btw)"

It really is unfortunate, it sent my mind immediately to this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrWflCJPM4w

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The name makes me think of Wakanda Forever, so I associate it with lame comic book movies.

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No, oddly enough. That one is the nightmare of the California life gone wrong, but it's individualist consumer decadence, not the kind of State power that "California Forever" evokes in me. Neither did I think of "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers

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"Moon over Marin" is the best California song anyway.

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I read _Meditation on Moloch_. I would like to suggest the reading of a very short tale to anybody who wants to keep meditating on that issue: _Useless Beauty_ by Guy de Maupassant.

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Has anyone watched a film called Bodies Bodies Bodies?

I watched it last night and decided that rational fiction it ain't but the main character's cleavage made up for the fact that everyone onscreen was an idiot.

Then I googled the film afterwards and found out it was supposed to be a comedy. This was a bigger twist than anything in the film itself. We'd just watched it all the way through and there were no hints or foreshadowing at all.

I laughed exactly once, and that was in incredulity at the dialogue. (All the way through, we were wondering whether the screenwriter was Gen Z and this was how they actually sounded, or whether they were 30 years old and trying their best to sound like Kids These Days. The lines that made me laugh were the ones that made me come down hard on hypothesis B.)

The internet says the film was actually a parody/satire of Gen Z - if I'd known the film was actually trying to be funny with those lines I don't think I'd have laughed at them.

Anyway, two good reasons to watch the film, and scriptwriting these days has gone to the dogs.

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I have always thought of Breaking Bad, which I absolutely loved, as a very very dark comedy.

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I remember people being disconcerted at me thinking that *The Remains of the Day* was something of a comedy.

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Somebody riding on a streetcar, knowing that they've fucked up romance so so so bad.

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There are these Youtube videos "Breaking Bad, the Sitcom", where the funniest scenes are flavoured with canned laughter. It works really well, and you see what a great comedian Bryan Cranston is.

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I saw Bryan Cranston on Colbert talking about playing LBJ. He broke into a Jesse Pinkman riff. “And that’s how we pass legislation bitches!”

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I continue to publish things, this time a sort of journal-entry on what it's like to be in my 3rd year of psychiatric residency. Much less technical than what I usually write, which was a nice break from feeling like I need to relentlessly research every statement I make. I think you might enjoy it if you've ever been curious about what psychiatry training is like

https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/on-being-a-3rd-year-psychiatry-resident

P.S. Scott, I am mindful that I keep posting my work here - if you think it's excessive just let me know.

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Just here to say thank you to Scott for featuring my Substack on his recommendation list, and to plug it shamelessly to other readers.

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Can someone who works in the field or "understands the science" at a deep level explain how the image manipulations that apparently have prompted requested retractions of six and corrections of 31 papers by Harvard researchers could be interpreted as anything other than deliberate, serious misconduct? (See: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/22/dana-farber-issues-corrections/ and https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-at-harvard-university/). The WSJ (gated, unfortunately) article on the papers and researchers quotes an uninvolved scientist as saying that some of the "errors" are "straightforward mistakes." (On the other hand, he says, “There’s a handful that seem more egregious.”) It could be that the issues are too technical to understand without an adequate technical background. I'm a little skeptical, though, having a much better understanding of the plagiarism issues that have surfaced in the social sciences and humanities and the attempts to dismiss them as "sloppy citation practices."

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I got curious and looked at one of the images in the second of the 2 articles linked. It's here: https://pubpeer.com/storage/image-1702574994021.png

It really is clear that in the bottom left part of the image the first pair of blots and the second pair are identical. Not knowing how this image is produced, I have no idea how likely it is that this happened by mistake. If the person writing the paper had to assemble the figure from a bunch of separate photos it does seem plausible that somebody could accidentally stick one pair in twice that way. Besides, if somebody wanted to fake the actg results it would have been very easy in Photoshop or another image editor to alter the second of the 2 duplicate pairs of blots so that it had the same favorable characteristics for one's results, but had small differences in shape and density to distinguish it from the first pair.

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>Besides, if somebody wanted to fake the actg results it would have been very easy in Photoshop or another image editor to alter the second of the 2 duplicate pairs of blots so that it had the same favorable characteristics for one's results, but had small differences in shape and density to distinguish it from the first pair.

That's exactly what they did. Check the image again—the right pair is squished. I swore you were wrong at first about it being duped, because the horizontal compression was enough to fool my eyes until I zoomed in and saw the little "knobs" on the bottoms of the bands.

I've run gels and done Western blots before. If you're dumb enough to fuck up the figures this bad on accident, I don't trust your data anyway.

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Oh, you're right, the right-hand pair is shortened laterally. But still, that's such a subtle change that anyone who looks carefully at the 2 pairs will recognize them as the same. So the shortening doesn't work as a way to hide the evidence. You'd need to change the outline of the blots some, which would be very easy to do.

<If you're dumb enough to fuck up the figures this bad on accident, I don't trust your data anyway.

Yeah, seems very sloppy. But sloppiness and deliberate deception are different, and I'd like to know which it was. Seems to me the case for sloppiness is much stronger. Anyone results-faker with a lick of sense would alter the outline of the blots a bit so none were identical.

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>You'd need to change the outline of the blots some, which would be very easy to do

Easier said than done, actually! You can't just MSPaint it, an image like that has enough subtle gradations—particularly at the borders of the blots—that a blotch of black pixels sticks out like a sore thumb. I'd encourage you to try it—open up GIMP or whatever you've got and try to alter the borders without it looking weird.

Maybe it's easy if you've got the new photoshop or something, but how many scientists do?

This is why transformations/stretches, duplications, tilings—the sort of thing people were discussing downthread—are the most common tools in image fraud.

Duplication + slight stretch takes 2 clicks and will probably get by 99% of people, even side-by-side. Throw in a flip-horizontal, you're a criminal mastermind...and smooth, too, because you've got plausible deniability. If you used a blot image from someone else's paper, maybe people would be less likely to notice the duplication...but it's a lot harder to argue that it might've been an honest mistake, if you DO get caught.

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OK, I took the image into photoshop and changed the one that's a duplicate in 2 different ways.

https://i.imgur.com/npNHZoM.png

You can see on the bottom that now there are 3 pairs of blots. The middle one is unchanged. The one on the right is darkened. The one on the left is changed in shape. This took me 5 mins. and was very easy. Anyone who can sort of stagger thru Photoshop and do basic things could do it.

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Wow, you should get into scientific fraud, you'd be top tier!

FR though I think you're overestimating how many biologists have photoshop. More to the point, the nubs on the bottom of the bands that clued me in to them being a duplicate are still there, and this is what I was saying about more intricate manipulations being higher-risk, in that there's no room for ambiguity about your intentions. Maybe less likely to be caught by reviewers, but career-ending in the event that you are. I also don't know how your shoop would stand up to the kind of automated image fraud detection software that people like Bik use—might leave some clear signatures.

Idk, maybe I'm being unfair bc of bias, but my biases come from having seen the extent of this kind of behavior in academia and biological research, so 🤷🏽‍♂️

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Elizabeth Bik lawsuit also had a chilling effect on some scientist outright criticising others work as fraudulent.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/elisabeth-bik-faces-legal-action-after-criticizing-studies-68831

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idk man in my heart Elizabeth Bik is an icon and her work is an inspiration to outright criticize fraudulent work where you spot it.

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I've never done any medical research but I've done astronomical research that involves image manipulation. Typically you have some raw data, and then you need to pick some kind of colour mapping that makes the features you're looking at more obvious.

Depending on the software you were using, maybe there's other filters you can apply, e.g. a "brighten edges" filter. Applying this filter destroys the one-to-one mapping between signal strength and pixel colour so you shouldn't be using it in published work (at least not without explaining the exact procedure which has been used) but it's easy to imagine that someone doofus might apply the wrong filters without realising what they did.

I don't know the details of this case, I'm just speculating on how an innocent mistake could result in "manipulated" images.

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That's interesting and helpful. Something similar to that could explain a category of the medical image issues. A different category of image manipulation appears to be copying parts of images (like a snipped screenshot, essentially) and then pasting the snipped copies in either the same image or in other images, sometimes in the same orientation or, surprisingly often, after rotating the copy. That strikes me as something that requires time, deliberation, and care.

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My random question is: I am not certain but it seems as most people in the rationality-sphere are moral anti-realists (I am not). How does this jive with also being an effective altruist? I.e., wouldn't moral realism help motivate EA's better?

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Metaethics is about what makes ethical statements true, not about what first order moral beliefs to take. Utilitarianism is compatible with all metaethical theories unless you stipulate a semantic thesis like "All moral statements in support of utilitarianism are false."

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I think that "morality" is a mix of values and strategies, sometimes difficult to disentangle.

For example, lying to people is wrong in two ways: (1) incorrect beliefs can get them hurt, and (2) when people find out that you are lying, they will no longer trust you.

The former is a question of values. If you don't really mind that other people get hurt (or if they are your enemies, so you want them to get hurt), then for you this is not an argument against lying. The latter is a question of strategy, credibility is an asset, in some situations it can be useful when you enemies know correctly that they can trust you about some things (for example, something happens that could kill both you and your enemies, so you need to make a truce and cooperate on removing the danger).

I am an anti-realist about values. There are already psychopaths among us who don't care about hurting others. If we had a magical pill that could make a spider 2 meters tall and give it IQ 200, the spider probably wouldn't share our moral intuition. So I see human values as "something that (some) humans have" rather than "something that any intelligent being must inevitably have".

But I might be a realist about strategies. Game theory is math, which does not depend on you species.

So from my perspective talking about "moral realism" is confusing, because I expect one side to keep saying "but values evolve!" and the other side to keep saying "but game theory!" as if one somehow disproves the other.

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I think the argument that "something that any intelligent being must inevitably have" is real is an extrapolation on how morals would necessarily develop in a pure materialist universe (i.e. no God or outside force creating morality).

If humans developed morality, it would necessarily be for good practical reasons. We can quibble on details, but there's a direction to morality that consistently points towards rules and goals that help society function "better" in some predictable way. If this is true, then a spider-man or an AI would also eventually come to the same conclusions (provided the social or environmental pressures were the same or similar enough - I would say a society where mutual cooperation is valuable, which would be most). A genius spider living among humans would act like a human, including in morality, as doing otherwise would become counterproductive to their goals - specifically when humans kill the spider for being anti-social. Sociopaths don't ignore the moral goals, and often follow the outward appearances involved. They just ignore morality when they think they can get away with it and doing so benefits them. That most of us seem to have something inside us that encourages us to follow morality even when we can identify benefits of doing otherwise is ultimately a benefit to us, as we are far less likely to mess up and break a moral code in a way that gets us in trouble with broader society.

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> there's a direction to morality that consistently points towards rules and goals that help society function "better" in some predictable way.

There could be more than one local maximum, so the evolution of morality could be path dependent.

A better functioning human society is not the same as a better functioning bee society, because of the differences in biology.

> most of us seem to have something inside us that encourages us to follow morality

The urge to copy what others do is a specifically human superpower; apes get the second place.

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>How does this jive with also being an effective altruist?

the same way that people believe determinism eliminates the possibility of free will: you acknowledge that logic and reason imply one thing, then forget about it and live your life as normal.

(i'm actually a determinist and moral anti-realist, so i'm being serious, not just strawmanning).

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I always thought the only requirement was that rationalists be dogmatically overconfident about whatever metaethical views they happened to hold-- and that the majority were cocksure utilitarians, with only a minority of cocksure moral skeptics.

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I think that depends on what you mean by "realism". Personally, I don't believe that there's some sort of a dualistic moral code that exists independently in a realm of pure forms etc.; but that doesn't automatically mean that morality is totally arbitrary, either -- because physical laws do in fact exist (well, probably), regardless of whether one believes in them or not.

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Yeah I suppose it's also possible that a spectrum of moral realism <----> moral anti-realism positions are valid, too. I might be anti-realist on the level of, say, across the space of all possible types of organisms or intelligences or even more so on the level of universes, when all such things are unknown or allowed to vary. I would probably still say that there are deducible truths that are implied by other contingent facts of nature, and I would probably still call that "realism."

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Huh, I don't believe in moral realism and I think I'm relatively (morally) motivated.

I think it's a bit of a mistake to think of motivation stemming from a fountain, and the more virtuous the fountain (it's real, everyone agrees on it and so on) the more motivating it is.

Ultimately motivations, including moral motivations are caused by normal drives, be it peer approval, desire to stick to some set of aesthetically pleasing principles or just innate desire, except it's pro social so adding moral elements to it is advantageous in some way.

The fact that some stories have the ontological tag of "real" and some have the tag of "non real" seems mostly orthogonal to how strong drives are.

Well, the above is *obviously* what a non realist tells themselves.

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Would it? Why?

The argument for moral realism seems to me to be like a consequentialist argument for believing something that isn't true because holding the belief would create better outcomes. My impression is that that's something that "rationalism" tries very hard to avoid, but maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong here? It's certainly a decent argument for being religious, and rationalism has roots in the Internet atheism wars of the early 2000s, so I wouldn't expect rationalism to embrace the argument outright.

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> My impression is that that's something that "rationalism" tries very hard to avoid, but maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong here?

Once you know that X is false, how exactly do you make yourself "believe in X"? Especially if you are aware that you are trying to make yourself believe a false thing for the purpose of higher productivity or something. I think that no one sane can actually do that.

What a non-rationalist can do instead, is to make themselves "believe *that* they believe in X". That is *not* the same thing, but most people are confused about the difference.

The difference is basically, that if you ask a honest believer about X, they will say something like "X is true, obviously" and "people who think X is false are simply mistaken". If you instead ask a honest believer-in-belief about X, they will say something like "believing in X is useful, therefore I believe in X" and "people who think X is false are depriving themselves of the wonderful benefits of the belief in X". But these are two quite different states of mind.

(To make things more complicated, it is possible to simultaneously believe in X and believe that X is useful, but this sounds more like "X is true, obviously; and by a lucky coincidence, it is also useful to believe in it; but X would be true even if it didn't have any practical advantage at all".)

A rationalist who understands how beliefs work can't even make themselves falsely believe-in-belief, because the falsity is too obvious. You can make yourself believe in false things you are confused about, not false things you clearly see as false.

It could be interesting to measure whether belief-in-belief is as motivating as the belief proper. I would expect it to be motivating less, but still a non-zero amount. (So maybe still worth it. But not an option for a rationalist, anyway.)

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> I think that no one sane can actually do that.

I think it does happen, but that's the tradeoff. (With, of course, the caveat that sanity isn't binary, and even if it's modeled as scalar, what's a little SAN loss among friends?)

> "X is true, obviously; and by a lucky coincidence, it is also useful to believe in it; but X would be true even if it didn't have any practical advantage at all"

But it seems to me that this pattern is very very very common, and so my conclusion is that it's not so much a corner case, as (somehow) a default state for human cognition. :-( Like, I think it's some form of "Stockholm Syndrome", where when it's convenient to believe something, the unconscious mechanisms of our brains make us actually believe it. And I'm skeptical of the potential for rigorous mental training to protect against this.

Anyway, what I was trying to get at was the tension between "rationality as truth-seeking" and "rationality as systematized winning", and I'd be interested to hear what you have to say on that?

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I think the traditional response is that (1) rationality wins on average, not in every single situation, and (2) sometimes half-rationality can be worse than either alternative. If rationality makes me choose better goals, but gives me less motivation to achieve them (because now I can only draw motivation from true thoughts, rather than from all possible convenient thoughts)... I guess the outcome will depend on various circumstances.

Seems to me that a strong source of motivation is having an aligned community. Effective altruists do not need to take their energy from the belief in moral realism; they can simply see their effort as satisfying their own personal preferences (regardless of whether some hypothetical impersonal cosmic force would agree or disagree) while supported by a community of effective altruists who cooperate on the same goal.

Who needs moral realism when you have effectively-altruistic friends?

But if you have neither the effectively-altruistic friends nor the belief in moral realism... yeah, that is probably very demotivating.

More generally, I think that it is much easier to "win systematically" if you are not alone in that attempt. Too bad there are not enough rationalists around some of us. We have not figured out (yet?) how to "raise the sanity waterline".

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What about situations where it seems more effective to "choose to believe" something false?

> More generally, I think that it is much easier to "win systematically" if you are not alone in that attempt.

Absolutely agreed. Tit-for-tat only starts to shine when it's not surrounded by DefectBots.

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> What about situations where it seems more effective to "choose to believe" something false?

Too bad to be me, I guess.

> Tit-for-tat only starts to shine when it's not surrounded by DefectBots.

That is a great way to put it.

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Case in point, it was being a moral realist that eventually led Leah Libresco (who was fairly active in the Rationalist "movement" back in the day) to become a Catholic. Religious types aren't really welcome in the Rat-sphere: The Sequences assume that whoever is reading them is an atheist, and it's a fairly good assumption to make.

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Huh. I can see how that would happen, yeah.

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FWIW I think it's pretty straightforward to be both an atheist and a moral realist. You can consider moral "laws" to merely be deducible facts about what is right and wrong once you've chosen other arbitrary features of reality (what kind of being are you, how does physics work, how does society function, how do minds function, what do minds want, how do they best achieve what they want, etc.).

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See, I really want this to be true, not the least because that's halfway to solving AI alignment right there (as in, John C. Wright's "The Golden Age"). But I don't actually think it is true; I've yet to see a formulation that does more than sound good, the way a lot of philosophy sounds good at first blush.

But who knows, maybe the problem is just that humans are half an order of magnitude too stupid to actually perceive the truth and make use of it.

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I don't disagree that you can be an atheist and a moral realist, but I don't know how philosophically stable combining those two beliefs is. If morality exists in the same way that the laws of physics exists, it's hard to see how we could ever understand it the way we understand the laws of physics. We can observe physical objects and experiment on them to create more useful observations, but how can you observe (or measure) morality?

Leah put it this way in an interview:

"What persuaded me was definitely pushing hard on the question of: How is it we come to know truth? We just can’t kind of bootstrap our way up the way we can with mathematics because mathematics is abstract and true and beautiful. So we can kind of bootstrap our way up because there are things in the physical world that are so apparent to us it doesn’t obviously require any supernatural intervention to know “How did we wind up understanding mathematics?” The basics of addition are graspable just from physical analogies. You can get to all of math just from having integers [whole numbers].

"But morality doesn’t work that way. It’s not as easy as decod[ing] the building blocks of the world around us. [I realized that] my grip on whether ethics existed was more tenuous than whether mathematics existed. So the question is: Where is that kind of knowledge coming from if it’s not something I’m building up from very elementary building blocks around me?"

"Ultimately, I had three propositions that didn’t fit well together: That there was no God. That morality was not dependent on humans — it was not something made, but was something transcendent outside us. And that I didn’t seem to have a way to reach something transcendent on my own. You can’t believe all three at once. So which one will you give up? The one I was definitely most certain about is that morality was transcendent. I kept puzzling away at the third, trying to find out a way to do it. I kept running into problems. Ultimately, the one I decided to give up of those three propositions was there isn’t a God. And it was [through] my conversations with Catholics and Eastern Orthodox friends that I recognized the God they were talking about as the type of God I had been creeping up on without noticing it."

https://www.ncregister.com/interview/ethics-mathematics-and-the-rosary-an-ex-atheist-discusses-her-conversion

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It feels like you also need some kind of grounding axiom like "it is good, all else equal, for minds to get what they want". That's the bit that I'm anti realist on; I agree that if you buy that plus fundamental logic, you get most of the rest.

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I'm back to thinking about how we teach things.

I was trying to explain the water cycle to my kid. (The child is less than two months old and fell asleep halfway though. This was more an exercise in talking to it lots so it hears English. Nevertheless, there will be a test and if the child fails to demonstrate an acceptable amount of knowledge I'm going to throw it in the pond.)

Anyway, I started with how water is a useful liquid, but how the water particles near the top can easily get warm and bounce out of the liquid and into the air. Which means that the air around you is actually full of water. You can feel when the air is more wet or dry, and we call that the "humidity". The amount of water the air can hold is related to how hot and/or pressurised it is. So when you're in the shower you can feel that the air itself is really humid; if you stop running the hot water, the temperature falls and the air itself gets drier as the water condenses onto the shower glass. You can then watch as the water forms little droplets and runs down the glass as a liquid again, back to join the water on the ground.

Then I mentioned you can scale the whole thing up and, because air gets colder the higher you go, the water condenses (around dust particles instead of the shower glass) and that's how you get clouds. Then we went on a lengthy digression about surface tension and erosion, as I tried to explain how water flows in neat streams and rivers even though rain falls evenly across the whole surface of the land. Then, there being too many witnesses at the pond, I took the child home.

The thing is, when I try to remember how I myself learned about the water cycle - I have one image of a circle of four words ("precipitation", "evapouration", etc) joined by brightly coloured arrows. I think they might even have pushed the boat out and drawn a picture next to each arrow for me (a cloud, a river, etc). But that was it.

Missing from that picture was any visceral understanding of what it is that's going on. I was able to match the label with the definition and the icon, which counted as Knowing It at the time, but which I don't feel counts as Knowledge now.

I can think of many occasions where we were learning stuff and all we were actually doing was just remembering how different tokens related to each other. And it was always a pet peeve of mine, even through University, when the format of the diagrams/illustrations (through their choice of arrow colour, etc) implied some logic about the subject that wasn't true in reality.

Thing is, if I don't count knowing the word "precipitation" to be real Knowledge, but I do count being able to talk about shower condensation and humidity and rivers flowing downhill and so on: what is the real property I'm trying to quantify here?

In the past I've held that you can dissect Science subjects into [Facts to Memorise], [History of X], and [problem solving], where I mentally see the facts to memorise as collections of colourful diagrams, animations, interactive minigames, etc, the history as the story of how we learned all these colourful facts in the first place, and the problem solving is basically the completely separate skill of Maths/Stats/Engineering, just using whatever equations this particular field of science chose to hand to you.

But the extra quality I'm looking for above isn't on the problem-solving side, yet it's not just memorising facts (ie, tokens and symbols.) It's something more interesting that entails being conversant with systems, able to visualise interactions and predict outcomes, etc.

I'd like to put whatever that is in a bottle and work out how you teach it.

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I'm sympathetic to your point, but right now you're explaining things for your own amusement, not for the education of a child.

I have a four year old, and I used to think that if I could just explain complicated science stuff to her in the right way then she'd get it. But it doesn't work. I try to explain things like atoms and her eyes glaze over, her brain just isn't ready for the fact that there's things that are not only too small to see, but much much much smaller than the things that are too small to see. Her brain, which boggles at the number 100, is not ready for the number 6.26e23. You or I can look at the world and see a dance of octillions of buzzing molecules, but kids just aren't ready for that.

When you teach the water cycle for the first time, you have just a limited number of facts which you can cram into a child's tiny brain before they've had too much. The fact that ocean water evaporates and turns into clouds and that's where rain comes from -- that's quite enough for a first pass at the subject.

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I had to think of Karl Valentin in the pharmacy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1aO_yZb6bk

His child is sick, and he told it: "If you tell me where you're hurting, later when you're ready I'll buy you a nice motor-bike." But it wouldn't cooperate, it's simply contumacious! OK, it's six months old and cannot speak, but it could at least point to where it hurts.

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As for what I think would be helpful, I think your story is really good. I would suggest:

Not talking about what we discovered and ask how they think the system works before explaining it, that way non intuitive parts become explicit instead of becoming pure hindsight bias.

Trying to relate, in as concrete detail as possible, how we came to know the fact and consequences of it.

I'm going to use "Electrons are a particle." As a similarly concrete example. Since electrons being individual particles means that we can measure the absolute smallest unit of charge, so if you can measure all possible differences in charges to cause an oil droplet to stop falling, then, after many measurements, you can figure out the number consistent with all the charge This is then the number that the smallest charge has.

Why does it matter that they're individual particles? Well because we can now use facts about particles in general to do stuff with electric charge! We can heat up a surface with lots of "loose" electrons on it, and cause them to "boil off". And if we don't have anything in the way we can then try and detect the charge on the other side, hence we can now make the electric equivalent to valves using vacuum tubes!

I get that this example is over elaborate and maybe way too verbose, but the advantage is that there are a lot of spring boards for curiosity. "Why aren't we using vacuum tubes any more?" "Wait, don't fluids also boil off? That doesn't seem particle specific at all!" So 1) there's an easy way to understand how your knowledge is incomplete and 2) ask enough of these and you start seeing commonalities across different physical situations.

This isn't meant to be complete, but this style of question asking is very common among the physics students and professors I talked with in college, and I get the sense that the complete world view you were talking about is very well exemplified by them. It's a common professor flex to forget extremely elementary formulas and then use their prior knowledge to receptive the formula. Not something you can consistently do with just a bag of facts!

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This makes me realise I need to update my model from subject = [facts, history, problem solving] to subject = [*model*, history, problem solving]

Where being tested on a fact is "having learned X, Y, Z - tell me what is X?" (which can be answered by basic storage of the tokens used in the explanation) to "having learned about XYZ, where is A/what happens if B occurs?" (which can only be answered by visualising/imagining the whole model and searching/simulating with it.)

All well and good, but you can write down a list of facts, draw a circle around it and declare, "Here, this is Physics, now go and teach it, learn it, test it, boom, curriculum sorted."

I'm now even more interested than I was before in ideas about how you can "write down" a model in the same legible way. In addition to notation, I think there needs to be an extraction process (to get the model out of people's head when they may not themselves know what they know.)

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