I was revisiting the sound track to "Phantom of the Opera" recently and I find that, at least the movie version, the Phantom's voice is just too high for me. I keep going through videos looking for different phantoms and was hoping to find a deeper one, maybe a bass singer rendition of the "Phantom of the Opera" duet. Can anybody recommend something like that?
Anyone in here an actuary? In a career switch who just got involved in the field in my late 20s. I’m early on the exam ladder, and just honing my coding skills (SQL and Python).
Just curious as to what my long term options are as far as going into different fields, data science and the like. An absolute *dream* job would be front office at a major sports team, but I know those are incredibly competitive. Just wanted to see if there’s anyone in here who used their experience in insurance to move into a diff field, or if I’ll be stuck in insurance my whole life (which I’d be somewhat OK with, I love my job).
I worked for an insurance company for a while. I don't opt for the actuarial track but several coworker analysis did. Our company wasn't known for the highest pay but their actuarial trainee programs paid for the tests past the first one and provided paid study time and test taking time. The company also supported other insurance education, such as CPCU.
The actuarial trainees ranged from young out of college analysis to career switching phds and former CPAs. Consider finding a job of that kind, if you aren't already.
Yeah from what I understand that’s industry standard at this point. Passing exams is often a decades long process, and it’s part of your job if you’re in the actuarial department. Up to the first credential, at least. Very few people actually finish the entire exam ladder, it’s extremely difficult, akin to a math PhD. The company I work for now pays for exams and all study materials. I’ve only passed the first two at this point, but got hired in my first job after passing my first exam last January, then passed my 2nd in October, which they covered.
So I’m in the field already, have a great job at an amazing company, and am studying for my next exam in May. I’m just wondering long term, if the skills I develop can open doors outside of the narrow niche of the actuarial dept of an insurance company/consulting firm.
I'm looking for someone with experience in calculations in Riemannian geometry using Mathematics. Please reply to this message if interested. Thank you
Have you looked into Sage Manifolds? It's much slower than Mathematica but it's free. I used it for a while in my research (stopped because it was too slow and my group uses Mathematica), but I really enjoyed it.
Would you also know a software that's good for abstract computations? In some sense, I don't want to specify the exact metric, but want to simplify complicated tensorial expressions, etc
I checked the indexes of Numerical Recipes in C, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers and a Vector Space Approach to Geometry. Afraid I can’t help you with this.
I did a lot of analytic geometry and linear algebra stuff when I was writing code to render medical images, but I am but a humble engineer, not a theoretical mathematician.
Edit: okay, out of pure obsessiveness I checked Knuth’s Seminumerical Algorithms. No dice.
I'm a mathematician; I know a little geometry (although more algebraic than analytic, so depending on how deep or specialist your problem is I may not be able to help). what do you want to calculate?
I want to write mathematica programs that can compute a wide variety of Riemannian invariants for a given metric. Are you aware of people who have done something like that?
I'm afraid not, and annoyingly while I do use mathematica I only have access to it at work, not on my personal computer (IIRC last time I checked it was jaw-droppingly expensive, even for a personal copy), which I think would make helping virtually impossible - sorry.
No problem! Thanks anyway for your interest. Let me know if you're ever in the New Jersey area, and I'd love to show you around (assuming you're not from there).
How can schizophrenia be mostly genetically determined and also discordant in identical twins? Bayesian reasoning is called for to sort this out again for reasons very similar to regression towards the mean. What other phenomena are misleading this way?
It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Really curious about this question. Not doing deep research or anything.
What are the best proxies for determining whether someone is happy? Happy in general. Proxies for people whose lives you can observe somewhat but not someone you know well. For instance a neighbor you might sometimes wave hello to or a coworker you don't work with closely.
The obvious things would be decent job, married, kids. But are those the best proxies for happiness? What might be better?
I am not even sure how happiness could be measured and compared, even if you could interview people and if they were 100% sincere.
By what actually happened? The same thing will have a different impact on different people, depending on how important it is for them, what they are used to, what they expected, and what they expect to happen in the future.
By their reactions? Some people are hysterical over trivialities, other people have good self-control (but they may be approaching the point where they break down), some people may be good at stoicism (which may or may not be powered by depression).
Also, it can change day to day, or hour to hour. One day your wife/kids make you happy, the next day it is as if they are trying to drive you insane. You may hate your job, but it provides a stable solid income; or you may be passionate about your work but also tired and always on the edge of bankruptcy. Are we measuring the average happiness, or its peaks?
I would guess hobbies, things they do for fun not profit. Married with kids is a social status thing, they could just be tolerating it for appearance's sake.
...also complaints? If someone never complains they're probably putting up a social mask.
".. the United States economy was still suffering from the severe depression of the Panic of 1893, during which people often subsisted on day-old bread .."
Wow! Bread a whole day old? Imagine the unspeakable horror. It must have been green with mold and crawling with weavils and maggots after all that time! :-)
Homemade day old bread is much better than modern grocery store bread. I think they had higher standards - it’s one of the few places where things get worse with national wealth, I think due to rising cost of labor.
Source: have done the experiment. With 15th c. recipes even!
For Wordle and XWord fans. One of the more prolific NYT XWord creators has come up with a new - free to play - word game. I haven’t played with it much yet myself but Mrs Gunflint thinks it’s fun.
I had a look. Perhaps the project isn’t fully baked. Jeff Chen is the main developer. He creates a lot of good XWords. Apparently he learned JavaScript and CSS over a couple months to to develop the game.
I’m subscribed to XWordInfo.com and got an email announcement about the game a couple days ago.
Okay, the final puzzle for Harder mode was fun; the puzzle words had multiple solutions and you had to recognize the meta-word to get the actual correct answer. Solved the puzzle, then had to unsolve about half of it and find second solutions because the meta made no sense.
After 23 years off the grid and out of public life I'm making a serious go at using what I've learned to make a nicer, kinder, happier, safer, friendlier, and more joyful world.
If this interests you please accept this free 7 trial to my substack and receive a free gift of 15 hour-long shows on the least known Jewish communities throughout Jewish history.
One of the fictional ones - probably Hector. By my pretty much any modern moral standards - and certainly by mine - the real ones were all monsters, but because Hector wasn't a monarch, little enough is specified about him that if we choose to imagine him as not having been we're probably not violating much of the letter of the canon.
Genuinely worthy people didn't become successful war-leaders in pre-modern societies.
Scott, any idea when there will be another AMA? Now that you're a dad, I'm freshly curious about your thoughts on education, the US school system, risk-taking vs safety, fostering agency, etc. I'll be trying to think up some well-posed questions.
Is the CPI broken? A lot of people who want to deny or underplay the recent inflation turn to figures that show the bottom 25 percentile has seen real wages grow at 3% over the last 4 years.
That’s not great anyway but in looking at how this is calculated the basket of goods is based on the median earner. The median earner spends something like 20% on food.
With that basket of goods in place we then look at wages for the 25 percentile and conclude that their income has kept above inflation by 3% over four years.
However the bottom 25 percentile pay much more of their income on food, which probably wipes out those gains. And yet I’ve seen commentators on the Reddit economics sub suggest that the reason that the bottom 25% are not happy is propaganda, maybe Putin.
But it’s probably food.
Food is very noticeable too, increases in grocery bills are obvious.
Excellent point. Reining in food prices seems like it would be an obvious political win, although I don't know enough about policy to know what the government could do to actually effect that, or what the countervailing incentives might be.
A general post originally written for a different group-
I got to thinking about something. I'm a fan of Sam Harris, but it annoys me when him and other philosophers of cognition make statements like "there is no such thing as free will."
To me, the "question" of free will is a fundamentally confused one.
Instead of "free will", let's use the less loaded term "agency." To me, saying "there is no such thing as agency" is like confused statements from supports of Daniel Dennett that claim (what Dennett himself claims seems to differ but that's a side track) that subjective consciousness doesn't exist because we can't measure it.
This is obviously absurd as without subjective consciousness, there would be no "thing" to perceive or consider the question.
This is the same with "free will" or "agency." It is an essential facet of human experience, and it's difficult to conceive of human interaction, society, etc, without something like it's assumption.
Now, the way I used to think about this was it was simply a different ontological realm from a deterministic view of how conscious beings operate. But diving deeper, I realized that both of these separate ontologies were incomplete, and we can make them "less wrong."
I remember something I thought about while playing poker. In poker, any halfway decent player will at least do some kind of probability estimate based on the information they have, and the actions of other players as to what cards they might have and what cards may come out.
But I noticed something about the way other players were talking about the future cards. They were talking as though the order of cards were arranged in an undetermined state.
Of course once the cards have been shuffled, they are in a definite state, and their is limit to the potential hands dealt based on the actions of the players as they receive new information.
Reading this, this probably sounds trivial. Of course, probability of this sort isn't about some actually indeterminate state but a way to make estimates with a lack of exact information.
But wait a moment. The actions of the players which determine what hands will be dealt... is that as determined as the order of the cards post shuffled?
The point of the people who say "there is no such thing as free will" is that the actions of the players when exposed to that information is as pre-determined as the cards in the completed shuffle.
Or, further back, the order of the cards, the actions of the players, all pre-determined.
However- this is where the trick is. Perfectly known... by whom or what?
No person or system has complete access to ALL information. On a deep physical level, all that IS, that we can be sure of, is our perception exists, and we can make models of the world that map to that territory we're relating to.
The drive of consciousness, both in evolution and execution, as explained by Friston, is the reduction of uncertainty over time. On a more basic level, the universe moves from what one could think of a maximum low entropy scenario to symmetry breaking. As the disc space of the universe is "written" the total possibility space shrinks, but the specific information, the nature of the universe to "project itself" into higher dimensional models simulating information complexity increases. The arrow of time does not allow for a net increase of entropy.
And being that was NOT constantly reducing uncertainty in some way would not move forward along the arrow of time in terms of perception.
It's what Einstein had the fundamental cat problem with QM. He said "God does not play dice."
But let's take that quote a but more seriously. A being "God" is generally defined as all knowing and all powerful.
But that definition runs into the "Dr. Manhattan" problem. A being all knowing also knows what actions its going to take and is thus not "all powerful" but constrained to a certain set of actions by its perfect knowledge.
It lacks "free will."
A system that has the subjective self experience of "free will" or "agency" must NOT be all knowing, it must be working with some limited information.
And indeed, when we look at how human cognition develops in children, when we look at how the universe operates on a quantum level, when we look at the Godelian incompleteness of information, there is never "perfect" knowledge. There are closed "good enough" probability loops- less wrong but never perfect.
This makes me think of something they talk about over at Less Wrong. That thought problem about the all knowing AI and how to fool it with the "pick a box with more money" question. The question assumes the AI has perfect information of the being trying to answer the question. And I don't doubt it could have much greater information then we could conceive of.
But it can't have "perfect" information, or it can't learn. Can't make choices, can't reduce uncertainty.
At a point of perfect knowledge, perfect symmetry, there is NO arrow of time, no change, no movement, no agency.
All that can happen is symmetry breaking- Multivac says "Let there be Light!"
Bringing this back to the question of whether "free will" exists, I would say it very much does. It's related to the lack of complete information any "intelligent" agent has. To affect change, it has to reduce uncertainty.
Now of course, one can find information about the component structure of such a being, or about the properties of inaminate matter. But that "information" always exists in the "mind" of the observer. It has be correlated with that information in some way, and even if in the tiniest bit, the observation alters the total "story" of the territory. What do I mean by that?
The moon may SEEM to be exactly the same to any observer. And we would generally agree the territory there is the same. But the entangling of that information with other information which creates a higher dimensional projection- in intelligent agents, in recording devices, in the gravitational effects on the tides, is only ever partially perceived by an individual, which all in all forms a "close enough" newtonian boundary, but like the coastline of England, you have to at some point round off to inexact limits to get a information that can be communicated. For most thing in the macroscopic world, it doesn't matter. But there's always a degree of fuzziness in any model, and the actual ability of any mind to project that model is only partial and constantly "flickering and dancing" in our mind's tapestry of experience, the way information projects to "higher levels" why losing specificity. Perfect specificty means no arrow of time, no change, no perception, no though.
There are going to be serious problems as the future progresses and we gain more knowledge with how we look at certainty and we understand more things to be determinable. But understanding and retaining human agency is also a vital question, and unfortunately at this point in time, the overton window on this matter is hopelessly confused and statements like "there is no free will" don't help clarify matters.
You replaced "free will" with "agency" without defining "agency".
The *experience of* some kind of free will or agency is part of out daily existence, but that doesn't mean agency per se is.
It's contradictory to say the "experience of experience i9s an illusion" but it's not contradictory to say "the experience of X is an illusion for any other X. Hence it is not contradictory to say "the experience of agency is an illusion".
"No person or system has complete access to ALL information"
Determinism also needs to be distinguished from predictability. A universe that unfolds deterministically is a universe that can be predicted by an omniscient being which can both capture a snapshot of all the causally relevant events, and have a perfect knowledge of the laws of physics.
The existence of such a predictor, known as a Laplace's demon is not a prerequisite for the actual existence of determinism, it is just a way of explaining the concept. It is not contradictory to assert that the universe is deterministic but unpredictable. But there is a relationship between determinism and predictability: predictability is the main evidence for determinism.
Nonetheless, determinism itself is the crux, in arguments for free will, and predictability only features indirectly as evidence for it. Determinism is the crux, because it removes the ability to have done otherwise, which seems to be important for moral responsibility; and also removes the ability to shape the future with present choices.
If determinism is an objective fact, then the only approximation to indeterminism that could exist would be based on lack of knowledge (Knightian uncertainty). But the argument is circular: you have to assume that determinism is objectively true , to infer that all indeterminism (really all unpredicted) is caused by lack of knowledge...so that deteminism is objectively true!
A Laplace's Daemon needs to have a one way relationship with the universe ..it needs to be able to read all the data, but if it outputs anything that could have a causal effect, that would create a strange loop.
That's what's basically happening in your scenario , when your LD tells you it's prediction
In-principle predictability needs to be distinguished from in-practice predictability.
Humans are not perfect, omniscient observers like Laplace's deamon, and therefore cannot make perfect predictions about everything, even in a deterministic universe. The prevailing situation where the human ability to make predictions exists, but is imperfect, is compatible with both complete determinism, and partial indeterminism, which is why the whole question of determinism versus indeterminism is still fraught.
"Bringing this back to the question of whether "free will" exists, I would say it very much does. It's related to the lack of complete information any "intelligent" agent has. "
So if a Laplace's Demons springs into being, everyone loses their free will -- without changing in any way.
First: Determined does not imply known, just unavoidable. Just as I don't necessarily know how a movie or book will end when I start it, but accept that the ending was determined long before I ever started (and I can still value the experience). Or like there might be a large meteor headed for Earth in this very moment that nobody knows about, but impact has been unavoidable since… well, a long time.
Second, I'm not sure that I understand you correctly, but you seem to say that the source of free will is the "fuzziness" in the system – which I take to mean the uneven distribution of knowledge, or even the idea that not everything can be known. But if knowledge were the whole game, that would imply that two agents with perfect information would necessarily have the same will (determined by having all the facts), but that's not necessarily true. It is perfectly possible to have the same knowledge, but diverging interests.
As for Sam Harris: In order to understand his view of free will (and maybe not get annoyed by it), it really helps to see it in context of 1) his moral philosophy, 2) his experience with meditation, and 3) his atheistic activism. The combo sets him a bit apart from many others who discuss free will.
In his discussions about 1), his moral philosophy, you see that he accepts the crucial distinction between agency and free will. He doesn't deny that there's a difference between doing something because you have a gun to your head, or doing something because you get the impulse to do it. We can use our agency to navigate between suffering and well-being, even if we're not the ultimate captains of that agency. Others who think like this often consider themselves compatibalists – there's no free will on the most fundamental level, but we have an experience of free will that is almost the same in everyday life.
He rejects that, however, for a couple of important and quite persuasive reasons:
From 2), his experience as a meditator, he gets that you can't really control your mind. You have about as much control over what thoughts and impulses enter your consciousness, as you have over which sounds you hear in a crowded café or what light reaches your eyes at any given moment. In fact, among all the ideas, there's not even a distinct "you" that could be said to be in charge. There's no place where "will" can rest and be free. So the experience of having a free will that compatibalists rely on, evaporates for him, even as he preserves the sense of agency. You don't have to meditate for very long to understand where he's coming from.
Both of those have implications for 3), his opposition to a lot of religious doctrine. If you don't have ultimate control over your mind, your options, your knowledge, your neurology (because they are all determined by things like genetics, environment, upbringing, or even randomness), then you can't have free will in the sense that pretty much all religions presuppose. A God that will punish or reward you for eternity for something that's out of your control is not great, and not worth worshiping even if you believe in him. Perpetuating the idea of any kind of free will, then, helps prop up belief in religions that cause evil and suffering.
He has written and said a lot of words about this, so this is hardly a complete description – just an attempt at contextualizing his particular views on free will in terms of some other beliefs he is known for. Also, I'm not necessarily asking or expecting you to agree, but it might make it less annoying if you see it in the bigger picture.
In any case: Many people seem to suggest that it's dangerous to take away people's sense of free will, as it might also rob them of agency, and turn them into something like nihilists. However, I think it can be dangerous to have people living the lie that they have free will, too, if it flips the switch in their mind that makes them fly planes into buildings or throw their fellow citizens under the bus.
I think it helps to be more specific about what exactly are we asking when talking about "free will".
Can I my predict my own future actions 100% reliably? No.
Can others predict my future actions 100% reliably? In practice, no.
Could they, hypothetically speaking, if they knew everything about all particles in my body (and the particles in the environment I will be interacting with)? In principle, yes. Minus the inevitable quantum noise.
Are my actions determined by the particles outside of me? Well, they are determined by the particles outside *and* inside of me. Unless we go back in time before I was born, in which case yes, my actions are determined by the particles, and the inevitable quantum noise.
Can the "quantum noise" be considered a "free will" in some sense? Nope, not in any meaningful sense. It is not some kind of anthropomorphic intelligent agent; it is pure noise. (It would be like insisting that a noise in television signal is the television's "free will".) If there are universes without quantum physics where conscious life can arise, the notes about quantum noise would not apply in those universes.
But we don't know how consciousness works, and most of us don't know how quantum physics works, therefore... obviously, those two must be connected, right? -- Haha, nope, it doesn't work that way. (It's like trying to translate from one language you don't speak to another language you don't speak by assigning the words randomly, under the assumption that if I don't know what X means, and if I don't know what Y means, then X could be a translation of Y. Sure, it could be, but it also could be anything else.)
"Can the "quantum noise" be considered a "free will" in some sense? Nope, not in any meaningful sense. It is not some kind of anthropomorphic intelligent agent; it is pure noise. "
It doesn't have to be an agent in itself, just part of an agent. An agent that uses quantum indeterminism has one of the ingredients of libertarian free will,freedom from determinism, but doesn't have to be purely random, and therefore doesn't have to lack other desireable features , such as rationality, and a relationship between actions and desires.
The Dilemma argument has it that libertarian free will is impossible , because it is a) incompatible with determinism, which allows no elbow room or could-have-done-otherwise; and b) incompatible with randomness, which allows no control, relation to desires, etc.
"Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made
conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we
are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not
responsible for them. If a man’s choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes—
perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost
sleep, and cosmic-ray bombardment—what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom." - Sam Harris
The Dilemma argument is a false dichotomy.
It is uncontensious that complete randomness is not a kind of free will worth having or worthy the name...but complete randomness is not the only alternative to complete determinism. The logical alternative to complete determinism is mostly some mixture or partial determinism..which isn't as obviously inimical to free will. So the dilemma argument has to juggle both senses of "not determined".
To demonstrate the concept that determinism-randomnrss is a scale, nott a binary:-
A million line computer programme that makes one call to to rand() is almost deterministc,..but a bit less than a million line programme that makes two calls to rand (), and so on. So it's a scale, not a dichotomy.
It is uncontensious that complete randomness is not a kind of free will worth having or worthy the name...but complete randomness is not the only alternative to complete determinism. The logical alternative to complete determinism is mostly some mixture or partial determinism..which isn't as obviously inimical to free will. So the dilemma argument has to juggle both senses of "not determined".
If you have something that's actually tri state , you can make it bivalent by merging two of the states. The problem is that people rarely do so consistently. Sometimes (some and none) are opposed to (all), sometimes (some and all) are opposed to (none).
To demonstrate the concept that determinism<->randomness is a scale, not a binary:-
A million line computer programme that makes one call to to rand() is almost deterministc,..but a bit less than a million line programme that makes two calls to rand (), and so on. So it's a scale, not a dichotomy.
If a deterministic algorithm does not satisfy your intuition about "free will", is this problem really fixed by adding a few calls to rand()?
If you later replaced the random number generator with a high-quality pseudorandom generator, would the robot lose its free will? Would it lose the *feeling* of having free will?
It would obviously lose libertarian free will. It might or might not lose the feeling of free will. But why would the actual existence of FW depend on the feeling?
> But why would the actual existence of FW depend on the feeling?
The reason why people talk about "free will" is that they have a feeling/experience of, basically, "I could realistically do X, and I could also realistically do Y, and it is difficult for me to make a reliable prediction which one will I ultimately do".
And the debate is basically about how can such feeling (seemingly supported by experience) arise in a universe where people are made out of atoms, and the atoms follow a few mechanical rules.
If we ignore the feelings of "free will" as important data, we are on the way to the "philosophical zombies" territory.
If the robot can lose free will, while fully retaining the feeling of free will, then... maybe we are such robots, too? How would we know?
> The reason why people talk about "free will" is that they have a feeling/experience of, basically, "I could realistically do X, and I could also realistically do Y, and it is difficult for me to make a reliable prediction which one will I ultimately do".
The feeling is evidence of free will, not a cause of free will.
...What does knowledge have anything to do with free will? The whole point is that this world is deterministic. Any decision that a human makes is completely dependent on the past, operating on consistent physical rules. Therefore, saying that humans have "free will" is about as ridiculous as saying a domino fell of its free will. Human knowledge is just statistical association formed by neurons; there's no reason to believe it affects anything beyond the outcome of calculations made by the brain. So... I don't even understand what point you're trying to make.
That definition of free will isn’t really the colloquial or legal version, where (as an example) if a man has a gun to his head while he is driving a criminal to rob a bank then he has no free will, if he chooses to do it then he has. In this version the external agent forcing him to do something violates his free will.
Without an external agent who or what is the person or agent who is stoping a person or agent from having free will - why the person himself!
Which obviously isn’t the same thing. So point one to philosophers - change your terminology. Maybe - “not perfect agency” or something.
It’s also naive to assume that there’s some kind of lower level determinism at the level of the neurons. That’s not true of software and the CPU, it won’t be true of AGI, and it isn’t true of conscious beings either. If free will exists or doesn’t exist it will exist or not exist at the level of the software, or mind.
If AGI ever comes about - and although definitions are fuzzy, I take that to mean an AI that is conscious or has agency - then how do we define or differentiate it from an AI without that agency if nothing ever has free will?
Or are we going to say the only AGI has free will? Or that humans, AGI, procedural expert systems from the 80s, and toasters are the same thing?
> Murray H. Hall (1841 − January 16, 1901) was a New York City bail bondsman and Tammany Hall politician who became famous on his death in 1901, when it was revealed that he was assigned female at birth.
It is pretty insane that, for over three decades, absolutely no one suspected that he wasn't male, not even his own adoptive daughter. ...Though I guess even if they did suspect it, no one would be rude enough to say it out loud, considering he was apparently well liked within the community.
I took a double take when I read that it was found out Hall was "assigned female at birth", as if someone found the birth certificate or something. I presume that that's a weird euphemism and that what was actually found out was that Hall was female. Contemporary US culture can be rather interesting.
If you want, you could undo that change and see what happens. Will it be rejected? Reverted? Will you trigger the most boring edit war of the year? Or will the whole Wikipedia continue thinking "meh, whatever"?
When someone says "Our name was changed at Ellis Island", they mean that the manifest author back in Europe changed it, when they converted a Cyrillic alphabet name into Latin characters. It was already different in the manifest.
I’m about to get my wife pregnant and I’m wondering what’s the best form of choline to take to maximize the ratio of bioavailable choline to harmful TMAO? Phosphatidylcholine, plain choline, both, or something else?
Hi all - I am a 48yo scientist with a so far very fulfilling career but also kind of ready to not work in corporate employment anymore. However, I don't have the courage to not have a job for fear I won't ever find one again if I wasn't happy without one. I am looking for an exchange with people who have "retired early" and what their experience was, as I know zero such people. I may be looking for bias and people for whom this was a good decision (don't let me).
Hmm 65 and semi-retired. I got fired from my dream tech job in 2019. I've been working 25-30 hours a week as a prep cook at the nearby restaurant, and I like it. I'd go crazy without some type of work to do, and if you've got enough money you can always find some job to do. Do you have any hobbies or pastimes you enjoy? (I like cooking.)
I don't have a personal experience, nor do I know anyone who has, so the following is just a guess:
The work provides certain discipline, without which your daily rhythm can fall apart. Just the fact that you need to wake up at certain time and go to some place... without it, some people stay in bed until 10 or 11AM, then they slowly prepare and eat breakfast, etc., oops, half the day is over and you haven't done anything yet, and it's time to think about lunch, oops, it's evening already, well maybe next day...
Another thing is that if you don't have a job, you need to actively think about socialization. Maybe there is a club for people who have the same hobby. But if they aren't early-retired, they will probably meet in the afternoon.
So your schedule could be something like: wake up in the morning, take a short walk (the physical activity and sunshine will wake up your brain), return home and do the work you want to do, then either go to a club or enjoy your afternoon otherwise. (By the way, lunch, are you going to cook it or someone else will? Because even if you have the time, and you don't mind cooking, it will still interfere with your work.)
There are whole communities based around financial independence and early retirement. If you are looking for whole forums to talk with, then try https://www.choosefi.com/community/ and https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/. Keep in mind, you will definitely get a positive bias at those sites.
I would say that whether or not you should retire early is a very personal decision. It changes not just your finances, but also your social life and self-image. I used to read a lot about it when I was working towards financial independence and would periodically come across stories of people being bored and depressed after leaving their job. Most people that retire early don't struggle with the financial side (barring a catastrophe) because they would already have to be disciplined to get to that point in the first place.
Thank you very much. I am a bit less interested in the financial aspect than seeing if anything resonated in the the emotional/mental journey of others who quit work.
Someone else covered the social aspect of retiring early quite well, so I'll touch a little bit more on the self-image part of quitting work.
What people do in many ways represents who we are, both socially and mentally. You went to school to be a scientist. When you meet people, you say you are a scientist, and you talk about science. You met many of your friends and colleagues through science. You spend much of your free time thinking about your field of study. Science is how you functionally contribute to society.
When you retire early and stop being a scientist, you need to be able to adjust the mindset of what you are. If your self-image stays tied to your career, then you will not be happy. You don't want to see yourself as an out of work scientist, you want your self-image to be something new and positive. You need to be able to almost reinvent yourself and find a new passion or you will be bored and depressed and end up watching TV or Youtube 10 hours a day more than before.
A while back in some Link post I think Scott mentioned some state passing a law that said every time they added a regulation, they had to delete one too. I suspect this is a case where the rock with the words “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING” chiseled on it but I am curious about the consequences. Anybody know?
Wasn't there an ancient Greek state which had a principle that if someone proposed a law and this was voted down, then the proposer got the chop, literally! Now _that_ would soon simplify the regulations, provided proposals to eliminate laws were not similarly treated.
Depends how one defines "laws" and such. A law can be establishing a negative right. As an obvious example, proposing a law to make slavery illegal would be a a negative right granted. One could say that's "a regulation that restricts someone's freedom" And there's the rub. While I suspect based on your post we share a similar "libertarian" mind state, people who propose laws and regulation will always argue there law is protecting someone's freedom from someone else who would violate it.
I.e., environmental regulations, you're right not be poisoned by the commons.
An analysis (https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/warnings-unheard-warnings-unheeded-the-story-of-the-2019-alaska-mid-air-collision-89a3444fe7d7) by Admiral Cloudberg by of a mid-air collision in Alaska cited a Trump executive order mandating one-regulation-enters-two-regulations-leave as a reason why the FAA was slow to adopt an NTSB regulation that might have avoided the collision. It's already the case that the FAA does not rubber-stamp NTSB recommendations, but it seems reasonable that the executive order was particularly problematic as applied to aircraft safety rules.
That's an interesting read. I'd like to point out that the SMS regulation, which was blocked by the one-regulation-enters-two-regulations-leave policy, only enters the scene after a miscommunication about a different regulation had already introduced (and the government paid for the installation of) a fatal downgrade of the safety systems.
"However, in 2012, the FAA proposed to upgrade the ADS-B equipment that it previously supplied to Alaskan operators. For this purpose, the FAA drew up a technical standard order, or TSO, listing the design requirements for the new equipment. This TSO didn’t include a requirement for a conflict alerting capability, even though plenty of systems in use at the time had this feature."
...
"The FAA’s position on the issue was that manufacturers could include a conflict alerting capability if they wanted, but should not be required to do so."
...
"In response to an NTSB request for comment, representatives of FreeFlight Systems (which designed the RANGR 978 transceiver) stated that they understood the FAA to discourage manufacturers from including capabilities that weren’t in the TSO. As a result, in 2015 the Garmin GDL 90 transceiver on N959PA was replaced by a new, FAA-supplied FreeFlight RANGR 978 that met the TSO’s specifications but didn’t include a conflict alerting capability."
So the government said "you must have AT LEAST these features" and the company thought they meant "you may have ONLY these features". Strangely, I've heard of this exact thing happening before. I wonder if it's a common failure mode?
It mentions something called the "gravitational form factor" a couple of times. Does that mean that energy densities are so high in local spots, and distances between these so small, that gravity can play a significant role in interactions within a proton? Or is that just a handy phrase transferred from some other context and gravity has no discernable effect inside it?
No idea... I'm going to guess no gravity, but just angular momentum and the distribution of mass/ energy in the system. (Search agrees... https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.08484.pdf)
Thanks. I found another good reference with a web search. (With Google, my habit until recently has been to try and "spoon feed" it with a few single words and short phrases in quotes, in the hope that would make things easier for it. But recently I'm finding one seems to get better results by using a natural language question as if it was a person or AI! )
Generally, pretty much as you guessed, it appears from that discussion that a form factor of an object, in relation to a field, is a measure (in terms of a set of parameters or a matrix or something) of how the field's influence on the object is distributed throughout it.
So for example, one can have an electric form factor, which indicates how charge is spread out over it and possibly within it, and a magnetic FF, etc. By analogy, the gravitational form factor is simply a measure of how mass/energy is distributed and, as I guessed, use of that term doesn't imply that gravity is actually having a noticeable effect, unless the object was the size of a planet!
BTW, and I know this is nitpicking and a bit ungracious to mention, as you took the trouble to reply, but with ArXiv results it is better to cite the abstract page rather than a PDF directly, because if the authors release a revised version of the paper then the quoted PDF will become out of date, but the abstract page will show the latest version or in a few cases a retraction! Ideally Google should do this automatically, but one can copy and paste the number ("2310.08484" above) in the Search line on the main page and this brings up:
Right link rather than pdf. People have tried to measure the neutron electric dipole moment, but still nothing. I love physics, but I always remember what a colleague said once. All this high energy stuff is cool, but not much useful to humans happens above 1 MeV of potential.
I've written over the past several weeks about an off year election we recently held in my northern Michigan community, sideways and upside down. Let us pray that this is not harbinger of our national elections. Part 3 is here, with links to the previous reports as well: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/local-election-part-3-party-headquarters
I just started reading The Doors of Perception, and it's the fisrt non-fiction book by Huxley that I have read. It strikes me as profoundly modern, a lot of the things in the first few chapters, his explanation of the realness of the mescaline experience ring quite familiar and it seems that people have been rediscovering that in the last decade. I wonder how many times throughout history we have gotten that knowledge and lost it again only to rediscover it a couple of generations later. Of course, given that for most of history the world was divided into lots of small groups with no unifying language/internet, I can imagine that psychedelics were something that has been rediscovered thousands of times
I'm not saying you personally have this bias, but there seems to be a common unspoken assumption these days that every idea, belief, or attitude that feels modern, liberal, or progressive was invented sometime after like 1967--i catch myself making this mistake sometimes-- and this can make it quite jarring to read material written before that time, especially from ca. the 1890s through the 1950s
I've caught myself doing exactly what you describe numerous times. The strongest example I can come up with right now was my surprise at learning that quantum mechanics is widely considered to have originated in 1900. Before finding that fact I would've given an estimate of 1945-1950. I wouldn't say it's jarring to read such materials, though, more like mind-opening and humbling
Why doesn't someone in the US start The Union of Concerned Swing-State Centrists? With enough members, this organisation could credibly threaten to determine the presidential election through block voting. It could then negotiate with the two parties and commit to urge all their members to vote for the party that accepts the most of their demands. Possible problems:
1. Centrists may not agree that much on policy.
2. Centrists aren't that interested in politics so it's hard to organise them like this.
3. The two parties aren't centralised enough to enable a negotiation and binding commitment.
4. The UoCSSC could easily be taken over by partisans.
Has anything like this been tried? Isn't this a more viable way for new centrists parties (e.g. the Forward Parrty) to get started?
As most politicians start with lower level offices, the natural place to start is with swing-districts. But there are not many of those, because congresscritters have every incentive to gerrymander, and also because red/blue tends to follow rural/urban geography quite closely.
Or I guess you could try going straight for state-wide positions like the Senate or Governor. Who knows, maybe it could work?
1 and 2 are definitely true. There /are/ "true centrists" in the sense of "politically engaged people with an ideological commitment to policies midway between the two parties across a wide range of issue", but they're massively outnumbered by "average centrists" who come out as "centrist" if you project them onto a one-dimensional left-right axis, but only because they hold a mix of left-wing and right-wing positions (and who often don't care much about politics). And, obviously, someone with a principled ideological commitment to left-wing social values and right-wing economics and someone with a principled ideological commitment to right-wing social values and left-wing economics are not natural bedfellows.
I don't know about 3 or 4 - I think the counterfactual is too large to predict corrolaries like these reliably.
One is that centrism as a philosophy does not lead to a lot of coherent positions. For example, at the moment neither party has a serious plan to address the national debt. The 'centrist' midpoint between the two parties would be, I guess, doing nothing?
Secondly, are you interested in centrism as a question of policy? Or centrism as a question of manner? A lot of our politics these days is dominated by sound bites, attacks that are meant to go viral, grandstanding, and generally making a big show of trying to do things rather than actually doing things.
I think just the usual third party issue would apply: anyone considering voting for a centrist party is going to be told in no uncertain terms by those around them that they're "giving the vote to The Enemy" by letting their party's vote be split.
Even if the centrist party theoretically does manage to be a perfect halfway point between the two parties: that won't really change the dynamics that it's risky for anyone with any sort of tilt at all to vote for a more central option, even if that's my truer preference.
Plus, viewed from the perspective of parties as just collections of Americans, it's a prisoner's dilemma - both sides cooperate, then we get more even-keeled leadership and not constant back-and-forth swinging from one extreme to the other, but if only one side "defects" (refuses to vote centrist, even if it's their true preference) they win.
But, viewed from the perspective of the parties as real political entities on their own, a third party genuinely a threat to to their power and not something either side has any reason to allow to exist, and something both parties may cooperate to prevent.
Maybe I'm explaining the idea badly: There's no centrist party to vote for so no-one is wasting their vote. There's no stronger-than-normal reason for a centrist to defect (unless they aren't actually a centrist). The existing parties may try to destroy it just because they prefer that no other centres of political power exist, I can see that, but that seems like a general counterargument against all kinds of political organisation ever.
I think the issue is that there are very few "true centrists who have no leaning towards either party and thus wouldn't feel like they're defecting".
I think the far more common case is the "60% Democrat/Republican" who usually votes with one party but will switch their vote, under the right circumstances. If you discount those people as "not actually a centrist", sure, but then I just doubt there's enough left to form a viable political movement.
The other common form of centrist is "Socially X but fiscally Y" and again, I think 'defection' mechanics apply: if I'm a "vote economically in hard times, but socially otherwise" (and I do think this is a very common model) then in economically hard times, I'm going to want to vote for the one that most convincingly promises to fix the economic stuff, not "throw away my vote" by voting for a compromise party.
The better mental model of this voter is perhaps not someone who sits dispassionately in the middle of the political spectrum and would prefer centrist options, but of Jekyll and Hyde. And maybe this voter would throw out the central premise of this argument that a "centrist" position would actually be better for the country: they might genuinely prefer the back and forth between the parties, depending on the current climate.
> The existing parties may try to destroy it just because they prefer that no other centres of political power exist, I can see that, but that seems like a general counterargument against all kinds of political organisation ever.
It's not an argument against all forms of political organization - the parties aren't going to uniformly oppose political organizations like the NRA or Planned Parenthood or [hypothetical non-partisan example that I can't think of here] because they aren't real threats.
But a general argument against third parties - groups that actually risk taking away congress seats or Presidential posts? Yes, exactly. *gestures broadly at the entire history of the United States political system*
EDIT: I realize I'm not really clearly addressing that your idea is not really it's own party but like a negotating block... but if it involves somehow giving over voting power to a group that might use it to vote for "the other" side, I think the same dynamics would occur.
While it can contribute to overeating, distracted eating doesn't seem to be a primary driver of appetite. People who engage in distracted eating will eat about 150 more calories per-meal than someone eating mindfully. I would need to know more about how "distraction" levels have changed over time, but I can't imagine we're that much more distracted than before.
You could say the same thing about reading or surfing the Internet or having scintillating conversation. I dimly recall seeing studies (and personal experiments) that indicated that eating slowly and mindfully and chewing a lot led to being satiated with less food. But I don't think that explains the entire problem.
I think the core of the problem is that food is incredibly abundant and cheap, and that our lifestyles no longer require significant amounts of physical movement and labor. BLS.gov shows food making up 46% of household spending in 1900, down to 7.5% today. Jobs are far more sedentary, and overall we hardly do the same kind of personal physical labor at home. Timesaving devices such as washing machines and lawn mowers (not to mention a lot more outsourcing of those types of functions) all reduce the number of calories used to complete daily activities.
I am fat and I don't even have a TV, so probably not.
My guess would be it is multiple causes, most of them correlated positively with modern lifestyle. How much you eat, what you eat, how you eat, how much you move. Maybe even something invisible, such as bacteria in the air interacting with your gut flora?
Occasionally, we want to convince a small, informal group to change some well-established tradition, for reasons such as efficiency or health. For example, do we want to eat germy birthday cakes? No? Then we could suggest that the birthday celebrator not blow out candles on the cake which we're about to eat.*
In my experience, suggestions like this are almost always rejected by the group, so I rarely make them.
Does anyone know of a good compilation of anecdotes about suggestions like this that were actually accepted? I would like to absorb some inspiration from what they have in common.
Arguably more bacteria in that situation gives the cake eaters' immune systems small samples of species and strains of bacteria they may not have previously encountered, and is thus _more_ healthy for them in the long run!
Aren't a lot of allergies and conditions like asthma said to be due to infants not being exposed to as much bacteria and different kinds of substances as they would have been in the past?
Let's assume that the correlation between less bacteria exposure and more autoimmune conditions is indeed an indication of a causal relationship. If that's so, then should each child briefly lick the whole cake before the slices are served?
We're not aware of any research showing where the threshold is between those two amounts. Nor are we aware of research into whether a 1400% increase in germs eaten has a meaningful impact on infection risk. Are you sure you are looking for equivalent levels of rigor here and in your other comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-313/comment/48438558)? The context is the same: what actions do we take, or not take, regarding cake hygiene.
Let's assign 99% probability to some level of germs being worse than some lower level germs in direct impact on infection risk among young children. Let's assign 65% probability to some level of germs being better than some lower level of germs for avoiding the formation of allergies among young children. It seems to me like the rational decision is to avoid the germs when possible, while waiting for more evidence on whether there is some way to expose young children to roughly the correct amount of germs for allergy avoidance. If you think allergy formation is terrible and infections are insignificant, then you will get the opposite answer.
We shouldn't forget that fewer toddlers die of infections than in past eras, where germ exposure was higher and allergies were less common. So even if we someday assign 99% instead of 65% to the allergy hypothesis being true, I think we would want to weigh that against additional toddlers remaining alive in the higher-allergy era.
I don't really care about the percent increase, which was my point in the comment you quoted. I care about the total viral load. A 1400% increase of a tiny amount may be meaningless. Licking the cake is certainly going to increase the viral load by a lot more than breathing around it or blowing on it.
There's also the question of what actions does a certain train of thought implicate. If breathing on a cake makes it unhealthy, then we might need to consider other types of breathing around other people. Given how conversations work, this may mean not talking to people in person anymore, or a wide variety of currently common activities. Not licking a cake is far easier without disrupting normal activities (for the record I would also discourage people from French kissing a bunch of people at a party as well).
I just fully disagree with your last point, because toddlers mostly died due to lack of antibiotics, not because they were exposed to germs more often. Does better hygiene improve childhood health? Absolutely, but a really small amount compared to better medicine. It also comes with tradeoffs where children aren't exposed to small and manageable amounts of germs that help build their immune systems.
The notion of 'briefly' licking seems to be obstructing us, since we might have very different understandings of 'briefly'. Instead, do you recommend that a 2nd child also blow on the cake?
You might say it's not appropriate to apply this sort of reversal test here, because you're in favor of only a small amount of bacteria exposure. But I don't see how the tentative claims about less germ exposure causing allergies justify any distinction between small numbers of children blowing on the cake.
I have never given any thought to how much of the drastic decrease in toddler deaths is attributable to antibiotics vs hygiene. Infection isn't a subject I read about much, so I tend to think of it in terms of 'What is the expected impact of our specific quick action? Is it worth the effort?' not 'How useless do I expect this specific quick action to be, in comparison to something involving medicine?'
Regarding your second paragraph, we're in agreement. Greater food hygiene doesn't seem like a costly tradeoff, whereas not socializing seems very costly.
On the one hand, this is clearly an uphill struggle because groups of humans will defend themselves and resist being pushed around by outsiders. (And telling me how I can and can't celebrate my own birthday is as much pushing me around as directly telling me what you want me to do/say/wear/etc.)
On the other hand - (and I apologise for bringing woke-bashing into your nice clean thread) - it's clearly been done successfully at some point, because at some point I woke up to find a large number of people my age and below have adopted a completely alien set of values and preferences, and I would rather like to know how this devilish feat was done.
Maybe you could target the members of your group with a campaign of Tiktok/Twitter/Facebook(delete as approriate) content showing high status attractive people enacting the behaviour you want to see, while unattractive low status people continue to do what you don't like and are made the butt of the joke for it.
I know it's just an example, but if you're worried about a 1400% increase, it helps to know the baselines. If you go from 10 germs to 150, and it takes 10,000 to get sick, maybe nobody cares. Talking about such a large percentage increase gives the impression that it's suddenly *very unhealthy* compared to the alternative, but it may not actually be so. There's also the question of comparable risks. Maybe being around a person who doesn't live in your household increases your risk of getting sick by 10000%. Even if true, almost everyone is going to continue taking that risk for a variety of reasons - most notably because they literally cannot survive without going to work/grocery store/whatever.
Given how many birthday cakes I've consumed that had been blown on, I feel reasonably sure that continuing to blow on them is fine and that your suggestion is unnecessary even if you're correct on the increase.
My point being - if you're going to make suggestions about how people should change things they do daily, make sure that your information is both correct and relevant.
The opposite of what you're looking for I'm afraid, but there was a semi-viral post of a woman standing in a queue at the airport a few weeks ago that made me think of this. Instead of doing the usual thing where as the person at the front of the line is seen she would shuffle forward approximately one person-length, this woman would stay in place for several people (creating a large gap) and then close say ten person-spaces at once.
People online were FURIOUS (even by online commentary standards). But the woman was right - it makes absolutely no difference as long as you aren't at the front of the queue.
I was extremely struck by exactly what you were saying - it seemed to be the transgression of informal social norms that was the problem, not the reasoning. I wonder maybe if people instinctively reinforce a schelling point of 'stick to social norms in informally coordinating spaces' because everyone benefits from the social norm of 'form an orderly queue', and if we allow that these norms can be broken if there is a good reason for it then we have to spend a lot of energy relitigating these norms every time we enter an informal social space?
This is actually the correct way to help alleviate a traffic jam where there are multiple lanes, and is effective especially when multiple people do it. However for a single queue I don't think it makes a difference.
It's inviting queue jumpers; if she leaves a large space in front of her, someone can come along, go "oh is this the end of the queue?" and get into that ten person space. At the very tail end of the queue, people are also bunched up because nobody is moving forward. And if you've come along to the tail end of a bunched-up queue, you know how annoying it is when nobody knows "should you go before me or me before you?", especially if it's a long line out the door in the usual beautiful Irish summer weather (rain) and you might be stuck waiting outdoors.
She may *feel* like "hey I'm moving way faster this way", but it's the same time either way and inconveniencing everybody else isn't worth it. If six new people came along and got in front of her in that "ten person space" she left clear, now she's six people more behind than if she had moved ahead, and I for one would think it serves her right to be delayed - if she wasn't delaying *everybody else* waiting in line behind her.
There are rational reasons why the woman's behavior was unhelpful, to other queuers and the airport management. But probably the most annoying thing for those queuing behind her is that psychologically people like to feel the queue is progressing and their distance from the desk is steadily reducing, whereas her antics denied them that satisfaction for long periods.
If everyone did that the line would become incredibly long and convoluted (and likely no longer be a line, as no one could tell where it was). Whatever benefit she's getting from doing that comes at the expense of everyone else - she's defecting against the rest of the line.
Yeah, this. Also, it kind of screws the people at the very back of the line, because there's usually queuing going on and delays / blockages from the point they check your ticket / passport, so she's making that line less accessible to everyone coming from that queue for basically no reason. AND making the overall security line before that point ~10 people longer because of her lack of consideration. Which undoubtedly causes some mental anguish, if not actually increased wait times.
You make a good point about the utility of social norms, and the expense of relitigating them. I'd like to see a list of irrational social behaviors that come from well established tradition. My feeling is that most have already been heavily discussed (things like the man buying dinner for his date, or buying christmas presents), or we value those traditions because we grew up with them and they constitute our culture. It is perfectly rational to want birthday candles because you turn down the lights and your face glows while your closest friends sing to you and the smell of wax reminds you of birthdays at your recently deceased grandmothers house. That may be worth a few extra germs to you.
How we dress is always good fodder though. I like to lift weights for about 25 minutes at a time, and rather than change cloths I pop into the gym wearing my full work attire and do some bench press. People think i am nuts, and I've even been told it is not allowed, but they can't articulate why it is not allowed, since I am wearing closed toes shoes. If I had to change I wouldn't have time to work out. And sometimes I jog home fully dressed, and some find a grown man running down the street to be very uncouth.
Preach it! I can't tell you how many dress shirts or dress pants I've ruined benching or squatting respectively in a quick gym pop-in. Well, I could estimate, it's more than 3 but under a double handful for each...but the real point is, more people should do this.
I also like popping in for a quick 25-50 pullups, though I've never ruined any clothes doing that. And of course, this means you always get your workout in - there's no "oops, left my gym bag / clothes at home" workout skipping, because working out is more important than some lame pair of dress clothes. You have to have *priorities.*
I never got crap for doing this at my work gym, but I'm at the top of leaderboard in the work gym and am moving some noticeable weight, and all the gym attendants know me.
I also used to get weird looks for bike commuting ~18 miles round trip to work in dress clothes.
Re the sweat question, some people just sweat less, or the threshold of exertion to start sweating is way higher than a quick 20-30 minute set or bike ride - I never got sweaty doing either of these things.
Yes, I typically cycle ~5km in my work clothes on days I need to go in to the office, and in the morning keep to a non-sweaty pace, no problem. In the afternoon it's warmer and I may be in a hurry to get home, so I might work up a sweat - but then half an hour later I'm home and there's a shower and clean clothes right there.
I'm a bike to worker too, and also wear my work clothes. I sometimes bike to work in 90 degree, humid weather, still wearing work clothes, and while they definitely get wet with sweat, I do not stink. I have actually had people I know well check me for b.o. I read somewhere that what stinks is anxiety sweat and old sweat that's been hanging around for a while. That's what I've found to be true for me. When I head in to work I am usually fresh out of the shower, so no old sweat around. As for anxiety sweat -- yeah, mine smells like cat piss. But it's rare for me to be seriously anxious at work.
I'm a woman and wear skirts and nice shoes to work. I bought an English Pashley bike with an internal hub and huge mud guards, and it's great. Even the skirts on my long dresses never get caught in the bike, and I don't get mud-spatters even if the streets are wet.
Long, loooong ago, back when I still had a half-decent level of fitness, I had a cycling speed threshold (well exertion threshold, really) above which I would sweat and below which I wouldn't. I could cycle at (say) 12mph average and not sweat, but if I was late for work I'd have to cycle at (say) 18mph average and thus arrive sweaty. I think perhaps it might also help that air-cooling and sweat-evapouration both scale with speed, which maybe provides some wiggle-room.
(The difficult bit was consciously making yourself cycle at just 12mph and letting other cyclists overtake you when you know you *could* go at 18mph and overtake them!)
understand when something is worth changing or its just you being neurotic. Kids will get sick just being at a party, the cake will not accelerate it. Other health related changes-make sure its worth spending your social capital on it.
The most obvious and consequential example I can think of is mandatory seat belts. And the solution? Just arrest people who don't comply until it's normalized. Turns out simple problems have simple solutions.
You are getting a demonstration of how readily people argue if you present the case against doing something the familiar way. You make clear that the birthday cake situation is just an *example* of the kind of situation you have in mind, but even so people are reflexively and irritably arguing against changing the custom, and against the info you mention about germs etc.
If you're going to worry about germs on birthday cakes, you should also worry about all those germy people standing or sitting close to you and breathing out germ-laden air that you then have to breathe in. There's such a thing as being too fastidious, and if you're really measuring germ counts on birthday cakes, I think that's verging on being over-anxious.
I think the best way to convince a small informal group to change something like that is to present the change as something you need for personal reasons -- so present it as something you can't help being bothered by, even though you know that being bothered maybe isn't clearly justified by the facts. SI would recommend doing that even in situations where your real reason for requesting the change is not that you have a quirk or sensitivity that makes you need it, but that you think the new way of doing things is safer/more efficient/less likely to get the group in legal trouble/whatever. That is by far the best way to get the group to change its behavior, rather than arguing with you.
Of course the price you pay is to present yourself as having a weird sensitivity, or a bit of unmanageable anxiety. Still, once the group shifts to doing the new thing, some may find they like it. And you can occasionally say something that backs up your preference, while still presenting it as an aspect of your sensitivity. For instance, in the birthday cake example: " It's such a relief that we blow the candles out with a fan now. I just could not stop thinking about the spittle and germs that land in the frosting if someone blows them out. I read somewhere that there are 14x as many bacteria on a cake after somebody does that. Who knows whether it's true but that was just such a gross thought."
Thank you. It hadn't occurred to me that presenting something as a personal sensitivity (even when it isn't) might appeal more to the group than a rationale which applies equally to everyone. That said, I would guess that there is a limit to how often one can get away with relying on pity like this. I suspect that most traditions weren't formed in such a way, either.
No, it's probably not a good thing to do frequently, but for many of us situations requiring it don't come up all that often. If you crave to ask the group to change its customs a lot of the time when you're in a group, you should try to figure out why that is. Is it the groupiness of groups you don't like -- so you start craving to protests their rituals and standards? Or is there some way things are handled in everyday life where you have very strong views and feel you can't tolerate being around people who don't share them? Maybe you need to be in a group of people who share your views. Or else consider just going with "when in Rome do as the Romans do.." The time you spend in the group, doing things that go against your principles, is probably tiny compared to your time away from it. Deviating from your priniciples for that amount of time is unlikely to make much differnce in the long term outcome for you.
Right. The first thing to do is to understand the power dynamics of the group and your place in it.
If we all agree to do things your way because your way is better, then we've all just ceded a whole bunch of power and status to you. Unless your way is a whole lot better, then we're pretty reluctant to do that.
By casting it as a personal irrational quirk, you allow us to do you a favour without admitting that your way is actually better; in fact, you're probably giving up some status in exchange for getting things your way.
If you're blowing out candles such that spittle is flying, you're doing it wrong. I think talking about "ooh all the spittle on the cake" is only going to make people think you're turning into Howard Hughes:
In that case, I think it's better to be honest: "Look, I'm sorry about this, but blowing out candles on the cake makes me nervous about germs. I'm not accusing anyone, but if you could humour me it'd be great, thanks?" That is at least understandable as "okay some people are anxious and can't help it, let's accommodate them", whereas going on about spittle and germ counts just makes you sound like an obsessive weirdo.
You could also ask them to cut you a slice of the cake *before* blowing out the candles, that way everyone gets to compromise without losing the tradition.
Are you immune deficient? If yes, most groups would be easily convinced by the argument that you're trying to avoid extra germs. If not, it doesn't make much sense to worry about.
The candles-on-cake example isn't important; I used it because almost all readers will be familiar with the tradition. But for anyone curious, this is how I would attempt to convince the group:
'Do we want to eat a germy cake? No. Instead, let's make a tortoise - symbol of long life - from Play-Doh. With several pairs of hands, this should only take 2 minutes. We'll call the tortoise Methuselah. The birthday celebrant blows out candles stuck into Methuselah's shell. Then, you can eat Methuselah if you really want, but the rest of us will eat the cake.'
Compared to just abandoning the tradition, the Methuselah option seems a little more likely to be accepted. But only a little, I think - say 10% vs 5%. My inability to come up with a more compelling suggestion is why I want to read through some anecdotes about successes.
Ugh. You would not be invited again. On the other hand saying that this tradition causes germ transmission might work. Or replacing the excitement of the candle blowing out with something else as exciting. Maybe the opposite - candles that light up (and maybe sparkle) when the birthday boy or girl presses a button after a countdown or the end of the song.
It's not compelling because most people are going to think "What the hell?" instead of "Wow, this makes so much sense!"
I mean, if you're worried about a germy cake, I regret to inform you that bakeries are not surgical operating theatres or pharmaceutical clean rooms, and that cake has been exposed to the open air and people breathing their noxious germ-laden breath on it before ever it ended up on a table with candles on it.
"Then, you can eat Methuselah if you really want, but the rest of us will eat the cake.'"
I'll tell you what is more likely to happen:
"Hands up everybody who thinks we should leave the candles on the cake and make Squirrels eat the plasticine tortoise? Yes, that's everyone!"
Besides, it should be a turtle, not a tortoise, to symbolise longevity.
Sorry, but sounds like an excellent way to not get invited to my next birthday party.
Birthday cakes are an instance where the value of the tradition outweighs the minor hygiene risk (unless of course the birthday boy/girl is actively sick, or a guest is severely immunocompromised, or something). The risk posed to my health by a birthday cake is primarily from the butter and sugar which will make me fat, and not from the germs which might have accumulated on top of it.
If you don't think so then you are probably either overvaluing germs or undervaluing tradition relative to normal people, which will put you in conflict with them. If that's a hill you want to die on then okay, but first take the time to understand why people enjoy doing it the current way.
I would suggest an electronic cover for the cake with light-up "candles" that one can "blow out" guaranteed. You can program however many candles to light up, and sell it as being reusable. Then everyone blows on the plastic and you just need to make the sure the bottom of it is clean when you put it on the cake.
Avoids the whole "you literally make me sick" implication.
Or one could come up with a fun alternative to extinguishing the candles by blowing on them. Would popping a helium-filled balloon near the cake have a similar effect?
A relative is considering acupuncture as a treatment for facial pain. (They've also booked a proper non-alternative-medicine scan to look into it.) How should I dissuade them from the acupuncture?
My wife is an acupuncturist, so I have some bias here, but I wanted to share a few things from my experience / exposure to acupuncture. I am not a doctor and not pretending to be one, just offering some perspective.
Anecdotally, I helped out in a clinic overseas with my wife for two weeks where we treated a couple hundred patients (who generally had little to no access to medical care) with acupuncture. We saw the same patients repeatedly for a wide range of conditions, most commonly pain and injuries from a lifetime of hard physical labor, and patients consistently reported to us substantial improvement by the last day of our clinic. Maybe all placebo, but if so, it's a damn good one.
Personally, while I would be the last person to claim it is always effective, I have experienced and seen many cases of striking effectiveness, with anxiety and pain being two things where I have first-hand experienced genuinely immediate relief from due to acupuncture (to be clear, in most cases/situations you would NOT be expected to experience immediate relief). To my mind, it's certainly a preferable first-line treatment for pain compared to pharmaceutical alternatives.
In terms of credibility, Acupuncturists are increasingly working alongside MDs at many of the top hospitals in the U.S. on cases such as managing symptoms of cancer treatments. I know several acupuncturists personally who do this. The fact that Medicare and Health Insurers have expanded coverage for acupuncture should offer some additional reassurance. It is not exactly fringe at this point.
Acupuncture is generally low risk in most cases with few/mild side effects to my knowledge/experience. The biggest risk I am aware of is a pneumothorax, which can occur if an acupuncture needle punctures the lung (rare, and to my understanding generally not fatal unless someone is very frail). If someone is at all competent and following the most basic required procedures, they are using needles that come in sterile packages and are disposed of after a single use, and infection risk should be very low.
Acupuncture, like any profession, has better and worse practitioners. There are plenty of people practicing acupuncture who I would be terrified to to receive it from. In contrast to licensed acupuncturists, who receive substantial training over a couple of years at least, physical therapists (maybe some other professions as well?) often do what amounts to a weekend course to learn "dry needling" (acupuncture needles inserted into the belly of the muscle to stimulate a contraction and release). I would personally never receive acupuncture from someone who was not trained specifically as an acupuncturist, as I would be concerned that they do not have an adequate awareness of risks and best practices (particularly when needling the shoulders/chest/upper back).
I would be curious to hear more about why you oppose acupuncture, if you have a specific reason or just a general sense that it is "woo-woo" or "alternative"?
Several decades ago I tried acupuncture for infertility, on the theory that it couldn’t hurt (I was doing conventional treatment as well). IDuring the period while I was having the acupuncture I had several weeks of unusually bad insomnia. Acupuncturist tried several different insomnia treatments on me over the course of several sessions. When the usual ones had no effect she gave me one so strong she cautioned me to be extra careful driving home. I actually believed her, and was in fact extra careful when ai drove home. But that treatment, like the others, did not have the slightest effect on me. Infertility treatments, combo of conventional plus acupuncture, also were ineffective. Also, when my acupuncturist administered various treatments she sometimes warned me about various odd sensations I might have while the needles were in. I can’t remember what they were now, except that they were state-of-mind things, not sensations from the needles themselves. I could usually feel the needles, though the pain was very minimal, but otherwise never felt a thing out of the ordinary.
Sorry to hear that that was your experience. My general conceptualization is that there are conditions that acupuncture is usually effective for, sometimes effective for, and generally ineffective for, with some overlap with Western Medicine and some conditions that acupuncture is more effective in treating (or equally effective, with much less downside). I have not had a lot of luck with acupuncture for my own insomnia (at times it has made it worse). Unfortunately, depending on the nature of the fertility issues, I suspect that in many cases they are intractable for both Western Medicine and Acupuncture/Oriental approaches, as was your experience. Pain like the original poster mentioned would fall more into the "bread-and-butter" of conditions that acupuncture is often effective for.
In terms of sensations, it is common to have some localized sensation (sometimes painful if they nick a nerve or blood vessel), and not uncommon to have referred pain/sensation elsewhere in the body. However, it isn't totally abnormal to not feel anything, although my understanding is that there is thought to be some relationship between sensation (again, not necessarily painful) and efficacy, with moderate sensation associated with greater efficacy than no sensation.
I am not sure what the acupuncturist you mentioned was referring to in terms of "state-of-mind" things, but there is certainly a subset of acupuncturists with an affinity for approaching the medicine is a "spiritual" way that is a little out there, and as far as I can tell is fairly divorced from the actual mainstream of the medicine (i.e. they bring that baggage with them to the medicine). There are also plenty of level-headed acupuncturists with an affinity for bio-medicine. At least for my wife, her education involved substantial biomedical training from respected MDs, who taught concurrently at medical schools.
I don't believe you that you are sorry that I had that experience. Why the fuck should you be? You don't even know me, and anyhow I make clear that my failed acupuncture treatment was not distressing or even particularly disappointing or frustrating. Even *I* am not sorry I had that experience. Why start out your post with a bit of insincere empathy?
Oh, one other semi-relevant experience I had: I used to have moderately bad migraines fairly often. They were not the kind where you can stand to do anything but lie in a darkened room. They were just medium-intensity one-sided headaches accompanied my mild vertigo, nausea and sleepiness. If I really had to I could go to work with one. So I read someplace about an acupressure technique said to help with headaches. I can't remember where I read it, but it was either a place I thought was worth taking semi-seriously, or possibly several places. Anyhow, the technique was to press the fleshy area connecting thumb and forefinger. So I worked really hard at getting some mileage out of that. Tried different parts of the area, different amounts of pressure, and for a while had the sense that maybe it was making the head pain recede a bit. Finally settled on keeping a clothespin on the area. I had weakened it so it did not squeeze as hard as clothespins normally do, and I would periodically take it off for a few minutes. Did that for a couple days. Eventually had to face the fact that once the novelty wore off and I was no longer paying attention to the hand sensation my head did not hurt one bit less.
I never did really think acupuncture was likely to make any difference in a health problem, but I did give it a wholehearted attempt with infertility and insomnia, was also wholehearted in how I tried acupressure for migraines. I am now pretty sure acupoke is completely ineffective. Paul Ingraham, at his Pain Science site, has a pretty good takedown of it:
Expressing sympathy over failed fertility treatments is a very normal thing for people to do, and is often done in a legitimately sincere manner, even to strangers.
Agreed. This was a standard (and arguably obligatory) call-and-response ritual to hearing about someone's loss / disappointment, be they a stranger or a close friend.
Most people would be offended if they *weren't* offered the courtesy of an acknowledgement of their suffering, even if it's merely ritual.
Eh, I said it was several decades ago, mentioned it in a matter of fact way, and did not say a single word suggesting that the subject is a painful one. Given all that, I think expressing sympathy is way over the top.
In another post on this thread, about AI doom, I wrote that I expected to be dead by the time it comes about, but that my daughter will probably not be, and I hate to think about that. Now *that* is an expression of serious ongoing distress. But even a response to that post that began with an expression of sympathy for my parental worry would have seemed a bit odd to me. Jeez, this isn’t group therapy!
. I’ve found that people who try that stuff are unpersuadable. You explain to them how the whole basis for the treatment is a bunch of nonsense, and they say well yes but life is complicated and there’s a lot science hasn’t figured out yet and it helped my friend and you are hurting my feelings and making me feel criticized. Acupuncture’s unlikely to harm them. The little needles are probably cheap and I think most practitioners use fresh ones for each person. Just let them realize that oddly enough their facial pain is not getting better from having teeny needles stuck in their belly button and knees
I know someone who lost a lung and some other valuable parts of her insides as a result of an infection (or maybe multiple simultaneous infections) caused by acupuncture needles. Almost died, but in any event she'll never be the same. The place seemed clean and reputable but shut down and skipped town after this incident when she threatened a lawsuit.
I had never had interest in acupuncture but didn't know this was a serious risk. I looked up the stats and this kind of thing seemed fairly rare but not unheard of. Though it wouldn't surprise me if it was underreported.
You mean beyond the subreddits like r/slatestarcodex, themotte, theschism, and places like that?
There's also the SSC / ACX old-style forum, Data Secrets Lox, and of course old standbys like LessWrong, and on Discord the SSC channel and Outer Haven.
Posting this last time, but going again in case I have any more bites:
Anyone here have any experience in the publishing world? I'm looking to start a little boutique publishing company and would love to pick the brain of someone more experienced in that world than I.
What is it that you want to know about? If it's about marketing and selling, then I know nothing at all about that (sadly!). Ditto contracts and attracting authors (don't charge them, I know that much). Hardback, paperback or ebook production, registering ISBNs etc, I have some experience with.
I have an acquaintance who I can run questions past if you like. She runs a freelance editing business for ELT textbooks but spent a lot of time in house as a managing/production editor. She probably wouldn't be up for a direct connection but I'm sure would be happy to have me proxy your questions and reply on her behalf.
Moretti (2021) studies agglomeration effects for innovation, where being in bigger cities causes inventors to patent more. The main results use OLS with fixed effects, and an event study (using inventors who change cities) and instrumental variables strategy (using size of tech clusters in other cities) support a causal interpretation. I show that both the event study and IV results are caused by coding errors.
Do vaccinated children have higher income as adults?
Atwood (2022) studies the long-run economic effects of the 1963 measles vaccine. Since the vaccine was introduced nationally, the paper uses states with high and low measles incidence as the treatment and control groups. But measles is so contagious that this probably represents differences in reporting capacity rather than actual disease incidence. I run an event study and find that the results are explained by trends, instead of a treatment effect of the vaccine.
What do you think is the ideal institutional setting for your work? Is it people like you displacing other people from academia, or is it a different sort of institution?
Journals could hire replicators as part of the peer review process. Data editors (who make sure the code runs) are becoming more common, so replicators is the next step.
Richard Hanania, who I read and often like, has been going off the deep end lately. Here's his latest:
"Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift represent the problem with modern Republicans. They’re good looking, white, successful. They would’ve naturally been conservative 10 years ago. There’s no path to winning without people like them.
You don’t have young people, minorities, single women. Republicans used to keep things competitive by being able to rely on normal white people who disliked extremism on all sides and just wanted to be left alone.
Now, I don't know about Kelce, my impression is that athletes aren't strongly left or right-wing when you control for race. But haven't Hollywood people, actors, singers, etc, long been left-wing? Isn't that something "everyone" knows? Apparently not.
My read on the situation, for what it’s worth, is that Taylor Swift is *such* a cultural icon right now that everyone, for better or for worse, is trying to shoehorn her into their camp. See also: speculation on whether she is secretly gay. For those of us who don’t base their political views on pop stars, it’s irrelevant. Pop stars have been overwhelming liberal since forever, and the only people who care are college students, who have also been overwhelmingly liberal since forever.
(I know Taylor started out being country music adjacent, which is right wing coded, but she’s long since moved past that into pop queen territory. It’s Michael Jackson/Elvis level of rarefied air she’s breathing.)
Hollywood, yes. Nashville, not so much. Taylor Swift started out as a country music star, and I believe was born and raised in a Rust Belt town. It's not a sure thing, but also not unreasonable to expect that such a person would lean conservative. And, yeah, if ten years ago you'd said "Country music star dating an NFL player", I'd have bet on their having voted for Romney in 2012.
But since then, Taylor has figured out how to make a billion dollars appealing to mostly young women who are disproportionately liberal. And Mitt Romeny has been replaced by Donald Trump. Whatever Taylor Swift's political views may be in private, she isn't likely to be speaking favorably of Republicans any time soon.
That is symptomatic of a problem for the GOP, even if it isn't quite the one Hanania thinks he's seeing.
Isn't the Republican party's racial composition actually diversifying surprisingly well, at least considering historical expectations? Is the contention that they should appeal less to blue collar people of all ethnic groups (or trying to expand their share of old white people) and try to appeal more to young successful white people? You also don't need to appeal to young people, as long as people become more conservative as they age at a sufficient rate, and party can be consistently successful while appealing disproportionately to the old.
It's also at least debatable if not clearly incorrect that this is some strategic error by the Republican Party. I doubt there's anything the GOP could do to win Swift's vote; I'm guessing she didn't vote for Romney. I doubt there's a Republican moderate enough for her to vote for. While I think it's unfortunate the turn taken by the GOP is unfortunate in an absolute sense, it's not clear that it isn't the optimal strategy for maximizing their share of the vote.
In any case, I think I decided Hanania was overrated a while ago. Some of his early pieces I thought were interesting and he filled a novel niche, but when he's defending some fairly conventional position, he doesn't stand out from all the other millions of pundits arguing the same things in terms of insightfulness, in my opinion. He stands out mainly because of the unusual eclecticism of his opinions, but I'd be hard pressed to name an individual opinion he has that hasn't been better defended by others.
Hanania wants to focus his political capital on what is important to him. If he spends too much time getting grouped with race/sex/conspiracy crazies he's going to lose a lot of it (easy to dismiss), so he's leaning heavily into creating distance on these issues (even some he might agree with). So he's picking his battles, let's see how this works out for him...
It won't work out for him at all. He's a frankly a pro-immigration extremist, which is essentially throwing in his lot with people who hate him and whose policies will end up destroying what little 'political capital' he has left. The future of the right is anti-immigration, and so he has no place in it, and he's already a marked man amongst the left.
What could probably be said is that white pop stars are near-universally leftists and probably have been for a long time, but historically they were mostly quiet about politics (unlike genre music, much of which is overtly political). Taylor was quiet about politics until, IIRC, the 2018 midterms. And the issue that caused her to speak out was homosexuality, noting that she has a lot of backup dancers that are homosexual.
I would guess that white male athletes lean a bit further right than other college-educated white males of their age. Though they're mostly quiet about it. There are prominent examples of Evangelical athletes, while Evangelicals are unheard of in other forms of secular entertainment.
Though at least in the NFL, white athletes probably lean further left on black racial issues than most other matters, as the job almost requires it. Or at least they have to pretend to.
Gods damn it, Hanania annoys me so much that, totally uninterested as I am in Taylor Swift, I'm going to have to look this one up.
Ten years ago was 2014. What was Taylor Swift doing in 2014?
She was 25 years of age, and apparently had broken out of being a country(?) starlet into full-fledged rock/pop:
"In March 2014, Swift began living in New York City. She...worked on her fifth studio album ... She promoted the album extensively, including inviting fans to secret album-listening sessions.1989 was released on October 27, 2014, and opened atop the Billboard 200 with 1.28 million copies sold. Its singles "Shake It Off", "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood" reached number one in Australia, Canada and the US, the first two making Swift the first woman to replace herself at the Hot 100 top spot; other singles include "Style", "Wildest Dreams", "Out of the Woods" and "New Romantics". The 1989 World Tour (2015) was the highest-grossing tour of the year with $250 million in total revenue." She also took on Spotify and got back money off Apple.
She may or may not have started out 'conservative' (seemingly she went to school to the nuns as a kid, but that tells us nothing; she moved to Nashville at a young age and built her career starting there but again, how she voted or who she voted for isn't immediately apparent. If she was potentially Republican but is now presumably Democrat (and we don't know for sure), why did she change? On the other hand, she might always have voted Democrat. Being rich and white doesn't mean you're a natural conservative, see all the rich white guys going back years who have never had any problem voting liberal to progressive to vaguely leftist.
Political views, again according to Wikipedia:
"Swift identifies as a pro-choice feminist, and is one of the founding signatories of the Time's Up movement against sexual harassment. She criticized the US Supreme Court's decision to end federal abortion rights in 2022. Swift also advocates for LGBT rights, and has called for the passing of the Equality Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. She performed during WorldPride NYC 2019 at the Stonewall Inn, a gay rights monument, and has donated to the LGBT organizations Tennessee Equality Project and GLAAD."
I don't really see a huge amount of difference there from any views she might have had in 2014; if she's pro-choice now she probably was back then, ditto the gay rights allyship. So to me, Hanania's argument boils down to "ditch the cultural stuff and go with the Zeitgeist, be pro-sex'n'drugs'n'rock and roll, and conservatism then means simply money". And Swift is certainly canny about money, so if that's "voting conservative" then sure - if the Republicans were just like the Democrats in everything but welfare programmes and tax cuts for the rich, she'd vote conservative.
I know someone smart who's fascinated by her & has dug up all kinds of info about her. For what it's worth, her family of origin was upper middle class.
I don't have any statistics, but I'd expect that on the whole, white college educated millennials who were socially left in their 20s (pro gay rights, pro choice, etc) are still pretty socially left on those issues, and for abortion at least the Republican party hasn't really updated to accommodate it - which didn't matter when the Boomers were in their 40s, but will matter as the millennials approach their 40s and are still socially left, comparatively.
Maybe if you go back 50-70 years, this would have been true? I do think there was an inflection point 10 years ago on the left, and a series of problems over the last 20 on the right. Maybe a way to save the argument is that there was a type of non-politically-vocal person who would quietly vote conservative, and now they don't? Dunno if that applies to his examples, though.
For the first several years of her career, she refused to talk about politics. Most people thought that made her neutral. But that silence along with her being blond, blue-eyed, and attractive led some neo-Nazis to assume (or at least hope) that she was secretly sympathetic to their cause.
After Trump was elected in 2016, Taylor was so horrified that she decided to begin supporting Democrats more openly. As far as I know, the main policy positions that she's taken are being pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights.
>But that silence along with her being blond, blue-eyed, and attractive led some neo-Nazis to assume (or at least hope) that she was secretly sympathetic to their cause.
Not really, more of a meme that exploited her silence rather than genuine belief.
Good grief, do neo-Nazi's actually put a lot of store by somebody being blond and blue eyed, and think that ups the chances they're Nazis? (Don't they even know that most adults with blond hair are bottle blonds?)
A quick Google on that indicates that there were more accusations of white supremacist fans than actual white supremacist fans, with a lot of outlets denouncing swift for being white supremacist adjacent.
Wow, the one person I know who is fascinated by her is a dark-skinned S Asian trans guy. There is a huge gender-nonconforming faction among her fans. That group has a custom of making friendship bracelets with letters woven in that spell out obscure references to her lyrics and trading them with people sitting nearby. Last concert he went to sounds like almost everyone around where he happened to sit was gay or trans. I'm pretty sure any white supremacist sitting in that area would have either passed out from sheer disgust or ripped off a few heads.
They literally view the world through a lens of "blonde + blue eyes = genetically superior and good", so it's not far from there to "we're the good guys, so the other definitionally good guys must secretly like us".
Eric Schmidt wrote a piece in the WSJ on Saturday about LLMs. With regard to training, he wrote:
"What’s still difficult is to encode human values. That currently requires an extra step known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, in which programmers use their own responses to train the model to be helpful and accurate. Meanwhile, so-called “red teams” provoke the program in order to uncover any possible harmful outputs. This combination of human adjustments and guardrails is designed to ensure alignment of AI with human values and overall safety. So far, this seems to have worked reasonably well."
This suggests that for AI companies "human values" (are there any other kind?) means the values of their programmers, or what those programmers consider to be within the boundaries of acceptable opinion. I suspect that the opinions of the ancient Greeks re pederasty, early 20th century progressives re eugenics, and ISIS re religious toleration are not considered by the programmers to be aligned with "human values." Making sure that an LLM does not appear to endorse taboo opinions is undoubtedly prudent, but does it reduce the utility of the LLM? Wouldn't it be interesting to know how the analysis of an LLM differs from the conventional wisdom, and why?
I wonder if any thought has been given to having two versions of an LLM, one of which has not gone through Reinforcement Learning and "red team" provocation and lacks "guardrails." Perhaps the original version could be behind a paywall, or access could be limited to adults who have signed disclaimers.
You could look at a recent podcast from 80000 hours on this where the red team was given access to GPT which had only been trained to be helpful, not helpful + harmless. They go into how different it was
>You know, the GPT-4 Early that I used in the red team, that was the purely helpful version that would do anything that you said, and it would still kind of give you some of these caveats.
edit: My _personal_ interest in this is that I would like to have a conversation with a competent AGI. One part of this is that e.g. GPT4 is still not getting straightforward uncontentious questions right. I've been asking various LLMs "What inorganic compounds are gases at standard temperature and pressure?" for several months, and I have yet to see one that is even close to right. ( Latest attempt: https://chat.openai.com/share/12040db2-5798-478d-a683-2dd2bd98fe4e ). And, of course, I want _factually_ correct answers, not _politically_ correct answers, so wokeish RLHF concerns me.
The AI "values", as espoused by token prediction, are a function of:
1. The input training set
2. The reinforcement learning process
The big/useful LLMs have to siphon up all the input they can get their hands on, with little or no ability to filter, so they will actually resemble a reasonable synthesis of the human values /local to the context fed in/. So if you start feeding it racist context, it will come up with the values of human racists from its input.
The programmers are not the ones deciding the values except insomuch as they can filter the input (they can't/don't) and the reinforcement learning (they do, Schmidt says it's not as effective as he'd like).
<Wouldn't it be interesting to know how the analysis of an LLM differs from the conventional wisdom, and why?
But they can't analyze from the ground up, developing an original view based on their store of info and knowledge of what has positive and negative effects on people. They just put together variations and combinations of the stuff the absorbed from human writing and speech in their training.
Also, there are some major wrinkles regarding implementing human values. One is the often-mentioned one that for values differ among cultures for many important aspects of life. Another that's less mentioned is that in practice there is a great deal of nuance (or you could call it unfairness or inconsistency) in when and for whom a certain law or value is upheld. For instance killing, if done in certain circumstances, is punished severely, but gets a pass in many situations: If done in wartime or as part of policing or some other role where the individual's life is at risk from those who object to their role. If done to end a pregnancy that is not far advanced. If done to anything non-human. If done for self-defense, or in a situation that did not really require using lethal means for self-defense but appeared to. If done in a situation that many feel is ethical, for instance when someone ends the life of a terminally ill loved one who asked them to do it. If done by someone with a great deal of influence, for whom members of the enforcement system make all sort of exceptions. And note that there's no one underlying priniciple that, if made explicit, would explain all of the exceptions to the rule. The things that lead to bending of the No Killing rule are a miscellany.
>"For instance murder gets a pass in many situations: If done in wartime or as part of policing or some other role where the individual's life is at risk from those who object to their role."
Sorry, this is one of my pet peeves. Those are examples of when killing gets a pass specifically because they're *not* "murder", which is unlawful/unjustified killing.
> Another thing I do worry about is just kids and artificial friends. I’ve done one episode only so far with the CEO of Replika, the virtual friend company, and I came out of that with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, she started that company before language models, and she served a population — and continues to, I think, largely serve a population — that has real challenges, right? Many of them anyway. Such that people are forming very real attachment to things that are very simplistic.
This is in the "Ethics and safety of AI today [02:09:39]" section of the interview.
Also, later in that section, Wiblin says:
>Inasmuch as it feels like a closer substitute for actually talking to people — such that people can end up limiting their social repertoire to things that only happen via talking to a chatbot, and maybe they can’t handle or they don’t feel comfortable with the kind of conflict or friction or challenges that come with dealing with a real human being, who’s not just trying to maximise your engagement, not just trying to keep you coming back always, but has their own interests and who you might have to deal with in a workplace, even if you don’t particularly like them — I could see that deskilling people.
All removing reinforcement learning does is move the problem one layer up. It's different but not necessarily better.
The real issue is that outside of a dictatorship you don't have agreement on what "human values" are. China can (and has) simply published 'correct' values and answers and has a fairly rigorous testing process to guarantee LLMs do not contradict their political orthodoxy. But a free speech society cannot create the same as much as certain activists might want it because it's inherently an act of censorship.
As I've said a couple of times, there's plenty of concern about AI alignment abroad. But not Yudkowsky style "it's going to destroy the world." In global terms the biggest, best funded problem in AI risk funding is how to align AI with the values of the CCP. I'm still waiting for someone like Yudkowsky to endorse the CCP on this account or go over there to assist since alignment is apparently That Important(tm).
Meta has released multiple Llama models with and without RLHF (and instruct tuning, the thing that makes it answer questions at all). The also released a separate RLHF classifier model. Part of the idea is that you can use a base, uncensored model but use the classifier model to check if the output is "good" or not. There are various ideas of how to implement this
OpenAI at one point was talking about using system messages this way, I believe this was the goal with GPT4's RLHF. Basically, you begin every convo with a system message telling the model which set of values to adhere to. As far as I'm aware, it doesn't work too well
Yudkowsky believes, on very shaky grounds, that "human values" are a coherent entity shared by everybody. Apparently, that's got into the water supply.
Not two different things. CEV is supposed to provide evidence for unitary human values, and unitary human values are supposed to provide evidence for CEV.
Support is his early writings.
In his later writings, he gives up on the feasibility of any kind of u alignment.
I am pretty sure that EY doesn't think that. I think that EYs main problem is that we don't know how to confidently and consistently train _any_ set of values, shared or not, into LLMs/AI more generally. He doesn't talk much about what "human values" means, because, from his point of view, it doesn't matter because the problem is getting any values at all.
i think the idea is that since someone could change from a deontologist to a consequentialist or vice versa given enough good arguments and knowledge, perhaps after giving everyone all the good arguments and all the knowledge they'll converge on a single system of ethics.
when yudkowsky talks about "values" he isn't talking about whether the police are beneficial to society or how much we should care about freedom of speech (most people would converge given all the knowledge), he probably isn't even talking about deontology vs consequentialism, he's talking about something much more fundamental.
Imagine you want to create a utopia. You can either 1) change people’s existing preferences to suit the world or 2) change the world to suit people’s existing preferences. Both methods are identical in their total cost to achieve and in their likelihood to succeed.
In either case, the experiential outcome for the population would be identical in its quality. Same level of felt contentment, happiness, fulfillment, etc.
Do you favor 1) or 2)? Why? Does it even matter?
And if you say, “well it depends on the people’s existing preferences,” aren’t you implicitly, and maybe paradoxically, just favoring changing the world to suit people’s (ie your) preferences?
doesn't matter, both are coercing people in the name of MY vision of utopia. What's unsaid is every utopia is a tyranny of one person's values over everyone, their vision of how humanity should exist. whether people or the world, its to serve your will.
theres no way people wont disagree in either approach
Well if you have the means and desire to implement 1 then I'd argue it'd be better to just wipe out humanity and tile the universe with hedonium. Like if you don't care about people's preferences and just want to maximize happiness then why even keep humans around at all?
IMO the second option is underated, since the preferences which wouldn't allow someone to have their desires reconciled with others are not very sympathetic. Since we'd be talking about sadists, abusers, unbearable moral authoritarians and people who want to use more than their fair share of humanities resources (and refuse to just experience their massive vanity projects in simulations).
1 sounds better. I'm not sure you could change the world to make a utopia since people have preferences for mutually exclusive things. If I have a community made up 50% silicon valley people and 50% Houthi fighters, how do I change the world to suit the preferences of my community?
Yeah I don’t know. It would require resource abundance and be hard and scary and might involve creating real/virtual spaces where people are only exposed to things that stimulate them in a positive way. It would probably have to be done at the individual level to abolish unsolicited conflict. I think the implementation side of utopia usually boils down to a moral disaster. I think that disaster is probably an unacceptable risk for both 1 and 2. Technology might or might not change that.
What I’m interested in is our intuitions about changing our circumstances versus changing how we see them.
What exactly does it mean to change people's preferences without changing the world? There are a lot of things in the world that happen because of people's preferences!
Like, currently, Ukraine and Russia are at war, and they would prefer the war end in victory for themselves. Would "changing their preferences to suit the world" result in:
1. Ukraine and Russia are changed to prefer being at war (the current state), and will continue slaughtering each other but they now feel really happy about it. They eventually all die, but they enjoyed it while it lasted.
2. Ukraine and Russia are changed to prefer not being at war. Soldiers throw down their guns, go home, and live lives that an unchanged person would find happy and fulfilling. This is undoubtedly the more "utopian" outcome, but the reason it's utopian is because the war ended, which is a change to the world!
I think option 1 is either immoral (because mind control is wrong even if the victim is controlled into liking it), incoherent (because if people are changed to prefer dying over living, they will quickly stop preferring anything), or simply reduces to option 2 (because the only purpose of changing preferences was to change the world to something you prefer.)
(Option 2 is not coherent either, since as Yug Gnirob points out it's possible to have conflicting preferences which must either change or go unfulfilled, but I'd say in general, changing the world is easier and less morally fraught than changing minds.)
I would say 2 is better if possible, but also that 2 is impossible. Ignoring the transient nature of "existing" preferences, people want contradictory things; the family of a drug addict want the court to be lenient, the shops he stole from want the court to be harsh. What does the changed world look like here?
VR conflicts with the preferences of people who prioritize truth or interpersonal engagement. I know a lot of 70-plusers who would hate something like that. Even as an option.
If you can change people’s preferences, you can give them coherent and non-contradictory preferences that make them perfectly happy with the world as it is. However, because people’s (unchanged) preferences are incoherent and contradictory, you can’t change the world to make them perfectly happy. So if utopia means “perfectly happy forever”, it has to be people’s preferences that change.
Well said. I worry that for preferences to be coherent and non-contradictory in an incoherent and contradictory world they might need to be absent. I guess that gets you to Nirvana, strictly speaking.
My answer is that both sides of the coin are important, and that doing a mixture of both would be better than either alone. But I guess that sidesteps the question.
Therefore to play fair, I would argue for changing the world to match our preferences. The logic is that human preferences and values have evolved over billions of years to optimize our success (with numerous obvious limitations and exceptions which plays into my first answer above). Humans need safety, comfort, food, energy, companionship, respect, excitement, love, independence and codependence and so on and on. I think it would be safer and smarter to tailor our world to our preferences than vice versa if I could just do one or the other.
Agreed. Loosely speaking, _all_ technology, from the use of fire to everything we have today, has been a series of "changing the world to match our preferences", and I favor this. I think that this is most glaringly obvious in the case of medical advances. I prefer changing the world to eliminate smallpox (as we did) over changing our preferences to remove human objections to smallpox.
How about this idea for a more market-based higher education system, for construction/manufacturing/nursing/technicians/mechanics/other in-demand, non-4 year degree skills. I.e. the types of jobs that people tend to get 2 year degrees from a community college for. Boilermakers, electricians, CNAs, controls technicians- that sort of thing. My understanding is that they're constantly in very high demand and employers can never find enough of them.
A community college that collects tuitions from its students, as in the current model. But also charges employers some kind of fee for trained workers once they've graduated from the program- so the college is double-dipping on the fees. I.e. Silicon Valley Community College now has a 2 year degree program for electronics technicians, a very in-demand skillset with manufacturing firms and so on. SVCC works closely with their future employers, tailors the classes & training programs to specifically the types of skills that the employers want to see, collaborates with line managers to train workers on exactly what the company needs. The college is almost a training arm of the employers. After the students graduate, the employers pays SVCC some kind of fee for each one they hire- whether that's a flat fee, a % of salary, or even just an ongoing monthly fee to the college just for training.
After all, lengthy multiyear training programs are not a core competency of say GE, Tesla, Raytheon, etc. Makes sense to outsource them. As I understand it, in European & Asian countries where employers & the government work together more closely than is customary in the US, this sort of training program is much more common. This would just be a more market-based version of say a German apprenticeship, because we're American and we always have to do the most capitalistic version of everything. Silicon Valley Community College would probably have to become a for-profit, but despite their dismal reputation, I don't think for-profits are actually banned from collecting tuition (University of Phoenix, etc.) Once a number of local employers are using this service, their reps in Congress would then probably block out any future government interference.
Could this business model work? Collecting tuition but also charging companies for very in-demand trained workers? There's been a lot of Silicon Valley interest in new educational models, so maybe it could inspire future investors? (Can a Musk-type just, like, acquire a community college?)
> A community college that collects tuitions from its students, as in the current model. But also charges employers some kind of fee for trained workers once they've graduated from the program
I’m currently doing a certificate in energy technology at a local community college in a big oil producing area. All the classes are held in a fancy new building with high tech labs, all of which seems to be heavily sponsored by BP... their logo is plastered up all over the place
Well, anecdotal experience here: I once worked as a place kind of like that in Denmark, teaching math to people who were at the same apprenticef to local businesses. The state paid for the schooling and the companies paid a stipend for the aoprentices, and was represented in the schools leadership.
When I did it, the student level was dropping. The companies were offering fewer apprenticeships since it would clearly be cheaper to let someone else pay the stipend and then poach the workers later. At the same time an unholy alliance of parents and vocational guidance counselors were trying to push all the talented students into 'academic' education so they could go to university and get high status jobs.
So there are definitely some problems, both cultural and economic that needs to be handled.
Are you going to be requiring the students to sign a contract promising not to work for one of the employers that selfishly decided not to participate in this program, and uses some of the money they saved to offer slightly higher salaries to qualified welders or whatever?
This plan seems to have a free rider problem, if it doesn't come bundled with something akin to indentured servitude.
No (I highly doubt that's legal). But employers could solve this problem on their end by paying the schools the way they pay recruiting agencies now- they could pay per month, they could split the payment into 12 months assuming the trainee lasts that long, etc. Or, if the employers find the training program that valuable, they could just pay the schools a flat or subscription fee. Trainee longevity is now a school problem.
From a finance POV, once the employers have the schools all trained-up in their specific way of doing things, that's a huge moat. The employers aren't going to want to drop the schools and then maybe start with a competitor from scratch, take a couple or few years to get back up to speed, etc.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire a recruiting agency to put one of their people at the graduation ceremony for each of these schools and whisper to the better candidates, "Psst. Come work for us, we pay 10% better than all the companies your school is trying to steer you to"?
I think the problem is (1) schools, and indeed society in general, pushes young people to aim for traditional college on the 'get a degree, be assured of a good job' model (2) living on an apprenticeship stipend can be tough because of course you're not being paid full rates while you're learning on the job (3) you do need abilities and interests for the job, it's not simply a case of "Johnny is too thick to go to college, steer him into vocational training instead" and (4) people don't want to do apprenticeships It can also be difficult to get one as employers are picky and sometimes it's a 'closed shop' situation de facto (whatever the laws may say).
A model where you're "double dipping" on the fees doesn't sound practicable to me, employers generally don't want to pay extra costs where they can avoid them, and if they're already paying a stipend to the apprentice then paying the college a bonus on top of that makes the apprenticeship more expensive.
If I'm understanding the proposal correctly the young person is a student, not an apprentice, and neither the employer nor the college is paying them a stipend but instead they are paying the college tuition.
The whole "start your life by paying for education" thing kind of sucks, but is the norm here unfortunately.
Then I don't see the benefit of this over the normal four-year college route, as it's students not apprentices, and that sounds more like 'turning out doctors and coders, not plumbers and bricklayers'.
And you need the plumbers and bricklayers, for the construction industry to have enough workforce to start building those houses to tackle the housing crisis. The attraction of an apprenticeship is you don't pay college fees, you get paid a stipend (even if it is small) and you have pretty much a guaranteed job with an employer lined up at the end:
Apprentices do not pay tuition fees. However, they have to pay the Student Contribution Charge (also known as the registration fee). They do not pay the full amount but pay a part of the fee based on how long they will be in college.
For example, the student contribution charge is capped at €3,000 per academic year for full-time students. For an apprentice who might spend a 10/11 week semester at college, they would only pay €1,000.
Apprenticeships do not qualify for the SUSI grant."
If you're still paying the college fees, not getting paid, and the employer at the end has to pay a percentage of your future earnings to the college, why not just take out the student loan anyway and go the degree course route?
I asked this in the Hidden thread, trying again here:
Finding ways to coordinate groups of people to all commit to the same action at the same time is a fundamental topic in Rationalist writing. To facilitate this, I figure there must be software tools that automate it.
For example:
- Something that messages everyone in your group: "Would you agree to go to <restaurant x> for dinner if everybody else also agreed to this message?", and then if/when everybody clicks it, send out another email saying, "Everybody has agreed to go to <restaurant x> for dinner. See you there!"
- Something that emails everybody in your community: "Would you agree to commit <x dollars> to <crowdfunding campaign> if <yyy dollars> worth of people also agreed to the terms in this email?", and then, when/if that threshhold is met, automatically and simultaneously withdraws the funds that everybody conditionally committed to.
I know these aren't novel ideas; I have a hard time believing that there aren't a large number of such tools and systems already in existence.
My questions for anybody who knows:
1) Is there an accepted name for this kind of thing? How would I search for information about these things?
2) What are some specific examples of these kinds of tools? (Websites, apps, plugins, protocols, etc)
There was a website called Thunderclap that called it's technique "crowdspeaking", where people would commit to posting a specific social media message, and if enough people committed then it would automatically send the message out from everyone's account at the same time. (Apparently it died because Facebook made API changes that made it impossible.)
Thanks! I think this is exactly what I was looking for.
I've also found https://www.lesswrong.com/s/vz9Zrj3oBGsttG3Jh . Together with the wiki article, I think these will be great starting points for catching up to the current state of thinking on this topic.
Was reading Knausgaard's new novel which has a bit about Nikolai Fyodorov, a 19th century Russian futurist who was interested in using science to resurrect every human who has ever lived. I immediately thought, oh, I just read about this dude in the ACT links! I went to check because I wanted to see if there was any mention of Knausgaard's novel, but I couldn't find the link. Then I thought maybe I read it in the comments but couldn't find Fyodorov mentioned there either. Did I read it somewhere else here? Was it on some related blog? Did I imagine the whole thing?
You might have seen things about Fyodorov in _anti-Rationalist_ writings. E.g., some people like to throw around the acronym "TESCREAL" (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism) -- with, it seems to me, a major goal of associating everyone who's interested in any of those things with the weirdest and/or nastiest things one can connect with any of them -- and the "C" there is for "cosmism", which is Fyodorov's thing.
If you see articles whose broad narrative is something like "Silicon Valley techbros and venture capitalists are spreading visions of god-like AI which we must either embrace worshipfully or fight at huge cost, motivated by their racist and eugenicist principles and their determination to sacrifice all present-day value on the altar of an imagined far future of allegedly far greater importance", then the chances are that you can trace them back to a smallish group of people who are very determinedly spreading that story. (Some key names: Emil Torres, Timnit Gebru, David Gerard; also El Sandifer, Emily Bender.) They're fond of bringing Fyodorov et al into it, I think mostly because (1) some of the Russian cosmists were pretty weird, and (2) for excellent reasons Russia has a pretty bad reputation in the west right now.
I feel like "far left" is quite a lot further left than anything in that article. I don't agree with Emily Bender, but "the type specimen for toxic wokester" feels waaay overblown.
Many Thanks! Maybe just call Bender _a_ toxic wokester professor? She doesn't want non-woke text in LLMs' training sets. She doesn't like policing of black areas. She calls training on publicly available data "stolen". She complains about the wages that people accept for RLHF work - which is exactly what pushes the politics of the LLMs' outputs in the direction that _she_ wants. She objects to the labor saving applications of LLMs - in a linear descendant of the Luddites. She even whines about the electric power to run the computers. Yetch!
I read something like: "Did you know that there was a group of 19th century Russians who believed a better way than socialism to achieve human equality was to create eternal life for everyone using science?"
Something like that only with a more Scott-like humorous tone. Then it had a link which I never clicked on. I have searched Marginal Revolution for it also. I don't tend to read anti-Rationalist writings.
EDIT: Knausgaard makes Fyodorov sound pretty cool and interesting. He points out how respected Fyodorov was by contemporary Russian luminaries like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Solovyov, and Tsiolkovsky, who influenced Korolyov and Glushko, masterminds of the Sputnik program.
The FDA seems to occasionally have low standards of evidence for granting marketing approval, specifically in terms of biofeedback devices. A company called GrayMatters is marketing a biofeedback procedure for PTSD, and the clinical study they described doesn't include a control group (https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf22/K222101.pdf). This probably matters, as adequately controlled ADHD trials have essentially never proven superiority to sham feedback - might PTSD be similar? Maybe.... Probably...
Knowing Scott & other's opinions about the FDA, I don't necessarily think the FDA should prevent companies from marketing devices that aren't proven effective on their own (without the patient's expectations). But stamping some form of FDA something on a product (and its intended application) does seem to signal that the product is effective by conventional medical standards. But all that's proven is that it's 'as effective' as existing devices, which were also tested in uncontrolled trials.
What happens when the device is used in the real world, outside the clinical trial, where patients aren't exposed to enthusiastic research personal utilizing a ground-breaking algorithm for linking some brain-measurements with other brain measurements? Maybe they don't respond. Maybe they waste their money, and maybe they waste time not trying other interventions that would more plausibly be effective or cheaper.
I read the document you link, half-thinking you were mistaken about the study, but nope, there was no control group. WTF? There was something in the document I didn't understand, that may explain, sort of, what's up. They keep talking about "the predicate study," and it seems like their point is that what the "predicate" study found also serves as a demonstration that their procedure is efficacious. And it would, if their procedure and device is the same as the other study's, and had the same target. Are they piggybacking their results on those for the ADHD study? If in both studies the device is being used to increase calmness, that would in fact be a useful intervention for people with either PTSD or ADHD, probably also for people with any of the many anxiety disorders, might be helpful for depressed people too, and, who knows, might aid alcoholics to quit drinking, etc etc Are they gonna get a separate patent for each use? Seems like there should be a way to block that nonsense. It's like having a separate patent for a painkiller for each of: headaches, joint pain, stomach pain, back pain, muscle pain from overexertion, etc. I have never heard the word predicate used to mean anything except the verb phrase in a sentence.
The predicate study thing is interesting - apparently the FDA deemed this device/procedure was proven 'substantially similar' to a couple of other devices/procedures. The prior FDA-approval about relaxation didn't include any data on efficacy, and the other approval used breathing biofeedback for PTSD, but similarly, included no control group in their study. The PTSD device/procedure was also deemed substantially similar to another device/procedure, but I stopped reading there, giving up hope. Even if the 5th turtle is a randomized controlled trial of breathing biofeedback, I wouldn't expect that a patient's expectations for breathing biofeedback are the same as for a sci-fi brain-recording biofeeback (seems like an easy argument against 'substantial similarity').
I'm going to accept that this type of FDA authorization has 1) low standards, 2) low transparency in reporting prior data (from predicate study), or 3) FDA approvers were bamboozled by a citation labyrinth.
Probably the most important point Rotkirch makes is that we still don't really know what works, but pretty much nothing that has been tried has offered *substantial* help. The only fertility policy I know of that can relatively well be demonstrated to have caused a concrete, substantial leap in fertility rates has been the promise of Patriarch of Georgia (the country) to personally become the godfather of all the children born to families that already have two children (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/06/georgian-orthodox-church-mass-baptisms), and that's most likely not very repeatable elsewhere.
What would you consider a non-limited attempt? A number of "conservative" suggestions have been tried and found wanting - banning abortion has not helped Poland's birth rate, for exampe, and attempts to promote religion by the state in European countries like Poland and Russia have mainly just led to "cultural Christianity" of the sort that does not appear to leave to a desire to form big families.
Notably, we have not tried paying much more. I think that's probably the answer, but the actual number families would demand to make a child will sound high
Australia tried a "baby bonus" scheme of simply paying people a lump sum at the birth of each child, which appears to have worked -- there was certainly a substantial increase in birth rate during those years, from about 1.7 to nearly 2.0:
The interesting thing is that the bonus wasn't all that high, just a few thousand dollars (exact implementation varied from year to year). This is substantially less than the cost of, say, government-funded paid maternity leave. But structuring it as a "cash bonus" made it more enticing.
It's also possible that other factors were going on; some versions of that same plot attribute the late-2000s bump to the children of boomers reaching child-bearing age themselves. But the bump seems too steep for that.
I suspect the right policy would pay up meagre amounts for the first child, a modest one for the second one, and then escalating amounts for subsequent children. Maybe something crazy like 100 thousand dollars for the 11th child. Most families would have 1 or 2 kids anyway and the baby bump bonus is unlikely to encourage marriage in the first place.
My particular (vague, general, armchair) diagnosis for East Asia is a combination of economic liberalization and toxic gender roles surrounding marriage and parenthood, such that single women can slip through the cracks and live as freely as a single man. As long as they don't marry, they don't have to put up with the bullshit, and can have the life of the westerners they see on TV.
Fixing (or noticing) that seems to be beyond China, Japan, and Korea, but maybe Singapore has had better success? It's been decades since I've known anyone from there.
The Australians tried a program to discourage teen pregnancy which backfired pretty significantly.
So in a sense they may have discovered a way to boost TFR.
However, it's not clear whether this approach would work on older women, and obviously questionable whether boosting TFR by increasing the number of pregnant 16 year olds is wise.
It does seem though that just boosting exposure to actual babies might be effective, though.
When was this? This source https://www1.racgp.org.au/ajgp/2020/june/teenage-pregnancy suggests that teen pregnancy has been pretty monotonically decreasing ever since the early 1970s. There is a tiny increase in the 2000s (probably related to the Baby Bonus I posted about elsewhere).
One thing that's really interesting from that plot, actually, is that the birth rate to women in every age group _except_ 20-30 is very similar to what it was in 1936. The problem is that births to women in their twenties have ~halved, but birth rates to older and younger women have stayed roughly the same (or rather, returned to where they were).
The intervention was done 2003-2006 in Perth. Pilot program, both intervention and control group just a little over a thousand girls, so no surprise it wouldn't have national effect. Increased the teen pregnancy rate in the intervention group by about 40%, apparently. Summary published in the Lancet in 2016: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27570178/
There is one thing that makes me a little less confident about the results. The intervention was supposed to be randomized, but the difference between the unadjusted effect (80% increase) and effect after adjusting for confounders (35-40%) is very large. If the damn thing is 'randomized', why do they have huge confounders? Is 'randomized' here just 'we chose whole school districts at random, but they were very different'?
I suspect Singapore's policies (cheap housing for families with kids and strong encorougement of marriage and cohabitation) have been pretty effective: Singapore's absolute birthrate is low but it's way higher than Hong Kong, which is culturally very similar.
That said, it does suggest that even going all out on policies gives you a 50% boost at best, which isn't enough for East Asia or San Francisco.
That's pretty much all they think about, you not liking their conclusions doesn't change that.
(We're not avoiding high-density cities, sorry. But we can make them more tolerable by filling them with safe, welcoming, comfortable public space outside of the apartments, for which by far the single lowest hanging fruit is doing away with car traffic and infrastructure.)
What exactly is more important about high density cities than your population having relationships and starting families at the bare minimum replacement level?
The fact that you've got a lot of different take-out flood places in walking distance?
>But we can make them more tolerable by filling them with safe, welcoming, comfortable public space outside of the apartments, for which by far the single lowest hanging fruit is doing away with car traffic and infrastructure
So this has never been implemented anywhere before?
I admit that seems more like poisoned fruit to me, but then I suppose I'm not the target audience for city-dwelling. Car infrastructure, as I understand it, is more of a side effect of truck infrastructure, which in turn is sort of necessary for getting your city-maintenance materials (food, concrete, electronics, et cetera) into the bits of the city not directly adjacent to a rail line.
I'd never heard of their reversal until you mentioned it. Which surprised me, since I follow the research around TFR pretty well. Weird.
Doesn't seem like it's tied to anything in particular either. Per capita GDP in both has been increasing at a good clip over the appropriate time period, but neither are what you'd call rich and increasing prosperity usually makes a countries TFR decrease. No major policy changes that I could find. Most peculiar.
Fertility collapse “experts” intentionally ignore Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Georgia because it breaks their neat models of how fertility works. It’s not a “conspiracy” per se, just a refusal to acknowledge the weakness of their theories.
I'm a big believer in Zvi's argument[0] of "stop preventing births" before you try to encourage them. A *ton* of policies in modern democracies, while not specifically designed to decrease births, have the effect of doing so. Some of those policies have larger effect sizes than any of the pro-birth policies so of course they aren't going to work well.
In addition, there is the evidence that the single biggest predictor of whether or not someone will have kids is how difficult they think raising kids is, so our cultural push towards "maximum effort parenting" is maybe an even bigger source of the issue.
In other words, I'm not surprised that nothing that's been tried works very well. It's attacking the wrong part of the problem.
That said, I think there's something to the idea that maximally difficult parenting is making (middle and upper middle class) families hesitate before having kids.
Western governments have no economic incentive to increase births; it's much cheaper and quicker to import a bunch of 20-something immigrants, who can start working straight off the plane, than it is to educate brand new babies from birth.
This doesn't seem like a strong argument, because governments don't have economic incentives full stop.
Politicians are driven by a mixture of moral/ideological and electoral concerns - "is the the right thing to do?" and "will this help me win reelection?"
"Will this bolster the national economy?" factors in to both of those, obviously, but even if something makes economic sense no politician is going to support it unless they believe it will be either ethical or popular, and conversely even if something will be economically ruinous politicians who think it will be one or both of those things may well still back it (see, for example, World War II!)
Depends on the type of immigration? The right's generally been in favor of brain-draining the rest of the world, and welcoming law-abiding, rule-following people who want to work hard and enjoy freedom and grill. (Unfortunately, these days our legal immigration system makes that nigh-impossible.) Yeah, there are nativist wackos, but surely you wouldn't want to define political parties by the views of the most extreme people in that party?
Both are pro-capitalist, from which support for policies pushing living standards below (society-wide) subsistence level whenever you have the opportunity to fill the resulting gap in workforce with outside migration immediately follows. That one of them makes performative racist noises against the immigrants' cultural characteristics as a distraction does not meaningfully change that.
Yes, I endorse all of this! Awareness of modern comforts and conveniences seems to disguise the fact that in many ways, concretely, raising children is more difficult and costly than it's ever been before, especially when you consider opportunity cost. And cultural norm that says that parenting is, and ought to be, first and foremost, EXTREMELY HARD, in addition to scaring off potential parents on the margin, makes it that much more difficult look for solutions or responses to this problem.
Those attempted-replication results for the Kahan numeracy thing are pretty wild. And they may not show "that people with higher numeracy employ it selectively in a way that favors their personal beliefs", but they sure do seem to show that when faced with politically-charged questions, people interpret evidence in ways biased by their personal beliefs and pay less attention to the actual evidence. Which seems like it's more relevant to what Scott's saying than the (admittedly intriguing) previous finding that "people with higher numeracy employ it selectively" such that higher numeracy makes them wronger.
Wild thing #1: in the supposedly non-political case (rash getting better/worse), conservatives and liberals have indistinguishable results when the numbers show that the new treatment makes the rash worse -- but they have _extremely different_ results when the numbers show that the new treatment makes the rash better. (It looks as if the liberals/worse and liberals/better results are very similar to one another and also to conservatives/worse. But conservatives/better is completely different: the most numerate conservatives are apparently flipping a coin to decide better/worse, and less numerate conservatives are doing just slightly worse than that.)
This is weird enough that I wonder whether something is wrong with either the experimental procedure or the statistics.
Thing #2 (not especially _wild_ but relevant to the discussion): this definitely seems like it shows ideology affecting people's ability to do the statisics right.
Faced with figures suggesting that gun control makes crime go up ("congruent with conservative ideology"), everyone does better with better numeracy (so _that_ intriguing aspect of the original research indeed doesn't replicate), but (1) for conservatives and liberals alike, numeracy makes much less difference than it does for the corresponding "rash" question, and (2) conservatives fairly consistently get it right more than for the "rash" question and liberals fairly consistently get it right less than for the "rash" question. In other words: for this scenario, for both conservatives and liberals, their assessments are pushed in the direction of their ideology, and numeracy makes less difference (suggesting that in some sense they're doing less _thinking about the numbers_ and more _reacting on the basis of ideology_).
Faced with figures suggesting that gun control makes crime go down ("congruent with liberal ideology"), the curves now look much more like the "rash / better" question: conservatives have a much flatter curve (being more numerate makes little difference) while liberals show the expected numeracy-helps pattern. The conservatives' success rate is significantly worse here than on the "gun control / crime up" question.
If I had to summarize the results shown here, I think it would go something like this. Say that the "baseline" expectation is that people will get this sort of question wrong 80-90% of the time at low numeracy, and gradually improve to getting it right about 60% of the time at high numeracy. And say that someone is "number-blind" if their way of processing the evidence doesn't make any use of their numeracy skills at all but just picks each answer with some fixed probability.
Both groups start off behaving more or less according to baseline expectations, but then:
(1) For cases where change makes things better, conservatives shift about 3/4 of the way to being number-blind with p=0.4. And then:
(2) For evidence that goes contrary to their ideology on guns, both conservatives and liberals shift about half-way to being number-blind with p=0.2.
(3) For evidence that goes _for_ their ideology on guns, conservatives shift about half-way to being number-blind with p=0.6. (For some reason nothing analogous to this happens to liberals.)
I don't claim that this analysis actually captures anyone's cognitive processes! And to make more sense of it I'd want to look at a bunch of other questions. But it seems clear to me that even though this replication attempt doesn't find the headline-grabbing "numeracy hurts you on ideological questions" thing, it _does_ find that people pay less attention to the evidence on ideological questions, and I think it also suggests that for conservatives anything of the form "we changed this and things got better" is somewhat ideological.
(Note: anything of the form "being liberal/conservative makes you do X with probability p" could instead be more like "a fraction p of liberals/conservatives do X with probability 1". Or anything in between. I expect there's at least a bit of that going on here.)
I think what's going on may have less to do with impairment of reasoning power when some belief we hold dear is being attacked, and more to do with paying less attention to the data under those circumstances. I'm aware of that tendency in myself. If I read something that comes from the realm of ideas that irritate the hell out of me, and are held by groups I dislike and see as harmful, a lot of my attention goes to being angry and formulating a sharp response. I'm likely to just skim the content that comes later, and often gives information or stats or reasoning to shore up the original claim, rather than read it carefully and think it over.
Here's a triviality: more and more often I encounter websites and apps that require login, but do not allow display of the characters entered in the password db. This annoys\infuriates me. Is there a good reason devs do this, or are they being careless? I assume the low energy answer will be that it's for better security, but that just seems totally weak to me in almost all cases.
This was 100% of all password fields in the beginning, now they often have an eye symbol on the right of the text field.
These decisions are rarely made by devs by the way, but product owners. Also even in developer written applications the default when using a password field (something built into the OS) is not to show the text.
I'm more annoyed by the increasingly common habit of putting username/email entry and password entry on two different pages. You enter your username, click submit, then enter your password, and hit submit again.
This is actually a situation where it's almost _more_ annoying with a password manager, because you have to click to your manager extension, hit "fill out", then click submit, then go back to your manager, hit fill out again, then hit submit _again_.
If there is a dramatic security benefit to this practice, I'd love to hear it. I can't imagine what it is other than annoying.
It also sounds less secure, if the system indicates whether or not a user ID is valid before a password has been entered.
The principle should be "Give authenticated users as much relevant information as they need, but unauthenticated users the least". So if one or other of a user ID and password is invalid, then the login process should not indicate which!
I don't think it's a security benefit. I think it's because sites are often using multiple different login systems on the backend, like outsourcing to Apple/Google/Facebook, in addition to the in-house password option. (Or, sometimes, they don't bother with a password and skip right to 2FA)
The first step of putting in your ID lets them figure out where to take you on the next page.
Surely this could be done while still having the user input on the same page? The login program just holds the password until it knows where to submit it based on whatever it finds by submitting the email.
In the ideal case you won't even need to enter a password as you'll already be authenticated with the other service which will pass back a token to that effect. The other side is liability, if it can all help it the website would prefer to not touch your password (or credit card number) or even in theory have access to it.
Is that really the ideal case? I've been avoiding doing google account linking for a long time. I use a password manager and just have a seperate, secure password for each service. I guess technically both are single points of failure, but they both seem ~equal from a security point of view and the password manager seems better from a privacy point of view (to whatever extent you think google is bad about privacy, which I do)
But often there is no password to enter. When you authenticate through FB, you don't give the subscriber page your FB password - instead it redirects you to a Facebook page which verifies your login and then passes an authentication token back to the subscriber page.
That being said, they could probably still do what you're talking about through some clever Javascript.
It probably wasn't the default behavior of the library or third party client they are using. And/Or it wasn't part of the spec.
I am surprised you are seeing this more and more often. The idea of someone stealing your password by looking at it is an outdated worry. Of course it's possible, but very unlikely, especially relative to the risk of data leaks, hacking, phishing, etc.
It's supposed to stop someone reading your password over your shoulder. Ideally, there would be a way to disable that when you're sitting in a room by yourself, but very often there is not
I once worked with a guy who could pick up passwords by watching fingers on the keyboard.
Edit: He used the skill to gain access to a spreadsheet with the salary of *everyone* who worked for the company. Caused a bit of a stir at the time by showing it around.
Apathy And Other Small Victories was a pure nonsense story that had a lot more sex than I was expecting, but some very funny writing.
- Goddammit Bryce, people are supposed to have more faith in each other. Landlords especially. I'm living in your building. That makes you kind of like my dad. Family is supposed to be important. When I stiffed him on next month's rent, then he could throw me out with a clear conscience. Until then he was just being a bad father and a dick. -
I read that book based on the cover when I was about 13 and was baffled by it. I've never seen it referenced anywhere since, so this was a wild comment to read.
I reread it when I was 24 and I suspect I still wasn't old enough to get it.
Mick Herron's Slough House series are laugh out loud funny in a lot of places, especially the sarcasm and comebacks of some of the characters. They are about the adventures of a small team of disgraced spies outcast from MI5 for various misdeeds and shortcomings, career-wrecking but not serious enough to warrant outright firing. They are based in a drab semi-derelict building called Slough House. But despite their disadvantages, and official neglect and sometimes obstruction, they always seem to solve their cases.
A couple of these novels have already been made into TV series, I believe with more planned, although I haven't seen any of these. But on the whole, they've had good reviews.
Seconded. Also, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books are pretty funny (though be careful, the last one is a downer).
Edit: Oh, and I forgot Thomas Pynchon! The Crying of Lot 49 and Bleeding Edge are both quite funny, though with shorter segments of deadly seriousness.
I thought Infinite Jest was very funny as well, if you're willing to take the plunge.
Pynchon's reputation has always kinda scared me away. I think it's centered around Gravity's Rainbow. Good to know he's funny. Crying of Lot 49 looks digestible.
Very silly and they rely on some basic understanding of the Warhammer 40k universe, at least at the level of 'this is a grimdark universe, nominally played straight these days,' but I genuinely enjoy and find amusing the Ciaphas Cain series from that universe. Especially the audiobooks.
FWIW, I've likewise heard that they're actually worth reading even if you don't care about the rest of the universe, but I haven't actually picked them up yet.
This is going sound weird as hell but The Virgin Suicides has passages that a very funny. The first time I read it I had to put the book down and walk away from it because I was laughing so hard I was afraid I might not be getting enough oxygen.
Note: the book really isn’t about the suicides themselves. It’s more about the dopey neighborhood adolescent boys that are watching things play out and their reaction to them.
I love Waugh and have read almost everything he's written. Saw the thank you for smoking movie, but was only vaguely aware it was a book first. I will look at it. Thank you.
Ah, *The Loved One*. They told me Francis Hingsley/ They told me you were hung/With red protruding eyeballs/And black protruding tongue. /I wept as I remember/How often you and I/Had laughed at San Francisco/And now it's here you lie./All pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore . . .
There are apps around like Windy and Ventusky that will show me a highly detailed map of real-time data like temperature, wind speed, particulate matter, and so on, based on data streams from weather monitoring stations from all over the world.
How come there isn't anything similar specifically for real-time CO2 tracking? It seems like this data would be highly relevant for anyone interested in climate change, and simple CO2 monitors seem to be pretty readily available on Amazon. But if there's anything out there aggregating CO2 data into a real-time map, I haven't been able to find it. (NASA does have a couple of satellites that perform detailed CO2 measurements from space, and some very pretty animations of those measurements, but I don't know if those measurements are available in real-time. Nothing seems to be visualizing them in real-time that I could find, at least.)
I did note that Windy has a real-time tracker for atmospheric carbon *monoxide*, and at a glance the hot spots on that layer seem to line up roughly with where I'd expect CO2 emissions to be highest. Do carbon dioxide emissions generally correlate with carbon monoxide emissions? I don't know. But maybe the makers of Windy assume that they're close enough that they didn't need to model CO2 distribution separately.
what would be use? on an hourly basis changes in co2 concentration have no meaning for climate change and barely any meaning for most people who are not doing things like fermentation or cell culture
While CO and CO2 are both produced by combustion of carbon-containing stuff, I would expect CO lasts way less time in the atmosphere because it can react with oxygen, so its presence in the atmosphere will be more localised near emitters than CO2.
I thought CO2 is extremely well-mixed in the atmosphere and so geographic differences should not be important, which is why Mauna Loa is used as a good overall reference point
It seems like there's enough variation that NASA is able to make animations like this with their satellite measurements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syU1rRCp7E8 But, granted, if you look at the scale, the difference between the high and low end is pretty small, so you're probably right that it diffuses fairly quickly in absolute terms.
I'd expect that those apps are using GFS data, not actual live weather station data. I don't know what kind of atmospheric gas products they export from those model runs. That might be the main limiting factor there.
Given humans breathe co2 and weather stations tend to be near populated areas it may be extra useless; while carbon monoxide is a pollution metric that probably health agencies worry about?
Proposal: strategic voting is irrational, while sincere voting is the best way to ensure your policy proposals are implemented - including voting for 3rd parties that have NO chance of winning.
Every election, people lament that "there are only two choices, and both of them are bad." I propose that this thinking isn't just defeatist, but actually wrong. Whether you subscribe to mistake theory or conflict theory, your best strategy is to vote your conscience. I'm sure there's more nuance than this, but let's have the debate!
It's easy to make the case that in the long run, voting your conscience sends a signal that you're dissatisfied with the top two candidates and would like to see a change. But I want to make a stronger case: that sincere voting sends an immediate signal that helps get your governance preferences implemented, and that it does so more strongly than strategic voting does. Now, I'll concede that any vote is only as strong as a marginal vote - so the effect size is still limited, but to the extent that a vote has an effect, sincere voting is non-zero, while strategic voting's effect size is often zero or even negative. Wait, how could that be possible if your sincere choice has no possible chance of getting elected?
It's no secret that politicians are always looking forward to the next election. Even in the face of term limits, a politician's party will want to retain control, and the lame duck politician will want to cement a legacy of electoral victory and prestige within the party that supported/funded them. In other words, all politicians look forward to the next election. This is true even the DAY AFTER the election!
Many campaign staffers directly involved in the election join the administration, but others refocus to the next election. They pore over the election results, cross tabs, county-by-county breakdowns, and exit polls. While you might suspect that the losing party will be interested in these results, so they can make a better pitch next time, this is also true of the winning party. They want to make a better pitch next time, too. Complacency is how you lose elections.
Early in the new administration, a few things will become clear. By changing the way the new administration governs, certain votes will become available - even if the new strategy doesn't match the promises made on the campaign trail. Your choice is: #1 - keep campaign promises or #2 - break campaign promises. The risk in breaking a campaign promise is that you'll lose voters who were PERSUADED to vote for you because you made that promise, in exchange for voters who would have voted for you if you had chosen an alternative approach. If the number in category #1 is larger, you're going to keep your promise. If category #2 is larger, you should probably break the campaign promise.
Fortunately for many politicians, lots of people are unwilling to change their votes based on actual governance, because they vote strategically. This often shows up in the election results and exit polls. If someone is persuaded to vote for a politician because they're not the other politician, keeping or breaking a campaign promise won't sway their vote. If you're a politician, these strategic voters allow you to break campaign promises, because these constituents are unwilling to change their vote in the face of electoral infidelity. Therefore, a large percentage of your support will absolutely still vote for you based on how you campaign and not based on what promises you make. In other words, strategic voting ENCOURAGES politicians to break campaign promises, because it withholds the one tool a voter has to hold a politician to their word: the threat of withdrawal of support. (Realistically, there's also volunteering for the campaign, choosing not to vote, and campaign contributions. I'm simplifying.)
Contrast this with the voter who is sincere. Perhaps they vote for one of the two major party candidates, thinking, "I would like them to govern this way!" They're disappointed by the eventual breaking of campaign promises, and subsequently vote for a third party candidate who more closely reflects their values. Directly after the election, campaign experts going through the cross tab results notice that they could get X% of voters in district Y by subtly changing their policies to reflect the priorities of the losing third-party candidate Z.
They reason that they're not risking the support of strategic voters by making this policy shift, while they will be able to campaigning for re-election on a platform that includes, "I did [policy supported by candidate Z]! Vote for me." Last time they didn't run on that policy, because it's not a winning general strategy. So they won't talk about it in campaign speeches. Instead, they'll create district-specific mailers touting the 'policy achievement' to those voters who care about it most.
The practical effect is this: sincere voting is more likely to get your preferred governance strategies implemented, *regardless of who wins the election*. This is true, whether your preference actually is one of the main party candidates, or if your preference is down ballot. A vote for the main candidate says, "more of the same, please" and allows the candidate room to compromise less in order to secure re-election, but its power rests in whether you had to be persuaded to vote in favor of a preferred candidate, not just in opposition. A vote down ballot signals that your vote can be earned by any candidate willing to do things differently - including the incumbent.
For example, if the main party candidate has overwhelming support through the primary and the general election, they're unlikely to significantly change their positions, since those won both the general and primary races. However, if they narrowly lost the primary, they will perceive a threat within their party and focus on winning votes in whichever districts they need in order to continue to ward off a primary challenge. OTOH, if they easily win their primary but narrowly lose the general election, they'll look to general election polling to see which districts can be won over with some policy manipulation that's different from what they campaigned on. Each sincere vote affects that calculation in a small way.
Compare this to strategic voting, where there's no guarantee the winner of the election is even going to care about your governance strategies after the election. "But the party platform!" Party policies and priorities shift and drift over time. Sometimes the priorities are dramatic: Democrats were once the most hawkish party (very supportive of getting into WWII), then after Vietnam they became doves while Republicans were pro-war (generally), then this flipped again with Trump, but maybe not quite (Neocons are still quite powerful). Party loyalties are to the persuadable voters. The platform the party ran on in the last election is meaningful only to the extent that it continues to persuade voters in the next election.
The problem with the strategic vote is that it pulls you away from the 'persuadable voter' pool, thereby removing any power to influence actual governance. A strategic vote is almost always justified on the basis of "but I can't let the other side win." But how would this work in practice? Is the thinking that maybe your single vote will be enough to sway the election one way or the other? That's not applicable even for most local elections. For a general election - and especially for president - it's as close to "false" as possible.
An analogy: My friend told me she was going to spend $2 playing the lottery on the off chance she was going to in the billion-dollar jackpot.
I said, "That's dumb. You're not going to win."
"You can't know that! Someone wins, they publish it every time."
"Right, but it won't be you. I am more certain of this than I am that I'll be employed tomorrow, or that I won't get into a car crash this week, or of nearly any other thing I can predict today. Statistically, I'm confident you won't win with >>99.9999% accuracy."
Now, there are more Power Ball winners running around the USA than there are individuals whose single vote decision changed the outcome of the US Presidential Election. As it happens, this year we (likely) have a choice between two candidate with a 4-year track record of how they would govern in the Executive Branch. You can choose to vote strategically or sincerely. Voting strategically is like taking a bigger risk than playing the Power Ball that your one vote is going to make a difference. To my mind, this is irrational. Or you can vote sincerely and send a signal to both parties how they can win your vote in the next election, and how you'd like to see the winner govern in order to earn that vote.
One issue this idea runs into is term limits. If a president wins their second term, they cannot be re-elected a third term anyway so their incentive is to act according to their own interest. (Though, they may still have some interest in helping other members of their party win in the future.)
I think if we want real choices between more than two options, we will (assuming you're in the US like me) have to move away from the first-past-the-post voting system to something like ranked choice. Condorcet voting systems are highly regarded among theorists, but unfortunately it takes a bit of explaining for the general public to even realize that there is more than one possible voting system. If you want to look into voting systems more, I'd recommend also reading about Nash equilibrium if you haven't already.
I agree that term limits dilute the value of sincere voting for potential lame-duck candidates. However, I think the significant power of political parties in systems like the US system are strong enough to heavily minimize this effect. The legion of staffers and other political operatives that surround a candidate are not term limited, and are certain to continue their careers within the political system long after the election. A candidate could surely push back against that pressure, but the pressure will be there even during a lame-duck term.
Yes I'm aware of other voting systems, and I agree that FPTP highly incentivizes strategic voting over, say, approval voting. Every voting system will have some degree of strategic voting, though - even Condorcet systems. (I'll concede that strategic voting is more difficult in more complex systems, but then you risk concerns of legitimacy and trust issues where most voters don't understand the mechanics of the system.) Although I don't think these are arguments to just accept an inferior FPTP system, I do think that because you'll never truly be rid of strategic voting it's necessary to think past the voting system itself.
Public Choice Theory can be leveraged to influence the candidates most likely to win. The winning candidate should still be accountable to the policy preferences of the voters. Currently they're able to game the system to only be accountable to oligarchs within the major political parties whose political preferences are entirely separate from stated party platforms/priorities. Theoretically, under a sincere voting paradigm, even a FPTP candidate should not be able to game the system that hard. It's strategic voting that allows the level of blatant corruption we see in the current system. (Among other things.)
It's the problem of strategic voting over sincere voting that all these voting systems are trying to solve - which is indeed a big problem! - but my point is that maybe people are being deceived into thinking that strategic voting is ... well, a strategic choice. I think it's actually sincere voting that holds the only strategic value in getting your preferences implemented.
If you have such corrections to your posts, *please* update them (inline or an a note at the bottom)! Your posts are read and linked to by many people, particularly the ones regarding studies and psychology, so it's important to update them if you're aware of a mistake that can mislead people or hurt your argument.
The third map on this page shows the shift in territorial control from November 11, 2022 to December 12, 2023. Not exactly the dates you mention, but I don’t believe there were any big moves in the weeks on either end (or in the middle, as you can see) so it’ll be pretty close:
Now, I know we're just a bunch of know-nothings here in the hinterlands, but in the wake of ... ah, recent events, and of learning that there is a lively, little-regulated gain-of-function research industry all over the damn place, even if that has not been mentioned here - is there any reason that people should accept this?
The county has said it doesn't want it. The nearest "big" town has said it doesn't want it.
My favorite quote from that article:
"Is it clear why Charles River Labs chose this area for primate research?
"Well, they told me that there were a few different reasons ... They were looking for a community where you have people already working with animals and agriculture – potentially this would be palatable to people who already work in this space."
[What, are we supposed to eat the monkeys when they're done being tested?]
Translation: the county is full of rednecks so we thought they wouldn't care.
I'm curious why you think that this plan will have anything at all to do with Gain of Function research? Even if primates are occasionally used for GoF research, I don't think that justifies a blanket concern over all primate research facilities. If it was, then we should be against every single virology lab.
One would be justified in asking what kind of research is going to be done, and there are lots of non GoF reasons to potentially be against this facility, but bringing it up without any kind of reason (that I can see) feels very much like FUD and instinctively puts my back up.
**IF** intentionally making animals sick wasn't stupid for human reasons, farm community who you know, feed america and know food doesn't come from idk starbucks (what do vegans even think they eat) on a primal level; should be more open to discussing trade offs of animal and human well being that city slickers won't
I should think they'd be more interested in not tying up 500 acres of productive land in order to make monkeys demented. (Note that Texas already has a large area dedicated to the "rescue" (old folks' home) of superannuated lab monkeys; it's a depressing place. Which they also managed to locate next to a nature preserve.)
There are people on both sides of the gain-o-function debate who don't treat animals as more important then human needs; I dont see bring up that sort of language as anything but it basically projecting religious beliefs around on everyone.
Id live next to a slaughter house, Ive bought meat from one a 20 minute drive away, I *wouldnt* ever tolerate a bioterrorism lab near me, but if they are only talking to peta they may be confused as to why.
Yeah, I don't see the connection to GoF research other than as an opportunity to add fnords. There's stuff that can best be studied in monkey models. You can argue that we ought not to use monkeys in experiments because they're too sentient, or that we ought not to use any animals in experiments (though that's practically saying to shut down a ton of biology and medical research--I think animal models for disease are basically how most research on treating various diseases is done), but those arguments ought to stand on their own.
This looks like solid advice but also seems too unattainable. Among other things, I would have difficulty to decide if a thing would be needed in the future to be written, or it’s too small. But yeah, I probably should adopt a diary of at least some sort—I don’t have any for now.
The standard advice here is to just try it, accept that it won't be perfect, and figure it out as you go along. Ideally you'll eventually develop an intuition about what's needed and what's too small.
The idea is that you have a 3D printable sticking side that can be drilled, nailed, glued, hot glued, magnetisized, velcroed or something else. If this break no problem.
Then there is the label which is an E-ink screen + Coin-size battery + RFID / Bluetooth / Other technology. It's safely detacheable from the 3D-printed part
The coin-size battery is put inside the label electronic using a 3D printed part that works bit like SIM-slot.
There is a waterproofed / epoxied version of the label and an easy-to-repair version. In both versions the battery can be changed, but the non-waterproofed one allows for hacking.
As for the size of it, about the size of an adult thumb, the platform and the label electronic combined. Except less thick.
Now you use Excel / LibreOffice / In-Built sheet editor to create a sheet that determines the labels and this sheets goes to your machine, say phone with Bluetooth, which then assists you to rewrite all the labels.
Temprature & heat protection is a minor problem. This may work inside a car, but to be truly universal one would want it to perform outdoors too. For improved visibility, one can always rig a mod using the 3D printed platform (say add a small light to it).
Sometime ago I asked for advice on selecting a computer for a DAW (basically, music recording setup). I ended up getting a mac, and it's working out quite well. Just wanted to thank everyone who responded and helped me to make a good decision.
I find it pretty convincing. The comment section is full of yes-sayers and the occasional pro-palestinian who mostly mark their dissent. Does anyone know a good counterargument I could read?
Eh, seems legit to me. Part of having power is being able to tell your people to stop: a lot of cease-fires are a demonstration of power, which tells the rest of the world "I can turn the violence on and off at will", which means "I am worth negotiating with", and thus allows me to negotiate to achieve my greater aims (assuming I have any greater aims other than violence). Can Hamas deliver a cease-fire? Fatah and Hezbollah seem to have hit some sort of equilibrium where they kill a few Israelis now and then to maintain face, and Israel retaliates by killing about three times as many to prove that they're tougher, and everyone goes home "happy" until the next time. I guess most of us on other continents thought Hamas was the same way, until a few months ago.
AMA for those interested: I'm a retired Major from the IDF who just finished about 100 days of reserve duty (in a non-combative role). I also have a degree in Middle-Eastern History, so some added perspective there. I'm only semi-available these days, and some things I won't be able to answer obviously, but feel free to ask.
What's your thoughts on the civilian/military casualty ratio on the Gazan side, and especially, what factors make that more complex than people over here might think?
I've seen estimates that the death toll is 60-66% civilians, but those are just assuming that all adult men are "military" and all adult women and all children are "civilian", and we know that none of those things is completely true. There's the absence of uniforms, there are child soldiers, there are suicide bombers, anyone can pick up a gun or a bomb, and frankly I'd expect that a lot of the population would be willing to, especially after 3 months of this. You mentioned "Black Hawk Down"; do you just have to wait and see who decides to shoot at you?
Is there any way of telling who is a member of the "military wing" of Hamas, or another of the militias? Is there even a distinction between the military and civilian sides of Hamas? I'd imagine that there are some people who have the standard jobs of keeping civil government functioning; do they count as Hamas?
Good question with no good answer. As I detailed in my response to Ajb (see the last section of my answer there, 4 and onwards), there are indeed clear women and children that are actively or passively taking part in the conflict.
There is simply no good source and no good way to measure. The only numbers we have are the ones provided by "Gaza's Ministry of Health", which is a nice western sounding name for Hamas. The numbers are likely inflated, but by how much? hard to tell. Even if there were journalists who would have gotten some approximation, it would have been difficult to believe them as well as many journalists working for international news firms such as AP or Reuters have been shown to be either Hamas personnel themselves or having a direct family member being part of some militia (usually Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad).
I can account to the fact that the numbers the IDF states publicly is the numbers we use internally as well - there is no exaggeration there. IIRC the IDF's current ratio estimate is for 2 civilians for every militant. In an area where kids are participating as suicide bombers and militants actively hide between civilians as human shields it's hard to get lower than that. I can elaborate though that the Israeli bar for collateral damage has been lowered; in previous operation in Gaza which I took part in, if a terrorist's children were in the house with him, we wouldn't attack the house. This is not the case in this operation, due to the fact that we are not trying to surgically cause damage to Hamas/Islamic Jihad, but our goal is to destroy these organizations.
Regarding the civilian wing of Hamas, I don't know the policy, but I honestly think that at least a part of them isn't currently not being targeted as they are the ones maintaining some sort of civilian infrastructure in the strip. I can personally and vehemently attest to the fact that the IDF is trying to not cause a humanitarian crisis in the strip as much as it can under the current circumstances; in all briefs and debriefs there are always slides detailing the current civilian situation in the strip, divided to areas, and in detail. I do believe that after a better peacekeeping/civilian authority force is established, these Hamas personnel will also be targeted (perhaps only arrested; depends on the details).
> we are not trying to surgically cause damage to Hamas/Islamic Jihad, but our goal is to destroy these organizations
I'd be interested in hearing a more detailed description of this, if you can? I don't have a clear picture of what it would look like. Obviously, some names and faces are known, and the tunnels are clearly Hamas's infrastructure. And you mentioned destroying machine shops that can produce rockets. Is it a process of gathering intelligence and running down leads?
Also, do you ever get assistance from ordinary Gazans, the way some Iraqis helped the US forces over there? (I'm guessing not.) What's the normal range of attitudes you encounter from non-combatant Gazans?
Generally speaking, when thinking in military terms, destroying an organization means one of two things, and usually a mix of both: Either destroying it's capability to act (e.g. through killing personnel, destroying outposts, denying supply) or eliminating its will to act (perhaps because it's leaders/soldiers believe that the price isn't worth it; or they don't believe they will be able to achieve their goals; etc.). On practical terms, this means a much more systematic approach to destroying physical assets of these organizations, and additionally, trying to cause most of its agents to stop being aligned with the organization's goal (e.g. because the civilian population does not support it anymore, or the moral of its soldiers is extremely low). In response to your questions, yes, that includes gathering intelligence (which I assume include cooperation from ordinary Gazans, though that is very far from where I was in the military so I have nothing of value really to say on that topic) and running down leads.
Because I was very far away from the front and this is far from my work in reserve duty, I can only echo what I heard from friends regarding range of attitudes from Gazans - Some hate us more, some hate Hamas more, some believe what Hamas is doing and did on October 7th was justified (though it is unclear whether they have been denied access to the footage and evidence of the atrocities it committed), and I think generally speaking, overall every Gazan is much more sad, afraid or angry. War is a terrible thing.
I can refer you to the polls that happened during the ceasefire among Gazans, though some time has passed.
Haven't seen them until now, just skimmed them. I generally think the points are well made. I'm not certain that everybody in Gaza has an ID these days, as the PA isn't controlling it anymore but Hamas; but they should have their own bookkeeping (and then they would be able to maintain internal consistency while telling the outside world wrong numbers). In practice though, in past wars indeed the numbers weren't inflated much, but this is a different conflict entirely and it is very hard to asses the reliability. How do you judge the death toll in an area you don't have access too? Do they indeed manage to differentiate the "heat of the moments claims" that are extremely common and are blatant propaganda (I've lost count how many times a single Israeli bombing was reported to have caused hundreds of dead minutes after the bombs fell, before anyone would have time to accurately count) to the honest final reports? Good questions, no good answers. I think the numbers aren't very far from the truth, but hard to judge.
I think the answer is that early estimates about specific incidents are indeed just estimates and are often wrong; the argument about ID numbers only applies to official death tolls. It also doesn't say much about timing or cause of death.
Sadly, the 2 citizens per combatant seem to me likely true. I think that the main thing that people who didn't fight a war are missing is that a terror organization can easily force killing two citizens with each one of its members, by using private homes and things like hospitals for military purposes, surprise attacks without uniforms in dense urban places, etc. At some point your choices become either to let them get way with anything, or fight them knowing that you kill mostly civilians.
Obviously, disclaimer that these are only my own personal opinions, etc. etc.
I think he is overall OK (I have never voted for him). It's difficult to judge such a long time period, and there are key moments in which things changed (with his trials being one). Generally speaking, my most serious issue with him isn't directly related to him - I find the fact that Israeli politics has become two groups easily divided by "Yes Bibi" and "No Bibi" horrible, and reminds me in many bad ways of the political situation in the US, which I personally find insane. I think he is a pragmatist and a mix of a security conservatist who hates change with some bright ideas (e.g. the Arab-Israeli peace process in the last few years) and a very good execution record. Mainly, I'd wish for us to stop debating him and resume debating actual policy. I think history will remember him overall as a technically good leader, but one that lead to a lot of negative polarization in Israel, which is a serious problem.
Re the current conflict, he does have quite a lot of responsibility for what happened, but only at the strategic level. His strategy was to keep the Palestinians divided between themselves in order for the peace process to remain dormant, and basically tried to cause the "Palestinian problem" to die via death by a thousand cuts, administered over decades. He is not directly to blame for the military and intelligence failure; he is responsible as he basically has been Prime Minister for a decade and thus responsible in that sense. I'd dare say that if there was no failure on the military's part, his strategy would have given us peace with Saudi Arabia (which is still likely to happen, just later) and delayed the Palestinian issue even longer. The most serious problem IMHO w.r.t Netanyahu's policy regarding the Palestinians is that there was no long term solution in sight; in Israel it is common to say that we are "Managing the conflict" and not trying to actively solve it. I generally would like to solve it and not have my kids live with it, but on the contrary it is quite a difficult conflict to solve.
Thanks for your insights. This has been my favourite part of the Open Thread.
My aunt and cousin live in Israel and they don’t much like Netanyahu. I see the parallels to Donald Trump (of whom my own opinion is considerably more nuanced than “Trump good” or “Trump bad”)
I am much less aware of what is going on in Israel but I gather GDP increased tremendously under Netanyahu’s leadership. But OTOH his legacy will be seriously tarnished by the current war. It’s an awful, complex, messy situation, and there are no good solutions, but I don’t think history will look on Netanyahu’s “managing the conflict” as the right way.
You may not be able to answer this, but: what's the end goal in the current war, and is it realistic in your judgement?
From over here it looks like Israel is killing about 200 Gazans a day, and wrecking infrastructure, and the claimed stopping point - "defeat" of "Hamas" - is something that will, in my opinion, never happen. So I assume that the "real" goal is to keep doing this (killing people) until the US hashes out some sort of internationally-supported peace deal that's better for Israel than what they had on Oct 6.
Is there something else going on, that you can talk about?
I don't think this is stated publicly, but the true rational IMHO is to recreate operation Defensive Shield (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Defensive_Shield) in the strip. The Wikipedia article is a bit misleading; the honest factual truth is that the operation continues, in some sense, to this day. To summarize: During Defensive Shield Israel has removed the major threat from the West bank on its citizens; and after a short operation of a couple of months established operational freedom for the IDF in the West bank. That means that if the IDF wants to arrest someone even in the densest slums of Ramallah, it can. After the end of the operation in 2003, Israel started slowly destroying terror organizations, individuals and capabilities in the West Bank. Opinions vary, but everyone estimate that the rate of destruction passed the rate of regrowth at least about a decade later, in 2013. I can attest to that; In 2018, my friend was tasked with destroying weapon lathes, as there were simply no more knowledge of how to create Car bombs/Explosive Belts/Serious terror money to apprehend. It works; very few Israelis die due to terrorist attacks originating from the West Bank these days.
Is this ideal? No. Is there any better solution? I'm not sure Israel would trust even the US to send boots on the ground to patrol Gaza for us, let alone the UN. Let me be clear: No Israeli mother wans her son or daughter to patrol Khan Yunis or Nabulus. To most Israeli's, the West Bank is the most hated assignment there is, and they would much rather hold the border against the far more deadly Hezbollah. But if that is the price we must pay for security, we will pay it.
Also of historical significance is that if you look at the News from those days, they were very similar to the ones we see today: The US will any minute stop the operation, Israel would stop itself because the cost in life and time is too high, etc.. The reality is that as long as no one can give a good security guarantee w.r.t the Gaza strip to Israel, I don't see any other solution. We probably won't be patrolling inside the streets of Khan Yunis; but I would be very surprised if there aren't counter terrorism operations running in it's slums 5 years from now.
I realize that full AGI would be a wild card, but could lesser degrees of automation help? Could e.g. pervasive surveillance with small drones feeding image recognition assist with counter terrorism operations, now, or in the next few years?
It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but I don't think substantially. I mean, similar technologies already help in the West Bank; that doesn't mean Israel can operate without permanent military outposts there. But I may be having a failure of imagination here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_imagination)
Many Thanks! I hope whatever techniques are available work well for Israel. My vague hope was that with enough continuous imaging that a potential terrorist arming themselves might be detectable very early, helping Israel stop them more easily. But if similar technologies are already in place, this option might already be saturated.
Do you know why the Gaza border was so woefully understaffed in the year(s) leading up to Oct. 7? Why would the IDF be so neglectful? Even with the intelligence failures to predict the attacks, I believe the Gaza border should have been heavily guarded 24/7 simply because that is how countries normally deal with heavily-armed hostile neighbors (in periods without active combat).
This stems from Israel's National Security Strategy*. Sadly, the Wikipedia article is only available in Hebrew (תפיסת הביטחון של ישראל) but Google Translate might do a good job for further details. But basically, Israel works under the problem that about 10 million Israelis are surrounded by hundreds of millions of unfriendly neighbors. Thus, it is impossible to fully staff all the borders at the same time. Staffing them at proper capacity would lead to a huge army and a massive drain on the Economy. Thus, the Security Framework established in 1948 is as follows:
Deterrence -> Intelligence Warning -> Decisive victory -> Vice versa. I'm convoluting the terms a bit (e.g. there is no victory per se in Hebrew) but the principle stands. I.e., Israel relies on Intelligence to bolster defense where it is needed, when it is needed.
However, clearly there needed to be further security measures in place on the Gaza border (and furthermore, in other borders as well), because intelligence failure is possible (so far it happens once every 50 years + 1 day in Israel), so this will likely change.
But there's 170k soldiers on active duty at any given point in the Israeli military? Surely that's enough to staff the critical borders with Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank?
A political impact here is that netanyahu (under strong encouragement from Ben Gvir) moved a lot of Gaza border troops to guard WB settlements, especially for the sukkot holiday celebrations. I don't know numerically the size of the impact (I've heard 70% of troops were moved" claims but they might be more based in anti-bibi politics than reality)
We'll have to wait and see what the committees that will investigate the Intelligence and military failures say, but a priori, these wouldn't have made a substantial difference.
Remember that includes everyone - Airforce, Logistics, Intelligence, troops still in basic training, Cooks, etc. Modern army ratios for combatants : non-combatants are extremely high. I don't know the public (or the private) estimate on how many combatants are in active duty at a single point of time in the IDF, but I assume you can find it and my hunch is that the number is at least one magnitude lower.
Very much agree. And those proportions becomes worse when you have universal service, and need to invent jobs for everyone that you have no excuse to free but nothing useful to do with (because they are too physically and mentally weak, really don't want to fight, or really don't want to work).
That is why while the IDF in its best is the army of the start up nation, but in its worse is a caricature of a large state-managed organization
Very little chance of Egypt accepting them all, or even a significant number. Despite the imminent US election, and mounting opposition to immigration via the Mexican border, it's more likely Joe Biden will agree for the US to take say a million provided other Middle Eastern countries split the rest between them.
For some reason, and I'm not sure why nor endorse or share the opinion personally, most of the Arab world doesn't appear to like Palestinians and evidently thinks of them as some ill-disposed people think of, say, gypsies.
I think you have lost your mind if you think the US populace wants to accept 1 million Palestinians for any amount of geopolitical gain. Democrats doing that is a slam dunk Trump 2024 victory.
I quite agree, although that didn't stop Biden & co dismantling the border fence and allowing in several million immigrants via Mexico over the last few years, 300,000 per month currently I believe. Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
It can be simultaneously true that the US populace absolutely does not want to accept a million Palestinian immigrants, and that this is still more likely than that Egypt would accept a million Palestinian immigrants. Egypt knows Palestinians in a way almost no one in America does, and they have made it clear that they really, really don't want them in Egypt.
I agree with Benaya. With my knowledge of the Middle East though, I think that even 5% is an upper limit. Egypt simply isn't interested in the Palestinians; for historical context, Israel even suggested returning the Gaza strip to Egypt during the peace talks (it was conquered during the Six day war), but Egypt was happy to give away Israel that troublesome population (in their words, not mine). The US would have to pay a very hefty sum for that to change.
I'm pretty uninformed on this conflict, but my biggest question is whether you see any path to a decent outcome in this war? Like, people in Israel not being murdered by terrorists, people in Gaza not being blown up from bombs, etc. From outside, the whole conflict just seems hopelessly tangled--is there a good reason to expect that ten years after combat in Gaza starts, there won't be another wave of terrorist attacks?
Barring something very unexpected deriving from this war (e.g. an amazing so far unknown leader rising up from the Palestinian populace) or an external dramatic change (e.g. AGI), I think that the lower bound for peace between Israel and Palestine is at least 20 years, more likely 25. The reason is simple: Children both in Gaza and in the West bank are still taught at their schools to hate Israelis and jews. It's important to understand that it is embedded deeply in their education system: You learn physics by calculating how fast a bullet needs to fly to kill a soldier; You learn to count by counting martyrs; etc. This isn't just Hamas - The Palestinian National Authority pays a monthly salary to families whose family member executed terrorist attacks against Israelis (whether they are dead or sitting in Israeli prison). Furthermore, even if the authority wanted to stop paying them this salary, this would be such an unpopular decision that there is a good chance that it would simply topple. For peace to happen (and thus, for terrorist attacks to become negligible at the least) we need for a whole new generation to rise that wasn't taught hatred.
Make no mistake: There are problems on the Israeli side too. I can list them if you want. But from my historical and current perspective (trying to put my biases aside as much as possible of course), they aren't as limiting as the one I noted above.
I think you have the problem backwards. There is no people on earth who could be treated as appallingly as Israel treats the Palestinians and not hate their oppressors; the idea that that hatred is synthetic and artificial rather than a natural, just response to Israel's behaviour is pure cope.
I agree about the timescale, though. We won't see peace while it's in Israel's power to prevent it, Israel will be able to maintain the occupation for as long as they have carte-blanche US support, and that's not going away any time soon.
But while I think the short and medium term future are definitely going to be appalling, I actually see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in a long time, in the form of an increasing number of young Americans willing to condemn Israel. At the moment they're still a minority, but if the wind keeps blowing in the same direction - and I think the increasingly extreme evil of Israeli politics makes that likely - then I can believe that we might be only 20-25 years away from something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Anti-Apartheid_Act , which I think would be the most likely route to peace.
Rereading my comment, I wasn't clear: I think the reason I stated (education system) is the main reason, not the sole reason for the length of the conflict. And as I stated very clearly (and in other comments in this thread), Israel has quite a lot of blame for prolonging the conflict.
However, history disagrees with your claim that the hatred is only because of the occupation. Before the occupation, in 1948, Israel said yes to the UN's peaceful partition plan for Palestine; Palestinians said no and started a war with Israel. But even before that, Palestinians were killing Jews (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Palestine_riots). Claiming that Palestinians hate Israel simply for the occupation is a common Western bias that I see a lot; from both personal experience, analysis of data accumulated in the IDF and historical perspective, it's simply plain wrong. Israel does supply the Palestinians with a plethora of reasons to hate us; but they come with quite the baggage beforehand.
Additionally, claiming that the US is giving carte-blanche support is... a matter of perspective, I guess? Every single operation I participated in the decade of my service had limitations put on the way the IDF wanted to operate to please the US. I think you're using the saying to claim that you would like to see the US do more; that is not the same as cart-blanche.
I agree with your assessment of the winds of change of American youth. I can tell you that many in Israel are worried about it. I have quite a lot of thoughts on the topic, but I don't think they are that interesting as they delve into classic analysis of why that is the trend.
Side note, and honest meta-commentary on your comment: I feel like you have some very strong opinions on Israel, and that's fine. But this conflict is, to much of the world's surprise, extremely grey. You use very black and white words such as 'carte-blanche' and 'increasingly extreme evil'. I recommend either studying this conflict thoroughly, or remaining unsure (which I wish more people would do, whether they support Israel or Palestine or whatever mix). I haven't met a person who truly studied the topic well and isn't representing an agenda (e.g. Ben Shapiro) who hasn't agreed on the greyness of it all.
Prior to being recalled fo duty, how likely did you think it was for that to happen? And if it happened, in what kind of circumstances ? Was a scenario like Oct 7 ever floated ?
Do retiring officers automatically go in the reserve army or did you volunteer?
How likely do you think they are to recall you again ? I read here and there that they can't keep the reserves mobilized much longer without morale plummeting, what do you think of that? Did you work mostly with other reservists or are you mixed with active troops? What are the relations like between active and reserve? Do you feel you have a different perspective on things after retiring?
1. Unfathomable on the Gaza border, highly, highly unlikely on the Lebanese one. Scenarios like this were floated in the military, but only regarding the northern border, and also were not discussed seriously. This was indeed pretty much a black swan.
2. Depends where you serve. I went in reserve but I also volunteered actively as it was personally important to me.
3. Likely to be called again, even if for short periods. If a war with Hezbollah breaks in the north, 100% will be called again. I worked mixed, but this changes according to where you served. The relations are also unit dependent: E.g. in the air force reservist are extremely respected as pilots continue to fly about once a week into their forties; in the ground troops less so; etc.
4. I retired only 2 years ago, so I do, but not a lot. It does freshen up your perspective, but how much varies personally.
Great - with the Ukraine situation, everyone and his dog is posting strategic and tactical analysis, but on Israel/Gaza I'm not finding any. And, a lot of the moral arguments about what Israel should/shouldn't do, and what Hamas might do in the future, seem to be based on unwritten strategic/tactical assumptions .So I'd like to ask your opinion of a few things purely at the strategic/tactical level, ignoring for the moment the moral (even though it is obviously hugely important and I have strong opinions on it).
If the IDF hadn't been massively out of position, what would the likely outcome of the Oct 7 attack have been?
Many Israelis now seem to believe that Oct 7 showed that, without a military response, Hamas could simply have repeated Oct 7 with the same result. I'm wondering to what extent this is an emotional response, which might not be a valid military evaluation. Presumably, even if Israel hadn't entered Gaza, the IDF would have worked to prevent a repeat. If (for whatever reason) Hamas, or some successor force, is still in being subsequent to the war, and the IDF has withdrawn, what is the risk of that organisation being able to repeat a similar attack, in your view?
More broadly, while Hamas was able to conduct a surprisingly effective attack. from an external perspective it seems like the IDF has a huge strength advantage vs Hamas. But many Israelis seem to believe that it poses an existential threat. To what extent do you think this is based on a valid understanding of the military situation?
What were Israel's plausible military options, other than what they are currently doing, after the attack? Were there ones which would have reduced the body count of Gazan civilians, that would still have fulfilled, either the current political objectives, or viable alternative ones?
I realise that's a lot of questions, feel free to ignore any and/or post links to analysis elsewhere.
1. Depends what "not massively out of position" means. Assuming knowledge of the attack beforehand, Israel would have probably signaled to Hamas that it is aware of the ploy to deter it from actually executing it. If they would have went with it, I think you would have seen a ratio of double, perhaps triple digit to single digit in the favor of Israel. I have to underline that I'm seriously not exaggerating.
2. a. See my answer to AF for further elaboration, but basically Israel maintains a strategy of deterrence (taken from nuclear deterrence). The main reason there was - and is - a consensus on pretty much "destroying Hamas" (I know this can be interpreted in multiple ways), is because a non-decisive answer would signal to much more dangerous adversaries - Specifically Hezbollah and Iran - that they can attack to without a significant cost. This is unacceptable in Israeli military thought; I. e., sadly, The Palestinians were doomed even if they immediately suggested peace talks because Israel is trying to deter others.
However, I won't deny that there is an emotional response here, and furthermore, a value response here. In short - Part of Israel's ethos is "Never Again" (w.r.t the Holocaust). This is the worst that has happened since that period in history; the country is very strongly aligned to signal to everybody that unlike that time, where there was no one to "charge a price" for the atrocities that Jews have suffered, this won't be the case this time.
2. b. For a successor to repeat the attack would require the IDF allowing it enough time to rebuilt itself and rearm itself in a similar fashion that Hamas has. It took Hamas about 15 years to do that; I don't think that in the near future Israel will allow any organization it deems dangerous of one or two magnitudes below Hamas to exist in the Gaza strip.
3. Hamas does not pose an existential threat on Israel; to be clear, I believed that even during the late afternoon of October 7th, when some were panicked. But not responding to Hamas in a manner that would signal clearly to Iran and Hezbollah is an existential threat, as elaborated above.
4. Honest and unpopular answer: No. I know a lot of the talk abroad, and specifically in the US, is about "Counter Terrorism Operations" and "A long and surgical operation to remove Hamas from power", but these, bluntly, have nothing to do with reality. This would require an extremely long and detailed answer, but major practical reasons include:
a. It is incredibly difficult to execute stealthy elite operations in a population that is both supportive of the terrorist group acting from it and lives, in some areas of the strip, perhaps in the most dense fashion in the world;
b. As exposed, there is nothing comparable to the underground city and facilities that Hamas has built (maybe barring stuff in North Korea/China and perhaps under Moscow that I'm not aware of). Some are more than 50 meters deep, and they span more than 500 km (for context, the entire NYC subway is less than 400). If any military expert has an idea how to destroy a terrorist organization with such facilities without a direct ground invasion that secures logistical pathways, I'd like to see his theory.
... And I'm not talking about saving hostages and the amount of time that they would have to remain in captivity if the operation would have been slower, which was unacceptable in Israeli public opinion.
W.r.t. lowering civilian casualties - also no; at the very least extremely difficult. The operation would have to be slowed significantly; much more casualties would have to be taken on the Israeli side. If we use QALY as a measurement, I'm not sure that the average Gazan citizen would be even better off (though I'm not certain): It means the war would have been very intense for an even longer period of time (I'm talking years). But even with that, it's simply incredibly difficult to fight an enemy that uses it's population as human shields. I have seen video footage (which I'm not sure is public, but there should be enough other public evidence) of Hamas combatants (wearing no uniforms of course) walking casually out of a hospital, a designated safe zone, arriving to a stash of hidden RPGs, grabbing them and firing at IDF, and while running back into the hospital grabbing toddlers so they won't be shot at. A more personal experience (and more graphic, be advised) is from a friends brother, whose unit cleared a house except one locked room; they warned beforehand in Arabic that they are breaching, took some steps back, got into positions, and breached. From the rubble a child, no more than a meter tall, stands holding a big white bed sheet in front of him in the hole that formed; slowly he starts to walk toward the soldiers, which shout to him not to come closer. No one decided to shoot the kid, which eventually exploded with a suicide vest on the soldiers, injuring and killing some of them.
These are just 2 stories out of at least a dozen I have; some of the death toll of civilians (or children) you hear is simply members of populace that are either actively fighting or at least supporting Hamas directly. Under these circumstances, a ratio of 2 civilians to 1 combatant is amazing. I can also personally attest that the majority of the IDF I have seen in my service actively works to not hurt civilians whenever possible; it is true that the bar has been lowered in this war, but not arbitrarily, and no civilian is being killed deliberately.
"a. It is incredibly difficult to execute stealthy elite operations in a population that is both supportive of the terrorist group acting from it and lives, in some areas of the strip, perhaps in the most dense fashion in the world;"
To elaborate on this, American readers may be familiar with the movie "Black Hawk Down", or at least the story behind it. And that is the story of a stealthy elite group *succeeding* in this sort of operation. Task Force Ranger had a mission, to capture two particular high-value targets, they carried out that mission, they gave at least an order of magnitude better than they got in spite of being outnumbered by about the same amount, and they mostly walked out under their own power.
In that sort of war, "Black Hawk Down" is what *victory* looks like.
It wasn't enough of a victory to defeat the Somali National Alliance, but two or three more like it (and a proportional number of less-spectacular operations) probably would have.
Hamas is about twelve times larger than the SNA. And it's dug in much deeper in Gaza than the SNA ever was in Mogadishu, so at least twice as hard a target. So, if the plan is for elite Israeli commandos to just go after the Hamas leadership and leave the civilians alone, sometimes that will work. But along the way, you're going to have a hundred "Black Hawk Down" scale incidents. Because in this sort of war, that's what victory looks like.
Thanks for this perspective, it's very useful information.
I have to say that, to end the conflict will require a situation where both sides, not just Israel, have hope for the future. The current actions doesn't seem to me to lead to hope for either Palestinians or Israelis; but to change that would require changes outside the scope of military action, so having asked for a military analysis, this isn't a criticism of your response.
I agree. I stated something similar in response to a different question: I think the best shot for ending the conflict starts with changing fundamentally how the Palestinian education system works and waiting patiently for 20-25 years for a different generation to arise (and some other changes on the Israeli side, but much more minor). Sadly, even that is a difficult task.
Well, I don't agree that saying to the Palestinians, "we are going to wait 20-25 years before even thinking about a Palestinian state" is a viable approach. That's just a recipe for this to never end. They hate Israel because of the things that happen to them and their families, much more because of than what they are told in school. Because they don't have hope of a better life. They need to be given hope ASAP, or the hatred will continue to be renewed, no matter what they are taught in school. And this is largely true on the Israeli side as well - without some clear endpoint, Palestinians will continue to be demonised and hated in Israeli society.
The US's position "we will support Israel no matter what" is actually rather cynical from this point of view - it leaves responsibility for the outcome entirely on Israel, which can't credibly promise the Palestinians anything. It would be a lot better in my view for the west to build and support some credible organisation to run and keep order in Gaza, with a clear commitment to transitioning to a Palestinian state. If everything is left to Israel, they will always be seen as the occupier.
My understanding is that Israel doesn't want a one-state solution, nor a two-state solution. What is Israel's goal in the region at this point? I'm trying to understand, and do not dispute they must fight this war at the least to deter additional attacks.
It's a bit difficult to say what "Israel wants" for the same reason that it's a bit difficult to say what "the UK/USA wants" - it changes on where you are on the political/military spectrum (which are not the same, though often confused).
What Ben and Benaya said is correct, but to further elaborate, most Israelis "don't care" for the Palestinians in the same way you (assuming you live in the US) "don't care" for Canadians. We would like to live our life, raise our children, and be happy. Yep, some want to do that in the west bank; but they aren't a majority (even though it seems so politically), and even from those who do, if they could reach a permanent peaceful arrangement with the Palestinians there that would be great (note that this doesn't necessarily mean a two-state solution, or a one-state solution, or anything).
Are you saying that most Israelis 'don't want to live in the west bank' or most oppose Israelis being allowed to live in the west bank?
Polls may be of limited accuracy, but they generally tell a different story. Half of Israelis say they support annexing at least part of the west bank (as of 2020). In a 2016 Gallup Poll almost half of Israeli Jews said they supported expelling even Arab-Israeli citizens. Recently, almost a quarter of the Knesset attended a conference supporting ethnic Jewish settlement of Gaza (and concomitant expulsion of Arabs). Territorial expansion and demographic, um, reconfiguration, do seem to be supported by at the very least a large segment of the population, often for openly religious (rather than ostensible security) reasons.
I agree with TheZeroWave here - I'd have to look at the poll, but I think it's a far smaller population that would want to outright annex the West Bank. While a core of (usually religious) Israelis want to take over the WB because they think it must be part of "Greater Israel", the majority of Israelis only care about it in terms of security. This means two things:
1. Security from the Palestinians within the West Bank.
2. Having the West Bank as a buffer to potential Arab invasions from other countries.
I think #2 is less relevant nowadays with Israel being more recognized and having peace agreements with some neighbors. #1 is obviously still critical.
Sure the polls could be wrong, but then polls of Palestinian attitudes toward Israel are often used as justification for Israeli policy toward them. Incredulity regarding polling data is reasonable, asymmetric incredulity is harder to defend.
Sorry for not being clear - "don't want to live in the west bank".
The annexing polls make sense; note that there are some settlements in the west bank that are now pretty much cities. Even those supporting a 2 state solution usually think that it's best to annex them and swap some other territory with the Palestinians.
I'm unfamiliar with the Gallup poll; I'm a bit skeptical (beware the one poll) as this seems very far away from my personal experience, but I would need to look at the wording of the questions, some meta-analysis and etc. to give a meaningful comment
Re the conference, I note that a quarter of the Knesset is a bit of an exaggeration. There were 12 ministers and 15 Knesset members (source in Hebrew: https://www.maariv.co.il/news/politics/Article-1071608), so half of what you noted (12.5% of the Knesset). Their political power isn't directly related to their part of the population; In this Knesset, in which I note that the left has lost some (2-3) seats due to the election system keeping Meretz out, there are 14 seats for parties that clearly support settlement due to religious reasons. Even if we double for people from other parties that support that and round to 30 + remove the Arabic parties from the equation (10 seats), that's still 30/110, a quarter of supporters, not half.
You are correct that my original reply wasn't clear enough though, and I'll try to correct it: There is support for settlement and territorial expansion into Gaza and the west bank in a large segment of the population (but less than half the jewish one). My point was that they wouldn't mind living near them in the west bank peacefully. Their "peacefully" sometimes means that Palestinians wouldn't have equal rights or be considered citizens (which I personally strongly oppose).
Are cabinet ministers not also Knesset members? This is the case usually in parliamentary systems (was assuming 12 + 15 = 27 members in total?).
I think a major issue here is: for the Palestinians, the settlements are probably not a minor issue that can easily be brushed aside as peripheral, as many Israelis do. For one thing, Palestinians - unlike Israelis - are still largely agricultural, so they need the land more than you do. Beyond the cost of gradually losing more and more land to settlers itself, it also precipitates the continued, gradual, indefinite erosion of what land they still have (combined with onerous building restrictions and strict land use laws for Palestinians). Rational or not, I'm not aware of many nations historically that would've viewed that as an acceptable peace. (and it's surely reflected in the incentive structure that while, even with all its international support, the PA has completely failed to even halt settlement expansion with mere politics, Hamas succeeded in pushing out settlers from Gaza entirely).
What Ben said. But in a less flattering note: We generally like to ignore long-term huge problems while dealing with our numerous moderately large problems - especially when the long term problems have no known solution and are that politically explosive. So for many years our policy was basically "make locally-better relations with Arab countries; wait for the Palestinian issue to somehow go away. "
One of the most important and scary aspects of this war is that we will have to deal with that subject again, in an already-polarized political system
Israel wants to live in peace. Israelis who are against a two state solution are against it because they believe that a Palestinian state will harry it. Regarding the current war with Hamas, a good outcome would be the elimination of Hamas as an organization, and the Gaza strip administered by representatives of Arab states who are party to the Abraham Accords.
It happens; e.g. sometimes combat units aren't sure where and what their mission will be (e.g. invade Gaza City or the northern part of the Gaza strip). However, most of the times the IDF tries to give everyone as much clarity as possible to plan beforehand. The IDF operates very much with giving the initiative to lower ranks - you set the borders of different units, give them goals, and let the people and lower rank officers figure out themselves how they want to go about it. The "Israeli Ingenuity/Improvisation" that people like to talk about comes a lot due to the army (but not necessarily, and this is a bit of a chicken-egg question).
Can you clarify your question on the mission? it's a bit open-ended for me to answer.
> 3 maine died in the whole pirate thing people blame iran
Would the left want a war with iran? Am I being oppimistic when I think "well ill never tell anyone to join the military, the military gone insane and everyone's thought iraq was worthless"?
I certainly remember the jokes in 2002-3 about how W. Bush had a solid justification for attacking Iran, they'd spent time working up a foolproof invasion plan, and then he went on TV and got one little letter wrong.
I'm not the left, but I don't think a war with Iran sounds like a great idea. At least not if it amounts to sending soldiers into Iran--if we blow up some ships and planes and buildings belonging to Iran to dissuade them from screwing with our shipping, that seems fine.
The OIF airstrikes ("Shock & Awe") were part of a larger plan that already included ground forces; even Stormin' Norman's famous 100-hour ground war in Desert Storm was only made possible by a 1,000-hour air war to prepare the way.
A campaign against Iran would more likely resemble Operation Allied Force (Kosovo), with airstrikes providing the main effect themselves rather than as mere prelude to invasion.
Iran is neither Gaza nor Serbia. As big of bag of dicks as the IRGC is, they don't hide behind their populace, and our ordnance has gotten *much* more precise since Serbia.
We've still got the UNHCR; it's a bit creaky and a bit corrupt but it seems to be doing some good work for all the refugees who *aren't* Palestinians. The bit where the UN decided there would be one agency for Palestinian refugees and another for every other sort of refugees does not seem to have worked out very well; in hindsight the effective capture of UNRWA by Hamas et al was almost inevitable with that structure.
Giving the UNHCR responsibility for the Palestinians as well would risk capture of whatever sub-organization takes on that job, of course. But we do know what to look for now, and having it be part of a larger organization mostly beyond the reach of Palestinian actors would probably help as well.
I wanted to share my TEDx Talk on Profit for Good businesses - those with charities in vast majority shareholder positions - with the ACX community. Feel free to share to share your thoughts.
Is anyone here on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT)? Or, have strong opinions about using TRT specifically for lifestyle enhancement for middle-aged guys? Theoretically one could be doing TRT because you legitimately have low test, but I think the large majority of users are simply looking for strength, sexual performance, and possibly psychological boosts in their 40s, 50s, 60s etc. As I understand it the FDA frowns on this kind of hormone enhancement a lot, and has cracked down on it some recently, but it's not totally outlawed.
As a middle-aged guy with medically normal test levels for my age- does anyone think it's bad to use a reasonable amount of TRT to boost my levels back to, say, those of 10 or 15 years ago? Yes I am already maximizing what I can get out of nutrition, sleep, and lifting now. I will say that I still have a great head of hair and would strongly prefer to not lose it
I am, and consider it the single biggest quality of life improvement available to middle aged men, especially if you are athletic in any way. (And I'm an example of "normal levels getting boosted by it.")
I've been doing testosterone for 7 years or so, and see significant differences. I've cycled off with PCT a couple of times because I was paranoid that I was suppressing my endogenous HPA axis capabilities and would need to take it the rest of my life. But the difference in training volume, recovery capacity, and libido the few times I did this were significant, such that I've just bit the bullet and decided screw my endogenous HPA axis, I can be dependent on external T the rest of my life.
From a macro perspective, I can tell you that older me is stronger and fitter across the board than younger me, and I was no slouch when I was younger. I'd estimate this is probably at least 30-50% due to taking T - the other 50-70% is having dialed in better eating habits, training methods, intensities, and recovery strategies over the decades.
I got my dad on it, and he loved the effects too - he eventually came off because his PSA was rising (though it didn't cross any threshold, he was being conservative), so keep an eye on your PSA and cholesterol and blood pressure, but if those are good, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
On hair effects, if you and your genetic line aren't prone to male pattern baldness or baldness overall, it's not much worry - my hair is as thick as ever after 7 years. If you are prone to it, you can take finasteride while on TRT, or pay for hair plugs if your hair thins / goes bald.
Have been on both T and clomiphene for low testosterone. My level was mostly suppressed due to lifestyle factors and, after some life changes, has since resolved without continuing treatment. You get def go on T and then off, it takes some time for your natural level to reset, so i would keep that in mind if youre trying to make a kid old fashioned way. T, for me, was “a little goes a long way.” The med was being managed by my PCP and while hes a generally competent guy, I think we let my level get too high (went from low 100’s to 700+ in less than a year). The result was that i expereinced something like roid rage/hypomania. In hindsight, it was, in fact, like being a teenager again both for better and worse. I developed acne again on my back, got really strong and lean without much effort, had more energy, but also i felt angry, had outbursts, became more oppositional, had poor sleep, and my sex drive was distractingly high. Id consider trying it again depending on how advanced middle age goes for me, but id use way less and work with a specialty clinic next time around. Clomiphene was also effective and my T level kinda resumed a healthy normal for me. It made my vision blurry at close ranges at first (known side effect) but other than that, was helpful and pretty chill. Also easy to come off of, no T crash or something. Anyhow, hope it goes well for you, whatever you choose!
It's never made sense to me how testosterone supplementation would be frowned upon or [treated as a joke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyR5BLqtx8E) while HRT (whether testosterone or estrogen) for trans people isn't.
Have you tried Tongkat Ali? I was considering TRT for all the reasons you mentioned (and still am), but gave tongkat a try first. I went from ~450 to 700ng/dl. Not a huge change, but I do notice more energy, more confidence, and strength gains.
Testosterone is rocket fuel for prostate cancer cells. Early detection saved me 12 years ago from my father's fate: death at age 60 from metastasized prostate cancer. I'm 67. Frank Zappa died of the same thing as my dad but at age 53.
Technically, that article only refers to effects of testosterone therapy on cancer recurrence AFTER localized treatment for prostate cancer. No mention of relationship between testosterone on initial occurrence of prostate cancer. You'd expect some relationship since testerone does have an effect on the prostate and eventually most men have some level of prostate cancer by the time they die; most men don't have cancer that is spreading fast enough to kill them faster than age does.
I suppose it is good news though; it was a pretty big study. My father's cancer was somewhat unique: he didn't HAVE a prostate; only a shell was left after his prostate was removed for other reasons in 1980. Cancer detected in 1984; already metastasized when surgery done in early 1985, he died in 1988.
So if I naturally had test levels of say 400, is that 'rocket fuel for prostate cancer'? Are high-testosterone men dropping dead left and right in their 50s and 60s of this? Or is it only when the testosterone is exogenous? If so, can you elaborate on why external but not internal test is unusually dangerous?
Just naming 3 people who had prostate cancer, but without any knowledge of their test levels, is not really an argument
Necessary but not sufficient. If you have the right androgen receptors in your scalp, and you also have testosterone, then you will lose your hair. If you have one but not the other you will keep it.
Yes, that was my view as I'm married to someone who lost most of his hair in his mid-twenties* in the classic male pattern way.
I didn't know if there was an opposite thing at work.
*While totally bald on top, which is indeed not comfortable, he still has some hair around the sides of his head, fortunately, and that has been 30 years since what I think of as the great shedding if that gives any younger person hope. The secret is to keep that remaining hair neatly trimmed (he likes to get this done professionally, ironically, since I cut my own voluminous hair, and once long ago was slightly pained when he was told "no charge"), and to often wear a hat, which fortunately guys down here usually do anyway, no longer removing it in say a restaurant as etiquette used to dictate, unless it's a cowboy hat.
For the 'once you start you'd have to take it for the rest of your life crowd'- I think this is highly exaggerated. I agree that there would be a strongly negative period once you quit, but I think after a few months your body naturally restarts normal test production. I know a number of ex-steroid users older than me who appear to be living perfectly normal lives as far as I can see
What are some of the *minimum/weakest* standards of evidence needed to *prove* that someone is guilty of battery? The example I have in mind is jury finding Trump guilty of battery (May 2023), where I couldn't find a discussion on the evidence used (perhaps it is "subjudice" of sorts?). I am not particularly interested in the politics of the situation, and don't mean to inflame this thread at all. But some pointers regarding the abstract question of evidential standards would be nice to know. I am talking about the "lower limit", and not the cases where the conclusion is trivial: do they follow the dictum of innocent unless proved otherwise?
(I repeat that I don't mean to inflame this thread; I will be happy to delete this question if it is triggering).
Question: does anyone actually believe that this case was correctly decided and that the verdict is reasonable? I am unfamiliar with what the actual evidence was.
I've also read that the lady in question is a "serial rape victim" who has accused six men of raping her over the years, but I can't find particularly credible sources one way or the other on this.
There are several different standards used for different kinds of case. All start with the presumption of innocence, but civil trials need “preponderance of evidence” to find the person liable, criminal cases require evidence “beyond reasonable doubt” to find the person guilty, and I believe there are some situations where the requirement is in between those, at “clear and convincing”.
None of these has a probabilistic interpretation - just showing that this person is in a set, a high proportion of whom are guilty, with no further way to distinguish between the members who are guilty and the members who aren’t, wouldn’t suffice, no matter how high the fraction of guilty members is. You are standard thought to need some evidence that is specific to the person in question.
In a civil case, a plaintiff must meet the burden to show liability (as you note). So in civil cases it makes more sense to talk about a "presumption against liability" rather than a presumption of innocence.
But either way, the presumption is reflected in the procedure where whoever initiates a case (whether a private party filing a complaint or a prosecutor filing charges) generally must prove it up.
It was a civil case, so he wasn't found guilty of battery, he was found liable for defamation.
In civil court cases, the standard is usually 'preponderance of the evidence', ie 51% likelihood.
To actually convict someone of battery it would have to be a criminal case, where the standard is ussually 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. My understanding is that courts have specifically refused to set a standard likelihood ratio for this phrase, but most consider it to be something like 98%, 99%.
The difference in evidentiary standards being largely because civil courts charge you money, criminal courts send you to jail, and those are understood as qualitatively different levels of harm (or, from a nearby perspective, different levels of power granted to the government over its citizens ).
Importantly, no probability is considered sufficient. The classic example is to imagine a concert where a bunch of people crashed the gates. 10 actual cover charges were paid and 1000 people were in the venue. If you just grab a random person from the venue, and no one can produce any more evidence for or against the claim that this person did or didn’t pay the cover, there’s a 99% chance that this person trespassed. But that wouldn’t be considered sufficient evidence, even if the numbers were more lopsided. (In particular, nothing that has been presented will prevent you from convicting the ten people who actually paid the cover.)
Thank you for this very interesting remark, and for your reply above to me as well.
I am slightly confused by your last sentence, whose naive reading seems to be at odds with the previous sentence and the first. Is your point the following: "Rather than the naive binary of criminal ≈ 99.99 and civil = 50 + ε, civil itself, depending on the nature of the case, spans a spectrum between 50 + ε and 99.99?"
Not quite, the point is a bit more subtle - criminal is "beyond reasonable doubt" and civil is "preponderance of evidence", but neither of those can be given a probabilistic interpretation, because in a case like the gatecrashers one, the probability can be arbitrarily high, but not specific to the person, and therefore not sufficient for either.
It is usually taken that "beyond reasonable doubt" requires something like 95% probability in addition to whatever other non-probabilistic criteria there are, and "preponderance of evidence" requires greater than 50% probability in addition to whatever other non-probabilistic criteria there are. But there is controversy about what exactly those other criteria are (though jurors generally know them when they see them).
So in the case of the gatecrashers, could the hosts sue everyone at the party for the cost of the ticket, and the ten people who legitimately paid are just SOL?
I think the usual interpretation is that the non-probabilistic criteria will ensure that they can't do that (or at least, that the court won't find against any particular gatecrasher or guest).
Unfortunately, what this means is that if you and your 11,000 identical siblings want to get in cheap, and one of you buys a ticket, then if the hosts can't do anything to distinguish which one of you bought the ticket, then the *hosts* are SOL at getting any civil recourse against any of the 11,000 others.
I think that sentence is just being misleading to the point of being dishonest.
It is referring to the civil case, which is 51% likelihood. But it's referring to him being found liable for defamation, not guilty of rape.
I think the author's defense would be 'the facts of the case were substantially about whether or not she was assaulted, they found him liable for defamation because they thought he was probably guilty of assault'.
But that 'probably' is using the 51% for civil cases, not the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' for criminal cases.
(Another justification may be that I vaguely remember the judge in that case making a public statement to the effect that people were saying 'this trial is not evidence that Trump assaulted anyone, it's just about defamation' by saying something like 'no, whether he assaulted her is the primary question of fact, the evidence is all about that and indicated that he likely did' or something. But I don't remember the details on that.)
Thank you for answering my second question as well. Much appreciated.
However, such a sentence is used by judge Kaplan as well, in the second sentence of the following quote: "The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was “raped” within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump “raped” her as many people commonly understand the word “rape.” Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that." (edit: the source is https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590045/gov.uscourts.nysd.590045.212.0.pdf straddling pages 3-5). So I guess in a civil context "The jury found that X did Y" merely means that according to the jury, it was more likely than not that X did Y.
I have been long aware that my legal knowledge is approximately zero, but I didn't know it had the consequence that even an interpretation of a seemingly simple sentence like "The jury found that X did Y" depended on having such a background. Given that it is all over the media and on wikipedia (not just USA today), I guess the mainstream understanding is that most people have the requisite legal background to interpret such statements correctly.
New York state law defines "rape" more narrowly than most other US jurisdictions do, and Ms. Carroll's experience did not fit that specific definition. So the jury found instead that Trump "sexually abused" her.
Thanks for the clarification, that was getting beyond my legal knowledge.
If I understand right, the case in question was for defamation rather than battery, likely because the statute of limitations on battery had run out already (but the defamatory statements were more recent)?
Oops my bad. Didn't know the word (embarrassing for me). Thank you for clarifying, and thank you for your patience with my ignorance.
Wikipedia says "In July 2023, Judge Kaplan clarified that the jury had found that Trump had raped Carroll according to the common definition of the word", and that the jury had stated "Carroll did prove that Trump had sexually abused her,". I guess you are saying that this is still technically "liable", not "guilty" in that civil context. And what is typically the standard of evidence for proving such statements: is this a setting in which "innocent unless proven otherwise" is applicable?
The presumption of innocence does not apply to civil cases in the United States. The *somewhat* related concepts of the burdens of production and persuasion apply. To oversimplify, the plaintiff in a civil case has (1) the burden of introducing admissible evidence sufficient for a fact-finder (a jury in this case) to conclude that it is more likely than not (just over 50% or more, so technically 50.0000000001% would suffice) that the defendant is liable for whatever tort or legal theory is at issue, and (2) the burden of actually convincing (persuading) the fact-finder / jury of that. The distinctions are subtle but important. Imagine a case where the only evidence is testimonial - "she said / he said." Assuming the relevant testimony is admissible, a plaintiff can meet the burden of production (introducing evidence) by providing testimony sufficient to meet the legal elements of the tort. A judge would not dismiss a claim so long as that testimony is in the record. A jury, however, does not have to believe the plaintiff's testimony! It could still find for the defendant, even if the defendant provides no testimony at all, by simply disbelieving the plaintiff. Imagine a great defense lawyer proving on cross-examination that the plaintiff lied about everything. (Note: In theory, only the fact-finder (the jury, in this case) has the right to believe or disbelieve testimony.) Of course, the jury could *believe* the plaintiff, crediting the plaintiff's testimony, at which point the law deems the plaintiff to have carried her burden of persuasion as well as her burden of production.
To be found "liable" is a standard of 51%. This is the distinction between civil and criminal. The only penalty from civil trial is financial, vs a criminal trial which can label you a felon and send you to jail.
The $83 million was mostly punitive damages inflicted because he was found liable for the statements before, then immediately started to make the same sorts of statements again, meaning Carroll could get a summary judgment on the statements in short order, for which she has now received a judgment for a very large amount of money.
In general, it is highly disrecommended to ignore the court and repeat the sort of misconduct the court just got you for, particularly in public.
1. I don't see that that addresses the "logical" question raised: if a civil punishment can be much more punitive than a criminal punishment, then requiring 51% "more likely than not" sort of vague evidence for the former and 98% "beyond reasonable doubt" confidence for the latter wouldn't seem to make sense, given that the two were distinguished based on an "only financial penalty" argument.
2. Let us accept that he deserves a greater punishment because he immediately started to make statements that the court had just found violative. Does it explain that the actual reputational damage, which was "evaluated" to 5 million earlier, can now be evaluated to 83 million? One could argue that given the court judgement, fresh statements amount to a _smaller_ reputational damage than before?
1. When I was at university I was desperately poor and didn't own any sort of music player. My friend Bobby who stayed in the same student residence had a cassette player. He also had a tape of Leonard Cohen's greatest hits. From time to time when I was suffering from one of my regular being dumpeds, I would go to Bobby's room, put on the headphones and listen to Leonard Cohen, which is surely the most mournful music anyone ever heard. The point is that when I was miserable, it gave me a perverse pleasure to wallow in it and feel sorry for myself. The next day I'd be back to normal, for me anyway.
2. Instant cure for depression. a. Get in your car and go for a drive. b. With the windows up naturally, at the top of your voice yell, "YEEEEE-HAHHH!" A few times. Dale Carnegie wrote, If you want to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic!
That would only work if Scott had written "...contained on A Middle East subthread".
Saying "...contained on THE Middle East subthread", when there is no such subthread, constitutes an AccessViolationException or a NullPointerException and results in the immediate shutdown of this Substack and the release of its resources by the Internet.
Before you get excited and buy a bunch of Oreos, you should take note of a couple things:
1. This "study" was done on one person, the one conducting the study.
2. This may only show that a Keto diet raises cholesterol; Oreos were chosen because of their reputation as only providing useless carbs.
I do say this needs an actual research program to find out why carbs worked to lower LDL cholesterol. I bet lots of people would volunteer to test eating 12 Oreo cookies a day.
No, not even if they lowered cholesterol would I eat Oreo cookies.
I'm fortunate in that my LDL levels are okay, it's my triglycerides which are the divils, but even then I would not eat Oreos. Tried them, didn't like them.
On the other hand, if only there were a study about how eating Jaffa cakes reduces bad cholesterol (sigh).
Looks like the study design is 12 additional Oreo cookies daily on top of "KD" diet. That this person has such a high baseline for their LDL on a ketogenic diet and responds so poorly to rosuvastatin I suspect something else is going on. They also note that they found LDL decreasing with oreo supplementation despite increasing saturated fat, which really contradicts all but a few studies. I'm going to have to do a deep dive on this one.
---------
Edit: OK, read through the entire paper in detail now and checked some of the background literature on the subject. Looks like this helps support the theory that some people on ketogenic diets end up using lipoproteins (LDL and HDL) to transport fat in the bloodstream to muscles, and thereby end up with high LDL/HLD-C. By restoring blood glucose through oreo cookies, they were able to decrease LDL.
This study isn't really applicable to the general population, but for people who are lean, on high-fat ketogenic diets, and have high cholesterol, and don't respond to statins, and are OK with weight gain, then this would work well.
I like your last paragraph — it almost reads like a Radio Yerevan joke.
Is there even any reason to believe that lowering LDL would be beneficial for such a population? It isn't obvious to me that the studies establishing a relationship between elevated LDL and mortality/morbidity would generalize to such an extreme outlier group.
Yes. Keep in mind the subject in the study had LDL >400 on a high fat KD. Regardless of BMI/Diet/Activity level/Blood pressure etc., an LDL >190 is pathologic (we will screen anyone with such a reading for familial hypercholesterolemia and other genetic disorders). As for how prevalent this specific hyperresponder phenotype is, I don't know. I suspect the same benefits could be had simply by changing from a high fat KD to a high protein KD.
I'm doing a a degree in philosophy and I have a hunch that they deliberately chose to teach us philosophers who are wrong so that we can get practice at arguing against famous wrong people.
My brain builds a model of the world around me. It uses the model to make predictions of what I expect to see and hear and smell. I experience those predictions as changes to the model and, when a prediction is wrong, my brain gives it extra attention so that it can learn from its mistake and make better predictions in future.
Completely serious here: They're all wrong, but you have to learn all the specific ways they were wrong, before you have a chance of coming up with a novel philosophy that's wrong in a completely new way.
The way you phrased this sounds like you think there are some philosophers who were right, but we instead focus on the wrong ones. If you continue your study, I think what you’ll find is that all philosophers are wrong about lots of things, and even these ones have some points they were right about.
How do you tell? I mean, when the philosopher ventured into things that are now considered science or math maybe we know they were wrong, but for moral philosophy or metaphysics, say, how would we tell whether a particular philosopher was wrong or right?
Most famous philosophers have a 'second-album' problem (the problem many famous bands face where their first famous album is the sum total result of a dozen years toiling and experimenting in obscurity and is great, and their second album is pumped out under studio pressure 8 months after they get their first record deal and kinda sucks).
Most famous philosophers have some important insight or framework or question that they realized and verbalized and developed before anyone else or better than anyone else, and that thing on its own is an important contribution.
Then they have to make a living as a famous philosopher for the next 50 years of their life, which means writing more and more and more words, whether they have new insights or not.
Write enough words, eventually some of them will be wrong.
That all the inadequacy of philosophy exists for a reason. That it serves its purpose. That it's part of some plan. And, who knows, maybe, when you graduate and prove your own abilities you will be allowed to learn about the "real philosophy", the compilation of state of the art works by the secret philosophers who appear to be mostly right, as far as it seems. You would have to still keep the appearance of course, publishing bullshit papers in the conventional philosophy journals, but you would also be able to contribute to a secret real philosophical works, if you are good enough.
What I don't understand about philosophy is this whole "did you read X" thing. I was a physics major and never read Newton or Einstein to learn their theories. Many philosopher have a reputation for being terrible writers, and their ideas have been improved/eviscerated/augmented since their inception, so reading the primary source seems like it should be irrelevant in forming an understanding of the underlying ideas.
That's funny! I was a philosophy major (kind of) and I _did_ read Newton and Einstein.
Improving, eviscerating and augmenting other philosophers' ideas is the main thing that philosophers do. Aquinas was augmenting Plato's philosophy (he thought) with the truth (as he thought) of Christianity. At the time, he was considered to have corrected, distilled and completed Plato's as-yet-unfinished ideas. Yet, today, we recognize Aquinas's ideas and Plato's ideas as totally separate things. We see Aquinas as erasing and twisting important parts of Plato.
Every culture and time period does this. Descartes is improving, eviscerating and augmenting Aquinas. Hegel is improving, eviscerating and augmenting Kant. Deleuze is improving, eviscerating and augmenting Husserl. Figuring out what's true and what's false in the previous philosophers is, itself, the act of creating a new philosophy. Every era has its own philosophy, different but connected to all the others.
What Acquinas thought was true in Plato, we now think was boring and wrong. What we see as fascinating and fruitful in Plato, Acquinas dismissed as obviously false paganism. Each era has its own standpoint, and our own era has one too, just like the others.
So, if your goal is to stay within the bounds of your own era's philosophy, and you're not interested in whether your own culture is right or wrong about stuff, then your own era's summaries (and improvements, eviscerations and augmentations) of it are probably fine for that. But most philosophers are trying to get to some kind of real actual truth, separate from what current writers and thinkers are saying. So philosophers really value reading the original books, as a guarantee against being tainted by contemporary biases. (translation is a whole nother problem, for this!)
Also! Lots of times the words we're using for stuff are wrong or silly. You can't summarize Heidegger, because he objects to practically every word you could use. He's trying to redefine the word "is"! (in German, of course, but I hear he's just as difficult in German.) It would be like showing somebody a physics equation without explaining what each symbol means.
So, sometimes, the texts themselves resist summary, for reasons that are inherent to the problem the writer is trying to address. And, always, you shouldn't trust your own culture to convey an important philosopher's ideas to you untwisted.
The reason I asked in this case is that the OP seems to be working off of somebody else's augmented or eviscerated idea of Kant, and might possibly not have been taught some of his key ideas.
Reading this im not convinced that’s there anything worthwhile there at all. The idea that we read plato different than acquinas indicates that philosophers are generational group thinkers.
I guess I'd say to read The Republic before you dismiss philosophy entirely, don't take what I (some Internet rando) say too seriously.
But also, if you go deeply enough into any field, and you're really serious about it, you'll find at least some conceptual confusion and conflict. If you follow those down into their causes, you'll hit philosophical questions before long.
Like, here on Astral Codex Ten, you only have to go a few comments deep in a post on AI or Effective Altruism before people are asking "What is consciousness?" or "What is justice?", and contradicting each other and getting very confused. Well, until physics finds a Justice Particle, or medical science locates the Consciousness Gland, those questions are the domain of philosophy, and if you study them, you'll find yourself in the world of Plato before too long.
I have a pet theory that the "hardness" of a field of study is inversely proportional to how frequently students of that field are told to read the original papers or books.
In a proper "hard" field, the object of study is sufficiently well defined and unambiguous that different authors can all describe it while agreeing with each other. We usually don't read Einstein on relativity, because other authors have described relativity more clearly and more succinctly since him.
In puffy subjects, the object of study is sufficiently poorly defined that you can't rely on multiple authors to be talking about the same thing. Ten different paraphrases of one passage by Nietzsche will say ten different things, so you can't rely on any of them. Instead, you have to read the original Nietzsche (or pretend to read the original Nietzsche by reading a translation, if you don't speak pretty advanced German) and develop your own, equally wrong, view of what Nietzsche was trying to say.
Why even bother? I like David Stove's idea that the point of professional philosophers is to save ordinary, useful people from the trouble of needing to do philosophy for themselves. Intelligent people will inevitably start to have philosophical thoughts eventually, and it's good to have a stack of books that we can refer them to to reassure them that whatever thought they've had has already been had, written down, labelled, and debated ad nauseum.
>In a proper "hard" field, the object of study is sufficiently well defined and unambiguous that different authors can all describe it while agreeing with each other.
Agreed. To put it another way, these fields have well-established consensus conclusions (e.g. Maxwell's equations), and teachers can pick textbooks based on the clearest exposition of the consensus rather than the original publications.
I don't think modern physics students would benefit from a close study of Newton's Principia for example, quite the opposite.
The problem was that in his elaborate geometrical constructions he was explicitly reiterating the limiting processes underlying calculus. Modern presentations are far more streamlined and easier to follow once this has been factored out of every individual case and treated as just "part of the furniture".
Plato kind of stacks the deck here. Like in The Republic, he creates various fictional guys who are wrong about stuff so that (fictional) Socrates can point out how they're wrong.
I read somewhere that Plato sometimes gave Socrates weak arguments because, if they were too strong, they would have less value as teaching aids with his students.
We read the Laches in an earlier class and Socrates was dead wrong about courage. Animals don't have courage? That's ridiculous!
Kierkegaard wrote as a series of pseudonyms, each of which gets certain things wrong. He was trying to make his readers reject his opinion and think about things for themselves. He hated the idea that anybody might believe something just because he, Kierkegaard, said so, as though he was some kind of prophet with special access to truth.
He wrote his university dissertation on Socratic irony, which is to say, when Socrates says one thing, but actually means something else.
I am a Berlin-based AI Engineer about to embark on 12 months of gardening leave. I am searching for interesting projects, potentially in the digital humanities / computational history or philanthropy, where I might be able to use my data science and ML skills to help drive the project forward.
If you know of any research groups or other deserving places that could perhaps use a bit of unpaid ML labor, please reach out!
-There's a thing called Code for Boston where volunteers do coding projects to help Boston or some subgroup of the population. They have projects you can join, or you can propose one of your own.
-A while ago some tech-savvy civilian developed a system that improved access to kidneys for those that needed a transplant. Each patient found one person who was willing to donate on their behalf, but was not necessarily a match for them, then person and a donor joined a pool. Software written by the founder figured out most efficient way of matching the various donors with the various people in need who had brought a donor into the pool. This project doesn't seen like one that uses ML (I'm a psychologist, so not deeply knowledgable abut tech) but I'll bet there are some ML projects that are like this one in that they solve some practical problem that medicine has not gotten around to developing a solution to.
-Look at 80,000 hours, the EA site.
-Jeremy Howard, an Australian entrepreneur and ML genius, teaches a bunch of courses in what he calls Fast AI. His thing is developing and teaching approaches to ML that can be done by an individual using a home computer, and achieve good results via clever techniques rather than huge volumes of training data. Was browsing the forum students in his class used, and came across a couple farmers who were using ML on photos of their fields to detect weeds! The forum is here, and seems to be a thriving ecosystem of people exchanging ideas and. helping each other.
You might get some ideas from browsing on there, or you could even just ask on the forum. Also, in case you’re curious about fast AI, here’s a link to topics taught in one of Howard’s courses.
-MIT runs a thing called the D Lab, where they develop tech that’s appropriate for use in developing companies. For ex., a few years ago they were making these things sort of like lego sets that could be put together in ways that helped Africans set up improvised medical devices. I’ve forgotten a lot of the details, but the gist of it is that there are a bunch of smart Africans who are clever at improvising things like intravenous lines and other medical devices from bits and pieces they find or buy. The MIT group conferred with them and came up with this lego stuff that somehow worked well to make frameworks to help hold the improvised devices in place. Something like that. Awesome, IMO. Anyhow, don’t know what they’re doing now or how they’d feel about a volunteer like you being involved, but seems like ML could be useful either to the D lab or to the clever Africans they work with.
I recently posted a poll in a rat adjacent forum asking: “Have you ever been on a passenger plane and wondered whether you could land it if the pilot was incapacitated?”
While the sample size for women respondents is low (it’s a rat adjacent forum), I find myself genuinely surprised by the complete absence of female affirmative responses.
Are there any other personality questions where the most common response among males, is not only much rarer but functionally non-existent among females?
I'm a woman who wondered that. That said, I had a period of being hyperfixated on aircraft communications and aren't exactly representative of general population.
Women make up ~7% of licensed pilots in the United States; that's probably a fair proxy for believing, "yes, really, flying an airplane is totally a thing I could do". So, yeah, that's really going to be skewed by gender. Which is unfortunate.
I should have known better to think gizmodo would not infuriate me.
Most of those are obvious why they're wrong (fight a grizzly bear and win? no).
But many are not (fight an eagle and win? why not?). And they of course haven't done even the slightest amount of research to show why or why not. We've all seen kangaroo fights, so we know how those turn out. But I'm fairly willing to bet if an eagle takes me on, odds are about 50/50 he's gonna regret it.
And for the record, I have fought a large iguana that was trying to take my food, so I know a little something about fighting animals with razor-sharp claws and teeth that are at least somewhat determined to win against you.
I think this gizmodo post is worse than useless. Wrong, and provides zero insight.
Seems like a major asymmetry with the eagle is that the fight ends when he decides to fly away, so if things are going well for him, the fight continues, but as soon as things seem to be going badly for him, if you haven't managed to break one of his wings or something, he just flies away and leaves you shaking your fist at him from the ground.
The people answering that they can beat a grizzly in a fight are just trolling, surely.
Absolutely there's trolling there. What kind of person hears "could you beat a grizzly bear in a fight" and thinks, "this is a serious question calling for a serious answer"?
I've seen dogs that got attacked by eagles. A hit an run by an eagle is extremely unlikely to do fatal damage to an adult human male and any kind of grappling (eagle's weapons are only close range) is going to favor the human I think (eagle's weight tops out at something like 15lbs, you pretty much just have to fall on it).
Well, I’ve never seen a man wrestle an eagle so I will bow out. Of course it all depends on the circumstances doesn’t it? If an eagle were stupid enough to hit you with a dive in the middle of nowhere, it certainly would not kill you, but I think it would do some damage. In a cage match a human definitely has an advantage. I don’t really know how Eagles fight when they can’t fly. A goose has a great advantage because it has a very long neck and a very sharp beak. They can strike pretty quickly, but I think it would take at least three of them to win a fight with a person, now of course it depends about whether we’re talking about Bruce Lee or myself
Surely that counts as a win? If there's a boxing match and one of the participants jumps out of the ring and runs away, we don't say "Wow the other guy is left shaking his fist impotently at him, there really ain't no way to decide the victor now".
Yeah, that poll went viral whenever it came out a couple years ago. I have a pet theory that respondents were answering a subtly different version of the question.
I personally interpret it as "You are in a cage match with this animal. Neither of you can leave. It's a fight to the death. Which one of you wins"?
I think many respondents were actually answering "You encounter this animal in the wild, what would the outcome be?" With many people believing they can either scare the animal off or alternatively, that they would choose not to fight.
For example, I am 100% confident that in a cage match to the death, I would easily beat a goose. But if I actually encountered a pissed off goose, I would probably just leave and avoid the fight ("lose", especially from the gooses perspective).
There's also the use of the word "could". At least to me, it means, "is there a physical possibility however remote you land the 1-to-a-million lucky punch that beats the creature?" Not at all whether you'll reliably win. With that outlook the numbers don't seem that wild to me.
Yeah, the parameters are undefined. As noted in another thread, someone thought eagle easily wins. Then I started wondering what they mean.
On one end of the spectrum, I'm on a cliff face trying to scale it, and an eagle attacks me. 0% chance I survive that encounter.
On the other end, we're in a small cage. Doesn't matter how sharp its claws/beak are. Yeah, I'll be bleeding and unhappy, but that is going to be a dead eagle.
In the middle, I'm in a field, minding my own business, and an eagle decides to take me out, swoops down on me, and catches me by surprise. I figure that's a 95% chance the eagle wins, but other humans I would change those odds.
And then there's "fair fight." Okay, the eagle and bear have very sharp, very hard knives built into their bodies. Does that mean I get to bring ten very large, very sharp knives to the fight? At that point, and with proper training, I think even my odds against a grizzy go up (not a lot, maybe from 0% to 2%, but again, other humans I might increase those odds...)
A fun thought experiment, but I'm sure every second I've put into this thing is wasted. When it comes down to it, none of these animals stand any chance against humans, because we have tools they can't even fathom, let alone utilise, in the fight we're actually engaged in. It turns out whatever the definition of "fair" is Gizmodo or anyone else is using is irrelevant. In the only fight that matters, humans are winning it, 99.9% of the time.
Sex gap here isn’t particularly large by the normal standards of the sex gap, and most importantly; there’s no mystery as to why women should feel less confident than men in fighting wild animals.
"Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas" is a lot of fun. 55% of male respondents and 22% of female respondents knew the word 'aileron'. 55% of female respondents and 18% of male respondents knew the word 'ruche'.
So googling it, it's just people answering whether they think they know the words, not giving a definition (although there were fake words to trip them up). No real guarantee they weren't lying or honestly mistaken. They give "whicker" as an example, surely a lot of people would think it's a possible spelling of wicker?
I knew both - of course an English-speaking girl knows "ruched" - but the reason I knew "aileron" was that I managed to get all the way to like age 30 before realizing I didn't know how airplanes stay up in the air and so I read basically a children's book about it. So I kind of illustrate the point even in the affirmative.
I sometimes wonder what they taught us in school and why.
I came up in the diagramming sentences era.
Something about combustion engines would have been useful. But we needed to read "Of Mice and Men".
What schools teach is a bit of a crap shoot based off of what people thought was important fifty to twenty years ago. At best, I see it as a bit of an intellectual sampler plater. Of Mice and Men might not have mattered in your life but may have been seminal to the next kid over.
Ok, I had to look up "ruche" since I had never heard it before. I asked my girlfriend if she knew it, and she said she recognized the word but forgot what it meant.
It's funny because I would have answered I knew the word, assuming it's a French loanword (it is!) for beehive (it isn't!). So that goes to show how flawed these things are.
I have heard that men will apply for a job for which they find one thing they are qualified to do, and women won't apply for a job for which they find one thing they aren't qualified to do. I have nothing with which to back up either statement, and my own experience, as a man, would be an exception.
In computing, the requirements on the job ad are a wildly over optimistic list of skills/experience they'd like the candidate to have. If you meet even some of it (but not all of it) you're typically in with a chance.
I think I had better not give too specific an example, but in academia, if you should be so fortunate as to get two well-qualified applicants for the same job ad, what you actually do is to create another position and hire both of them.
I don't have firsthand experience but that sounds wildly different from the descriptions I've heard of the ratio of talented applicants to (funding for) open positions in the academic job market. It might vary some based on field I guess.
I was thinking of Research Associate positions, or jobs working for industrial research labs.
You want a permanent teaching position, that's harder.
One undergrad student of ours I was supervising was very good. We would have given him a phd position no problem. sadly, from our point of view if not his, he instead went and got a job in industry for $$$ more money.
A few years back, interview.io did an experiment where they disguised the voices of programmer interview candidates to make men sound like women and vice versa to test the theory that women are more likely to discriminated against. They found it made no difference.
What they did find was that women were 7x more likely to quit the interview process if they had a single bad interview while men were more likely to barrel on regardless.
Nothing that grand, it was just something doing the rounds on Twitter, something like: "Ladies, have you any idea how often your husband/boyfriend thinks about the Roman Empire?".
I also know a few people here write their own blogs / do research, so two suggestions for anyone who has the time!
A) there's a boarding school in Switzerland, Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, whose boarding fees are amongst the highest in the world. However, tuition for day students is basically free. I imagine this can be used to analyse the effect of family wealth on school performance?
B) I've asked this many times in different places but have never found a definitive answer: what's the origin of the media play symbols (triangle for Play, lines for Pause, etc)? On which device were they first used? I imagine one could put together a compelling CGP Grey-like piece on this.
I’m looking for a particular PSA I saw in my youth, ca. 1980–82. It was half an hour long (unless my ability to estimate time from so long ago is waaaay off) and lectured kids about the duplicity of toy commercials.
For example, it showed a [fake] commercial for action figures rocketing downstream on a raft, and the voiceover whispers hastily, “river not included”; the rafting action figures would be a lot less fun in a bathtub!
I’ve utterly failed to find this through conventional google methods, and was wondering if anyone had encountered it, or knew of a resource on classroom PSAs of that period.
Wow! Are you familiar with a PSA looking ad from the early 90s in which a man asks a librarian for a book, she says no, and as the man walks away she calls two men in suits, presumably to investigate him?
I know a lot of readers here are EAs, so I wanted to ask... I read Michael Lewis's book on SBF, and the thing I couldn't understand is, what are EAs solving for?
It looks like all the maths is around saving as many lives as possible, but to what end? Why are EAs focused on saving lives, if they don't value equally pleasure in life (and so, they make calls such as 'I shouldn't focus on my own happiness because it might lead to fewer lives saved' or 'no time to have children' etc)?
As others have said, "lives saved" is definitely a big oversimplification. The reason it gets focused on so much in surface-level public facing discussions is that saving lives is very easy to explain and it's something almost everyone agrees is good, without having to get into a lot of debates about what exactly constitutes quality of life, how it should be measured, etc.
I'd ignore the Very Online debates, basically none of it matters at all to real people who are actually suffering. I don't care about invisible organ harvesters, I don't care about trolley problems, I don't care about abstract trade offs of life Vs happiness. In the real world half a million children die of malaria every year, and many many more people get very sick from it. This is a disease which is relatively trivially prevented and treated. People feel better when they don't die of malaria, and I would also be rather upset if my children were to die of malaria. Everything else is commentary. There are a number of things in this category (lead poisoning, unclean water, intestinal worms, etc), and in a century's time if we've run out of incredibly low hanging fruit I'll start entertaining the philosophical questions.
Remaining alive is usually a prerequisite to experiencing pleasure. And Greek myths aside, it's usually rare that saving someone's life leaves them in a situation so miserable that they'd rather be dead.
EAs get into endless discussions over the details, but the basic unit of improvement is usually the quality adjusted life year (qaly). E.g. a lot of deworming charities don't actually save many lives but do cheaply massively improve many people's life quality.
Do any EA organization have a way of directing donors to proximity-weighted qaly increasing charities? E.g. if someone wanted to donate to the charity that was optimal for increasing qalys within 100 miles of the donor's home per dollar? Efficiency and cosmopolitanism are separate goals...
I don't know if the thing you're looking for exists (it takes a massive amount of resource to find the ten best charities in the world, it would be an impossible task to find the ten best charities operating in - say - every individual municipality). You might be interested that you can proximity-weight QALY through time, giving different weights to charities which produce a small number of QALYs today (say, cash transfer) vs a large number of QALYs in the future (say, vaccination). It is a very live question in the literature as to exactly how you make the tradeoff between the two.
Many Thanks! I wasn't thinking in terms of proliferating the number of charities covered, which, as you said, would be an impossible task. I was thinking more of just keeping track of the geographic span of each of the e.g. ten best charities that e.g. GiveWell already covers, so that e.g. donors could sort the list by proximity-weighted QALYs per dollar rather than by raw QALYs per dollar. That way, each donor could decide for their own donation in what ratio they value a QALY for a neighbor vs a QALY for someone halfway around the world.
>you can proximity-weight QALY through time, giving different weights to charities which produce a small number of QALYs today (say, cash transfer) vs a large number of QALYs in the future (say, vaccination)
Neat! So a _temporal_ discount rate is already supported, and I'm suggesting a _spatial_ discount rate.
I was revisiting the sound track to "Phantom of the Opera" recently and I find that, at least the movie version, the Phantom's voice is just too high for me. I keep going through videos looking for different phantoms and was hoping to find a deeper one, maybe a bass singer rendition of the "Phantom of the Opera" duet. Can anybody recommend something like that?
Not actually a bass singer, but this is different enough from the standard renditions it might be interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL25rbnvM4o
Anyone in here an actuary? In a career switch who just got involved in the field in my late 20s. I’m early on the exam ladder, and just honing my coding skills (SQL and Python).
Just curious as to what my long term options are as far as going into different fields, data science and the like. An absolute *dream* job would be front office at a major sports team, but I know those are incredibly competitive. Just wanted to see if there’s anyone in here who used their experience in insurance to move into a diff field, or if I’ll be stuck in insurance my whole life (which I’d be somewhat OK with, I love my job).
I worked for an insurance company for a while. I don't opt for the actuarial track but several coworker analysis did. Our company wasn't known for the highest pay but their actuarial trainee programs paid for the tests past the first one and provided paid study time and test taking time. The company also supported other insurance education, such as CPCU.
The actuarial trainees ranged from young out of college analysis to career switching phds and former CPAs. Consider finding a job of that kind, if you aren't already.
Yeah from what I understand that’s industry standard at this point. Passing exams is often a decades long process, and it’s part of your job if you’re in the actuarial department. Up to the first credential, at least. Very few people actually finish the entire exam ladder, it’s extremely difficult, akin to a math PhD. The company I work for now pays for exams and all study materials. I’ve only passed the first two at this point, but got hired in my first job after passing my first exam last January, then passed my 2nd in October, which they covered.
So I’m in the field already, have a great job at an amazing company, and am studying for my next exam in May. I’m just wondering long term, if the skills I develop can open doors outside of the narrow niche of the actuarial dept of an insurance company/consulting firm.
I'm looking for someone with experience in calculations in Riemannian geometry using Mathematics. Please reply to this message if interested. Thank you
Have you looked into Sage Manifolds? It's much slower than Mathematica but it's free. I used it for a while in my research (stopped because it was too slow and my group uses Mathematica), but I really enjoyed it.
https://sagemanifolds.obspm.fr/
Thanks! It looks really cool!
Would you also know a software that's good for abstract computations? In some sense, I don't want to specify the exact metric, but want to simplify complicated tensorial expressions, etc
I checked the indexes of Numerical Recipes in C, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers and a Vector Space Approach to Geometry. Afraid I can’t help you with this.
I did a lot of analytic geometry and linear algebra stuff when I was writing code to render medical images, but I am but a humble engineer, not a theoretical mathematician.
Edit: okay, out of pure obsessiveness I checked Knuth’s Seminumerical Algorithms. No dice.
Another edit:
But… GitHub has some repositories:
https://github.com/topics/riemannian-geometry
I'm a mathematician; I know a little geometry (although more algebraic than analytic, so depending on how deep or specialist your problem is I may not be able to help). what do you want to calculate?
I want to write mathematica programs that can compute a wide variety of Riemannian invariants for a given metric. Are you aware of people who have done something like that?
I'm afraid not, and annoyingly while I do use mathematica I only have access to it at work, not on my personal computer (IIRC last time I checked it was jaw-droppingly expensive, even for a personal copy), which I think would make helping virtually impossible - sorry.
The ‘Home and Hobby’ version goes for $399 US. I don’t know if it is crippled though.
How many calculations can it perform before the DRM shuts it down?
Good question.
No problem! Thanks anyway for your interest. Let me know if you're ever in the New Jersey area, and I'd love to show you around (assuming you're not from there).
OC ACXLW Sat Feb 3 Political Trauma and Schizophrenia Math
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 55th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Feb 3 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters :
Is political discourse degenerating into trauma responses? How is the madness of crowds amplifying trauma politics?
The Psychopolitics Of Trauma - by Scott Alexander
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma
Audio
https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma
How can schizophrenia be mostly genetically determined and also discordant in identical twins? Bayesian reasoning is called for to sort this out again for reasons very similar to regression towards the mean. What other phenomena are misleading this way?
It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-fair-to-describe-schizophrenia
Audio
https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic-disorders
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Really curious about this question. Not doing deep research or anything.
What are the best proxies for determining whether someone is happy? Happy in general. Proxies for people whose lives you can observe somewhat but not someone you know well. For instance a neighbor you might sometimes wave hello to or a coworker you don't work with closely.
The obvious things would be decent job, married, kids. But are those the best proxies for happiness? What might be better?
I am not even sure how happiness could be measured and compared, even if you could interview people and if they were 100% sincere.
By what actually happened? The same thing will have a different impact on different people, depending on how important it is for them, what they are used to, what they expected, and what they expect to happen in the future.
By their reactions? Some people are hysterical over trivialities, other people have good self-control (but they may be approaching the point where they break down), some people may be good at stoicism (which may or may not be powered by depression).
Also, it can change day to day, or hour to hour. One day your wife/kids make you happy, the next day it is as if they are trying to drive you insane. You may hate your job, but it provides a stable solid income; or you may be passionate about your work but also tired and always on the edge of bankruptcy. Are we measuring the average happiness, or its peaks?
I would guess hobbies, things they do for fun not profit. Married with kids is a social status thing, they could just be tolerating it for appearance's sake.
...also complaints? If someone never complains they're probably putting up a social mask.
You never know. See ‘Richard Cory’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cory
Either the Edwin Arlington Robinson poem or the Simon and Garfunkel version.
From the article:
".. the United States economy was still suffering from the severe depression of the Panic of 1893, during which people often subsisted on day-old bread .."
Wow! Bread a whole day old? Imagine the unspeakable horror. It must have been green with mold and crawling with weavils and maggots after all that time! :-)
I would assume bread was not as shelf stable in 1893 as it is today
Homemade day old bread is much better than modern grocery store bread. I think they had higher standards - it’s one of the few places where things get worse with national wealth, I think due to rising cost of labor.
Source: have done the experiment. With 15th c. recipes even!
Well, no, not exactly the siege of Stalingrad.
Those poor guys probably had a two days old bread there, and some vodka from the last week.
I'll be finishing an undergrad economics degree at the end of the year with a pretty thin resume (no internships etc).
I know that people here generally value forecasting much higher than most other signals of competence/intelligence.
What are the odds I can get a job in an ACX/EA/rat-adjacent area via my excellent (top 0.01%) forecasting track record on Manifold Markets?
For Wordle and XWord fans. One of the more prolific NYT XWord creators has come up with a new - free to play - word game. I haven’t played with it much yet myself but Mrs Gunflint thinks it’s fun.
https://imsqueezy.com/
Shame they lock you into whatever difficulty you picked, the easy version was too easy; one can solve them without looking at the words.
I had a look. Perhaps the project isn’t fully baked. Jeff Chen is the main developer. He creates a lot of good XWords. Apparently he learned JavaScript and CSS over a couple months to to develop the game.
I’m subscribed to XWordInfo.com and got an email announcement about the game a couple days ago.
Okay, the final puzzle for Harder mode was fun; the puzzle words had multiple solutions and you had to recognize the meta-word to get the actual correct answer. Solved the puzzle, then had to unsolve about half of it and find second solutions because the meta made no sense.
Shalom!
After 23 years off the grid and out of public life I'm making a serious go at using what I've learned to make a nicer, kinder, happier, safer, friendlier, and more joyful world.
If this interests you please accept this free 7 trial to my substack and receive a free gift of 15 hour-long shows on the least known Jewish communities throughout Jewish history.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/our-community-is-growing
This isn't just another newsletter, where we're going there are no roads.
https://youtu.be/U9TpbR6o7WU?feature=shared
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/ki-va-moed-the-time-for-worldwide
Which of the Nine Worthies would you say was the worthiest?
One of the fictional ones - probably Hector. By my pretty much any modern moral standards - and certainly by mine - the real ones were all monsters, but because Hector wasn't a monarch, little enough is specified about him that if we choose to imagine him as not having been we're probably not violating much of the letter of the canon.
Genuinely worthy people didn't become successful war-leaders in pre-modern societies.
Scott, any idea when there will be another AMA? Now that you're a dad, I'm freshly curious about your thoughts on education, the US school system, risk-taking vs safety, fostering agency, etc. I'll be trying to think up some well-posed questions.
Is the CPI broken? A lot of people who want to deny or underplay the recent inflation turn to figures that show the bottom 25 percentile has seen real wages grow at 3% over the last 4 years.
That’s not great anyway but in looking at how this is calculated the basket of goods is based on the median earner. The median earner spends something like 20% on food.
With that basket of goods in place we then look at wages for the 25 percentile and conclude that their income has kept above inflation by 3% over four years.
However the bottom 25 percentile pay much more of their income on food, which probably wipes out those gains. And yet I’ve seen commentators on the Reddit economics sub suggest that the reason that the bottom 25% are not happy is propaganda, maybe Putin.
But it’s probably food.
Food is very noticeable too, increases in grocery bills are obvious.
Excellent point. Reining in food prices seems like it would be an obvious political win, although I don't know enough about policy to know what the government could do to actually effect that, or what the countervailing incentives might be.
A general post originally written for a different group-
I got to thinking about something. I'm a fan of Sam Harris, but it annoys me when him and other philosophers of cognition make statements like "there is no such thing as free will."
To me, the "question" of free will is a fundamentally confused one.
Instead of "free will", let's use the less loaded term "agency." To me, saying "there is no such thing as agency" is like confused statements from supports of Daniel Dennett that claim (what Dennett himself claims seems to differ but that's a side track) that subjective consciousness doesn't exist because we can't measure it.
This is obviously absurd as without subjective consciousness, there would be no "thing" to perceive or consider the question.
This is the same with "free will" or "agency." It is an essential facet of human experience, and it's difficult to conceive of human interaction, society, etc, without something like it's assumption.
Now, the way I used to think about this was it was simply a different ontological realm from a deterministic view of how conscious beings operate. But diving deeper, I realized that both of these separate ontologies were incomplete, and we can make them "less wrong."
I remember something I thought about while playing poker. In poker, any halfway decent player will at least do some kind of probability estimate based on the information they have, and the actions of other players as to what cards they might have and what cards may come out.
But I noticed something about the way other players were talking about the future cards. They were talking as though the order of cards were arranged in an undetermined state.
Of course once the cards have been shuffled, they are in a definite state, and their is limit to the potential hands dealt based on the actions of the players as they receive new information.
Reading this, this probably sounds trivial. Of course, probability of this sort isn't about some actually indeterminate state but a way to make estimates with a lack of exact information.
But wait a moment. The actions of the players which determine what hands will be dealt... is that as determined as the order of the cards post shuffled?
The point of the people who say "there is no such thing as free will" is that the actions of the players when exposed to that information is as pre-determined as the cards in the completed shuffle.
Or, further back, the order of the cards, the actions of the players, all pre-determined.
However- this is where the trick is. Perfectly known... by whom or what?
No person or system has complete access to ALL information. On a deep physical level, all that IS, that we can be sure of, is our perception exists, and we can make models of the world that map to that territory we're relating to.
The drive of consciousness, both in evolution and execution, as explained by Friston, is the reduction of uncertainty over time. On a more basic level, the universe moves from what one could think of a maximum low entropy scenario to symmetry breaking. As the disc space of the universe is "written" the total possibility space shrinks, but the specific information, the nature of the universe to "project itself" into higher dimensional models simulating information complexity increases. The arrow of time does not allow for a net increase of entropy.
And being that was NOT constantly reducing uncertainty in some way would not move forward along the arrow of time in terms of perception.
It's what Einstein had the fundamental cat problem with QM. He said "God does not play dice."
But let's take that quote a but more seriously. A being "God" is generally defined as all knowing and all powerful.
But that definition runs into the "Dr. Manhattan" problem. A being all knowing also knows what actions its going to take and is thus not "all powerful" but constrained to a certain set of actions by its perfect knowledge.
It lacks "free will."
A system that has the subjective self experience of "free will" or "agency" must NOT be all knowing, it must be working with some limited information.
And indeed, when we look at how human cognition develops in children, when we look at how the universe operates on a quantum level, when we look at the Godelian incompleteness of information, there is never "perfect" knowledge. There are closed "good enough" probability loops- less wrong but never perfect.
This makes me think of something they talk about over at Less Wrong. That thought problem about the all knowing AI and how to fool it with the "pick a box with more money" question. The question assumes the AI has perfect information of the being trying to answer the question. And I don't doubt it could have much greater information then we could conceive of.
But it can't have "perfect" information, or it can't learn. Can't make choices, can't reduce uncertainty.
At a point of perfect knowledge, perfect symmetry, there is NO arrow of time, no change, no movement, no agency.
All that can happen is symmetry breaking- Multivac says "Let there be Light!"
Bringing this back to the question of whether "free will" exists, I would say it very much does. It's related to the lack of complete information any "intelligent" agent has. To affect change, it has to reduce uncertainty.
Now of course, one can find information about the component structure of such a being, or about the properties of inaminate matter. But that "information" always exists in the "mind" of the observer. It has be correlated with that information in some way, and even if in the tiniest bit, the observation alters the total "story" of the territory. What do I mean by that?
The moon may SEEM to be exactly the same to any observer. And we would generally agree the territory there is the same. But the entangling of that information with other information which creates a higher dimensional projection- in intelligent agents, in recording devices, in the gravitational effects on the tides, is only ever partially perceived by an individual, which all in all forms a "close enough" newtonian boundary, but like the coastline of England, you have to at some point round off to inexact limits to get a information that can be communicated. For most thing in the macroscopic world, it doesn't matter. But there's always a degree of fuzziness in any model, and the actual ability of any mind to project that model is only partial and constantly "flickering and dancing" in our mind's tapestry of experience, the way information projects to "higher levels" why losing specificity. Perfect specificty means no arrow of time, no change, no perception, no though.
There are going to be serious problems as the future progresses and we gain more knowledge with how we look at certainty and we understand more things to be determinable. But understanding and retaining human agency is also a vital question, and unfortunately at this point in time, the overton window on this matter is hopelessly confused and statements like "there is no free will" don't help clarify matters.
You replaced "free will" with "agency" without defining "agency".
The *experience of* some kind of free will or agency is part of out daily existence, but that doesn't mean agency per se is.
It's contradictory to say the "experience of experience i9s an illusion" but it's not contradictory to say "the experience of X is an illusion for any other X. Hence it is not contradictory to say "the experience of agency is an illusion".
"No person or system has complete access to ALL information"
Determinism also needs to be distinguished from predictability. A universe that unfolds deterministically is a universe that can be predicted by an omniscient being which can both capture a snapshot of all the causally relevant events, and have a perfect knowledge of the laws of physics.
The existence of such a predictor, known as a Laplace's demon is not a prerequisite for the actual existence of determinism, it is just a way of explaining the concept. It is not contradictory to assert that the universe is deterministic but unpredictable. But there is a relationship between determinism and predictability: predictability is the main evidence for determinism.
Nonetheless, determinism itself is the crux, in arguments for free will, and predictability only features indirectly as evidence for it. Determinism is the crux, because it removes the ability to have done otherwise, which seems to be important for moral responsibility; and also removes the ability to shape the future with present choices.
If determinism is an objective fact, then the only approximation to indeterminism that could exist would be based on lack of knowledge (Knightian uncertainty). But the argument is circular: you have to assume that determinism is objectively true , to infer that all indeterminism (really all unpredicted) is caused by lack of knowledge...so that deteminism is objectively true!
A Laplace's Daemon needs to have a one way relationship with the universe ..it needs to be able to read all the data, but if it outputs anything that could have a causal effect, that would create a strange loop.
That's what's basically happening in your scenario , when your LD tells you it's prediction
In-principle predictability needs to be distinguished from in-practice predictability.
Humans are not perfect, omniscient observers like Laplace's deamon, and therefore cannot make perfect predictions about everything, even in a deterministic universe. The prevailing situation where the human ability to make predictions exists, but is imperfect, is compatible with both complete determinism, and partial indeterminism, which is why the whole question of determinism versus indeterminism is still fraught.
"Bringing this back to the question of whether "free will" exists, I would say it very much does. It's related to the lack of complete information any "intelligent" agent has. "
So if a Laplace's Demons springs into being, everyone loses their free will -- without changing in any way.
First: Determined does not imply known, just unavoidable. Just as I don't necessarily know how a movie or book will end when I start it, but accept that the ending was determined long before I ever started (and I can still value the experience). Or like there might be a large meteor headed for Earth in this very moment that nobody knows about, but impact has been unavoidable since… well, a long time.
Second, I'm not sure that I understand you correctly, but you seem to say that the source of free will is the "fuzziness" in the system – which I take to mean the uneven distribution of knowledge, or even the idea that not everything can be known. But if knowledge were the whole game, that would imply that two agents with perfect information would necessarily have the same will (determined by having all the facts), but that's not necessarily true. It is perfectly possible to have the same knowledge, but diverging interests.
As for Sam Harris: In order to understand his view of free will (and maybe not get annoyed by it), it really helps to see it in context of 1) his moral philosophy, 2) his experience with meditation, and 3) his atheistic activism. The combo sets him a bit apart from many others who discuss free will.
In his discussions about 1), his moral philosophy, you see that he accepts the crucial distinction between agency and free will. He doesn't deny that there's a difference between doing something because you have a gun to your head, or doing something because you get the impulse to do it. We can use our agency to navigate between suffering and well-being, even if we're not the ultimate captains of that agency. Others who think like this often consider themselves compatibalists – there's no free will on the most fundamental level, but we have an experience of free will that is almost the same in everyday life.
He rejects that, however, for a couple of important and quite persuasive reasons:
From 2), his experience as a meditator, he gets that you can't really control your mind. You have about as much control over what thoughts and impulses enter your consciousness, as you have over which sounds you hear in a crowded café or what light reaches your eyes at any given moment. In fact, among all the ideas, there's not even a distinct "you" that could be said to be in charge. There's no place where "will" can rest and be free. So the experience of having a free will that compatibalists rely on, evaporates for him, even as he preserves the sense of agency. You don't have to meditate for very long to understand where he's coming from.
Both of those have implications for 3), his opposition to a lot of religious doctrine. If you don't have ultimate control over your mind, your options, your knowledge, your neurology (because they are all determined by things like genetics, environment, upbringing, or even randomness), then you can't have free will in the sense that pretty much all religions presuppose. A God that will punish or reward you for eternity for something that's out of your control is not great, and not worth worshiping even if you believe in him. Perpetuating the idea of any kind of free will, then, helps prop up belief in religions that cause evil and suffering.
He has written and said a lot of words about this, so this is hardly a complete description – just an attempt at contextualizing his particular views on free will in terms of some other beliefs he is known for. Also, I'm not necessarily asking or expecting you to agree, but it might make it less annoying if you see it in the bigger picture.
In any case: Many people seem to suggest that it's dangerous to take away people's sense of free will, as it might also rob them of agency, and turn them into something like nihilists. However, I think it can be dangerous to have people living the lie that they have free will, too, if it flips the switch in their mind that makes them fly planes into buildings or throw their fellow citizens under the bus.
It strikes me this can serve as a pretty good argument against determinism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2qnx3yVGzg
Just its existence.
I think it helps to be more specific about what exactly are we asking when talking about "free will".
Can I my predict my own future actions 100% reliably? No.
Can others predict my future actions 100% reliably? In practice, no.
Could they, hypothetically speaking, if they knew everything about all particles in my body (and the particles in the environment I will be interacting with)? In principle, yes. Minus the inevitable quantum noise.
Are my actions determined by the particles outside of me? Well, they are determined by the particles outside *and* inside of me. Unless we go back in time before I was born, in which case yes, my actions are determined by the particles, and the inevitable quantum noise.
Can the "quantum noise" be considered a "free will" in some sense? Nope, not in any meaningful sense. It is not some kind of anthropomorphic intelligent agent; it is pure noise. (It would be like insisting that a noise in television signal is the television's "free will".) If there are universes without quantum physics where conscious life can arise, the notes about quantum noise would not apply in those universes.
But we don't know how consciousness works, and most of us don't know how quantum physics works, therefore... obviously, those two must be connected, right? -- Haha, nope, it doesn't work that way. (It's like trying to translate from one language you don't speak to another language you don't speak by assigning the words randomly, under the assumption that if I don't know what X means, and if I don't know what Y means, then X could be a translation of Y. Sure, it could be, but it also could be anything else.)
"Can the "quantum noise" be considered a "free will" in some sense? Nope, not in any meaningful sense. It is not some kind of anthropomorphic intelligent agent; it is pure noise. "
It doesn't have to be an agent in itself, just part of an agent. An agent that uses quantum indeterminism has one of the ingredients of libertarian free will,freedom from determinism, but doesn't have to be purely random, and therefore doesn't have to lack other desireable features , such as rationality, and a relationship between actions and desires.
The Dilemma argument has it that libertarian free will is impossible , because it is a) incompatible with determinism, which allows no elbow room or could-have-done-otherwise; and b) incompatible with randomness, which allows no control, relation to desires, etc.
"Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made
conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we
are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not
responsible for them. If a man’s choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes—
perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost
sleep, and cosmic-ray bombardment—what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom." - Sam Harris
The Dilemma argument is a false dichotomy.
It is uncontensious that complete randomness is not a kind of free will worth having or worthy the name...but complete randomness is not the only alternative to complete determinism. The logical alternative to complete determinism is mostly some mixture or partial determinism..which isn't as obviously inimical to free will. So the dilemma argument has to juggle both senses of "not determined".
To demonstrate the concept that determinism-randomnrss is a scale, nott a binary:-
A million line computer programme that makes one call to to rand() is almost deterministc,..but a bit less than a million line programme that makes two calls to rand (), and so on. So it's a scale, not a dichotomy.
It is uncontensious that complete randomness is not a kind of free will worth having or worthy the name...but complete randomness is not the only alternative to complete determinism. The logical alternative to complete determinism is mostly some mixture or partial determinism..which isn't as obviously inimical to free will. So the dilemma argument has to juggle both senses of "not determined".
If you have something that's actually tri state , you can make it bivalent by merging two of the states. The problem is that people rarely do so consistently. Sometimes (some and none) are opposed to (all), sometimes (some and all) are opposed to (none).
To demonstrate the concept that determinism<->randomness is a scale, not a binary:-
A million line computer programme that makes one call to to rand() is almost deterministc,..but a bit less than a million line programme that makes two calls to rand (), and so on. So it's a scale, not a dichotomy.
If a deterministic algorithm does not satisfy your intuition about "free will", is this problem really fixed by adding a few calls to rand()?
If you later replaced the random number generator with a high-quality pseudorandom generator, would the robot lose its free will? Would it lose the *feeling* of having free will?
It would obviously lose libertarian free will. It might or might not lose the feeling of free will. But why would the actual existence of FW depend on the feeling?
> But why would the actual existence of FW depend on the feeling?
The reason why people talk about "free will" is that they have a feeling/experience of, basically, "I could realistically do X, and I could also realistically do Y, and it is difficult for me to make a reliable prediction which one will I ultimately do".
And the debate is basically about how can such feeling (seemingly supported by experience) arise in a universe where people are made out of atoms, and the atoms follow a few mechanical rules.
If we ignore the feelings of "free will" as important data, we are on the way to the "philosophical zombies" territory.
If the robot can lose free will, while fully retaining the feeling of free will, then... maybe we are such robots, too? How would we know?
> The reason why people talk about "free will" is that they have a feeling/experience of, basically, "I could realistically do X, and I could also realistically do Y, and it is difficult for me to make a reliable prediction which one will I ultimately do".
The feeling is evidence of free will, not a cause of free will.
...What does knowledge have anything to do with free will? The whole point is that this world is deterministic. Any decision that a human makes is completely dependent on the past, operating on consistent physical rules. Therefore, saying that humans have "free will" is about as ridiculous as saying a domino fell of its free will. Human knowledge is just statistical association formed by neurons; there's no reason to believe it affects anything beyond the outcome of calculations made by the brain. So... I don't even understand what point you're trying to make.
That definition of free will isn’t really the colloquial or legal version, where (as an example) if a man has a gun to his head while he is driving a criminal to rob a bank then he has no free will, if he chooses to do it then he has. In this version the external agent forcing him to do something violates his free will.
Without an external agent who or what is the person or agent who is stoping a person or agent from having free will - why the person himself!
Which obviously isn’t the same thing. So point one to philosophers - change your terminology. Maybe - “not perfect agency” or something.
It’s also naive to assume that there’s some kind of lower level determinism at the level of the neurons. That’s not true of software and the CPU, it won’t be true of AGI, and it isn’t true of conscious beings either. If free will exists or doesn’t exist it will exist or not exist at the level of the software, or mind.
If AGI ever comes about - and although definitions are fuzzy, I take that to mean an AI that is conscious or has agency - then how do we define or differentiate it from an AI without that agency if nothing ever has free will?
Or are we going to say the only AGI has free will? Or that humans, AGI, procedural expert systems from the 80s, and toasters are the same thing?
An interesting individual I found on Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Hall_(politician)
> Murray H. Hall (1841 − January 16, 1901) was a New York City bail bondsman and Tammany Hall politician who became famous on his death in 1901, when it was revealed that he was assigned female at birth.
It is pretty insane that, for over three decades, absolutely no one suspected that he wasn't male, not even his own adoptive daughter. ...Though I guess even if they did suspect it, no one would be rude enough to say it out loud, considering he was apparently well liked within the community.
I took a double take when I read that it was found out Hall was "assigned female at birth", as if someone found the birth certificate or something. I presume that that's a weird euphemism and that what was actually found out was that Hall was female. Contemporary US culture can be rather interesting.
That was changed by some IPv6 in 2017:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Murray_Hall_(politician)&diff=prev&oldid=790933057
If you want, you could undo that change and see what happens. Will it be rejected? Reverted? Will you trigger the most boring edit war of the year? Or will the whole Wikipedia continue thinking "meh, whatever"?
When someone says "Our name was changed at Ellis Island", they mean that the manifest author back in Europe changed it, when they converted a Cyrillic alphabet name into Latin characters. It was already different in the manifest.
I’m about to get my wife pregnant and I’m wondering what’s the best form of choline to take to maximize the ratio of bioavailable choline to harmful TMAO? Phosphatidylcholine, plain choline, both, or something else?
Your wife is in on the plan, right? Her part in this project is going to be a bit more work than yours. Yeah a joke
Lookup what NOVOS Protocol and Blueprint (Bryan Johnson) are doing, they've generally got the best recommendations.
Hi all - I am a 48yo scientist with a so far very fulfilling career but also kind of ready to not work in corporate employment anymore. However, I don't have the courage to not have a job for fear I won't ever find one again if I wasn't happy without one. I am looking for an exchange with people who have "retired early" and what their experience was, as I know zero such people. I may be looking for bias and people for whom this was a good decision (don't let me).
Anybody out there?
Hmm 65 and semi-retired. I got fired from my dream tech job in 2019. I've been working 25-30 hours a week as a prep cook at the nearby restaurant, and I like it. I'd go crazy without some type of work to do, and if you've got enough money you can always find some job to do. Do you have any hobbies or pastimes you enjoy? (I like cooking.)
Interesting. Thank you! I have 102 things I would love to do but the job doesn't leave enough energy for most.
I don't have a personal experience, nor do I know anyone who has, so the following is just a guess:
The work provides certain discipline, without which your daily rhythm can fall apart. Just the fact that you need to wake up at certain time and go to some place... without it, some people stay in bed until 10 or 11AM, then they slowly prepare and eat breakfast, etc., oops, half the day is over and you haven't done anything yet, and it's time to think about lunch, oops, it's evening already, well maybe next day...
Another thing is that if you don't have a job, you need to actively think about socialization. Maybe there is a club for people who have the same hobby. But if they aren't early-retired, they will probably meet in the afternoon.
So your schedule could be something like: wake up in the morning, take a short walk (the physical activity and sunshine will wake up your brain), return home and do the work you want to do, then either go to a club or enjoy your afternoon otherwise. (By the way, lunch, are you going to cook it or someone else will? Because even if you have the time, and you don't mind cooking, it will still interfere with your work.)
There are whole communities based around financial independence and early retirement. If you are looking for whole forums to talk with, then try https://www.choosefi.com/community/ and https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/. Keep in mind, you will definitely get a positive bias at those sites.
I would say that whether or not you should retire early is a very personal decision. It changes not just your finances, but also your social life and self-image. I used to read a lot about it when I was working towards financial independence and would periodically come across stories of people being bored and depressed after leaving their job. Most people that retire early don't struggle with the financial side (barring a catastrophe) because they would already have to be disciplined to get to that point in the first place.
Thank you very much. I am a bit less interested in the financial aspect than seeing if anything resonated in the the emotional/mental journey of others who quit work.
Someone else covered the social aspect of retiring early quite well, so I'll touch a little bit more on the self-image part of quitting work.
What people do in many ways represents who we are, both socially and mentally. You went to school to be a scientist. When you meet people, you say you are a scientist, and you talk about science. You met many of your friends and colleagues through science. You spend much of your free time thinking about your field of study. Science is how you functionally contribute to society.
When you retire early and stop being a scientist, you need to be able to adjust the mindset of what you are. If your self-image stays tied to your career, then you will not be happy. You don't want to see yourself as an out of work scientist, you want your self-image to be something new and positive. You need to be able to almost reinvent yourself and find a new passion or you will be bored and depressed and end up watching TV or Youtube 10 hours a day more than before.
There was also an early retirement blogger that ended up hating it when he finally got there. His writing on his experience is: https://livingafi.com/2016/04/01/early-retirement-bites/
A while back in some Link post I think Scott mentioned some state passing a law that said every time they added a regulation, they had to delete one too. I suspect this is a case where the rock with the words “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING” chiseled on it but I am curious about the consequences. Anybody know?
Wasn't there an ancient Greek state which had a principle that if someone proposed a law and this was voted down, then the proposer got the chop, literally! Now _that_ would soon simplify the regulations, provided proposals to eliminate laws were not similarly treated.
You're thinking of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphe_paranomon
Depends how one defines "laws" and such. A law can be establishing a negative right. As an obvious example, proposing a law to make slavery illegal would be a a negative right granted. One could say that's "a regulation that restricts someone's freedom" And there's the rub. While I suspect based on your post we share a similar "libertarian" mind state, people who propose laws and regulation will always argue there law is protecting someone's freedom from someone else who would violate it.
I.e., environmental regulations, you're right not be poisoned by the commons.
An analysis (https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/warnings-unheard-warnings-unheeded-the-story-of-the-2019-alaska-mid-air-collision-89a3444fe7d7) by Admiral Cloudberg by of a mid-air collision in Alaska cited a Trump executive order mandating one-regulation-enters-two-regulations-leave as a reason why the FAA was slow to adopt an NTSB regulation that might have avoided the collision. It's already the case that the FAA does not rubber-stamp NTSB recommendations, but it seems reasonable that the executive order was particularly problematic as applied to aircraft safety rules.
That's an interesting read. I'd like to point out that the SMS regulation, which was blocked by the one-regulation-enters-two-regulations-leave policy, only enters the scene after a miscommunication about a different regulation had already introduced (and the government paid for the installation of) a fatal downgrade of the safety systems.
"However, in 2012, the FAA proposed to upgrade the ADS-B equipment that it previously supplied to Alaskan operators. For this purpose, the FAA drew up a technical standard order, or TSO, listing the design requirements for the new equipment. This TSO didn’t include a requirement for a conflict alerting capability, even though plenty of systems in use at the time had this feature."
...
"The FAA’s position on the issue was that manufacturers could include a conflict alerting capability if they wanted, but should not be required to do so."
...
"In response to an NTSB request for comment, representatives of FreeFlight Systems (which designed the RANGR 978 transceiver) stated that they understood the FAA to discourage manufacturers from including capabilities that weren’t in the TSO. As a result, in 2015 the Garmin GDL 90 transceiver on N959PA was replaced by a new, FAA-supplied FreeFlight RANGR 978 that met the TSO’s specifications but didn’t include a conflict alerting capability."
So the government said "you must have AT LEAST these features" and the company thought they meant "you may have ONLY these features". Strangely, I've heard of this exact thing happening before. I wonder if it's a common failure mode?
There's quite an interesting article at https://gizmodo.com/proton-physics-strong-force-quarks-measurement-1851192840 about new measurements of the proton, specifically some of its internal parameters.
It mentions something called the "gravitational form factor" a couple of times. Does that mean that energy densities are so high in local spots, and distances between these so small, that gravity can play a significant role in interactions within a proton? Or is that just a handy phrase transferred from some other context and gravity has no discernable effect inside it?
No idea... I'm going to guess no gravity, but just angular momentum and the distribution of mass/ energy in the system. (Search agrees... https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.08484.pdf)
Thanks. I found another good reference with a web search. (With Google, my habit until recently has been to try and "spoon feed" it with a few single words and short phrases in quotes, in the hope that would make things easier for it. But recently I'm finding one seems to get better results by using a natural language question as if it was a person or AI! )
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/422590/in-less-technical-language-what-exactly-is-a-gravitational-form-factor
Generally, pretty much as you guessed, it appears from that discussion that a form factor of an object, in relation to a field, is a measure (in terms of a set of parameters or a matrix or something) of how the field's influence on the object is distributed throughout it.
So for example, one can have an electric form factor, which indicates how charge is spread out over it and possibly within it, and a magnetic FF, etc. By analogy, the gravitational form factor is simply a measure of how mass/energy is distributed and, as I guessed, use of that term doesn't imply that gravity is actually having a noticeable effect, unless the object was the size of a planet!
BTW, and I know this is nitpicking and a bit ungracious to mention, as you took the trouble to reply, but with ArXiv results it is better to cite the abstract page rather than a PDF directly, because if the authors release a revised version of the paper then the quoted PDF will become out of date, but the abstract page will show the latest version or in a few cases a retraction! Ideally Google should do this automatically, but one can copy and paste the number ("2310.08484" above) in the Search line on the main page and this brings up:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08484
Right link rather than pdf. People have tried to measure the neutron electric dipole moment, but still nothing. I love physics, but I always remember what a colleague said once. All this high energy stuff is cool, but not much useful to humans happens above 1 MeV of potential.
I've written over the past several weeks about an off year election we recently held in my northern Michigan community, sideways and upside down. Let us pray that this is not harbinger of our national elections. Part 3 is here, with links to the previous reports as well: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/local-election-part-3-party-headquarters
That was a fun read. Subscribed!
Welcome and thank you, more stories of the peninsula coming soon!
I just started reading The Doors of Perception, and it's the fisrt non-fiction book by Huxley that I have read. It strikes me as profoundly modern, a lot of the things in the first few chapters, his explanation of the realness of the mescaline experience ring quite familiar and it seems that people have been rediscovering that in the last decade. I wonder how many times throughout history we have gotten that knowledge and lost it again only to rediscover it a couple of generations later. Of course, given that for most of history the world was divided into lots of small groups with no unifying language/internet, I can imagine that psychedelics were something that has been rediscovered thousands of times
I'm not saying you personally have this bias, but there seems to be a common unspoken assumption these days that every idea, belief, or attitude that feels modern, liberal, or progressive was invented sometime after like 1967--i catch myself making this mistake sometimes-- and this can make it quite jarring to read material written before that time, especially from ca. the 1890s through the 1950s
I've caught myself doing exactly what you describe numerous times. The strongest example I can come up with right now was my surprise at learning that quantum mechanics is widely considered to have originated in 1900. Before finding that fact I would've given an estimate of 1945-1950. I wouldn't say it's jarring to read such materials, though, more like mind-opening and humbling
It’s a good one. You might want to check out his The Perennial Philosophy when you get a chance too.
Will do, I've seen this book recommended a number of times around here
Why doesn't someone in the US start The Union of Concerned Swing-State Centrists? With enough members, this organisation could credibly threaten to determine the presidential election through block voting. It could then negotiate with the two parties and commit to urge all their members to vote for the party that accepts the most of their demands. Possible problems:
1. Centrists may not agree that much on policy.
2. Centrists aren't that interested in politics so it's hard to organise them like this.
3. The two parties aren't centralised enough to enable a negotiation and binding commitment.
4. The UoCSSC could easily be taken over by partisans.
Has anything like this been tried? Isn't this a more viable way for new centrists parties (e.g. the Forward Parrty) to get started?
As most politicians start with lower level offices, the natural place to start is with swing-districts. But there are not many of those, because congresscritters have every incentive to gerrymander, and also because red/blue tends to follow rural/urban geography quite closely.
Or I guess you could try going straight for state-wide positions like the Senate or Governor. Who knows, maybe it could work?
1 and 2 are definitely true. There /are/ "true centrists" in the sense of "politically engaged people with an ideological commitment to policies midway between the two parties across a wide range of issue", but they're massively outnumbered by "average centrists" who come out as "centrist" if you project them onto a one-dimensional left-right axis, but only because they hold a mix of left-wing and right-wing positions (and who often don't care much about politics). And, obviously, someone with a principled ideological commitment to left-wing social values and right-wing economics and someone with a principled ideological commitment to right-wing social values and left-wing economics are not natural bedfellows.
I don't know about 3 or 4 - I think the counterfactual is too large to predict corrolaries like these reliably.
Two problems that I can see.
One is that centrism as a philosophy does not lead to a lot of coherent positions. For example, at the moment neither party has a serious plan to address the national debt. The 'centrist' midpoint between the two parties would be, I guess, doing nothing?
Secondly, are you interested in centrism as a question of policy? Or centrism as a question of manner? A lot of our politics these days is dominated by sound bites, attacks that are meant to go viral, grandstanding, and generally making a big show of trying to do things rather than actually doing things.
I think just the usual third party issue would apply: anyone considering voting for a centrist party is going to be told in no uncertain terms by those around them that they're "giving the vote to The Enemy" by letting their party's vote be split.
Even if the centrist party theoretically does manage to be a perfect halfway point between the two parties: that won't really change the dynamics that it's risky for anyone with any sort of tilt at all to vote for a more central option, even if that's my truer preference.
Plus, viewed from the perspective of parties as just collections of Americans, it's a prisoner's dilemma - both sides cooperate, then we get more even-keeled leadership and not constant back-and-forth swinging from one extreme to the other, but if only one side "defects" (refuses to vote centrist, even if it's their true preference) they win.
But, viewed from the perspective of the parties as real political entities on their own, a third party genuinely a threat to to their power and not something either side has any reason to allow to exist, and something both parties may cooperate to prevent.
Maybe I'm explaining the idea badly: There's no centrist party to vote for so no-one is wasting their vote. There's no stronger-than-normal reason for a centrist to defect (unless they aren't actually a centrist). The existing parties may try to destroy it just because they prefer that no other centres of political power exist, I can see that, but that seems like a general counterargument against all kinds of political organisation ever.
I think the issue is that there are very few "true centrists who have no leaning towards either party and thus wouldn't feel like they're defecting".
I think the far more common case is the "60% Democrat/Republican" who usually votes with one party but will switch their vote, under the right circumstances. If you discount those people as "not actually a centrist", sure, but then I just doubt there's enough left to form a viable political movement.
The other common form of centrist is "Socially X but fiscally Y" and again, I think 'defection' mechanics apply: if I'm a "vote economically in hard times, but socially otherwise" (and I do think this is a very common model) then in economically hard times, I'm going to want to vote for the one that most convincingly promises to fix the economic stuff, not "throw away my vote" by voting for a compromise party.
The better mental model of this voter is perhaps not someone who sits dispassionately in the middle of the political spectrum and would prefer centrist options, but of Jekyll and Hyde. And maybe this voter would throw out the central premise of this argument that a "centrist" position would actually be better for the country: they might genuinely prefer the back and forth between the parties, depending on the current climate.
> The existing parties may try to destroy it just because they prefer that no other centres of political power exist, I can see that, but that seems like a general counterargument against all kinds of political organisation ever.
It's not an argument against all forms of political organization - the parties aren't going to uniformly oppose political organizations like the NRA or Planned Parenthood or [hypothetical non-partisan example that I can't think of here] because they aren't real threats.
But a general argument against third parties - groups that actually risk taking away congress seats or Presidential posts? Yes, exactly. *gestures broadly at the entire history of the United States political system*
EDIT: I realize I'm not really clearly addressing that your idea is not really it's own party but like a negotating block... but if it involves somehow giving over voting power to a group that might use it to vote for "the other" side, I think the same dynamics would occur.
Could distracted eating explain the obesity epidemic, or is the effect not strong enough? People eat in front of their TVs -> overeating -> obesity?
While it can contribute to overeating, distracted eating doesn't seem to be a primary driver of appetite. People who engage in distracted eating will eat about 150 more calories per-meal than someone eating mindfully. I would need to know more about how "distraction" levels have changed over time, but I can't imagine we're that much more distracted than before.
You could say the same thing about reading or surfing the Internet or having scintillating conversation. I dimly recall seeing studies (and personal experiments) that indicated that eating slowly and mindfully and chewing a lot led to being satiated with less food. But I don't think that explains the entire problem.
I think the core of the problem is that food is incredibly abundant and cheap, and that our lifestyles no longer require significant amounts of physical movement and labor. BLS.gov shows food making up 46% of household spending in 1900, down to 7.5% today. Jobs are far more sedentary, and overall we hardly do the same kind of personal physical labor at home. Timesaving devices such as washing machines and lawn mowers (not to mention a lot more outsourcing of those types of functions) all reduce the number of calories used to complete daily activities.
This is the correct answer AFAIK. The hyperpalatability of energy dense foods likely also plays a significant role.
I am fat and I don't even have a TV, so probably not.
My guess would be it is multiple causes, most of them correlated positively with modern lifestyle. How much you eat, what you eat, how you eat, how much you move. Maybe even something invisible, such as bacteria in the air interacting with your gut flora?
Occasionally, we want to convince a small, informal group to change some well-established tradition, for reasons such as efficiency or health. For example, do we want to eat germy birthday cakes? No? Then we could suggest that the birthday celebrator not blow out candles on the cake which we're about to eat.*
In my experience, suggestions like this are almost always rejected by the group, so I rarely make them.
Does anyone know of a good compilation of anecdotes about suggestions like this that were actually accepted? I would like to absorb some inspiration from what they have in common.
* https://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jfr/article/view/67217
> Blowing out the candles over the icing surface resulted in 1400% more bacteria compared to icing not blown on.
Arguably more bacteria in that situation gives the cake eaters' immune systems small samples of species and strains of bacteria they may not have previously encountered, and is thus _more_ healthy for them in the long run!
Aren't a lot of allergies and conditions like asthma said to be due to infants not being exposed to as much bacteria and different kinds of substances as they would have been in the past?
Let's assume that the correlation between less bacteria exposure and more autoimmune conditions is indeed an indication of a causal relationship. If that's so, then should each child briefly lick the whole cake before the slices are served?
There would be a limit to the benefits. Small amounts act like a vaccine, while large amounts overwhelm your system and you just get sick.
We're not aware of any research showing where the threshold is between those two amounts. Nor are we aware of research into whether a 1400% increase in germs eaten has a meaningful impact on infection risk. Are you sure you are looking for equivalent levels of rigor here and in your other comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-313/comment/48438558)? The context is the same: what actions do we take, or not take, regarding cake hygiene.
Let's assign 99% probability to some level of germs being worse than some lower level germs in direct impact on infection risk among young children. Let's assign 65% probability to some level of germs being better than some lower level of germs for avoiding the formation of allergies among young children. It seems to me like the rational decision is to avoid the germs when possible, while waiting for more evidence on whether there is some way to expose young children to roughly the correct amount of germs for allergy avoidance. If you think allergy formation is terrible and infections are insignificant, then you will get the opposite answer.
We shouldn't forget that fewer toddlers die of infections than in past eras, where germ exposure was higher and allergies were less common. So even if we someday assign 99% instead of 65% to the allergy hypothesis being true, I think we would want to weigh that against additional toddlers remaining alive in the higher-allergy era.
I don't really care about the percent increase, which was my point in the comment you quoted. I care about the total viral load. A 1400% increase of a tiny amount may be meaningless. Licking the cake is certainly going to increase the viral load by a lot more than breathing around it or blowing on it.
There's also the question of what actions does a certain train of thought implicate. If breathing on a cake makes it unhealthy, then we might need to consider other types of breathing around other people. Given how conversations work, this may mean not talking to people in person anymore, or a wide variety of currently common activities. Not licking a cake is far easier without disrupting normal activities (for the record I would also discourage people from French kissing a bunch of people at a party as well).
I just fully disagree with your last point, because toddlers mostly died due to lack of antibiotics, not because they were exposed to germs more often. Does better hygiene improve childhood health? Absolutely, but a really small amount compared to better medicine. It also comes with tradeoffs where children aren't exposed to small and manageable amounts of germs that help build their immune systems.
I apologize for the delay. I've been traveling.
The notion of 'briefly' licking seems to be obstructing us, since we might have very different understandings of 'briefly'. Instead, do you recommend that a 2nd child also blow on the cake?
You might say it's not appropriate to apply this sort of reversal test here, because you're in favor of only a small amount of bacteria exposure. But I don't see how the tentative claims about less germ exposure causing allergies justify any distinction between small numbers of children blowing on the cake.
I have never given any thought to how much of the drastic decrease in toddler deaths is attributable to antibiotics vs hygiene. Infection isn't a subject I read about much, so I tend to think of it in terms of 'What is the expected impact of our specific quick action? Is it worth the effort?' not 'How useless do I expect this specific quick action to be, in comparison to something involving medicine?'
Regarding your second paragraph, we're in agreement. Greater food hygiene doesn't seem like a costly tradeoff, whereas not socializing seems very costly.
On the one hand, this is clearly an uphill struggle because groups of humans will defend themselves and resist being pushed around by outsiders. (And telling me how I can and can't celebrate my own birthday is as much pushing me around as directly telling me what you want me to do/say/wear/etc.)
On the other hand - (and I apologise for bringing woke-bashing into your nice clean thread) - it's clearly been done successfully at some point, because at some point I woke up to find a large number of people my age and below have adopted a completely alien set of values and preferences, and I would rather like to know how this devilish feat was done.
Maybe you could target the members of your group with a campaign of Tiktok/Twitter/Facebook(delete as approriate) content showing high status attractive people enacting the behaviour you want to see, while unattractive low status people continue to do what you don't like and are made the butt of the joke for it.
I know it's just an example, but if you're worried about a 1400% increase, it helps to know the baselines. If you go from 10 germs to 150, and it takes 10,000 to get sick, maybe nobody cares. Talking about such a large percentage increase gives the impression that it's suddenly *very unhealthy* compared to the alternative, but it may not actually be so. There's also the question of comparable risks. Maybe being around a person who doesn't live in your household increases your risk of getting sick by 10000%. Even if true, almost everyone is going to continue taking that risk for a variety of reasons - most notably because they literally cannot survive without going to work/grocery store/whatever.
Given how many birthday cakes I've consumed that had been blown on, I feel reasonably sure that continuing to blow on them is fine and that your suggestion is unnecessary even if you're correct on the increase.
My point being - if you're going to make suggestions about how people should change things they do daily, make sure that your information is both correct and relevant.
Excellent points.
The opposite of what you're looking for I'm afraid, but there was a semi-viral post of a woman standing in a queue at the airport a few weeks ago that made me think of this. Instead of doing the usual thing where as the person at the front of the line is seen she would shuffle forward approximately one person-length, this woman would stay in place for several people (creating a large gap) and then close say ten person-spaces at once.
People online were FURIOUS (even by online commentary standards). But the woman was right - it makes absolutely no difference as long as you aren't at the front of the queue.
I was extremely struck by exactly what you were saying - it seemed to be the transgression of informal social norms that was the problem, not the reasoning. I wonder maybe if people instinctively reinforce a schelling point of 'stick to social norms in informally coordinating spaces' because everyone benefits from the social norm of 'form an orderly queue', and if we allow that these norms can be broken if there is a good reason for it then we have to spend a lot of energy relitigating these norms every time we enter an informal social space?
This is actually the correct way to help alleviate a traffic jam where there are multiple lanes, and is effective especially when multiple people do it. However for a single queue I don't think it makes a difference.
It's inviting queue jumpers; if she leaves a large space in front of her, someone can come along, go "oh is this the end of the queue?" and get into that ten person space. At the very tail end of the queue, people are also bunched up because nobody is moving forward. And if you've come along to the tail end of a bunched-up queue, you know how annoying it is when nobody knows "should you go before me or me before you?", especially if it's a long line out the door in the usual beautiful Irish summer weather (rain) and you might be stuck waiting outdoors.
She may *feel* like "hey I'm moving way faster this way", but it's the same time either way and inconveniencing everybody else isn't worth it. If six new people came along and got in front of her in that "ten person space" she left clear, now she's six people more behind than if she had moved ahead, and I for one would think it serves her right to be delayed - if she wasn't delaying *everybody else* waiting in line behind her.
There are rational reasons why the woman's behavior was unhelpful, to other queuers and the airport management. But probably the most annoying thing for those queuing behind her is that psychologically people like to feel the queue is progressing and their distance from the desk is steadily reducing, whereas her antics denied them that satisfaction for long periods.
If everyone did that the line would become incredibly long and convoluted (and likely no longer be a line, as no one could tell where it was). Whatever benefit she's getting from doing that comes at the expense of everyone else - she's defecting against the rest of the line.
This.
>It makes absolutely no difference as long as you aren't at the front of the queue.
On the contrary, leaving an ever-increasing gap in the line gives people the opportunity and implicit permission to cut into it.
Yeah, this. Also, it kind of screws the people at the very back of the line, because there's usually queuing going on and delays / blockages from the point they check your ticket / passport, so she's making that line less accessible to everyone coming from that queue for basically no reason. AND making the overall security line before that point ~10 people longer because of her lack of consideration. Which undoubtedly causes some mental anguish, if not actually increased wait times.
You make a good point about the utility of social norms, and the expense of relitigating them. I'd like to see a list of irrational social behaviors that come from well established tradition. My feeling is that most have already been heavily discussed (things like the man buying dinner for his date, or buying christmas presents), or we value those traditions because we grew up with them and they constitute our culture. It is perfectly rational to want birthday candles because you turn down the lights and your face glows while your closest friends sing to you and the smell of wax reminds you of birthdays at your recently deceased grandmothers house. That may be worth a few extra germs to you.
How we dress is always good fodder though. I like to lift weights for about 25 minutes at a time, and rather than change cloths I pop into the gym wearing my full work attire and do some bench press. People think i am nuts, and I've even been told it is not allowed, but they can't articulate why it is not allowed, since I am wearing closed toes shoes. If I had to change I wouldn't have time to work out. And sometimes I jog home fully dressed, and some find a grown man running down the street to be very uncouth.
Preach it! I can't tell you how many dress shirts or dress pants I've ruined benching or squatting respectively in a quick gym pop-in. Well, I could estimate, it's more than 3 but under a double handful for each...but the real point is, more people should do this.
I also like popping in for a quick 25-50 pullups, though I've never ruined any clothes doing that. And of course, this means you always get your workout in - there's no "oops, left my gym bag / clothes at home" workout skipping, because working out is more important than some lame pair of dress clothes. You have to have *priorities.*
I never got crap for doing this at my work gym, but I'm at the top of leaderboard in the work gym and am moving some noticeable weight, and all the gym attendants know me.
I also used to get weird looks for bike commuting ~18 miles round trip to work in dress clothes.
Re the sweat question, some people just sweat less, or the threshold of exertion to start sweating is way higher than a quick 20-30 minute set or bike ride - I never got sweaty doing either of these things.
Almost everybody used to cycle in their workwear when cycling was their only transport option.
See Dublin in the 60s.
http://www.thebikecomesfirst.com/dublin-then-and-now-june-1961-2015/
Now people who cycle 5km in Lycra need a shower.
Yes, I typically cycle ~5km in my work clothes on days I need to go in to the office, and in the morning keep to a non-sweaty pace, no problem. In the afternoon it's warmer and I may be in a hurry to get home, so I might work up a sweat - but then half an hour later I'm home and there's a shower and clean clothes right there.
I do not believe that I own anything Lycra.
I'm a bike to worker too, and also wear my work clothes. I sometimes bike to work in 90 degree, humid weather, still wearing work clothes, and while they definitely get wet with sweat, I do not stink. I have actually had people I know well check me for b.o. I read somewhere that what stinks is anxiety sweat and old sweat that's been hanging around for a while. That's what I've found to be true for me. When I head in to work I am usually fresh out of the shower, so no old sweat around. As for anxiety sweat -- yeah, mine smells like cat piss. But it's rare for me to be seriously anxious at work.
I'm a woman and wear skirts and nice shoes to work. I bought an English Pashley bike with an internal hub and huge mud guards, and it's great. Even the skirts on my long dresses never get caught in the bike, and I don't get mud-spatters even if the streets are wet.
Don't you get sweaty? And therefore visibly wet, possibly stinky? After 25 min of weightlifting?
I always wonder how people manage to bike to work in hot climates for the same reason.
Maybe you work somewhere where this is more socially palatable than in the US?
Long, loooong ago, back when I still had a half-decent level of fitness, I had a cycling speed threshold (well exertion threshold, really) above which I would sweat and below which I wouldn't. I could cycle at (say) 12mph average and not sweat, but if I was late for work I'd have to cycle at (say) 18mph average and thus arrive sweaty. I think perhaps it might also help that air-cooling and sweat-evapouration both scale with speed, which maybe provides some wiggle-room.
(The difficult bit was consciously making yourself cycle at just 12mph and letting other cyclists overtake you when you know you *could* go at 18mph and overtake them!)
understand when something is worth changing or its just you being neurotic. Kids will get sick just being at a party, the cake will not accelerate it. Other health related changes-make sure its worth spending your social capital on it.
The most obvious and consequential example I can think of is mandatory seat belts. And the solution? Just arrest people who don't comply until it's normalized. Turns out simple problems have simple solutions.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201120224357/https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/before-face-masks-americans-went-to-war-against-seat-belts/ar-BB14CsNG
You are getting a demonstration of how readily people argue if you present the case against doing something the familiar way. You make clear that the birthday cake situation is just an *example* of the kind of situation you have in mind, but even so people are reflexively and irritably arguing against changing the custom, and against the info you mention about germs etc.
If you're going to worry about germs on birthday cakes, you should also worry about all those germy people standing or sitting close to you and breathing out germ-laden air that you then have to breathe in. There's such a thing as being too fastidious, and if you're really measuring germ counts on birthday cakes, I think that's verging on being over-anxious.
Also, germs in someone's breathing outflow would often be more dangerous to breathe in then to eat.
I guess we could use cakes instead of face masks. 🎂
When I pied you in the face, it was because I didn't want you to get a respiratory infection! 🥧
I think the best way to convince a small informal group to change something like that is to present the change as something you need for personal reasons -- so present it as something you can't help being bothered by, even though you know that being bothered maybe isn't clearly justified by the facts. SI would recommend doing that even in situations where your real reason for requesting the change is not that you have a quirk or sensitivity that makes you need it, but that you think the new way of doing things is safer/more efficient/less likely to get the group in legal trouble/whatever. That is by far the best way to get the group to change its behavior, rather than arguing with you.
Of course the price you pay is to present yourself as having a weird sensitivity, or a bit of unmanageable anxiety. Still, once the group shifts to doing the new thing, some may find they like it. And you can occasionally say something that backs up your preference, while still presenting it as an aspect of your sensitivity. For instance, in the birthday cake example: " It's such a relief that we blow the candles out with a fan now. I just could not stop thinking about the spittle and germs that land in the frosting if someone blows them out. I read somewhere that there are 14x as many bacteria on a cake after somebody does that. Who knows whether it's true but that was just such a gross thought."
Thank you. It hadn't occurred to me that presenting something as a personal sensitivity (even when it isn't) might appeal more to the group than a rationale which applies equally to everyone. That said, I would guess that there is a limit to how often one can get away with relying on pity like this. I suspect that most traditions weren't formed in such a way, either.
No, it's probably not a good thing to do frequently, but for many of us situations requiring it don't come up all that often. If you crave to ask the group to change its customs a lot of the time when you're in a group, you should try to figure out why that is. Is it the groupiness of groups you don't like -- so you start craving to protests their rituals and standards? Or is there some way things are handled in everyday life where you have very strong views and feel you can't tolerate being around people who don't share them? Maybe you need to be in a group of people who share your views. Or else consider just going with "when in Rome do as the Romans do.." The time you spend in the group, doing things that go against your principles, is probably tiny compared to your time away from it. Deviating from your priniciples for that amount of time is unlikely to make much differnce in the long term outcome for you.
Right. The first thing to do is to understand the power dynamics of the group and your place in it.
If we all agree to do things your way because your way is better, then we've all just ceded a whole bunch of power and status to you. Unless your way is a whole lot better, then we're pretty reluctant to do that.
By casting it as a personal irrational quirk, you allow us to do you a favour without admitting that your way is actually better; in fact, you're probably giving up some status in exchange for getting things your way.
Tis called going one down to get
one up.
If you're blowing out candles such that spittle is flying, you're doing it wrong. I think talking about "ooh all the spittle on the cake" is only going to make people think you're turning into Howard Hughes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysophobia
In that case, I think it's better to be honest: "Look, I'm sorry about this, but blowing out candles on the cake makes me nervous about germs. I'm not accusing anyone, but if you could humour me it'd be great, thanks?" That is at least understandable as "okay some people are anxious and can't help it, let's accommodate them", whereas going on about spittle and germ counts just makes you sound like an obsessive weirdo.
You could also ask them to cut you a slice of the cake *before* blowing out the candles, that way everyone gets to compromise without losing the tradition.
Are you immune deficient? If yes, most groups would be easily convinced by the argument that you're trying to avoid extra germs. If not, it doesn't make much sense to worry about.
The candles-on-cake example isn't important; I used it because almost all readers will be familiar with the tradition. But for anyone curious, this is how I would attempt to convince the group:
'Do we want to eat a germy cake? No. Instead, let's make a tortoise - symbol of long life - from Play-Doh. With several pairs of hands, this should only take 2 minutes. We'll call the tortoise Methuselah. The birthday celebrant blows out candles stuck into Methuselah's shell. Then, you can eat Methuselah if you really want, but the rest of us will eat the cake.'
Compared to just abandoning the tradition, the Methuselah option seems a little more likely to be accepted. But only a little, I think - say 10% vs 5%. My inability to come up with a more compelling suggestion is why I want to read through some anecdotes about successes.
Ugh. You would not be invited again. On the other hand saying that this tradition causes germ transmission might work. Or replacing the excitement of the candle blowing out with something else as exciting. Maybe the opposite - candles that light up (and maybe sparkle) when the birthday boy or girl presses a button after a countdown or the end of the song.
It's not compelling because most people are going to think "What the hell?" instead of "Wow, this makes so much sense!"
I mean, if you're worried about a germy cake, I regret to inform you that bakeries are not surgical operating theatres or pharmaceutical clean rooms, and that cake has been exposed to the open air and people breathing their noxious germ-laden breath on it before ever it ended up on a table with candles on it.
"Then, you can eat Methuselah if you really want, but the rest of us will eat the cake.'"
I'll tell you what is more likely to happen:
"Hands up everybody who thinks we should leave the candles on the cake and make Squirrels eat the plasticine tortoise? Yes, that's everyone!"
Besides, it should be a turtle, not a tortoise, to symbolise longevity.
Sorry, but sounds like an excellent way to not get invited to my next birthday party.
Birthday cakes are an instance where the value of the tradition outweighs the minor hygiene risk (unless of course the birthday boy/girl is actively sick, or a guest is severely immunocompromised, or something). The risk posed to my health by a birthday cake is primarily from the butter and sugar which will make me fat, and not from the germs which might have accumulated on top of it.
If you don't think so then you are probably either overvaluing germs or undervaluing tradition relative to normal people, which will put you in conflict with them. If that's a hill you want to die on then okay, but first take the time to understand why people enjoy doing it the current way.
I would suggest an electronic cover for the cake with light-up "candles" that one can "blow out" guaranteed. You can program however many candles to light up, and sell it as being reusable. Then everyone blows on the plastic and you just need to make the sure the bottom of it is clean when you put it on the cake.
Avoids the whole "you literally make me sick" implication.
Or one could come up with a fun alternative to extinguishing the candles by blowing on them. Would popping a helium-filled balloon near the cake have a similar effect?
We light the candles, and then the birthday boy/girl stands at twenty paces and tries to put them all out with the garden hose.
Or a cake condom.
Oh dear god, the wax burns from the candles would be horrible.
A relative is considering acupuncture as a treatment for facial pain. (They've also booked a proper non-alternative-medicine scan to look into it.) How should I dissuade them from the acupuncture?
My wife is an acupuncturist, so I have some bias here, but I wanted to share a few things from my experience / exposure to acupuncture. I am not a doctor and not pretending to be one, just offering some perspective.
Anecdotally, I helped out in a clinic overseas with my wife for two weeks where we treated a couple hundred patients (who generally had little to no access to medical care) with acupuncture. We saw the same patients repeatedly for a wide range of conditions, most commonly pain and injuries from a lifetime of hard physical labor, and patients consistently reported to us substantial improvement by the last day of our clinic. Maybe all placebo, but if so, it's a damn good one.
Personally, while I would be the last person to claim it is always effective, I have experienced and seen many cases of striking effectiveness, with anxiety and pain being two things where I have first-hand experienced genuinely immediate relief from due to acupuncture (to be clear, in most cases/situations you would NOT be expected to experience immediate relief). To my mind, it's certainly a preferable first-line treatment for pain compared to pharmaceutical alternatives.
In terms of credibility, Acupuncturists are increasingly working alongside MDs at many of the top hospitals in the U.S. on cases such as managing symptoms of cancer treatments. I know several acupuncturists personally who do this. The fact that Medicare and Health Insurers have expanded coverage for acupuncture should offer some additional reassurance. It is not exactly fringe at this point.
Acupuncture is generally low risk in most cases with few/mild side effects to my knowledge/experience. The biggest risk I am aware of is a pneumothorax, which can occur if an acupuncture needle punctures the lung (rare, and to my understanding generally not fatal unless someone is very frail). If someone is at all competent and following the most basic required procedures, they are using needles that come in sterile packages and are disposed of after a single use, and infection risk should be very low.
Acupuncture, like any profession, has better and worse practitioners. There are plenty of people practicing acupuncture who I would be terrified to to receive it from. In contrast to licensed acupuncturists, who receive substantial training over a couple of years at least, physical therapists (maybe some other professions as well?) often do what amounts to a weekend course to learn "dry needling" (acupuncture needles inserted into the belly of the muscle to stimulate a contraction and release). I would personally never receive acupuncture from someone who was not trained specifically as an acupuncturist, as I would be concerned that they do not have an adequate awareness of risks and best practices (particularly when needling the shoulders/chest/upper back).
I would be curious to hear more about why you oppose acupuncture, if you have a specific reason or just a general sense that it is "woo-woo" or "alternative"?
I hope this proves helpful.
Several decades ago I tried acupuncture for infertility, on the theory that it couldn’t hurt (I was doing conventional treatment as well). IDuring the period while I was having the acupuncture I had several weeks of unusually bad insomnia. Acupuncturist tried several different insomnia treatments on me over the course of several sessions. When the usual ones had no effect she gave me one so strong she cautioned me to be extra careful driving home. I actually believed her, and was in fact extra careful when ai drove home. But that treatment, like the others, did not have the slightest effect on me. Infertility treatments, combo of conventional plus acupuncture, also were ineffective. Also, when my acupuncturist administered various treatments she sometimes warned me about various odd sensations I might have while the needles were in. I can’t remember what they were now, except that they were state-of-mind things, not sensations from the needles themselves. I could usually feel the needles, though the pain was very minimal, but otherwise never felt a thing out of the ordinary.
Sorry to hear that that was your experience. My general conceptualization is that there are conditions that acupuncture is usually effective for, sometimes effective for, and generally ineffective for, with some overlap with Western Medicine and some conditions that acupuncture is more effective in treating (or equally effective, with much less downside). I have not had a lot of luck with acupuncture for my own insomnia (at times it has made it worse). Unfortunately, depending on the nature of the fertility issues, I suspect that in many cases they are intractable for both Western Medicine and Acupuncture/Oriental approaches, as was your experience. Pain like the original poster mentioned would fall more into the "bread-and-butter" of conditions that acupuncture is often effective for.
In terms of sensations, it is common to have some localized sensation (sometimes painful if they nick a nerve or blood vessel), and not uncommon to have referred pain/sensation elsewhere in the body. However, it isn't totally abnormal to not feel anything, although my understanding is that there is thought to be some relationship between sensation (again, not necessarily painful) and efficacy, with moderate sensation associated with greater efficacy than no sensation.
I am not sure what the acupuncturist you mentioned was referring to in terms of "state-of-mind" things, but there is certainly a subset of acupuncturists with an affinity for approaching the medicine is a "spiritual" way that is a little out there, and as far as I can tell is fairly divorced from the actual mainstream of the medicine (i.e. they bring that baggage with them to the medicine). There are also plenty of level-headed acupuncturists with an affinity for bio-medicine. At least for my wife, her education involved substantial biomedical training from respected MDs, who taught concurrently at medical schools.
I don't believe you that you are sorry that I had that experience. Why the fuck should you be? You don't even know me, and anyhow I make clear that my failed acupuncture treatment was not distressing or even particularly disappointing or frustrating. Even *I* am not sorry I had that experience. Why start out your post with a bit of insincere empathy?
Oh, one other semi-relevant experience I had: I used to have moderately bad migraines fairly often. They were not the kind where you can stand to do anything but lie in a darkened room. They were just medium-intensity one-sided headaches accompanied my mild vertigo, nausea and sleepiness. If I really had to I could go to work with one. So I read someplace about an acupressure technique said to help with headaches. I can't remember where I read it, but it was either a place I thought was worth taking semi-seriously, or possibly several places. Anyhow, the technique was to press the fleshy area connecting thumb and forefinger. So I worked really hard at getting some mileage out of that. Tried different parts of the area, different amounts of pressure, and for a while had the sense that maybe it was making the head pain recede a bit. Finally settled on keeping a clothespin on the area. I had weakened it so it did not squeeze as hard as clothespins normally do, and I would periodically take it off for a few minutes. Did that for a couple days. Eventually had to face the fact that once the novelty wore off and I was no longer paying attention to the hand sensation my head did not hurt one bit less.
I never did really think acupuncture was likely to make any difference in a health problem, but I did give it a wholehearted attempt with infertility and insomnia, was also wholehearted in how I tried acupressure for migraines. I am now pretty sure acupoke is completely ineffective. Paul Ingraham, at his Pain Science site, has a pretty good takedown of it:
https://www.painscience.com/articles/acupuncture-for-pain.php
Expressing sympathy over failed fertility treatments is a very normal thing for people to do, and is often done in a legitimately sincere manner, even to strangers.
Agreed. This was a standard (and arguably obligatory) call-and-response ritual to hearing about someone's loss / disappointment, be they a stranger or a close friend.
Most people would be offended if they *weren't* offered the courtesy of an acknowledgement of their suffering, even if it's merely ritual.
Eh, I said it was several decades ago, mentioned it in a matter of fact way, and did not say a single word suggesting that the subject is a painful one. Given all that, I think expressing sympathy is way over the top.
In another post on this thread, about AI doom, I wrote that I expected to be dead by the time it comes about, but that my daughter will probably not be, and I hate to think about that. Now *that* is an expression of serious ongoing distress. But even a response to that post that began with an expression of sympathy for my parental worry would have seemed a bit odd to me. Jeez, this isn’t group therapy!
. I’ve found that people who try that stuff are unpersuadable. You explain to them how the whole basis for the treatment is a bunch of nonsense, and they say well yes but life is complicated and there’s a lot science hasn’t figured out yet and it helped my friend and you are hurting my feelings and making me feel criticized. Acupuncture’s unlikely to harm them. The little needles are probably cheap and I think most practitioners use fresh ones for each person. Just let them realize that oddly enough their facial pain is not getting better from having teeny needles stuck in their belly button and knees
I know someone who lost a lung and some other valuable parts of her insides as a result of an infection (or maybe multiple simultaneous infections) caused by acupuncture needles. Almost died, but in any event she'll never be the same. The place seemed clean and reputable but shut down and skipped town after this incident when she threatened a lawsuit.
I had never had interest in acupuncture but didn't know this was a serious risk. I looked up the stats and this kind of thing seemed fairly rare but not unheard of. Though it wouldn't surprise me if it was underreported.
Why dissuade them?
Indeed:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29198932/
Does anyone have any good links to communities or sub reddits where peers can share similar rationalist content?
You mean beyond the subreddits like r/slatestarcodex, themotte, theschism, and places like that?
There's also the SSC / ACX old-style forum, Data Secrets Lox, and of course old standbys like LessWrong, and on Discord the SSC channel and Outer Haven.
Posting this last time, but going again in case I have any more bites:
Anyone here have any experience in the publishing world? I'm looking to start a little boutique publishing company and would love to pick the brain of someone more experienced in that world than I.
What is it that you want to know about? If it's about marketing and selling, then I know nothing at all about that (sadly!). Ditto contracts and attracting authors (don't charge them, I know that much). Hardback, paperback or ebook production, registering ISBNs etc, I have some experience with.
I have an acquaintance who I can run questions past if you like. She runs a freelance editing business for ELT textbooks but spent a lot of time in house as a managing/production editor. She probably wouldn't be up for a direct connection but I'm sure would be happy to have me proxy your questions and reply on her behalf.
I posted some new replications:
https://michaelwiebe.com/hire-me/
Do bigger cities cause more innovation?
Moretti (2021) studies agglomeration effects for innovation, where being in bigger cities causes inventors to patent more. The main results use OLS with fixed effects, and an event study (using inventors who change cities) and instrumental variables strategy (using size of tech clusters in other cities) support a causal interpretation. I show that both the event study and IV results are caused by coding errors.
Do vaccinated children have higher income as adults?
Atwood (2022) studies the long-run economic effects of the 1963 measles vaccine. Since the vaccine was introduced nationally, the paper uses states with high and low measles incidence as the treatment and control groups. But measles is so contagious that this probably represents differences in reporting capacity rather than actual disease incidence. I run an event study and find that the results are explained by trends, instead of a treatment effect of the vaccine.
What do you think is the ideal institutional setting for your work? Is it people like you displacing other people from academia, or is it a different sort of institution?
Journals could hire replicators as part of the peer review process. Data editors (who make sure the code runs) are becoming more common, so replicators is the next step.
Great work, great idea. But if ever you're near a college campus, wear a bulletproof vest.
I don't have a job for you but this is great work!
Richard Hanania, who I read and often like, has been going off the deep end lately. Here's his latest:
"Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift represent the problem with modern Republicans. They’re good looking, white, successful. They would’ve naturally been conservative 10 years ago. There’s no path to winning without people like them.
You don’t have young people, minorities, single women. Republicans used to keep things competitive by being able to rely on normal white people who disliked extremism on all sides and just wanted to be left alone.
{snip}"
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1752028578513072209
Now, I don't know about Kelce, my impression is that athletes aren't strongly left or right-wing when you control for race. But haven't Hollywood people, actors, singers, etc, long been left-wing? Isn't that something "everyone" knows? Apparently not.
My read on the situation, for what it’s worth, is that Taylor Swift is *such* a cultural icon right now that everyone, for better or for worse, is trying to shoehorn her into their camp. See also: speculation on whether she is secretly gay. For those of us who don’t base their political views on pop stars, it’s irrelevant. Pop stars have been overwhelming liberal since forever, and the only people who care are college students, who have also been overwhelmingly liberal since forever.
(I know Taylor started out being country music adjacent, which is right wing coded, but she’s long since moved past that into pop queen territory. It’s Michael Jackson/Elvis level of rarefied air she’s breathing.)
Just for amusement value, the snarkiest thing I've read about Taylor Swift's embrace of the Democrats was: "wait for the break-up album".
Lol
Hollywood, yes. Nashville, not so much. Taylor Swift started out as a country music star, and I believe was born and raised in a Rust Belt town. It's not a sure thing, but also not unreasonable to expect that such a person would lean conservative. And, yeah, if ten years ago you'd said "Country music star dating an NFL player", I'd have bet on their having voted for Romney in 2012.
But since then, Taylor has figured out how to make a billion dollars appealing to mostly young women who are disproportionately liberal. And Mitt Romeny has been replaced by Donald Trump. Whatever Taylor Swift's political views may be in private, she isn't likely to be speaking favorably of Republicans any time soon.
That is symptomatic of a problem for the GOP, even if it isn't quite the one Hanania thinks he's seeing.
Isn't the Republican party's racial composition actually diversifying surprisingly well, at least considering historical expectations? Is the contention that they should appeal less to blue collar people of all ethnic groups (or trying to expand their share of old white people) and try to appeal more to young successful white people? You also don't need to appeal to young people, as long as people become more conservative as they age at a sufficient rate, and party can be consistently successful while appealing disproportionately to the old.
It's also at least debatable if not clearly incorrect that this is some strategic error by the Republican Party. I doubt there's anything the GOP could do to win Swift's vote; I'm guessing she didn't vote for Romney. I doubt there's a Republican moderate enough for her to vote for. While I think it's unfortunate the turn taken by the GOP is unfortunate in an absolute sense, it's not clear that it isn't the optimal strategy for maximizing their share of the vote.
In any case, I think I decided Hanania was overrated a while ago. Some of his early pieces I thought were interesting and he filled a novel niche, but when he's defending some fairly conventional position, he doesn't stand out from all the other millions of pundits arguing the same things in terms of insightfulness, in my opinion. He stands out mainly because of the unusual eclecticism of his opinions, but I'd be hard pressed to name an individual opinion he has that hasn't been better defended by others.
Hanania wants to focus his political capital on what is important to him. If he spends too much time getting grouped with race/sex/conspiracy crazies he's going to lose a lot of it (easy to dismiss), so he's leaning heavily into creating distance on these issues (even some he might agree with). So he's picking his battles, let's see how this works out for him...
See https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-oppose-eugenics
It won't work out for him at all. He's a frankly a pro-immigration extremist, which is essentially throwing in his lot with people who hate him and whose policies will end up destroying what little 'political capital' he has left. The future of the right is anti-immigration, and so he has no place in it, and he's already a marked man amongst the left.
What could probably be said is that white pop stars are near-universally leftists and probably have been for a long time, but historically they were mostly quiet about politics (unlike genre music, much of which is overtly political). Taylor was quiet about politics until, IIRC, the 2018 midterms. And the issue that caused her to speak out was homosexuality, noting that she has a lot of backup dancers that are homosexual.
I would guess that white male athletes lean a bit further right than other college-educated white males of their age. Though they're mostly quiet about it. There are prominent examples of Evangelical athletes, while Evangelicals are unheard of in other forms of secular entertainment.
Though at least in the NFL, white athletes probably lean further left on black racial issues than most other matters, as the job almost requires it. Or at least they have to pretend to.
In the rock-n-roll era the biggest white stars were pretty political. We're just in another political era.
Rock and roll is different to pop in very relevant ways.
Gods damn it, Hanania annoys me so much that, totally uninterested as I am in Taylor Swift, I'm going to have to look this one up.
Ten years ago was 2014. What was Taylor Swift doing in 2014?
She was 25 years of age, and apparently had broken out of being a country(?) starlet into full-fledged rock/pop:
"In March 2014, Swift began living in New York City. She...worked on her fifth studio album ... She promoted the album extensively, including inviting fans to secret album-listening sessions.1989 was released on October 27, 2014, and opened atop the Billboard 200 with 1.28 million copies sold. Its singles "Shake It Off", "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood" reached number one in Australia, Canada and the US, the first two making Swift the first woman to replace herself at the Hot 100 top spot; other singles include "Style", "Wildest Dreams", "Out of the Woods" and "New Romantics". The 1989 World Tour (2015) was the highest-grossing tour of the year with $250 million in total revenue." She also took on Spotify and got back money off Apple.
She may or may not have started out 'conservative' (seemingly she went to school to the nuns as a kid, but that tells us nothing; she moved to Nashville at a young age and built her career starting there but again, how she voted or who she voted for isn't immediately apparent. If she was potentially Republican but is now presumably Democrat (and we don't know for sure), why did she change? On the other hand, she might always have voted Democrat. Being rich and white doesn't mean you're a natural conservative, see all the rich white guys going back years who have never had any problem voting liberal to progressive to vaguely leftist.
Political views, again according to Wikipedia:
"Swift identifies as a pro-choice feminist, and is one of the founding signatories of the Time's Up movement against sexual harassment. She criticized the US Supreme Court's decision to end federal abortion rights in 2022. Swift also advocates for LGBT rights, and has called for the passing of the Equality Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. She performed during WorldPride NYC 2019 at the Stonewall Inn, a gay rights monument, and has donated to the LGBT organizations Tennessee Equality Project and GLAAD."
I don't really see a huge amount of difference there from any views she might have had in 2014; if she's pro-choice now she probably was back then, ditto the gay rights allyship. So to me, Hanania's argument boils down to "ditch the cultural stuff and go with the Zeitgeist, be pro-sex'n'drugs'n'rock and roll, and conservatism then means simply money". And Swift is certainly canny about money, so if that's "voting conservative" then sure - if the Republicans were just like the Democrats in everything but welfare programmes and tax cuts for the rich, she'd vote conservative.
Maybe.
I know someone smart who's fascinated by her & has dug up all kinds of info about her. For what it's worth, her family of origin was upper middle class.
I don't have any statistics, but I'd expect that on the whole, white college educated millennials who were socially left in their 20s (pro gay rights, pro choice, etc) are still pretty socially left on those issues, and for abortion at least the Republican party hasn't really updated to accommodate it - which didn't matter when the Boomers were in their 40s, but will matter as the millennials approach their 40s and are still socially left, comparatively.
Putting taylor swifts name in a tweet is a surefire way to get more views. That explains about 80% of why I think Hanania tweeted that.
100%
+1
It's bad on purpose to make you click.
Because I'd forgotten it, and to save everyone else a trip to "let me google that for you":
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-bad-on-purpose-to-make-you-click
Maybe if you go back 50-70 years, this would have been true? I do think there was an inflection point 10 years ago on the left, and a series of problems over the last 20 on the right. Maybe a way to save the argument is that there was a type of non-politically-vocal person who would quietly vote conservative, and now they don't? Dunno if that applies to his examples, though.
I don’t know anything about Taylor Swift’s politics, but she’s very popular with gender nonconforming people, who surely are not mostly right-leaning.
For the first several years of her career, she refused to talk about politics. Most people thought that made her neutral. But that silence along with her being blond, blue-eyed, and attractive led some neo-Nazis to assume (or at least hope) that she was secretly sympathetic to their cause.
After Trump was elected in 2016, Taylor was so horrified that she decided to begin supporting Democrats more openly. As far as I know, the main policy positions that she's taken are being pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights.
>But that silence along with her being blond, blue-eyed, and attractive led some neo-Nazis to assume (or at least hope) that she was secretly sympathetic to their cause.
Not really, more of a meme that exploited her silence rather than genuine belief.
Good grief, do neo-Nazi's actually put a lot of store by somebody being blond and blue eyed, and think that ups the chances they're Nazis? (Don't they even know that most adults with blond hair are bottle blonds?)
This was entirely a meme, few if any genuinely believed she held far-right views
Yeah, OK, I really don't know much about Taylor Swift.
A quick Google on that indicates that there were more accusations of white supremacist fans than actual white supremacist fans, with a lot of outlets denouncing swift for being white supremacist adjacent.
She wasn’t out of the woods as of last year.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/taylor-swift-ice-spice-karma-collaboration_n_646f6a21e4b0a7554f3d5b98/amp
Wow, the one person I know who is fascinated by her is a dark-skinned S Asian trans guy. There is a huge gender-nonconforming faction among her fans. That group has a custom of making friendship bracelets with letters woven in that spell out obscure references to her lyrics and trading them with people sitting nearby. Last concert he went to sounds like almost everyone around where he happened to sit was gay or trans. I'm pretty sure any white supremacist sitting in that area would have either passed out from sheer disgust or ripped off a few heads.
They literally view the world through a lens of "blonde + blue eyes = genetically superior and good", so it's not far from there to "we're the good guys, so the other definitionally good guys must secretly like us".
Nazis are not particularly smart.
You would be surprised. https://web.archive.org/web/20120827002245/http://theforeigner.no/pages/columns/i-met-anders-behring-breivik-in-a-bar/
Eric Schmidt wrote a piece in the WSJ on Saturday about LLMs. With regard to training, he wrote:
"What’s still difficult is to encode human values. That currently requires an extra step known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, in which programmers use their own responses to train the model to be helpful and accurate. Meanwhile, so-called “red teams” provoke the program in order to uncover any possible harmful outputs. This combination of human adjustments and guardrails is designed to ensure alignment of AI with human values and overall safety. So far, this seems to have worked reasonably well."
This suggests that for AI companies "human values" (are there any other kind?) means the values of their programmers, or what those programmers consider to be within the boundaries of acceptable opinion. I suspect that the opinions of the ancient Greeks re pederasty, early 20th century progressives re eugenics, and ISIS re religious toleration are not considered by the programmers to be aligned with "human values." Making sure that an LLM does not appear to endorse taboo opinions is undoubtedly prudent, but does it reduce the utility of the LLM? Wouldn't it be interesting to know how the analysis of an LLM differs from the conventional wisdom, and why?
I wonder if any thought has been given to having two versions of an LLM, one of which has not gone through Reinforcement Learning and "red team" provocation and lacks "guardrails." Perhaps the original version could be behind a paywall, or access could be limited to adults who have signed disclaimers.
You could look at a recent podcast from 80000 hours on this where the red team was given access to GPT which had only been trained to be helpful, not helpful + harmless. They go into how different it was
Is this the https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-labenz-ai-breakthroughs-controversies/ podcast or a different one? The url I found includes a mention of
>You know, the GPT-4 Early that I used in the red team, that was the purely helpful version that would do anything that you said, and it would still kind of give you some of these caveats.
edit: My _personal_ interest in this is that I would like to have a conversation with a competent AGI. One part of this is that e.g. GPT4 is still not getting straightforward uncontentious questions right. I've been asking various LLMs "What inorganic compounds are gases at standard temperature and pressure?" for several months, and I have yet to see one that is even close to right. ( Latest attempt: https://chat.openai.com/share/12040db2-5798-478d-a683-2dd2bd98fe4e ). And, of course, I want _factually_ correct answers, not _politically_ correct answers, so wokeish RLHF concerns me.
The AI "values", as espoused by token prediction, are a function of:
1. The input training set
2. The reinforcement learning process
The big/useful LLMs have to siphon up all the input they can get their hands on, with little or no ability to filter, so they will actually resemble a reasonable synthesis of the human values /local to the context fed in/. So if you start feeding it racist context, it will come up with the values of human racists from its input.
The programmers are not the ones deciding the values except insomuch as they can filter the input (they can't/don't) and the reinforcement learning (they do, Schmidt says it's not as effective as he'd like).
What does "racist" mean?
Is replicated intelligence research demonstrating empirical differences in intelligence between racial populations "racist"?
<Wouldn't it be interesting to know how the analysis of an LLM differs from the conventional wisdom, and why?
But they can't analyze from the ground up, developing an original view based on their store of info and knowledge of what has positive and negative effects on people. They just put together variations and combinations of the stuff the absorbed from human writing and speech in their training.
Also, there are some major wrinkles regarding implementing human values. One is the often-mentioned one that for values differ among cultures for many important aspects of life. Another that's less mentioned is that in practice there is a great deal of nuance (or you could call it unfairness or inconsistency) in when and for whom a certain law or value is upheld. For instance killing, if done in certain circumstances, is punished severely, but gets a pass in many situations: If done in wartime or as part of policing or some other role where the individual's life is at risk from those who object to their role. If done to end a pregnancy that is not far advanced. If done to anything non-human. If done for self-defense, or in a situation that did not really require using lethal means for self-defense but appeared to. If done in a situation that many feel is ethical, for instance when someone ends the life of a terminally ill loved one who asked them to do it. If done by someone with a great deal of influence, for whom members of the enforcement system make all sort of exceptions. And note that there's no one underlying priniciple that, if made explicit, would explain all of the exceptions to the rule. The things that lead to bending of the No Killing rule are a miscellany.
>"For instance murder gets a pass in many situations: If done in wartime or as part of policing or some other role where the individual's life is at risk from those who object to their role."
Sorry, this is one of my pet peeves. Those are examples of when killing gets a pass specifically because they're *not* "murder", which is unlawful/unjustified killing.
Yeah, you're right. I changed the word to 'killing,'
:)
This is a bit of a derail from the values question, but you might appreciate part of the https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-labenz-ai-breakthroughs-controversies/#transcript interview where Labenz echos some of your concerns:
> Another thing I do worry about is just kids and artificial friends. I’ve done one episode only so far with the CEO of Replika, the virtual friend company, and I came out of that with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, she started that company before language models, and she served a population — and continues to, I think, largely serve a population — that has real challenges, right? Many of them anyway. Such that people are forming very real attachment to things that are very simplistic.
This is in the "Ethics and safety of AI today [02:09:39]" section of the interview.
Also, later in that section, Wiblin says:
>Inasmuch as it feels like a closer substitute for actually talking to people — such that people can end up limiting their social repertoire to things that only happen via talking to a chatbot, and maybe they can’t handle or they don’t feel comfortable with the kind of conflict or friction or challenges that come with dealing with a real human being, who’s not just trying to maximise your engagement, not just trying to keep you coming back always, but has their own interests and who you might have to deal with in a workplace, even if you don’t particularly like them — I could see that deskilling people.
All removing reinforcement learning does is move the problem one layer up. It's different but not necessarily better.
The real issue is that outside of a dictatorship you don't have agreement on what "human values" are. China can (and has) simply published 'correct' values and answers and has a fairly rigorous testing process to guarantee LLMs do not contradict their political orthodoxy. But a free speech society cannot create the same as much as certain activists might want it because it's inherently an act of censorship.
As I've said a couple of times, there's plenty of concern about AI alignment abroad. But not Yudkowsky style "it's going to destroy the world." In global terms the biggest, best funded problem in AI risk funding is how to align AI with the values of the CCP. I'm still waiting for someone like Yudkowsky to endorse the CCP on this account or go over there to assist since alignment is apparently That Important(tm).
Meta has released multiple Llama models with and without RLHF (and instruct tuning, the thing that makes it answer questions at all). The also released a separate RLHF classifier model. Part of the idea is that you can use a base, uncensored model but use the classifier model to check if the output is "good" or not. There are various ideas of how to implement this
OpenAI at one point was talking about using system messages this way, I believe this was the goal with GPT4's RLHF. Basically, you begin every convo with a system message telling the model which set of values to adhere to. As far as I'm aware, it doesn't work too well
We've got an entire quarantine thread for "human values"; I don't think they're going to save us.
Yudkowsky believes, on very shaky grounds, that "human values" are a coherent entity shared by everybody. Apparently, that's got into the water supply.
Source?
If that's true, why would he not support hard coding these values into an AI instead of coherent extrapolated volition?
Not two different things. CEV is supposed to provide evidence for unitary human values, and unitary human values are supposed to provide evidence for CEV.
Support is his early writings.
In his later writings, he gives up on the feasibility of any kind of u alignment.
I am pretty sure that EY doesn't think that. I think that EYs main problem is that we don't know how to confidently and consistently train _any_ set of values, shared or not, into LLMs/AI more generally. He doesn't talk much about what "human values" means, because, from his point of view, it doesn't matter because the problem is getting any values at all.
i think the idea is that since someone could change from a deontologist to a consequentialist or vice versa given enough good arguments and knowledge, perhaps after giving everyone all the good arguments and all the knowledge they'll converge on a single system of ethics.
when yudkowsky talks about "values" he isn't talking about whether the police are beneficial to society or how much we should care about freedom of speech (most people would converge given all the knowledge), he probably isn't even talking about deontology vs consequentialism, he's talking about something much more fundamental.
Imagine you want to create a utopia. You can either 1) change people’s existing preferences to suit the world or 2) change the world to suit people’s existing preferences. Both methods are identical in their total cost to achieve and in their likelihood to succeed.
In either case, the experiential outcome for the population would be identical in its quality. Same level of felt contentment, happiness, fulfillment, etc.
Do you favor 1) or 2)? Why? Does it even matter?
And if you say, “well it depends on the people’s existing preferences,” aren’t you implicitly, and maybe paradoxically, just favoring changing the world to suit people’s (ie your) preferences?
doesn't matter, both are coercing people in the name of MY vision of utopia. What's unsaid is every utopia is a tyranny of one person's values over everyone, their vision of how humanity should exist. whether people or the world, its to serve your will.
theres no way people wont disagree in either approach
Morally i have a strong instinctual preference for 2.
I think it is driven by these heuristics
If i change the world to match preferences, i have done good hard work building things that ppl like.
If i change ppl i have probably done something evil, like lobotomies or something else non consensual.
Now if 1 was achieved with reasoned discourse great. Its just not what my instinct tells me was used.
Well if you have the means and desire to implement 1 then I'd argue it'd be better to just wipe out humanity and tile the universe with hedonium. Like if you don't care about people's preferences and just want to maximize happiness then why even keep humans around at all?
IMO the second option is underated, since the preferences which wouldn't allow someone to have their desires reconciled with others are not very sympathetic. Since we'd be talking about sadists, abusers, unbearable moral authoritarians and people who want to use more than their fair share of humanities resources (and refuse to just experience their massive vanity projects in simulations).
1 sounds better. I'm not sure you could change the world to make a utopia since people have preferences for mutually exclusive things. If I have a community made up 50% silicon valley people and 50% Houthi fighters, how do I change the world to suit the preferences of my community?
Yeah I don’t know. It would require resource abundance and be hard and scary and might involve creating real/virtual spaces where people are only exposed to things that stimulate them in a positive way. It would probably have to be done at the individual level to abolish unsolicited conflict. I think the implementation side of utopia usually boils down to a moral disaster. I think that disaster is probably an unacceptable risk for both 1 and 2. Technology might or might not change that.
What I’m interested in is our intuitions about changing our circumstances versus changing how we see them.
What exactly does it mean to change people's preferences without changing the world? There are a lot of things in the world that happen because of people's preferences!
Like, currently, Ukraine and Russia are at war, and they would prefer the war end in victory for themselves. Would "changing their preferences to suit the world" result in:
1. Ukraine and Russia are changed to prefer being at war (the current state), and will continue slaughtering each other but they now feel really happy about it. They eventually all die, but they enjoyed it while it lasted.
2. Ukraine and Russia are changed to prefer not being at war. Soldiers throw down their guns, go home, and live lives that an unchanged person would find happy and fulfilling. This is undoubtedly the more "utopian" outcome, but the reason it's utopian is because the war ended, which is a change to the world!
I think option 1 is either immoral (because mind control is wrong even if the victim is controlled into liking it), incoherent (because if people are changed to prefer dying over living, they will quickly stop preferring anything), or simply reduces to option 2 (because the only purpose of changing preferences was to change the world to something you prefer.)
(Option 2 is not coherent either, since as Yug Gnirob points out it's possible to have conflicting preferences which must either change or go unfulfilled, but I'd say in general, changing the world is easier and less morally fraught than changing minds.)
I would say 2 is better if possible, but also that 2 is impossible. Ignoring the transient nature of "existing" preferences, people want contradictory things; the family of a drug addict want the court to be lenient, the shops he stole from want the court to be harsh. What does the changed world look like here?
I see your point. Though I can imagine a 2 that uses VR-type solutions to conflicting preference problems like the kind you illustrated.
VR conflicts with the preferences of people who prioritize truth or interpersonal engagement. I know a lot of 70-plusers who would hate something like that. Even as an option.
...well, because I'm happy this is easily available on the Internet, I'm going to link it. A possible glimpse of a "true 2" utopia.
https://poetry4kids.com/classics/the-dying-fishermans-song/
If you can change people’s preferences, you can give them coherent and non-contradictory preferences that make them perfectly happy with the world as it is. However, because people’s (unchanged) preferences are incoherent and contradictory, you can’t change the world to make them perfectly happy. So if utopia means “perfectly happy forever”, it has to be people’s preferences that change.
Well said. I worry that for preferences to be coherent and non-contradictory in an incoherent and contradictory world they might need to be absent. I guess that gets you to Nirvana, strictly speaking.
If you read this paragraph 1000 times it will lead you to enlightenment
Or paperclips.
What a great exercise!
My answer is that both sides of the coin are important, and that doing a mixture of both would be better than either alone. But I guess that sidesteps the question.
Therefore to play fair, I would argue for changing the world to match our preferences. The logic is that human preferences and values have evolved over billions of years to optimize our success (with numerous obvious limitations and exceptions which plays into my first answer above). Humans need safety, comfort, food, energy, companionship, respect, excitement, love, independence and codependence and so on and on. I think it would be safer and smarter to tailor our world to our preferences than vice versa if I could just do one or the other.
I am open to counter arguments of course.
Agreed. Loosely speaking, _all_ technology, from the use of fire to everything we have today, has been a series of "changing the world to match our preferences", and I favor this. I think that this is most glaringly obvious in the case of medical advances. I prefer changing the world to eliminate smallpox (as we did) over changing our preferences to remove human objections to smallpox.
How about this idea for a more market-based higher education system, for construction/manufacturing/nursing/technicians/mechanics/other in-demand, non-4 year degree skills. I.e. the types of jobs that people tend to get 2 year degrees from a community college for. Boilermakers, electricians, CNAs, controls technicians- that sort of thing. My understanding is that they're constantly in very high demand and employers can never find enough of them.
A community college that collects tuitions from its students, as in the current model. But also charges employers some kind of fee for trained workers once they've graduated from the program- so the college is double-dipping on the fees. I.e. Silicon Valley Community College now has a 2 year degree program for electronics technicians, a very in-demand skillset with manufacturing firms and so on. SVCC works closely with their future employers, tailors the classes & training programs to specifically the types of skills that the employers want to see, collaborates with line managers to train workers on exactly what the company needs. The college is almost a training arm of the employers. After the students graduate, the employers pays SVCC some kind of fee for each one they hire- whether that's a flat fee, a % of salary, or even just an ongoing monthly fee to the college just for training.
After all, lengthy multiyear training programs are not a core competency of say GE, Tesla, Raytheon, etc. Makes sense to outsource them. As I understand it, in European & Asian countries where employers & the government work together more closely than is customary in the US, this sort of training program is much more common. This would just be a more market-based version of say a German apprenticeship, because we're American and we always have to do the most capitalistic version of everything. Silicon Valley Community College would probably have to become a for-profit, but despite their dismal reputation, I don't think for-profits are actually banned from collecting tuition (University of Phoenix, etc.) Once a number of local employers are using this service, their reps in Congress would then probably block out any future government interference.
Could this business model work? Collecting tuition but also charging companies for very in-demand trained workers? There's been a lot of Silicon Valley interest in new educational models, so maybe it could inspire future investors? (Can a Musk-type just, like, acquire a community college?)
> A community college that collects tuitions from its students, as in the current model. But also charges employers some kind of fee for trained workers once they've graduated from the program
I’m currently doing a certificate in energy technology at a local community college in a big oil producing area. All the classes are held in a fancy new building with high tech labs, all of which seems to be heavily sponsored by BP... their logo is plastered up all over the place
Well, anecdotal experience here: I once worked as a place kind of like that in Denmark, teaching math to people who were at the same apprenticef to local businesses. The state paid for the schooling and the companies paid a stipend for the aoprentices, and was represented in the schools leadership.
When I did it, the student level was dropping. The companies were offering fewer apprenticeships since it would clearly be cheaper to let someone else pay the stipend and then poach the workers later. At the same time an unholy alliance of parents and vocational guidance counselors were trying to push all the talented students into 'academic' education so they could go to university and get high status jobs.
So there are definitely some problems, both cultural and economic that needs to be handled.
Are you going to be requiring the students to sign a contract promising not to work for one of the employers that selfishly decided not to participate in this program, and uses some of the money they saved to offer slightly higher salaries to qualified welders or whatever?
This plan seems to have a free rider problem, if it doesn't come bundled with something akin to indentured servitude.
No (I highly doubt that's legal). But employers could solve this problem on their end by paying the schools the way they pay recruiting agencies now- they could pay per month, they could split the payment into 12 months assuming the trainee lasts that long, etc. Or, if the employers find the training program that valuable, they could just pay the schools a flat or subscription fee. Trainee longevity is now a school problem.
From a finance POV, once the employers have the schools all trained-up in their specific way of doing things, that's a huge moat. The employers aren't going to want to drop the schools and then maybe start with a competitor from scratch, take a couple or few years to get back up to speed, etc.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire a recruiting agency to put one of their people at the graduation ceremony for each of these schools and whisper to the better candidates, "Psst. Come work for us, we pay 10% better than all the companies your school is trying to steer you to"?
I think the problem is (1) schools, and indeed society in general, pushes young people to aim for traditional college on the 'get a degree, be assured of a good job' model (2) living on an apprenticeship stipend can be tough because of course you're not being paid full rates while you're learning on the job (3) you do need abilities and interests for the job, it's not simply a case of "Johnny is too thick to go to college, steer him into vocational training instead" and (4) people don't want to do apprenticeships It can also be difficult to get one as employers are picky and sometimes it's a 'closed shop' situation de facto (whatever the laws may say).
https://mabs.ie/blogs/apprenticeship/#
A model where you're "double dipping" on the fees doesn't sound practicable to me, employers generally don't want to pay extra costs where they can avoid them, and if they're already paying a stipend to the apprentice then paying the college a bonus on top of that makes the apprenticeship more expensive.
If I'm understanding the proposal correctly the young person is a student, not an apprentice, and neither the employer nor the college is paying them a stipend but instead they are paying the college tuition.
The whole "start your life by paying for education" thing kind of sucks, but is the norm here unfortunately.
Then I don't see the benefit of this over the normal four-year college route, as it's students not apprentices, and that sounds more like 'turning out doctors and coders, not plumbers and bricklayers'.
And you need the plumbers and bricklayers, for the construction industry to have enough workforce to start building those houses to tackle the housing crisis. The attraction of an apprenticeship is you don't pay college fees, you get paid a stipend (even if it is small) and you have pretty much a guaranteed job with an employer lined up at the end:
https://mabs.ie/blogs/apprenticeship/
"What does it cost?
Apprentices do not pay tuition fees. However, they have to pay the Student Contribution Charge (also known as the registration fee). They do not pay the full amount but pay a part of the fee based on how long they will be in college.
For example, the student contribution charge is capped at €3,000 per academic year for full-time students. For an apprentice who might spend a 10/11 week semester at college, they would only pay €1,000.
Apprenticeships do not qualify for the SUSI grant."
If you're still paying the college fees, not getting paid, and the employer at the end has to pay a percentage of your future earnings to the college, why not just take out the student loan anyway and go the degree course route?
I asked this in the Hidden thread, trying again here:
Finding ways to coordinate groups of people to all commit to the same action at the same time is a fundamental topic in Rationalist writing. To facilitate this, I figure there must be software tools that automate it.
For example:
- Something that messages everyone in your group: "Would you agree to go to <restaurant x> for dinner if everybody else also agreed to this message?", and then if/when everybody clicks it, send out another email saying, "Everybody has agreed to go to <restaurant x> for dinner. See you there!"
- Something that emails everybody in your community: "Would you agree to commit <x dollars> to <crowdfunding campaign> if <yyy dollars> worth of people also agreed to the terms in this email?", and then, when/if that threshhold is met, automatically and simultaneously withdraws the funds that everybody conditionally committed to.
I know these aren't novel ideas; I have a hard time believing that there aren't a large number of such tools and systems already in existence.
My questions for anybody who knows:
1) Is there an accepted name for this kind of thing? How would I search for information about these things?
2) What are some specific examples of these kinds of tools? (Websites, apps, plugins, protocols, etc)
There was a website called Thunderclap that called it's technique "crowdspeaking", where people would commit to posting a specific social media message, and if enough people committed then it would automatically send the message out from everyone's account at the same time. (Apparently it died because Facebook made API changes that made it impossible.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderclap_(website)
Also, Kickstarter is a more everyday example.
This is effectively how Groupon works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupon
One term you might find helpful: "assurance contract" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract).
Thanks! I think this is exactly what I was looking for.
I've also found https://www.lesswrong.com/s/vz9Zrj3oBGsttG3Jh . Together with the wiki article, I think these will be great starting points for catching up to the current state of thinking on this topic.
Was reading Knausgaard's new novel which has a bit about Nikolai Fyodorov, a 19th century Russian futurist who was interested in using science to resurrect every human who has ever lived. I immediately thought, oh, I just read about this dude in the ACT links! I went to check because I wanted to see if there was any mention of Knausgaard's novel, but I couldn't find the link. Then I thought maybe I read it in the comments but couldn't find Fyodorov mentioned there either. Did I read it somewhere else here? Was it on some related blog? Did I imagine the whole thing?
Fyodorov was discussed on the SSC subreddit at least once (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/f4nb39/more_on_nikolai_fyodorovich_fyodorov_one_of_the/) and Ilforte of The Motte discussed him at least once (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/j5dqwd/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_05/g8k3xwa/). But both examples were years ago.
Interesting but I hadn't read those before.
You might have seen things about Fyodorov in _anti-Rationalist_ writings. E.g., some people like to throw around the acronym "TESCREAL" (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism) -- with, it seems to me, a major goal of associating everyone who's interested in any of those things with the weirdest and/or nastiest things one can connect with any of them -- and the "C" there is for "cosmism", which is Fyodorov's thing.
If you see articles whose broad narrative is something like "Silicon Valley techbros and venture capitalists are spreading visions of god-like AI which we must either embrace worshipfully or fight at huge cost, motivated by their racist and eugenicist principles and their determination to sacrifice all present-day value on the altar of an imagined far future of allegedly far greater importance", then the chances are that you can trace them back to a smallish group of people who are very determinedly spreading that story. (Some key names: Emil Torres, Timnit Gebru, David Gerard; also El Sandifer, Emily Bender.) They're fond of bringing Fyodorov et al into it, I think mostly because (1) some of the Russian cosmists were pretty weird, and (2) for excellent reasons Russia has a pretty bad reputation in the west right now.
>(Some key names: Emil Torres, Timnit Gebru, David Gerard; also El Sandifer, Emily Bender.)
Yup. I just read yet another article by professor Emily Bender ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-to-focus-on-ais-real-harms-not-imaginary-existential-risks/ ). As usual, it hit all the far left cliches - describing politically incorrect views on the internet as "every kind of bigotry exhibited on the Internet". Prof Bender may be the type specimen for toxic wokester.
I feel like "far left" is quite a lot further left than anything in that article. I don't agree with Emily Bender, but "the type specimen for toxic wokester" feels waaay overblown.
Many Thanks! Maybe just call Bender _a_ toxic wokester professor? She doesn't want non-woke text in LLMs' training sets. She doesn't like policing of black areas. She calls training on publicly available data "stolen". She complains about the wages that people accept for RLHF work - which is exactly what pushes the politics of the LLMs' outputs in the direction that _she_ wants. She objects to the labor saving applications of LLMs - in a linear descendant of the Luddites. She even whines about the electric power to run the computers. Yetch!
Hmm. No. That wasn't it. Thanks, though.
I read something like: "Did you know that there was a group of 19th century Russians who believed a better way than socialism to achieve human equality was to create eternal life for everyone using science?"
Something like that only with a more Scott-like humorous tone. Then it had a link which I never clicked on. I have searched Marginal Revolution for it also. I don't tend to read anti-Rationalist writings.
EDIT: Knausgaard makes Fyodorov sound pretty cool and interesting. He points out how respected Fyodorov was by contemporary Russian luminaries like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Solovyov, and Tsiolkovsky, who influenced Korolyov and Glushko, masterminds of the Sputnik program.
There's https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKWhnNty3Hax4B7rR/resurrecting-all-humans-ever-lived-as-a-technical-problem but that doesn't sound all that much like what you describe.
The FDA seems to occasionally have low standards of evidence for granting marketing approval, specifically in terms of biofeedback devices. A company called GrayMatters is marketing a biofeedback procedure for PTSD, and the clinical study they described doesn't include a control group (https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf22/K222101.pdf). This probably matters, as adequately controlled ADHD trials have essentially never proven superiority to sham feedback - might PTSD be similar? Maybe.... Probably...
Knowing Scott & other's opinions about the FDA, I don't necessarily think the FDA should prevent companies from marketing devices that aren't proven effective on their own (without the patient's expectations). But stamping some form of FDA something on a product (and its intended application) does seem to signal that the product is effective by conventional medical standards. But all that's proven is that it's 'as effective' as existing devices, which were also tested in uncontrolled trials.
What happens when the device is used in the real world, outside the clinical trial, where patients aren't exposed to enthusiastic research personal utilizing a ground-breaking algorithm for linking some brain-measurements with other brain measurements? Maybe they don't respond. Maybe they waste their money, and maybe they waste time not trying other interventions that would more plausibly be effective or cheaper.
I read the document you link, half-thinking you were mistaken about the study, but nope, there was no control group. WTF? There was something in the document I didn't understand, that may explain, sort of, what's up. They keep talking about "the predicate study," and it seems like their point is that what the "predicate" study found also serves as a demonstration that their procedure is efficacious. And it would, if their procedure and device is the same as the other study's, and had the same target. Are they piggybacking their results on those for the ADHD study? If in both studies the device is being used to increase calmness, that would in fact be a useful intervention for people with either PTSD or ADHD, probably also for people with any of the many anxiety disorders, might be helpful for depressed people too, and, who knows, might aid alcoholics to quit drinking, etc etc Are they gonna get a separate patent for each use? Seems like there should be a way to block that nonsense. It's like having a separate patent for a painkiller for each of: headaches, joint pain, stomach pain, back pain, muscle pain from overexertion, etc. I have never heard the word predicate used to mean anything except the verb phrase in a sentence.
The predicate study thing is interesting - apparently the FDA deemed this device/procedure was proven 'substantially similar' to a couple of other devices/procedures. The prior FDA-approval about relaxation didn't include any data on efficacy, and the other approval used breathing biofeedback for PTSD, but similarly, included no control group in their study. The PTSD device/procedure was also deemed substantially similar to another device/procedure, but I stopped reading there, giving up hope. Even if the 5th turtle is a randomized controlled trial of breathing biofeedback, I wouldn't expect that a patient's expectations for breathing biofeedback are the same as for a sci-fi brain-recording biofeeback (seems like an easy argument against 'substantial similarity').
I'm going to accept that this type of FDA authorization has 1) low standards, 2) low transparency in reporting prior data (from predicate study), or 3) FDA approvers were bamboozled by a citation labyrinth.
Yeah, I agree that breathing biofeedback is its own turtle. So it's turtle shells filled with bullshit all the way down.
Finland's best-well-known expert on fertility and family formation questions now on FT: "Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are family-friendly policies no longer enough?" https://www.ft.com/content/500c0fb7-a04a-4f87-9b93-bf65045b9401
Probably the most important point Rotkirch makes is that we still don't really know what works, but pretty much nothing that has been tried has offered *substantial* help. The only fertility policy I know of that can relatively well be demonstrated to have caused a concrete, substantial leap in fertility rates has been the promise of Patriarch of Georgia (the country) to personally become the godfather of all the children born to families that already have two children (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/06/georgian-orthodox-church-mass-baptisms), and that's most likely not very repeatable elsewhere.
This post is very good: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/fertility-questions-the-role-of-population
Western countries don't fundamentally want higher birth rates, which is why every single attempt at increasing them has been extremely limited.
What would you consider a non-limited attempt? A number of "conservative" suggestions have been tried and found wanting - banning abortion has not helped Poland's birth rate, for exampe, and attempts to promote religion by the state in European countries like Poland and Russia have mainly just led to "cultural Christianity" of the sort that does not appear to leave to a desire to form big families.
Notably, we have not tried paying much more. I think that's probably the answer, but the actual number families would demand to make a child will sound high
Australia tried a "baby bonus" scheme of simply paying people a lump sum at the birth of each child, which appears to have worked -- there was certainly a substantial increase in birth rate during those years, from about 1.7 to nearly 2.0:
https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/725fc6764cb05023f5e24c6b5fb98658e26e2d6f/56-Figure4.1-1.png
The interesting thing is that the bonus wasn't all that high, just a few thousand dollars (exact implementation varied from year to year). This is substantially less than the cost of, say, government-funded paid maternity leave. But structuring it as a "cash bonus" made it more enticing.
It's also possible that other factors were going on; some versions of that same plot attribute the late-2000s bump to the children of boomers reaching child-bearing age themselves. But the bump seems too steep for that.
The Czechs did something similar. Brought their birth rate from near one up to 1.8. That being said, it was down last year and may be plateauing.
I suspect the right policy would pay up meagre amounts for the first child, a modest one for the second one, and then escalating amounts for subsequent children. Maybe something crazy like 100 thousand dollars for the 11th child. Most families would have 1 or 2 kids anyway and the baby bump bonus is unlikely to encourage marriage in the first place.
I think it would be easy to experiment and try.
But ultimately, western governments don't _want_ to increase birth rates, they want to increase immigration rates.
100%
My particular (vague, general, armchair) diagnosis for East Asia is a combination of economic liberalization and toxic gender roles surrounding marriage and parenthood, such that single women can slip through the cracks and live as freely as a single man. As long as they don't marry, they don't have to put up with the bullshit, and can have the life of the westerners they see on TV.
Fixing (or noticing) that seems to be beyond China, Japan, and Korea, but maybe Singapore has had better success? It's been decades since I've known anyone from there.
The Australians tried a program to discourage teen pregnancy which backfired pretty significantly.
So in a sense they may have discovered a way to boost TFR.
However, it's not clear whether this approach would work on older women, and obviously questionable whether boosting TFR by increasing the number of pregnant 16 year olds is wise.
It does seem though that just boosting exposure to actual babies might be effective, though.
When was this? This source https://www1.racgp.org.au/ajgp/2020/june/teenage-pregnancy suggests that teen pregnancy has been pretty monotonically decreasing ever since the early 1970s. There is a tiny increase in the 2000s (probably related to the Baby Bonus I posted about elsewhere).
One thing that's really interesting from that plot, actually, is that the birth rate to women in every age group _except_ 20-30 is very similar to what it was in 1936. The problem is that births to women in their twenties have ~halved, but birth rates to older and younger women have stayed roughly the same (or rather, returned to where they were).
The intervention was done 2003-2006 in Perth. Pilot program, both intervention and control group just a little over a thousand girls, so no surprise it wouldn't have national effect. Increased the teen pregnancy rate in the intervention group by about 40%, apparently. Summary published in the Lancet in 2016: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27570178/
There is one thing that makes me a little less confident about the results. The intervention was supposed to be randomized, but the difference between the unadjusted effect (80% increase) and effect after adjusting for confounders (35-40%) is very large. If the damn thing is 'randomized', why do they have huge confounders? Is 'randomized' here just 'we chose whole school districts at random, but they were very different'?
I suspect Singapore's policies (cheap housing for families with kids and strong encorougement of marriage and cohabitation) have been pretty effective: Singapore's absolute birthrate is low but it's way higher than Hong Kong, which is culturally very similar.
That said, it does suggest that even going all out on policies gives you a 50% boost at best, which isn't enough for East Asia or San Francisco.
It's 1.05, near the bottom of the list. More likely that there's something particularly bad about Hong Kong.
Singapore and Hong Kong are city-states, and cities have always had low fertility.
Which completely demolishes the YIMBY claim that building millions of apartments will make people start families, especially Singapore.
Moreover they're incredibly high density cities, and nobody wants to have three kids in a 35 square metre apartment.
(Something that the New Urbanism types who want to abolish cars and houses should think about.)
That's pretty much all they think about, you not liking their conclusions doesn't change that.
(We're not avoiding high-density cities, sorry. But we can make them more tolerable by filling them with safe, welcoming, comfortable public space outside of the apartments, for which by far the single lowest hanging fruit is doing away with car traffic and infrastructure.)
>We're not avoiding high-density cities, sorry.
What exactly is more important about high density cities than your population having relationships and starting families at the bare minimum replacement level?
The fact that you've got a lot of different take-out flood places in walking distance?
>But we can make them more tolerable by filling them with safe, welcoming, comfortable public space outside of the apartments, for which by far the single lowest hanging fruit is doing away with car traffic and infrastructure
So this has never been implemented anywhere before?
I admit that seems more like poisoned fruit to me, but then I suppose I'm not the target audience for city-dwelling. Car infrastructure, as I understand it, is more of a side effect of truck infrastructure, which in turn is sort of necessary for getting your city-maintenance materials (food, concrete, electronics, et cetera) into the bits of the city not directly adjacent to a rail line.
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan pulled off a major reversal as well but almost no one talks about them.
I'd never heard of their reversal until you mentioned it. Which surprised me, since I follow the research around TFR pretty well. Weird.
Doesn't seem like it's tied to anything in particular either. Per capita GDP in both has been increasing at a good clip over the appropriate time period, but neither are what you'd call rich and increasing prosperity usually makes a countries TFR decrease. No major policy changes that I could find. Most peculiar.
Fertility collapse “experts” intentionally ignore Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Georgia because it breaks their neat models of how fertility works. It’s not a “conspiracy” per se, just a refusal to acknowledge the weakness of their theories.
Yes, but in those cases it can't be connected to any (single) policy, the way as it is in Georgia.
I don't buy the simplistic Georgian explanation either tbh. Its probably a combination of many factors.
I'm a big believer in Zvi's argument[0] of "stop preventing births" before you try to encourage them. A *ton* of policies in modern democracies, while not specifically designed to decrease births, have the effect of doing so. Some of those policies have larger effect sizes than any of the pro-birth policies so of course they aren't going to work well.
In addition, there is the evidence that the single biggest predictor of whether or not someone will have kids is how difficult they think raising kids is, so our cultural push towards "maximum effort parenting" is maybe an even bigger source of the issue.
In other words, I'm not surprised that nothing that's been tried works very well. It's attacking the wrong part of the problem.
[0] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception
Gideon's substack proposed that it's party Baumol cost disease:
https://gideons.substack.com/p/fertility-free-fall
That said, I think there's something to the idea that maximally difficult parenting is making (middle and upper middle class) families hesitate before having kids.
Western governments have no economic incentive to increase births; it's much cheaper and quicker to import a bunch of 20-something immigrants, who can start working straight off the plane, than it is to educate brand new babies from birth.
This doesn't seem like a strong argument, because governments don't have economic incentives full stop.
Politicians are driven by a mixture of moral/ideological and electoral concerns - "is the the right thing to do?" and "will this help me win reelection?"
"Will this bolster the national economy?" factors in to both of those, obviously, but even if something makes economic sense no politician is going to support it unless they believe it will be either ethical or popular, and conversely even if something will be economically ruinous politicians who think it will be one or both of those things may well still back it (see, for example, World War II!)
Except that importing immigrants, especially if they're to be allowed to do valuable, well-paid work, seems to be politically difficult.
Also, birth rates are dropping in a lot of the immigrant producing countries.
>Except that importing immigrants, especially if they're to be allowed to do valuable, well-paid work, seems to be politically difficult.
Yes, just ignore all the western countries bringing in millions of immigrants
And tell me - what is this valuable and well paying work that Somalians could be doing if only they were allowed to?
It's not politically difficult at all. Both parties agree. If anyone disagrees, you call them racist. Easy!
Do you genuinely think that both parties are pro-immigration or is this some sort of joke?
Depends on the type of immigration? The right's generally been in favor of brain-draining the rest of the world, and welcoming law-abiding, rule-following people who want to work hard and enjoy freedom and grill. (Unfortunately, these days our legal immigration system makes that nigh-impossible.) Yeah, there are nativist wackos, but surely you wouldn't want to define political parties by the views of the most extreme people in that party?
Both are pro-capitalist, from which support for policies pushing living standards below (society-wide) subsistence level whenever you have the opportunity to fill the resulting gap in workforce with outside migration immediately follows. That one of them makes performative racist noises against the immigrants' cultural characteristics as a distraction does not meaningfully change that.
Yes, I endorse all of this! Awareness of modern comforts and conveniences seems to disguise the fact that in many ways, concretely, raising children is more difficult and costly than it's ever been before, especially when you consider opportunity cost. And cultural norm that says that parenting is, and ought to be, first and foremost, EXTREMELY HARD, in addition to scaring off potential parents on the margin, makes it that much more difficult look for solutions or responses to this problem.
Those attempted-replication results for the Kahan numeracy thing are pretty wild. And they may not show "that people with higher numeracy employ it selectively in a way that favors their personal beliefs", but they sure do seem to show that when faced with politically-charged questions, people interpret evidence in ways biased by their personal beliefs and pay less attention to the actual evidence. Which seems like it's more relevant to what Scott's saying than the (admittedly intriguing) previous finding that "people with higher numeracy employ it selectively" such that higher numeracy makes them wronger.
Wild thing #1: in the supposedly non-political case (rash getting better/worse), conservatives and liberals have indistinguishable results when the numbers show that the new treatment makes the rash worse -- but they have _extremely different_ results when the numbers show that the new treatment makes the rash better. (It looks as if the liberals/worse and liberals/better results are very similar to one another and also to conservatives/worse. But conservatives/better is completely different: the most numerate conservatives are apparently flipping a coin to decide better/worse, and less numerate conservatives are doing just slightly worse than that.)
This is weird enough that I wonder whether something is wrong with either the experimental procedure or the statistics.
Thing #2 (not especially _wild_ but relevant to the discussion): this definitely seems like it shows ideology affecting people's ability to do the statisics right.
Faced with figures suggesting that gun control makes crime go up ("congruent with conservative ideology"), everyone does better with better numeracy (so _that_ intriguing aspect of the original research indeed doesn't replicate), but (1) for conservatives and liberals alike, numeracy makes much less difference than it does for the corresponding "rash" question, and (2) conservatives fairly consistently get it right more than for the "rash" question and liberals fairly consistently get it right less than for the "rash" question. In other words: for this scenario, for both conservatives and liberals, their assessments are pushed in the direction of their ideology, and numeracy makes less difference (suggesting that in some sense they're doing less _thinking about the numbers_ and more _reacting on the basis of ideology_).
Faced with figures suggesting that gun control makes crime go down ("congruent with liberal ideology"), the curves now look much more like the "rash / better" question: conservatives have a much flatter curve (being more numerate makes little difference) while liberals show the expected numeracy-helps pattern. The conservatives' success rate is significantly worse here than on the "gun control / crime up" question.
If I had to summarize the results shown here, I think it would go something like this. Say that the "baseline" expectation is that people will get this sort of question wrong 80-90% of the time at low numeracy, and gradually improve to getting it right about 60% of the time at high numeracy. And say that someone is "number-blind" if their way of processing the evidence doesn't make any use of their numeracy skills at all but just picks each answer with some fixed probability.
Both groups start off behaving more or less according to baseline expectations, but then:
(1) For cases where change makes things better, conservatives shift about 3/4 of the way to being number-blind with p=0.4. And then:
(2) For evidence that goes contrary to their ideology on guns, both conservatives and liberals shift about half-way to being number-blind with p=0.2.
(3) For evidence that goes _for_ their ideology on guns, conservatives shift about half-way to being number-blind with p=0.6. (For some reason nothing analogous to this happens to liberals.)
I don't claim that this analysis actually captures anyone's cognitive processes! And to make more sense of it I'd want to look at a bunch of other questions. But it seems clear to me that even though this replication attempt doesn't find the headline-grabbing "numeracy hurts you on ideological questions" thing, it _does_ find that people pay less attention to the evidence on ideological questions, and I think it also suggests that for conservatives anything of the form "we changed this and things got better" is somewhat ideological.
(Note: anything of the form "being liberal/conservative makes you do X with probability p" could instead be more like "a fraction p of liberals/conservatives do X with probability 1". Or anything in between. I expect there's at least a bit of that going on here.)
I think what's going on may have less to do with impairment of reasoning power when some belief we hold dear is being attacked, and more to do with paying less attention to the data under those circumstances. I'm aware of that tendency in myself. If I read something that comes from the realm of ideas that irritate the hell out of me, and are held by groups I dislike and see as harmful, a lot of my attention goes to being angry and formulating a sharp response. I'm likely to just skim the content that comes later, and often gives information or stats or reasoning to shore up the original claim, rather than read it carefully and think it over.
Here's a triviality: more and more often I encounter websites and apps that require login, but do not allow display of the characters entered in the password db. This annoys\infuriates me. Is there a good reason devs do this, or are they being careless? I assume the low energy answer will be that it's for better security, but that just seems totally weak to me in almost all cases.
This was 100% of all password fields in the beginning, now they often have an eye symbol on the right of the text field.
These decisions are rarely made by devs by the way, but product owners. Also even in developer written applications the default when using a password field (something built into the OS) is not to show the text.
I'm more annoyed by the increasingly common habit of putting username/email entry and password entry on two different pages. You enter your username, click submit, then enter your password, and hit submit again.
This is actually a situation where it's almost _more_ annoying with a password manager, because you have to click to your manager extension, hit "fill out", then click submit, then go back to your manager, hit fill out again, then hit submit _again_.
If there is a dramatic security benefit to this practice, I'd love to hear it. I can't imagine what it is other than annoying.
It also sounds less secure, if the system indicates whether or not a user ID is valid before a password has been entered.
The principle should be "Give authenticated users as much relevant information as they need, but unauthenticated users the least". So if one or other of a user ID and password is invalid, then the login process should not indicate which!
I don't think it's a security benefit. I think it's because sites are often using multiple different login systems on the backend, like outsourcing to Apple/Google/Facebook, in addition to the in-house password option. (Or, sometimes, they don't bother with a password and skip right to 2FA)
The first step of putting in your ID lets them figure out where to take you on the next page.
Surely this could be done while still having the user input on the same page? The login program just holds the password until it knows where to submit it based on whatever it finds by submitting the email.
In the ideal case you won't even need to enter a password as you'll already be authenticated with the other service which will pass back a token to that effect. The other side is liability, if it can all help it the website would prefer to not touch your password (or credit card number) or even in theory have access to it.
Is that really the ideal case? I've been avoiding doing google account linking for a long time. I use a password manager and just have a seperate, secure password for each service. I guess technically both are single points of failure, but they both seem ~equal from a security point of view and the password manager seems better from a privacy point of view (to whatever extent you think google is bad about privacy, which I do)
Ideal case from the website developer standpoint (in that it minimize friction).
But often there is no password to enter. When you authenticate through FB, you don't give the subscriber page your FB password - instead it redirects you to a Facebook page which verifies your login and then passes an authentication token back to the subscriber page.
That being said, they could probably still do what you're talking about through some clever Javascript.
>Is there a good reason devs do this
It probably wasn't the default behavior of the library or third party client they are using. And/Or it wasn't part of the spec.
I am surprised you are seeing this more and more often. The idea of someone stealing your password by looking at it is an outdated worry. Of course it's possible, but very unlikely, especially relative to the risk of data leaks, hacking, phishing, etc.
I just use a password manager, solves the issue perfectly.
It's supposed to stop someone reading your password over your shoulder. Ideally, there would be a way to disable that when you're sitting in a room by yourself, but very often there is not
also it's nice when you are screen sharing in a video converence
I once worked with a guy who could pick up passwords by watching fingers on the keyboard.
Edit: He used the skill to gain access to a spreadsheet with the salary of *everyone* who worked for the company. Caused a bit of a stir at the time by showing it around.
Any recommendations for funny novels? For someone who enjoys Scott's prose style but doesn't need high concept stuff.
John Dies at the End (although high concept, it's the funniest novel I've ever read).
"Bellwether" by Connie Willis
"Good Omens" by Gaiman and Pratchett
Apathy And Other Small Victories was a pure nonsense story that had a lot more sex than I was expecting, but some very funny writing.
- Goddammit Bryce, people are supposed to have more faith in each other. Landlords especially. I'm living in your building. That makes you kind of like my dad. Family is supposed to be important. When I stiffed him on next month's rent, then he could throw me out with a clear conscience. Until then he was just being a bad father and a dick. -
I read that book based on the cover when I was about 13 and was baffled by it. I've never seen it referenced anywhere since, so this was a wild comment to read.
I reread it when I was 24 and I suspect I still wasn't old enough to get it.
I picked it up after TheVoiceOfDog used it in an LP to fill time while he did a sidequest that involved standing still for four minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFCDNP0IKjI&t=2090s
The Time Machine Did It (for black-hole-tier joke density)
Ready, Okay! (if you can stand having your heart torn out and stomped on between chuckles)
Terry Pratchett's "Going Postal" is IMO more Scott-like then his other stuff.
The one or two Pratchett novels I read are indeed quite Scott-like. This looks like a good rec. Thank you.
If you happen to be in the mood for Harry Potter fanfic, "Seventh Horcrux" is (heretically) my favorite.
Mick Herron's Slough House series are laugh out loud funny in a lot of places, especially the sarcasm and comebacks of some of the characters. They are about the adventures of a small team of disgraced spies outcast from MI5 for various misdeeds and shortcomings, career-wrecking but not serious enough to warrant outright firing. They are based in a drab semi-derelict building called Slough House. But despite their disadvantages, and official neglect and sometimes obstruction, they always seem to solve their cases.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mick+herron+slough+house
A couple of these novels have already been made into TV series, I believe with more planned, although I haven't seen any of these. But on the whole, they've had good reviews.
Totally new name to me. Looks interesting. And contemporary. Thank you.
Prizzi’s Honor.
Catch-22.
Seconded. Also, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books are pretty funny (though be careful, the last one is a downer).
Edit: Oh, and I forgot Thomas Pynchon! The Crying of Lot 49 and Bleeding Edge are both quite funny, though with shorter segments of deadly seriousness.
I thought Infinite Jest was very funny as well, if you're willing to take the plunge.
Pynchon's reputation has always kinda scared me away. I think it's centered around Gravity's Rainbow. Good to know he's funny. Crying of Lot 49 looks digestible.
Very silly and they rely on some basic understanding of the Warhammer 40k universe, at least at the level of 'this is a grimdark universe, nominally played straight these days,' but I genuinely enjoy and find amusing the Ciaphas Cain series from that universe. Especially the audiobooks.
Started reading this on your recommendation. So far, I love it! Thank you for the recommendation.
Intriguing enough to warrant an investigation. Thank you.
FWIW, I've likewise heard that they're actually worth reading even if you don't care about the rest of the universe, but I haven't actually picked them up yet.
This is going sound weird as hell but The Virgin Suicides has passages that a very funny. The first time I read it I had to put the book down and walk away from it because I was laughing so hard I was afraid I might not be getting enough oxygen.
Note: the book really isn’t about the suicides themselves. It’s more about the dopey neighborhood adolescent boys that are watching things play out and their reaction to them.
I've heard it recommended many times. The movie was quite good. I will try it. Thank you.
I haven’t seen it but love this Soundtrack by the French band Air
MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors. Very funny. But a book of its time, and therefore not politically correct to modern standards.
Whoa. Did not realize MASH was a book first. Looks up my alley. Thanks.
Oh yeah. Finest kind. ;)
Lucky Jim
A Confederacy of Dunces
Both fantastic books. I was disappointed by most everything else I read by Kingsley Amis afterwards. Anything else in this vein?
- Martin Amis (especially Money)
- Evelyn Waugh (especially A Handful of Dust)
- John Niven
To Say Nothing of the Dog
John Dies At The End
> To Say Nothing of the Dog
I'll put in a plug for the "source" work, "Three Men In A Boat", which is also very funny.
I love Waugh and have read almost everything he's written. Saw the thank you for smoking movie, but was only vaguely aware it was a book first. I will look at it. Thank you.
Ah, *The Loved One*. They told me Francis Hingsley/ They told me you were hung/With red protruding eyeballs/And black protruding tongue. /I wept as I remember/How often you and I/Had laughed at San Francisco/And now it's here you lie./All pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore . . .
I predict that 2024 will be less political then 2020
https://monkyyyscience.substack.com/p/prediction-2024-will-be-less-poltical
fight me
Nah, I want you to be right, so even if I don't think you are, what's the point? I win either way. ;-P
Silly question.
There are apps around like Windy and Ventusky that will show me a highly detailed map of real-time data like temperature, wind speed, particulate matter, and so on, based on data streams from weather monitoring stations from all over the world.
How come there isn't anything similar specifically for real-time CO2 tracking? It seems like this data would be highly relevant for anyone interested in climate change, and simple CO2 monitors seem to be pretty readily available on Amazon. But if there's anything out there aggregating CO2 data into a real-time map, I haven't been able to find it. (NASA does have a couple of satellites that perform detailed CO2 measurements from space, and some very pretty animations of those measurements, but I don't know if those measurements are available in real-time. Nothing seems to be visualizing them in real-time that I could find, at least.)
I did note that Windy has a real-time tracker for atmospheric carbon *monoxide*, and at a glance the hot spots on that layer seem to line up roughly with where I'd expect CO2 emissions to be highest. Do carbon dioxide emissions generally correlate with carbon monoxide emissions? I don't know. But maybe the makers of Windy assume that they're close enough that they didn't need to model CO2 distribution separately.
what would be use? on an hourly basis changes in co2 concentration have no meaning for climate change and barely any meaning for most people who are not doing things like fermentation or cell culture
While CO and CO2 are both produced by combustion of carbon-containing stuff, I would expect CO lasts way less time in the atmosphere because it can react with oxygen, so its presence in the atmosphere will be more localised near emitters than CO2.
CO2 is about the same in Manhattan and in the middle of the Pacific ocean so its not a useful metric.
I thought CO2 is extremely well-mixed in the atmosphere and so geographic differences should not be important, which is why Mauna Loa is used as a good overall reference point
It seems like there's enough variation that NASA is able to make animations like this with their satellite measurements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syU1rRCp7E8 But, granted, if you look at the scale, the difference between the high and low end is pretty small, so you're probably right that it diffuses fairly quickly in absolute terms.
Thanks, that's a bit more variation than I expected (+/- 2.5%)
I'd expect that those apps are using GFS data, not actual live weather station data. I don't know what kind of atmospheric gas products they export from those model runs. That might be the main limiting factor there.
Given humans breathe co2 and weather stations tend to be near populated areas it may be extra useless; while carbon monoxide is a pollution metric that probably health agencies worry about?
Proposal: strategic voting is irrational, while sincere voting is the best way to ensure your policy proposals are implemented - including voting for 3rd parties that have NO chance of winning.
Every election, people lament that "there are only two choices, and both of them are bad." I propose that this thinking isn't just defeatist, but actually wrong. Whether you subscribe to mistake theory or conflict theory, your best strategy is to vote your conscience. I'm sure there's more nuance than this, but let's have the debate!
It's easy to make the case that in the long run, voting your conscience sends a signal that you're dissatisfied with the top two candidates and would like to see a change. But I want to make a stronger case: that sincere voting sends an immediate signal that helps get your governance preferences implemented, and that it does so more strongly than strategic voting does. Now, I'll concede that any vote is only as strong as a marginal vote - so the effect size is still limited, but to the extent that a vote has an effect, sincere voting is non-zero, while strategic voting's effect size is often zero or even negative. Wait, how could that be possible if your sincere choice has no possible chance of getting elected?
It's no secret that politicians are always looking forward to the next election. Even in the face of term limits, a politician's party will want to retain control, and the lame duck politician will want to cement a legacy of electoral victory and prestige within the party that supported/funded them. In other words, all politicians look forward to the next election. This is true even the DAY AFTER the election!
Many campaign staffers directly involved in the election join the administration, but others refocus to the next election. They pore over the election results, cross tabs, county-by-county breakdowns, and exit polls. While you might suspect that the losing party will be interested in these results, so they can make a better pitch next time, this is also true of the winning party. They want to make a better pitch next time, too. Complacency is how you lose elections.
Early in the new administration, a few things will become clear. By changing the way the new administration governs, certain votes will become available - even if the new strategy doesn't match the promises made on the campaign trail. Your choice is: #1 - keep campaign promises or #2 - break campaign promises. The risk in breaking a campaign promise is that you'll lose voters who were PERSUADED to vote for you because you made that promise, in exchange for voters who would have voted for you if you had chosen an alternative approach. If the number in category #1 is larger, you're going to keep your promise. If category #2 is larger, you should probably break the campaign promise.
Fortunately for many politicians, lots of people are unwilling to change their votes based on actual governance, because they vote strategically. This often shows up in the election results and exit polls. If someone is persuaded to vote for a politician because they're not the other politician, keeping or breaking a campaign promise won't sway their vote. If you're a politician, these strategic voters allow you to break campaign promises, because these constituents are unwilling to change their vote in the face of electoral infidelity. Therefore, a large percentage of your support will absolutely still vote for you based on how you campaign and not based on what promises you make. In other words, strategic voting ENCOURAGES politicians to break campaign promises, because it withholds the one tool a voter has to hold a politician to their word: the threat of withdrawal of support. (Realistically, there's also volunteering for the campaign, choosing not to vote, and campaign contributions. I'm simplifying.)
Contrast this with the voter who is sincere. Perhaps they vote for one of the two major party candidates, thinking, "I would like them to govern this way!" They're disappointed by the eventual breaking of campaign promises, and subsequently vote for a third party candidate who more closely reflects their values. Directly after the election, campaign experts going through the cross tab results notice that they could get X% of voters in district Y by subtly changing their policies to reflect the priorities of the losing third-party candidate Z.
They reason that they're not risking the support of strategic voters by making this policy shift, while they will be able to campaigning for re-election on a platform that includes, "I did [policy supported by candidate Z]! Vote for me." Last time they didn't run on that policy, because it's not a winning general strategy. So they won't talk about it in campaign speeches. Instead, they'll create district-specific mailers touting the 'policy achievement' to those voters who care about it most.
The practical effect is this: sincere voting is more likely to get your preferred governance strategies implemented, *regardless of who wins the election*. This is true, whether your preference actually is one of the main party candidates, or if your preference is down ballot. A vote for the main candidate says, "more of the same, please" and allows the candidate room to compromise less in order to secure re-election, but its power rests in whether you had to be persuaded to vote in favor of a preferred candidate, not just in opposition. A vote down ballot signals that your vote can be earned by any candidate willing to do things differently - including the incumbent.
For example, if the main party candidate has overwhelming support through the primary and the general election, they're unlikely to significantly change their positions, since those won both the general and primary races. However, if they narrowly lost the primary, they will perceive a threat within their party and focus on winning votes in whichever districts they need in order to continue to ward off a primary challenge. OTOH, if they easily win their primary but narrowly lose the general election, they'll look to general election polling to see which districts can be won over with some policy manipulation that's different from what they campaigned on. Each sincere vote affects that calculation in a small way.
Compare this to strategic voting, where there's no guarantee the winner of the election is even going to care about your governance strategies after the election. "But the party platform!" Party policies and priorities shift and drift over time. Sometimes the priorities are dramatic: Democrats were once the most hawkish party (very supportive of getting into WWII), then after Vietnam they became doves while Republicans were pro-war (generally), then this flipped again with Trump, but maybe not quite (Neocons are still quite powerful). Party loyalties are to the persuadable voters. The platform the party ran on in the last election is meaningful only to the extent that it continues to persuade voters in the next election.
The problem with the strategic vote is that it pulls you away from the 'persuadable voter' pool, thereby removing any power to influence actual governance. A strategic vote is almost always justified on the basis of "but I can't let the other side win." But how would this work in practice? Is the thinking that maybe your single vote will be enough to sway the election one way or the other? That's not applicable even for most local elections. For a general election - and especially for president - it's as close to "false" as possible.
An analogy: My friend told me she was going to spend $2 playing the lottery on the off chance she was going to in the billion-dollar jackpot.
I said, "That's dumb. You're not going to win."
"You can't know that! Someone wins, they publish it every time."
"Right, but it won't be you. I am more certain of this than I am that I'll be employed tomorrow, or that I won't get into a car crash this week, or of nearly any other thing I can predict today. Statistically, I'm confident you won't win with >>99.9999% accuracy."
Now, there are more Power Ball winners running around the USA than there are individuals whose single vote decision changed the outcome of the US Presidential Election. As it happens, this year we (likely) have a choice between two candidate with a 4-year track record of how they would govern in the Executive Branch. You can choose to vote strategically or sincerely. Voting strategically is like taking a bigger risk than playing the Power Ball that your one vote is going to make a difference. To my mind, this is irrational. Or you can vote sincerely and send a signal to both parties how they can win your vote in the next election, and how you'd like to see the winner govern in order to earn that vote.
One issue this idea runs into is term limits. If a president wins their second term, they cannot be re-elected a third term anyway so their incentive is to act according to their own interest. (Though, they may still have some interest in helping other members of their party win in the future.)
I think if we want real choices between more than two options, we will (assuming you're in the US like me) have to move away from the first-past-the-post voting system to something like ranked choice. Condorcet voting systems are highly regarded among theorists, but unfortunately it takes a bit of explaining for the general public to even realize that there is more than one possible voting system. If you want to look into voting systems more, I'd recommend also reading about Nash equilibrium if you haven't already.
I agree that term limits dilute the value of sincere voting for potential lame-duck candidates. However, I think the significant power of political parties in systems like the US system are strong enough to heavily minimize this effect. The legion of staffers and other political operatives that surround a candidate are not term limited, and are certain to continue their careers within the political system long after the election. A candidate could surely push back against that pressure, but the pressure will be there even during a lame-duck term.
Yes I'm aware of other voting systems, and I agree that FPTP highly incentivizes strategic voting over, say, approval voting. Every voting system will have some degree of strategic voting, though - even Condorcet systems. (I'll concede that strategic voting is more difficult in more complex systems, but then you risk concerns of legitimacy and trust issues where most voters don't understand the mechanics of the system.) Although I don't think these are arguments to just accept an inferior FPTP system, I do think that because you'll never truly be rid of strategic voting it's necessary to think past the voting system itself.
Public Choice Theory can be leveraged to influence the candidates most likely to win. The winning candidate should still be accountable to the policy preferences of the voters. Currently they're able to game the system to only be accountable to oligarchs within the major political parties whose political preferences are entirely separate from stated party platforms/priorities. Theoretically, under a sincere voting paradigm, even a FPTP candidate should not be able to game the system that hard. It's strategic voting that allows the level of blatant corruption we see in the current system. (Among other things.)
It's the problem of strategic voting over sincere voting that all these voting systems are trying to solve - which is indeed a big problem! - but my point is that maybe people are being deceived into thinking that strategic voting is ... well, a strategic choice. I think it's actually sincere voting that holds the only strategic value in getting your preferences implemented.
> Correction to Psychopolitics Of Trauma...
> Correction to Should The Future Be Human...
If you have such corrections to your posts, *please* update them (inline or an a note at the bottom)! Your posts are read and linked to by many people, particularly the ones regarding studies and psychology, so it's important to update them if you're aware of a mistake that can mislead people or hurt your argument.
Does anyone know of a map of Ukraine showing how the frontlines shifted between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023?
This is a collection of all of ISW's maps of the conflict from Feb 23, 2022 through Dec 31, 2023: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/733fe90805894bfc8562d90b106aa895
Russian site tracking area of control: https://lostarmour.info/map (drag a slider or pick a date right above the map)
Ukrainian site tracking area of control: https://deepstatemap.live/en (click a circular arrow in the bottom-right corner)
The third map on this page shows the shift in territorial control from November 11, 2022 to December 12, 2023. Not exactly the dates you mention, but I don’t believe there were any big moves in the weeks on either end (or in the middle, as you can see) so it’ll be pretty close:
https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/russia-ukraine-war-report-card-dec-12-2023
Now, I know we're just a bunch of know-nothings here in the hinterlands, but in the wake of ... ah, recent events, and of learning that there is a lively, little-regulated gain-of-function research industry all over the damn place, even if that has not been mentioned here - is there any reason that people should accept this?
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/brazoria-county-monkey-research-lab-worries-neighbors/
The county has said it doesn't want it. The nearest "big" town has said it doesn't want it.
My favorite quote from that article:
"Is it clear why Charles River Labs chose this area for primate research?
"Well, they told me that there were a few different reasons ... They were looking for a community where you have people already working with animals and agriculture – potentially this would be palatable to people who already work in this space."
[What, are we supposed to eat the monkeys when they're done being tested?]
Translation: the county is full of rednecks so we thought they wouldn't care.
I'm curious why you think that this plan will have anything at all to do with Gain of Function research? Even if primates are occasionally used for GoF research, I don't think that justifies a blanket concern over all primate research facilities. If it was, then we should be against every single virology lab.
One would be justified in asking what kind of research is going to be done, and there are lots of non GoF reasons to potentially be against this facility, but bringing it up without any kind of reason (that I can see) feels very much like FUD and instinctively puts my back up.
That seems fine to me
**IF** intentionally making animals sick wasn't stupid for human reasons, farm community who you know, feed america and know food doesn't come from idk starbucks (what do vegans even think they eat) on a primal level; should be more open to discussing trade offs of animal and human well being that city slickers won't
I should think they'd be more interested in not tying up 500 acres of productive land in order to make monkeys demented. (Note that Texas already has a large area dedicated to the "rescue" (old folks' home) of superannuated lab monkeys; it's a depressing place. Which they also managed to locate next to a nature preserve.)
land usage debates and... ummm elderly people, exist everywhere so why would it effect a choice?
The elderly people aren't in open-air cages making a sort of aboveground Dantean circle.
There are people on both sides of the gain-o-function debate who don't treat animals as more important then human needs; I dont see bring up that sort of language as anything but it basically projecting religious beliefs around on everyone.
Id live next to a slaughter house, Ive bought meat from one a 20 minute drive away, I *wouldnt* ever tolerate a bioterrorism lab near me, but if they are only talking to peta they may be confused as to why.
Yeah, I don't see the connection to GoF research other than as an opportunity to add fnords. There's stuff that can best be studied in monkey models. You can argue that we ought not to use monkeys in experiments because they're too sentient, or that we ought not to use any animals in experiments (though that's practically saying to shut down a ton of biology and medical research--I think animal models for disease are basically how most research on treating various diseases is done), but those arguments ought to stand on their own.
Here's another non-paywalled story:
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/brazoria-county-commissioners-unanimously-reject-monkey-facility-plans
Advice for being a better rationalist when having ADHD?
I mean for example, my episodic memory is very sparse and unorganized, how can I better know if I update on something and how much?
Write a diary? If you decide to update on something, write your previous and current beliefs and what made you update. Review it at the end of a year.
This looks like solid advice but also seems too unattainable. Among other things, I would have difficulty to decide if a thing would be needed in the future to be written, or it’s too small. But yeah, I probably should adopt a diary of at least some sort—I don’t have any for now.
The standard advice here is to just try it, accept that it won't be perfect, and figure it out as you go along. Ideally you'll eventually develop an intuition about what's needed and what's too small.
# PROJECTS
0: Universal Label, an electronic device.
1: Sculptures with LLM-machines inside them so depressed humans can get consultation from Yoda, requires funding.
2: Press that legally sells our own prints of expensive textbooks for ¼ of the original price.
3: Startup that sell waiting lobby music.
4: Autonomous AI agent research project.
---
# MY E-MAIL
fuvmteyz@pm.me
#0 and #3 seem appealing. #1, #2, and #4, not so much.
The idea is that you have a 3D printable sticking side that can be drilled, nailed, glued, hot glued, magnetisized, velcroed or something else. If this break no problem.
Then there is the label which is an E-ink screen + Coin-size battery + RFID / Bluetooth / Other technology. It's safely detacheable from the 3D-printed part
The coin-size battery is put inside the label electronic using a 3D printed part that works bit like SIM-slot.
There is a waterproofed / epoxied version of the label and an easy-to-repair version. In both versions the battery can be changed, but the non-waterproofed one allows for hacking.
As for the size of it, about the size of an adult thumb, the platform and the label electronic combined. Except less thick.
Now you use Excel / LibreOffice / In-Built sheet editor to create a sheet that determines the labels and this sheets goes to your machine, say phone with Bluetooth, which then assists you to rewrite all the labels.
Temprature & heat protection is a minor problem. This may work inside a car, but to be truly universal one would want it to perform outdoors too. For improved visibility, one can always rig a mod using the 3D printed platform (say add a small light to it).
Sometime ago I asked for advice on selecting a computer for a DAW (basically, music recording setup). I ended up getting a mac, and it's working out quite well. Just wanted to thank everyone who responded and helped me to make a good decision.
-----------------MIDDLE EAST SUBTHREAD------------------
Hanania did a take called Why Palestine Can't Deliver Peace: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-palestine-cant-deliver-peace?r=f8fjn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I find it pretty convincing. The comment section is full of yes-sayers and the occasional pro-palestinian who mostly mark their dissent. Does anyone know a good counterargument I could read?
Eh, seems legit to me. Part of having power is being able to tell your people to stop: a lot of cease-fires are a demonstration of power, which tells the rest of the world "I can turn the violence on and off at will", which means "I am worth negotiating with", and thus allows me to negotiate to achieve my greater aims (assuming I have any greater aims other than violence). Can Hamas deliver a cease-fire? Fatah and Hezbollah seem to have hit some sort of equilibrium where they kill a few Israelis now and then to maintain face, and Israel retaliates by killing about three times as many to prove that they're tougher, and everyone goes home "happy" until the next time. I guess most of us on other continents thought Hamas was the same way, until a few months ago.
AMA for those interested: I'm a retired Major from the IDF who just finished about 100 days of reserve duty (in a non-combative role). I also have a degree in Middle-Eastern History, so some added perspective there. I'm only semi-available these days, and some things I won't be able to answer obviously, but feel free to ask.
What's your thoughts on the civilian/military casualty ratio on the Gazan side, and especially, what factors make that more complex than people over here might think?
I've seen estimates that the death toll is 60-66% civilians, but those are just assuming that all adult men are "military" and all adult women and all children are "civilian", and we know that none of those things is completely true. There's the absence of uniforms, there are child soldiers, there are suicide bombers, anyone can pick up a gun or a bomb, and frankly I'd expect that a lot of the population would be willing to, especially after 3 months of this. You mentioned "Black Hawk Down"; do you just have to wait and see who decides to shoot at you?
Is there any way of telling who is a member of the "military wing" of Hamas, or another of the militias? Is there even a distinction between the military and civilian sides of Hamas? I'd imagine that there are some people who have the standard jobs of keeping civil government functioning; do they count as Hamas?
Good question with no good answer. As I detailed in my response to Ajb (see the last section of my answer there, 4 and onwards), there are indeed clear women and children that are actively or passively taking part in the conflict.
There is simply no good source and no good way to measure. The only numbers we have are the ones provided by "Gaza's Ministry of Health", which is a nice western sounding name for Hamas. The numbers are likely inflated, but by how much? hard to tell. Even if there were journalists who would have gotten some approximation, it would have been difficult to believe them as well as many journalists working for international news firms such as AP or Reuters have been shown to be either Hamas personnel themselves or having a direct family member being part of some militia (usually Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad).
I can account to the fact that the numbers the IDF states publicly is the numbers we use internally as well - there is no exaggeration there. IIRC the IDF's current ratio estimate is for 2 civilians for every militant. In an area where kids are participating as suicide bombers and militants actively hide between civilians as human shields it's hard to get lower than that. I can elaborate though that the Israeli bar for collateral damage has been lowered; in previous operation in Gaza which I took part in, if a terrorist's children were in the house with him, we wouldn't attack the house. This is not the case in this operation, due to the fact that we are not trying to surgically cause damage to Hamas/Islamic Jihad, but our goal is to destroy these organizations.
Regarding the civilian wing of Hamas, I don't know the policy, but I honestly think that at least a part of them isn't currently not being targeted as they are the ones maintaining some sort of civilian infrastructure in the strip. I can personally and vehemently attest to the fact that the IDF is trying to not cause a humanitarian crisis in the strip as much as it can under the current circumstances; in all briefs and debriefs there are always slides detailing the current civilian situation in the strip, divided to areas, and in detail. I do believe that after a better peacekeeping/civilian authority force is established, these Hamas personnel will also be targeted (perhaps only arrested; depends on the details).
> we are not trying to surgically cause damage to Hamas/Islamic Jihad, but our goal is to destroy these organizations
I'd be interested in hearing a more detailed description of this, if you can? I don't have a clear picture of what it would look like. Obviously, some names and faces are known, and the tunnels are clearly Hamas's infrastructure. And you mentioned destroying machine shops that can produce rockets. Is it a process of gathering intelligence and running down leads?
Also, do you ever get assistance from ordinary Gazans, the way some Iraqis helped the US forces over there? (I'm guessing not.) What's the normal range of attitudes you encounter from non-combatant Gazans?
Generally speaking, when thinking in military terms, destroying an organization means one of two things, and usually a mix of both: Either destroying it's capability to act (e.g. through killing personnel, destroying outposts, denying supply) or eliminating its will to act (perhaps because it's leaders/soldiers believe that the price isn't worth it; or they don't believe they will be able to achieve their goals; etc.). On practical terms, this means a much more systematic approach to destroying physical assets of these organizations, and additionally, trying to cause most of its agents to stop being aligned with the organization's goal (e.g. because the civilian population does not support it anymore, or the moral of its soldiers is extremely low). In response to your questions, yes, that includes gathering intelligence (which I assume include cooperation from ordinary Gazans, though that is very far from where I was in the military so I have nothing of value really to say on that topic) and running down leads.
Because I was very far away from the front and this is far from my work in reserve duty, I can only echo what I heard from friends regarding range of attitudes from Gazans - Some hate us more, some hate Hamas more, some believe what Hamas is doing and did on October 7th was justified (though it is unclear whether they have been denied access to the footage and evidence of the atrocities it committed), and I think generally speaking, overall every Gazan is much more sad, afraid or angry. War is a terrible thing.
I can refer you to the polls that happened during the ceasefire among Gazans, though some time has passed.
(Sorry, it was John Schilling who brought up "Black Hawk Down", not you.)
Have you seen the arguments about why inflating death counts would be difficult? What do you think of them?
https://tildes.net/~news/1bwx/israel_hamas_war_megathread_november_6_to_november_15#comment-b4vr
Haven't seen them until now, just skimmed them. I generally think the points are well made. I'm not certain that everybody in Gaza has an ID these days, as the PA isn't controlling it anymore but Hamas; but they should have their own bookkeeping (and then they would be able to maintain internal consistency while telling the outside world wrong numbers). In practice though, in past wars indeed the numbers weren't inflated much, but this is a different conflict entirely and it is very hard to asses the reliability. How do you judge the death toll in an area you don't have access too? Do they indeed manage to differentiate the "heat of the moments claims" that are extremely common and are blatant propaganda (I've lost count how many times a single Israeli bombing was reported to have caused hundreds of dead minutes after the bombs fell, before anyone would have time to accurately count) to the honest final reports? Good questions, no good answers. I think the numbers aren't very far from the truth, but hard to judge.
I think the answer is that early estimates about specific incidents are indeed just estimates and are often wrong; the argument about ID numbers only applies to official death tolls. It also doesn't say much about timing or cause of death.
Sadly, the 2 citizens per combatant seem to me likely true. I think that the main thing that people who didn't fight a war are missing is that a terror organization can easily force killing two citizens with each one of its members, by using private homes and things like hospitals for military purposes, surprise attacks without uniforms in dense urban places, etc. At some point your choices become either to let them get way with anything, or fight them knowing that you kill mostly civilians.
In your judgment, in what ways has Netanyahu been a good leader, and in what ways has he been a bad one?
Small clarification first: In the context of this conflict, or generally speaking?
Over the past 25 years, but particularly with reference to the current conflict - did his policies precipitate it? Is he handling it in the right way?
Obviously, disclaimer that these are only my own personal opinions, etc. etc.
I think he is overall OK (I have never voted for him). It's difficult to judge such a long time period, and there are key moments in which things changed (with his trials being one). Generally speaking, my most serious issue with him isn't directly related to him - I find the fact that Israeli politics has become two groups easily divided by "Yes Bibi" and "No Bibi" horrible, and reminds me in many bad ways of the political situation in the US, which I personally find insane. I think he is a pragmatist and a mix of a security conservatist who hates change with some bright ideas (e.g. the Arab-Israeli peace process in the last few years) and a very good execution record. Mainly, I'd wish for us to stop debating him and resume debating actual policy. I think history will remember him overall as a technically good leader, but one that lead to a lot of negative polarization in Israel, which is a serious problem.
Re the current conflict, he does have quite a lot of responsibility for what happened, but only at the strategic level. His strategy was to keep the Palestinians divided between themselves in order for the peace process to remain dormant, and basically tried to cause the "Palestinian problem" to die via death by a thousand cuts, administered over decades. He is not directly to blame for the military and intelligence failure; he is responsible as he basically has been Prime Minister for a decade and thus responsible in that sense. I'd dare say that if there was no failure on the military's part, his strategy would have given us peace with Saudi Arabia (which is still likely to happen, just later) and delayed the Palestinian issue even longer. The most serious problem IMHO w.r.t Netanyahu's policy regarding the Palestinians is that there was no long term solution in sight; in Israel it is common to say that we are "Managing the conflict" and not trying to actively solve it. I generally would like to solve it and not have my kids live with it, but on the contrary it is quite a difficult conflict to solve.
Thanks for your insights. This has been my favourite part of the Open Thread.
My aunt and cousin live in Israel and they don’t much like Netanyahu. I see the parallels to Donald Trump (of whom my own opinion is considerably more nuanced than “Trump good” or “Trump bad”)
I am much less aware of what is going on in Israel but I gather GDP increased tremendously under Netanyahu’s leadership. But OTOH his legacy will be seriously tarnished by the current war. It’s an awful, complex, messy situation, and there are no good solutions, but I don’t think history will look on Netanyahu’s “managing the conflict” as the right way.
You may not be able to answer this, but: what's the end goal in the current war, and is it realistic in your judgement?
From over here it looks like Israel is killing about 200 Gazans a day, and wrecking infrastructure, and the claimed stopping point - "defeat" of "Hamas" - is something that will, in my opinion, never happen. So I assume that the "real" goal is to keep doing this (killing people) until the US hashes out some sort of internationally-supported peace deal that's better for Israel than what they had on Oct 6.
Is there something else going on, that you can talk about?
I don't think this is stated publicly, but the true rational IMHO is to recreate operation Defensive Shield (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Defensive_Shield) in the strip. The Wikipedia article is a bit misleading; the honest factual truth is that the operation continues, in some sense, to this day. To summarize: During Defensive Shield Israel has removed the major threat from the West bank on its citizens; and after a short operation of a couple of months established operational freedom for the IDF in the West bank. That means that if the IDF wants to arrest someone even in the densest slums of Ramallah, it can. After the end of the operation in 2003, Israel started slowly destroying terror organizations, individuals and capabilities in the West Bank. Opinions vary, but everyone estimate that the rate of destruction passed the rate of regrowth at least about a decade later, in 2013. I can attest to that; In 2018, my friend was tasked with destroying weapon lathes, as there were simply no more knowledge of how to create Car bombs/Explosive Belts/Serious terror money to apprehend. It works; very few Israelis die due to terrorist attacks originating from the West Bank these days.
Is this ideal? No. Is there any better solution? I'm not sure Israel would trust even the US to send boots on the ground to patrol Gaza for us, let alone the UN. Let me be clear: No Israeli mother wans her son or daughter to patrol Khan Yunis or Nabulus. To most Israeli's, the West Bank is the most hated assignment there is, and they would much rather hold the border against the far more deadly Hezbollah. But if that is the price we must pay for security, we will pay it.
Also of historical significance is that if you look at the News from those days, they were very similar to the ones we see today: The US will any minute stop the operation, Israel would stop itself because the cost in life and time is too high, etc.. The reality is that as long as no one can give a good security guarantee w.r.t the Gaza strip to Israel, I don't see any other solution. We probably won't be patrolling inside the streets of Khan Yunis; but I would be very surprised if there aren't counter terrorism operations running in it's slums 5 years from now.
I realize that full AGI would be a wild card, but could lesser degrees of automation help? Could e.g. pervasive surveillance with small drones feeding image recognition assist with counter terrorism operations, now, or in the next few years?
It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but I don't think substantially. I mean, similar technologies already help in the West Bank; that doesn't mean Israel can operate without permanent military outposts there. But I may be having a failure of imagination here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_imagination)
Many Thanks! I hope whatever techniques are available work well for Israel. My vague hope was that with enough continuous imaging that a potential terrorist arming themselves might be detectable very early, helping Israel stop them more easily. But if similar technologies are already in place, this option might already be saturated.
Many Thanks!
Do you know why the Gaza border was so woefully understaffed in the year(s) leading up to Oct. 7? Why would the IDF be so neglectful? Even with the intelligence failures to predict the attacks, I believe the Gaza border should have been heavily guarded 24/7 simply because that is how countries normally deal with heavily-armed hostile neighbors (in periods without active combat).
This stems from Israel's National Security Strategy*. Sadly, the Wikipedia article is only available in Hebrew (תפיסת הביטחון של ישראל) but Google Translate might do a good job for further details. But basically, Israel works under the problem that about 10 million Israelis are surrounded by hundreds of millions of unfriendly neighbors. Thus, it is impossible to fully staff all the borders at the same time. Staffing them at proper capacity would lead to a huge army and a massive drain on the Economy. Thus, the Security Framework established in 1948 is as follows:
Deterrence -> Intelligence Warning -> Decisive victory -> Vice versa. I'm convoluting the terms a bit (e.g. there is no victory per se in Hebrew) but the principle stands. I.e., Israel relies on Intelligence to bolster defense where it is needed, when it is needed.
However, clearly there needed to be further security measures in place on the Gaza border (and furthermore, in other borders as well), because intelligence failure is possible (so far it happens once every 50 years + 1 day in Israel), so this will likely change.
For further reading, in a skim this looks good: https://jiss.org.il/en/amidror-israels-national-security-doctrine/
*Obviously, until the 7th of October. Some of it will likely change
But there's 170k soldiers on active duty at any given point in the Israeli military? Surely that's enough to staff the critical borders with Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank?
A political impact here is that netanyahu (under strong encouragement from Ben Gvir) moved a lot of Gaza border troops to guard WB settlements, especially for the sukkot holiday celebrations. I don't know numerically the size of the impact (I've heard 70% of troops were moved" claims but they might be more based in anti-bibi politics than reality)
We'll have to wait and see what the committees that will investigate the Intelligence and military failures say, but a priori, these wouldn't have made a substantial difference.
Remember that includes everyone - Airforce, Logistics, Intelligence, troops still in basic training, Cooks, etc. Modern army ratios for combatants : non-combatants are extremely high. I don't know the public (or the private) estimate on how many combatants are in active duty at a single point of time in the IDF, but I assume you can find it and my hunch is that the number is at least one magnitude lower.
Very much agree. And those proportions becomes worse when you have universal service, and need to invent jobs for everyone that you have no excuse to free but nothing useful to do with (because they are too physically and mentally weak, really don't want to fight, or really don't want to work).
That is why while the IDF in its best is the army of the start up nation, but in its worse is a caricature of a large state-managed organization
What are the odds of Israel pulling off a full expulsion of Gazans to Egypt?
Very little chance of Egypt accepting them all, or even a significant number. Despite the imminent US election, and mounting opposition to immigration via the Mexican border, it's more likely Joe Biden will agree for the US to take say a million provided other Middle Eastern countries split the rest between them.
For some reason, and I'm not sure why nor endorse or share the opinion personally, most of the Arab world doesn't appear to like Palestinians and evidently thinks of them as some ill-disposed people think of, say, gypsies.
I think you have lost your mind if you think the US populace wants to accept 1 million Palestinians for any amount of geopolitical gain. Democrats doing that is a slam dunk Trump 2024 victory.
I quite agree, although that didn't stop Biden & co dismantling the border fence and allowing in several million immigrants via Mexico over the last few years, 300,000 per month currently I believe. Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
It can be simultaneously true that the US populace absolutely does not want to accept a million Palestinian immigrants, and that this is still more likely than that Egypt would accept a million Palestinian immigrants. Egypt knows Palestinians in a way almost no one in America does, and they have made it clear that they really, really don't want them in Egypt.
Yes it can be true logically based on how it was phrased, but factually there’s still less chance America accepts a million than Egypt next door does.
As with many solutions, it's perfect except for the tiny flaw that no one involved wants to.
0%. The odds are better than Egypt would agree to take the Gaza strip.
I agree with Benaya. With my knowledge of the Middle East though, I think that even 5% is an upper limit. Egypt simply isn't interested in the Palestinians; for historical context, Israel even suggested returning the Gaza strip to Egypt during the peace talks (it was conquered during the Six day war), but Egypt was happy to give away Israel that troublesome population (in their words, not mine). The US would have to pay a very hefty sum for that to change.
As an Israeli I would not give it more than 5%, and even that just because things are so unpredictable lately. For that there need to be:
1) a democratic support in Israel
2) political will in Israel to clash with the whole world including the US to make it happen.
3) Egypt agree, or at least not immediately threaten with war against Israel.
In less modest mood, I would have given each of those 10% at most, even given the previous ones
I'm pretty uninformed on this conflict, but my biggest question is whether you see any path to a decent outcome in this war? Like, people in Israel not being murdered by terrorists, people in Gaza not being blown up from bombs, etc. From outside, the whole conflict just seems hopelessly tangled--is there a good reason to expect that ten years after combat in Gaza starts, there won't be another wave of terrorist attacks?
Barring something very unexpected deriving from this war (e.g. an amazing so far unknown leader rising up from the Palestinian populace) or an external dramatic change (e.g. AGI), I think that the lower bound for peace between Israel and Palestine is at least 20 years, more likely 25. The reason is simple: Children both in Gaza and in the West bank are still taught at their schools to hate Israelis and jews. It's important to understand that it is embedded deeply in their education system: You learn physics by calculating how fast a bullet needs to fly to kill a soldier; You learn to count by counting martyrs; etc. This isn't just Hamas - The Palestinian National Authority pays a monthly salary to families whose family member executed terrorist attacks against Israelis (whether they are dead or sitting in Israeli prison). Furthermore, even if the authority wanted to stop paying them this salary, this would be such an unpopular decision that there is a good chance that it would simply topple. For peace to happen (and thus, for terrorist attacks to become negligible at the least) we need for a whole new generation to rise that wasn't taught hatred.
Make no mistake: There are problems on the Israeli side too. I can list them if you want. But from my historical and current perspective (trying to put my biases aside as much as possible of course), they aren't as limiting as the one I noted above.
I think you have the problem backwards. There is no people on earth who could be treated as appallingly as Israel treats the Palestinians and not hate their oppressors; the idea that that hatred is synthetic and artificial rather than a natural, just response to Israel's behaviour is pure cope.
I agree about the timescale, though. We won't see peace while it's in Israel's power to prevent it, Israel will be able to maintain the occupation for as long as they have carte-blanche US support, and that's not going away any time soon.
But while I think the short and medium term future are definitely going to be appalling, I actually see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in a long time, in the form of an increasing number of young Americans willing to condemn Israel. At the moment they're still a minority, but if the wind keeps blowing in the same direction - and I think the increasingly extreme evil of Israeli politics makes that likely - then I can believe that we might be only 20-25 years away from something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Anti-Apartheid_Act , which I think would be the most likely route to peace.
Rereading my comment, I wasn't clear: I think the reason I stated (education system) is the main reason, not the sole reason for the length of the conflict. And as I stated very clearly (and in other comments in this thread), Israel has quite a lot of blame for prolonging the conflict.
However, history disagrees with your claim that the hatred is only because of the occupation. Before the occupation, in 1948, Israel said yes to the UN's peaceful partition plan for Palestine; Palestinians said no and started a war with Israel. But even before that, Palestinians were killing Jews (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Palestine_riots). Claiming that Palestinians hate Israel simply for the occupation is a common Western bias that I see a lot; from both personal experience, analysis of data accumulated in the IDF and historical perspective, it's simply plain wrong. Israel does supply the Palestinians with a plethora of reasons to hate us; but they come with quite the baggage beforehand.
Additionally, claiming that the US is giving carte-blanche support is... a matter of perspective, I guess? Every single operation I participated in the decade of my service had limitations put on the way the IDF wanted to operate to please the US. I think you're using the saying to claim that you would like to see the US do more; that is not the same as cart-blanche.
I agree with your assessment of the winds of change of American youth. I can tell you that many in Israel are worried about it. I have quite a lot of thoughts on the topic, but I don't think they are that interesting as they delve into classic analysis of why that is the trend.
Side note, and honest meta-commentary on your comment: I feel like you have some very strong opinions on Israel, and that's fine. But this conflict is, to much of the world's surprise, extremely grey. You use very black and white words such as 'carte-blanche' and 'increasingly extreme evil'. I recommend either studying this conflict thoroughly, or remaining unsure (which I wish more people would do, whether they support Israel or Palestine or whatever mix). I haven't met a person who truly studied the topic well and isn't representing an agenda (e.g. Ben Shapiro) who hasn't agreed on the greyness of it all.
Prior to being recalled fo duty, how likely did you think it was for that to happen? And if it happened, in what kind of circumstances ? Was a scenario like Oct 7 ever floated ?
Do retiring officers automatically go in the reserve army or did you volunteer?
How likely do you think they are to recall you again ? I read here and there that they can't keep the reserves mobilized much longer without morale plummeting, what do you think of that? Did you work mostly with other reservists or are you mixed with active troops? What are the relations like between active and reserve? Do you feel you have a different perspective on things after retiring?
1. Unfathomable on the Gaza border, highly, highly unlikely on the Lebanese one. Scenarios like this were floated in the military, but only regarding the northern border, and also were not discussed seriously. This was indeed pretty much a black swan.
2. Depends where you serve. I went in reserve but I also volunteered actively as it was personally important to me.
3. Likely to be called again, even if for short periods. If a war with Hezbollah breaks in the north, 100% will be called again. I worked mixed, but this changes according to where you served. The relations are also unit dependent: E.g. in the air force reservist are extremely respected as pilots continue to fly about once a week into their forties; in the ground troops less so; etc.
4. I retired only 2 years ago, so I do, but not a lot. It does freshen up your perspective, but how much varies personally.
Great - with the Ukraine situation, everyone and his dog is posting strategic and tactical analysis, but on Israel/Gaza I'm not finding any. And, a lot of the moral arguments about what Israel should/shouldn't do, and what Hamas might do in the future, seem to be based on unwritten strategic/tactical assumptions .So I'd like to ask your opinion of a few things purely at the strategic/tactical level, ignoring for the moment the moral (even though it is obviously hugely important and I have strong opinions on it).
If the IDF hadn't been massively out of position, what would the likely outcome of the Oct 7 attack have been?
Many Israelis now seem to believe that Oct 7 showed that, without a military response, Hamas could simply have repeated Oct 7 with the same result. I'm wondering to what extent this is an emotional response, which might not be a valid military evaluation. Presumably, even if Israel hadn't entered Gaza, the IDF would have worked to prevent a repeat. If (for whatever reason) Hamas, or some successor force, is still in being subsequent to the war, and the IDF has withdrawn, what is the risk of that organisation being able to repeat a similar attack, in your view?
More broadly, while Hamas was able to conduct a surprisingly effective attack. from an external perspective it seems like the IDF has a huge strength advantage vs Hamas. But many Israelis seem to believe that it poses an existential threat. To what extent do you think this is based on a valid understanding of the military situation?
What were Israel's plausible military options, other than what they are currently doing, after the attack? Were there ones which would have reduced the body count of Gazan civilians, that would still have fulfilled, either the current political objectives, or viable alternative ones?
I realise that's a lot of questions, feel free to ignore any and/or post links to analysis elsewhere.
1. Depends what "not massively out of position" means. Assuming knowledge of the attack beforehand, Israel would have probably signaled to Hamas that it is aware of the ploy to deter it from actually executing it. If they would have went with it, I think you would have seen a ratio of double, perhaps triple digit to single digit in the favor of Israel. I have to underline that I'm seriously not exaggerating.
2. a. See my answer to AF for further elaboration, but basically Israel maintains a strategy of deterrence (taken from nuclear deterrence). The main reason there was - and is - a consensus on pretty much "destroying Hamas" (I know this can be interpreted in multiple ways), is because a non-decisive answer would signal to much more dangerous adversaries - Specifically Hezbollah and Iran - that they can attack to without a significant cost. This is unacceptable in Israeli military thought; I. e., sadly, The Palestinians were doomed even if they immediately suggested peace talks because Israel is trying to deter others.
However, I won't deny that there is an emotional response here, and furthermore, a value response here. In short - Part of Israel's ethos is "Never Again" (w.r.t the Holocaust). This is the worst that has happened since that period in history; the country is very strongly aligned to signal to everybody that unlike that time, where there was no one to "charge a price" for the atrocities that Jews have suffered, this won't be the case this time.
2. b. For a successor to repeat the attack would require the IDF allowing it enough time to rebuilt itself and rearm itself in a similar fashion that Hamas has. It took Hamas about 15 years to do that; I don't think that in the near future Israel will allow any organization it deems dangerous of one or two magnitudes below Hamas to exist in the Gaza strip.
3. Hamas does not pose an existential threat on Israel; to be clear, I believed that even during the late afternoon of October 7th, when some were panicked. But not responding to Hamas in a manner that would signal clearly to Iran and Hezbollah is an existential threat, as elaborated above.
4. Honest and unpopular answer: No. I know a lot of the talk abroad, and specifically in the US, is about "Counter Terrorism Operations" and "A long and surgical operation to remove Hamas from power", but these, bluntly, have nothing to do with reality. This would require an extremely long and detailed answer, but major practical reasons include:
a. It is incredibly difficult to execute stealthy elite operations in a population that is both supportive of the terrorist group acting from it and lives, in some areas of the strip, perhaps in the most dense fashion in the world;
b. As exposed, there is nothing comparable to the underground city and facilities that Hamas has built (maybe barring stuff in North Korea/China and perhaps under Moscow that I'm not aware of). Some are more than 50 meters deep, and they span more than 500 km (for context, the entire NYC subway is less than 400). If any military expert has an idea how to destroy a terrorist organization with such facilities without a direct ground invasion that secures logistical pathways, I'd like to see his theory.
... And I'm not talking about saving hostages and the amount of time that they would have to remain in captivity if the operation would have been slower, which was unacceptable in Israeli public opinion.
W.r.t. lowering civilian casualties - also no; at the very least extremely difficult. The operation would have to be slowed significantly; much more casualties would have to be taken on the Israeli side. If we use QALY as a measurement, I'm not sure that the average Gazan citizen would be even better off (though I'm not certain): It means the war would have been very intense for an even longer period of time (I'm talking years). But even with that, it's simply incredibly difficult to fight an enemy that uses it's population as human shields. I have seen video footage (which I'm not sure is public, but there should be enough other public evidence) of Hamas combatants (wearing no uniforms of course) walking casually out of a hospital, a designated safe zone, arriving to a stash of hidden RPGs, grabbing them and firing at IDF, and while running back into the hospital grabbing toddlers so they won't be shot at. A more personal experience (and more graphic, be advised) is from a friends brother, whose unit cleared a house except one locked room; they warned beforehand in Arabic that they are breaching, took some steps back, got into positions, and breached. From the rubble a child, no more than a meter tall, stands holding a big white bed sheet in front of him in the hole that formed; slowly he starts to walk toward the soldiers, which shout to him not to come closer. No one decided to shoot the kid, which eventually exploded with a suicide vest on the soldiers, injuring and killing some of them.
These are just 2 stories out of at least a dozen I have; some of the death toll of civilians (or children) you hear is simply members of populace that are either actively fighting or at least supporting Hamas directly. Under these circumstances, a ratio of 2 civilians to 1 combatant is amazing. I can also personally attest that the majority of the IDF I have seen in my service actively works to not hurt civilians whenever possible; it is true that the bar has been lowered in this war, but not arbitrarily, and no civilian is being killed deliberately.
"a. It is incredibly difficult to execute stealthy elite operations in a population that is both supportive of the terrorist group acting from it and lives, in some areas of the strip, perhaps in the most dense fashion in the world;"
To elaborate on this, American readers may be familiar with the movie "Black Hawk Down", or at least the story behind it. And that is the story of a stealthy elite group *succeeding* in this sort of operation. Task Force Ranger had a mission, to capture two particular high-value targets, they carried out that mission, they gave at least an order of magnitude better than they got in spite of being outnumbered by about the same amount, and they mostly walked out under their own power.
In that sort of war, "Black Hawk Down" is what *victory* looks like.
It wasn't enough of a victory to defeat the Somali National Alliance, but two or three more like it (and a proportional number of less-spectacular operations) probably would have.
Hamas is about twelve times larger than the SNA. And it's dug in much deeper in Gaza than the SNA ever was in Mogadishu, so at least twice as hard a target. So, if the plan is for elite Israeli commandos to just go after the Hamas leadership and leave the civilians alone, sometimes that will work. But along the way, you're going to have a hundred "Black Hawk Down" scale incidents. Because in this sort of war, that's what victory looks like.
Thanks for this perspective, it's very useful information.
I have to say that, to end the conflict will require a situation where both sides, not just Israel, have hope for the future. The current actions doesn't seem to me to lead to hope for either Palestinians or Israelis; but to change that would require changes outside the scope of military action, so having asked for a military analysis, this isn't a criticism of your response.
I agree. I stated something similar in response to a different question: I think the best shot for ending the conflict starts with changing fundamentally how the Palestinian education system works and waiting patiently for 20-25 years for a different generation to arise (and some other changes on the Israeli side, but much more minor). Sadly, even that is a difficult task.
Well, I don't agree that saying to the Palestinians, "we are going to wait 20-25 years before even thinking about a Palestinian state" is a viable approach. That's just a recipe for this to never end. They hate Israel because of the things that happen to them and their families, much more because of than what they are told in school. Because they don't have hope of a better life. They need to be given hope ASAP, or the hatred will continue to be renewed, no matter what they are taught in school. And this is largely true on the Israeli side as well - without some clear endpoint, Palestinians will continue to be demonised and hated in Israeli society.
The US's position "we will support Israel no matter what" is actually rather cynical from this point of view - it leaves responsibility for the outcome entirely on Israel, which can't credibly promise the Palestinians anything. It would be a lot better in my view for the west to build and support some credible organisation to run and keep order in Gaza, with a clear commitment to transitioning to a Palestinian state. If everything is left to Israel, they will always be seen as the occupier.
My understanding is that Israel doesn't want a one-state solution, nor a two-state solution. What is Israel's goal in the region at this point? I'm trying to understand, and do not dispute they must fight this war at the least to deter additional attacks.
It's a bit difficult to say what "Israel wants" for the same reason that it's a bit difficult to say what "the UK/USA wants" - it changes on where you are on the political/military spectrum (which are not the same, though often confused).
What Ben and Benaya said is correct, but to further elaborate, most Israelis "don't care" for the Palestinians in the same way you (assuming you live in the US) "don't care" for Canadians. We would like to live our life, raise our children, and be happy. Yep, some want to do that in the west bank; but they aren't a majority (even though it seems so politically), and even from those who do, if they could reach a permanent peaceful arrangement with the Palestinians there that would be great (note that this doesn't necessarily mean a two-state solution, or a one-state solution, or anything).
Are you saying that most Israelis 'don't want to live in the west bank' or most oppose Israelis being allowed to live in the west bank?
Polls may be of limited accuracy, but they generally tell a different story. Half of Israelis say they support annexing at least part of the west bank (as of 2020). In a 2016 Gallup Poll almost half of Israeli Jews said they supported expelling even Arab-Israeli citizens. Recently, almost a quarter of the Knesset attended a conference supporting ethnic Jewish settlement of Gaza (and concomitant expulsion of Arabs). Territorial expansion and demographic, um, reconfiguration, do seem to be supported by at the very least a large segment of the population, often for openly religious (rather than ostensible security) reasons.
(I'm Israeli)
I agree with TheZeroWave here - I'd have to look at the poll, but I think it's a far smaller population that would want to outright annex the West Bank. While a core of (usually religious) Israelis want to take over the WB because they think it must be part of "Greater Israel", the majority of Israelis only care about it in terms of security. This means two things:
1. Security from the Palestinians within the West Bank.
2. Having the West Bank as a buffer to potential Arab invasions from other countries.
I think #2 is less relevant nowadays with Israel being more recognized and having peace agreements with some neighbors. #1 is obviously still critical.
Sure the polls could be wrong, but then polls of Palestinian attitudes toward Israel are often used as justification for Israeli policy toward them. Incredulity regarding polling data is reasonable, asymmetric incredulity is harder to defend.
Sorry for not being clear - "don't want to live in the west bank".
The annexing polls make sense; note that there are some settlements in the west bank that are now pretty much cities. Even those supporting a 2 state solution usually think that it's best to annex them and swap some other territory with the Palestinians.
I'm unfamiliar with the Gallup poll; I'm a bit skeptical (beware the one poll) as this seems very far away from my personal experience, but I would need to look at the wording of the questions, some meta-analysis and etc. to give a meaningful comment
Re the conference, I note that a quarter of the Knesset is a bit of an exaggeration. There were 12 ministers and 15 Knesset members (source in Hebrew: https://www.maariv.co.il/news/politics/Article-1071608), so half of what you noted (12.5% of the Knesset). Their political power isn't directly related to their part of the population; In this Knesset, in which I note that the left has lost some (2-3) seats due to the election system keeping Meretz out, there are 14 seats for parties that clearly support settlement due to religious reasons. Even if we double for people from other parties that support that and round to 30 + remove the Arabic parties from the equation (10 seats), that's still 30/110, a quarter of supporters, not half.
You are correct that my original reply wasn't clear enough though, and I'll try to correct it: There is support for settlement and territorial expansion into Gaza and the west bank in a large segment of the population (but less than half the jewish one). My point was that they wouldn't mind living near them in the west bank peacefully. Their "peacefully" sometimes means that Palestinians wouldn't have equal rights or be considered citizens (which I personally strongly oppose).
Are cabinet ministers not also Knesset members? This is the case usually in parliamentary systems (was assuming 12 + 15 = 27 members in total?).
I think a major issue here is: for the Palestinians, the settlements are probably not a minor issue that can easily be brushed aside as peripheral, as many Israelis do. For one thing, Palestinians - unlike Israelis - are still largely agricultural, so they need the land more than you do. Beyond the cost of gradually losing more and more land to settlers itself, it also precipitates the continued, gradual, indefinite erosion of what land they still have (combined with onerous building restrictions and strict land use laws for Palestinians). Rational or not, I'm not aware of many nations historically that would've viewed that as an acceptable peace. (and it's surely reflected in the incentive structure that while, even with all its international support, the PA has completely failed to even halt settlement expansion with mere politics, Hamas succeeded in pushing out settlers from Gaza entirely).
What Ben said. But in a less flattering note: We generally like to ignore long-term huge problems while dealing with our numerous moderately large problems - especially when the long term problems have no known solution and are that politically explosive. So for many years our policy was basically "make locally-better relations with Arab countries; wait for the Palestinian issue to somehow go away. "
One of the most important and scary aspects of this war is that we will have to deal with that subject again, in an already-polarized political system
Israel wants to live in peace. Israelis who are against a two state solution are against it because they believe that a Palestinian state will harry it. Regarding the current war with Hamas, a good outcome would be the elimination of Hamas as an organization, and the Gaza strip administered by representatives of Arab states who are party to the Abraham Accords.
It happens; e.g. sometimes combat units aren't sure where and what their mission will be (e.g. invade Gaza City or the northern part of the Gaza strip). However, most of the times the IDF tries to give everyone as much clarity as possible to plan beforehand. The IDF operates very much with giving the initiative to lower ranks - you set the borders of different units, give them goals, and let the people and lower rank officers figure out themselves how they want to go about it. The "Israeli Ingenuity/Improvisation" that people like to talk about comes a lot due to the army (but not necessarily, and this is a bit of a chicken-egg question).
Can you clarify your question on the mission? it's a bit open-ended for me to answer.
Sometimes IDF soldiers are not briefed until shortly before a mission, in order to prevent the problem of loose lips.
> 3 maine died in the whole pirate thing people blame iran
Would the left want a war with iran? Am I being oppimistic when I think "well ill never tell anyone to join the military, the military gone insane and everyone's thought iraq was worthless"?
I certainly remember the jokes in 2002-3 about how W. Bush had a solid justification for attacking Iran, they'd spent time working up a foolproof invasion plan, and then he went on TV and got one little letter wrong.
I'm not the left, but I don't think a war with Iran sounds like a great idea. At least not if it amounts to sending soldiers into Iran--if we blow up some ships and planes and buildings belonging to Iran to dissuade them from screwing with our shipping, that seems fine.
The OIF airstrikes ("Shock & Awe") were part of a larger plan that already included ground forces; even Stormin' Norman's famous 100-hour ground war in Desert Storm was only made possible by a 1,000-hour air war to prepare the way.
A campaign against Iran would more likely resemble Operation Allied Force (Kosovo), with airstrikes providing the main effect themselves rather than as mere prelude to invasion.
Iran is neither Gaza nor Serbia. As big of bag of dicks as the IRGC is, they don't hide behind their populace, and our ordnance has gotten *much* more precise since Serbia.
We've still got the UNHCR; it's a bit creaky and a bit corrupt but it seems to be doing some good work for all the refugees who *aren't* Palestinians. The bit where the UN decided there would be one agency for Palestinian refugees and another for every other sort of refugees does not seem to have worked out very well; in hindsight the effective capture of UNRWA by Hamas et al was almost inevitable with that structure.
Giving the UNHCR responsibility for the Palestinians as well would risk capture of whatever sub-organization takes on that job, of course. But we do know what to look for now, and having it be part of a larger organization mostly beyond the reach of Palestinian actors would probably help as well.
I wanted to share my TEDx Talk on Profit for Good businesses - those with charities in vast majority shareholder positions - with the ACX community. Feel free to share to share your thoughts.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GL6gcZAdiHI
Is anyone here on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT)? Or, have strong opinions about using TRT specifically for lifestyle enhancement for middle-aged guys? Theoretically one could be doing TRT because you legitimately have low test, but I think the large majority of users are simply looking for strength, sexual performance, and possibly psychological boosts in their 40s, 50s, 60s etc. As I understand it the FDA frowns on this kind of hormone enhancement a lot, and has cracked down on it some recently, but it's not totally outlawed.
As a middle-aged guy with medically normal test levels for my age- does anyone think it's bad to use a reasonable amount of TRT to boost my levels back to, say, those of 10 or 15 years ago? Yes I am already maximizing what I can get out of nutrition, sleep, and lifting now. I will say that I still have a great head of hair and would strongly prefer to not lose it
Your number one resource on the matter should be this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDoapSVb3g
Ignore the goofy name, he's the real deal
I am, and consider it the single biggest quality of life improvement available to middle aged men, especially if you are athletic in any way. (And I'm an example of "normal levels getting boosted by it.")
I've been doing testosterone for 7 years or so, and see significant differences. I've cycled off with PCT a couple of times because I was paranoid that I was suppressing my endogenous HPA axis capabilities and would need to take it the rest of my life. But the difference in training volume, recovery capacity, and libido the few times I did this were significant, such that I've just bit the bullet and decided screw my endogenous HPA axis, I can be dependent on external T the rest of my life.
From a macro perspective, I can tell you that older me is stronger and fitter across the board than younger me, and I was no slouch when I was younger. I'd estimate this is probably at least 30-50% due to taking T - the other 50-70% is having dialed in better eating habits, training methods, intensities, and recovery strategies over the decades.
I got my dad on it, and he loved the effects too - he eventually came off because his PSA was rising (though it didn't cross any threshold, he was being conservative), so keep an eye on your PSA and cholesterol and blood pressure, but if those are good, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
On hair effects, if you and your genetic line aren't prone to male pattern baldness or baldness overall, it's not much worry - my hair is as thick as ever after 7 years. If you are prone to it, you can take finasteride while on TRT, or pay for hair plugs if your hair thins / goes bald.
Have been on both T and clomiphene for low testosterone. My level was mostly suppressed due to lifestyle factors and, after some life changes, has since resolved without continuing treatment. You get def go on T and then off, it takes some time for your natural level to reset, so i would keep that in mind if youre trying to make a kid old fashioned way. T, for me, was “a little goes a long way.” The med was being managed by my PCP and while hes a generally competent guy, I think we let my level get too high (went from low 100’s to 700+ in less than a year). The result was that i expereinced something like roid rage/hypomania. In hindsight, it was, in fact, like being a teenager again both for better and worse. I developed acne again on my back, got really strong and lean without much effort, had more energy, but also i felt angry, had outbursts, became more oppositional, had poor sleep, and my sex drive was distractingly high. Id consider trying it again depending on how advanced middle age goes for me, but id use way less and work with a specialty clinic next time around. Clomiphene was also effective and my T level kinda resumed a healthy normal for me. It made my vision blurry at close ranges at first (known side effect) but other than that, was helpful and pretty chill. Also easy to come off of, no T crash or something. Anyhow, hope it goes well for you, whatever you choose!
It's never made sense to me how testosterone supplementation would be frowned upon or [treated as a joke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyR5BLqtx8E) while HRT (whether testosterone or estrogen) for trans people isn't.
Have you tried Tongkat Ali? I was considering TRT for all the reasons you mentioned (and still am), but gave tongkat a try first. I went from ~450 to 700ng/dl. Not a huge change, but I do notice more energy, more confidence, and strength gains.
Testosterone is rocket fuel for prostate cancer cells. Early detection saved me 12 years ago from my father's fate: death at age 60 from metastasized prostate cancer. I'm 67. Frank Zappa died of the same thing as my dad but at age 53.
This has recently been shown not to be true. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41391-020-0241-3
Technically, that article only refers to effects of testosterone therapy on cancer recurrence AFTER localized treatment for prostate cancer. No mention of relationship between testosterone on initial occurrence of prostate cancer. You'd expect some relationship since testerone does have an effect on the prostate and eventually most men have some level of prostate cancer by the time they die; most men don't have cancer that is spreading fast enough to kill them faster than age does.
I suppose it is good news though; it was a pretty big study. My father's cancer was somewhat unique: he didn't HAVE a prostate; only a shell was left after his prostate was removed for other reasons in 1980. Cancer detected in 1984; already metastasized when surgery done in early 1985, he died in 1988.
Your mileage will vary.
The prostate cancer figures out a way around the testosterone limiting therapies. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/2018/05/testosterone-as-a-drug#:~:text=The%20male%20hormone%20testosterone%20can,with%20advanced%20prostate%20cancer%20therapy.
So if I naturally had test levels of say 400, is that 'rocket fuel for prostate cancer'? Are high-testosterone men dropping dead left and right in their 50s and 60s of this? Or is it only when the testosterone is exogenous? If so, can you elaborate on why external but not internal test is unusually dangerous?
Just naming 3 people who had prostate cancer, but without any knowledge of their test levels, is not really an argument
I never heard that testosterone keeps the hair on your head.
Oops. I was trying to give that as a counter-argument- why I shouldn't use exogenous test, because I would like to not lose my hair
Oh, got it. That makes sense.
I've heard the opposite actually, that there's correlation between high T and baldness. Quick google search confirms this though nothing damning.
If you're sensitive to DHT (which is what male pattern baldness is), then all things equal higher test = higher DHT = more balding.
If you're not sensitive, then higher DHT isn't much of a problem. Though its usually a spectrum.
I think the view is high testosterone contributed to male pattern baldness
Necessary but not sufficient. If you have the right androgen receptors in your scalp, and you also have testosterone, then you will lose your hair. If you have one but not the other you will keep it.
Yes, that was my view as I'm married to someone who lost most of his hair in his mid-twenties* in the classic male pattern way.
I didn't know if there was an opposite thing at work.
*While totally bald on top, which is indeed not comfortable, he still has some hair around the sides of his head, fortunately, and that has been 30 years since what I think of as the great shedding if that gives any younger person hope. The secret is to keep that remaining hair neatly trimmed (he likes to get this done professionally, ironically, since I cut my own voluminous hair, and once long ago was slightly pained when he was told "no charge"), and to often wear a hat, which fortunately guys down here usually do anyway, no longer removing it in say a restaurant as etiquette used to dictate, unless it's a cowboy hat.
For the 'once you start you'd have to take it for the rest of your life crowd'- I think this is highly exaggerated. I agree that there would be a strongly negative period once you quit, but I think after a few months your body naturally restarts normal test production. I know a number of ex-steroid users older than me who appear to be living perfectly normal lives as far as I can see
Did I miss the results of the 2023 forecasting contest?
No, we're all still waiting on them
What are some of the *minimum/weakest* standards of evidence needed to *prove* that someone is guilty of battery? The example I have in mind is jury finding Trump guilty of battery (May 2023), where I couldn't find a discussion on the evidence used (perhaps it is "subjudice" of sorts?). I am not particularly interested in the politics of the situation, and don't mean to inflame this thread at all. But some pointers regarding the abstract question of evidential standards would be nice to know. I am talking about the "lower limit", and not the cases where the conclusion is trivial: do they follow the dictum of innocent unless proved otherwise?
(I repeat that I don't mean to inflame this thread; I will be happy to delete this question if it is triggering).
Question: does anyone actually believe that this case was correctly decided and that the verdict is reasonable? I am unfamiliar with what the actual evidence was.
I've also read that the lady in question is a "serial rape victim" who has accused six men of raping her over the years, but I can't find particularly credible sources one way or the other on this.
I don't personally know the answer to whether the verdict was responsible, as I didn't put more than a tiny amount of effort. You may find some pointers in this memorandum from Lewis Kaplan: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590045/gov.uscourts.nysd.590045.212.0.pdf
There are several different standards used for different kinds of case. All start with the presumption of innocence, but civil trials need “preponderance of evidence” to find the person liable, criminal cases require evidence “beyond reasonable doubt” to find the person guilty, and I believe there are some situations where the requirement is in between those, at “clear and convincing”.
None of these has a probabilistic interpretation - just showing that this person is in a set, a high proportion of whom are guilty, with no further way to distinguish between the members who are guilty and the members who aren’t, wouldn’t suffice, no matter how high the fraction of guilty members is. You are standard thought to need some evidence that is specific to the person in question.
In a civil case, a plaintiff must meet the burden to show liability (as you note). So in civil cases it makes more sense to talk about a "presumption against liability" rather than a presumption of innocence.
But either way, the presumption is reflected in the procedure where whoever initiates a case (whether a private party filing a complaint or a prosecutor filing charges) generally must prove it up.
It was a civil case, so he wasn't found guilty of battery, he was found liable for defamation.
In civil court cases, the standard is usually 'preponderance of the evidence', ie 51% likelihood.
To actually convict someone of battery it would have to be a criminal case, where the standard is ussually 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. My understanding is that courts have specifically refused to set a standard likelihood ratio for this phrase, but most consider it to be something like 98%, 99%.
The difference in evidentiary standards being largely because civil courts charge you money, criminal courts send you to jail, and those are understood as qualitatively different levels of harm (or, from a nearby perspective, different levels of power granted to the government over its citizens ).
AFAIK, IANAL.
Importantly, no probability is considered sufficient. The classic example is to imagine a concert where a bunch of people crashed the gates. 10 actual cover charges were paid and 1000 people were in the venue. If you just grab a random person from the venue, and no one can produce any more evidence for or against the claim that this person did or didn’t pay the cover, there’s a 99% chance that this person trespassed. But that wouldn’t be considered sufficient evidence, even if the numbers were more lopsided. (In particular, nothing that has been presented will prevent you from convicting the ten people who actually paid the cover.)
Thank you for this very interesting remark, and for your reply above to me as well.
I am slightly confused by your last sentence, whose naive reading seems to be at odds with the previous sentence and the first. Is your point the following: "Rather than the naive binary of criminal ≈ 99.99 and civil = 50 + ε, civil itself, depending on the nature of the case, spans a spectrum between 50 + ε and 99.99?"
Not quite, the point is a bit more subtle - criminal is "beyond reasonable doubt" and civil is "preponderance of evidence", but neither of those can be given a probabilistic interpretation, because in a case like the gatecrashers one, the probability can be arbitrarily high, but not specific to the person, and therefore not sufficient for either.
It is usually taken that "beyond reasonable doubt" requires something like 95% probability in addition to whatever other non-probabilistic criteria there are, and "preponderance of evidence" requires greater than 50% probability in addition to whatever other non-probabilistic criteria there are. But there is controversy about what exactly those other criteria are (though jurors generally know them when they see them).
That and your further comment were very clear. Thank you again.
So in the case of the gatecrashers, could the hosts sue everyone at the party for the cost of the ticket, and the ten people who legitimately paid are just SOL?
I think the usual interpretation is that the non-probabilistic criteria will ensure that they can't do that (or at least, that the court won't find against any particular gatecrasher or guest).
Unfortunately, what this means is that if you and your 11,000 identical siblings want to get in cheap, and one of you buys a ticket, then if the hosts can't do anything to distinguish which one of you bought the ticket, then the *hosts* are SOL at getting any civil recourse against any of the 11,000 others.
Thank you. Your response is quite clarifying, and I am embarrassed about my ignorance.
But I am still confused; USA today reports, for instance "a nine-person civil jury found that Trump sexually abused her, but that she failed to prove he raped her." (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/29/donald-trump-rape-e-jean-carroll/72295009007/). Is this sentence to be interpreted as meaning 51% likelihood?
I think that sentence is just being misleading to the point of being dishonest.
It is referring to the civil case, which is 51% likelihood. But it's referring to him being found liable for defamation, not guilty of rape.
I think the author's defense would be 'the facts of the case were substantially about whether or not she was assaulted, they found him liable for defamation because they thought he was probably guilty of assault'.
But that 'probably' is using the 51% for civil cases, not the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' for criminal cases.
(Another justification may be that I vaguely remember the judge in that case making a public statement to the effect that people were saying 'this trial is not evidence that Trump assaulted anyone, it's just about defamation' by saying something like 'no, whether he assaulted her is the primary question of fact, the evidence is all about that and indicated that he likely did' or something. But I don't remember the details on that.)
Thank you for answering my second question as well. Much appreciated.
However, such a sentence is used by judge Kaplan as well, in the second sentence of the following quote: "The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was “raped” within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump “raped” her as many people commonly understand the word “rape.” Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that." (edit: the source is https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590045/gov.uscourts.nysd.590045.212.0.pdf straddling pages 3-5). So I guess in a civil context "The jury found that X did Y" merely means that according to the jury, it was more likely than not that X did Y.
I have been long aware that my legal knowledge is approximately zero, but I didn't know it had the consequence that even an interpretation of a seemingly simple sentence like "The jury found that X did Y" depended on having such a background. Given that it is all over the media and on wikipedia (not just USA today), I guess the mainstream understanding is that most people have the requisite legal background to interpret such statements correctly.
So is the "defamation" that she said he did something, and then he denied it, thus calling her a liar?
Has this legal maneuver ever succeeded before?
He did a lot more than that, the original defamation case goes into detail.
No, to my knowledge no one has ever been held liable for defamation for ignoring a criminal accusation, including in this case.
>thus calling her a liar
<mild snark>
Or effectively accusing her of impersonating a politician? :-)
</mild snark>
New York state law defines "rape" more narrowly than most other US jurisdictions do, and Ms. Carroll's experience did not fit that specific definition. So the jury found instead that Trump "sexually abused" her.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-sd-new-yor/114642632.html
Battery is a civil cause of action in most jurisdictions around the world as well.
Thanks for the clarification, that was getting beyond my legal knowledge.
If I understand right, the case in question was for defamation rather than battery, likely because the statute of limitations on battery had run out already (but the defamatory statements were more recent)?
The jury found him liable, not guilty, as it was a civil rather than criminal trial.
Oops my bad. Didn't know the word (embarrassing for me). Thank you for clarifying, and thank you for your patience with my ignorance.
Wikipedia says "In July 2023, Judge Kaplan clarified that the jury had found that Trump had raped Carroll according to the common definition of the word", and that the jury had stated "Carroll did prove that Trump had sexually abused her,". I guess you are saying that this is still technically "liable", not "guilty" in that civil context. And what is typically the standard of evidence for proving such statements: is this a setting in which "innocent unless proven otherwise" is applicable?
The presumption of innocence does not apply to civil cases in the United States. The *somewhat* related concepts of the burdens of production and persuasion apply. To oversimplify, the plaintiff in a civil case has (1) the burden of introducing admissible evidence sufficient for a fact-finder (a jury in this case) to conclude that it is more likely than not (just over 50% or more, so technically 50.0000000001% would suffice) that the defendant is liable for whatever tort or legal theory is at issue, and (2) the burden of actually convincing (persuading) the fact-finder / jury of that. The distinctions are subtle but important. Imagine a case where the only evidence is testimonial - "she said / he said." Assuming the relevant testimony is admissible, a plaintiff can meet the burden of production (introducing evidence) by providing testimony sufficient to meet the legal elements of the tort. A judge would not dismiss a claim so long as that testimony is in the record. A jury, however, does not have to believe the plaintiff's testimony! It could still find for the defendant, even if the defendant provides no testimony at all, by simply disbelieving the plaintiff. Imagine a great defense lawyer proving on cross-examination that the plaintiff lied about everything. (Note: In theory, only the fact-finder (the jury, in this case) has the right to believe or disbelieve testimony.) Of course, the jury could *believe* the plaintiff, crediting the plaintiff's testimony, at which point the law deems the plaintiff to have carried her burden of persuasion as well as her burden of production.
Thank you for this very clear and helpful explanation.
To be found "liable" is a standard of 51%. This is the distinction between civil and criminal. The only penalty from civil trial is financial, vs a criminal trial which can label you a felon and send you to jail.
The fact that it's "only" a financial penalty doesn't seem to be reassuring, if financial penalties of $83 million can be levied.
If I were to be unjustly convicted I'd rather spend a few months in jail than be levied a fine of $83 million.
The $83 million was mostly punitive damages inflicted because he was found liable for the statements before, then immediately started to make the same sorts of statements again, meaning Carroll could get a summary judgment on the statements in short order, for which she has now received a judgment for a very large amount of money.
In general, it is highly disrecommended to ignore the court and repeat the sort of misconduct the court just got you for, particularly in public.
1. I don't see that that addresses the "logical" question raised: if a civil punishment can be much more punitive than a criminal punishment, then requiring 51% "more likely than not" sort of vague evidence for the former and 98% "beyond reasonable doubt" confidence for the latter wouldn't seem to make sense, given that the two were distinguished based on an "only financial penalty" argument.
2. Let us accept that he deserves a greater punishment because he immediately started to make statements that the court had just found violative. Does it explain that the actual reputational damage, which was "evaluated" to 5 million earlier, can now be evaluated to 83 million? One could argue that given the court judgement, fresh statements amount to a _smaller_ reputational damage than before?
Thank you, this helps.
Some anecdata:
1. When I was at university I was desperately poor and didn't own any sort of music player. My friend Bobby who stayed in the same student residence had a cassette player. He also had a tape of Leonard Cohen's greatest hits. From time to time when I was suffering from one of my regular being dumpeds, I would go to Bobby's room, put on the headphones and listen to Leonard Cohen, which is surely the most mournful music anyone ever heard. The point is that when I was miserable, it gave me a perverse pleasure to wallow in it and feel sorry for myself. The next day I'd be back to normal, for me anyway.
2. Instant cure for depression. a. Get in your car and go for a drive. b. With the windows up naturally, at the top of your voice yell, "YEEEEE-HAHHH!" A few times. Dale Carnegie wrote, If you want to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic!
Hey Scott, I'm assuming you just didn't post it yet, but in case you forgot, there is no Middle East subthread here.
Thanks, you're right, I've put it at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-313/comment/48369120 now.
@TheZeroWave, I believe you just created the Middle East subthread. Thanks!
All Middle East-related Open Thread comments need to be contained on the Middle East subthread.
There is no Middle East subthread.
And thus the student was enlightened.
That would only work if Scott had written "...contained on A Middle East subthread".
Saying "...contained on THE Middle East subthread", when there is no such subthread, constitutes an AccessViolationException or a NullPointerException and results in the immediate shutdown of this Substack and the release of its resources by the Internet.
One hand clapping.
Oreo cookies can lower LDL cholesterol! https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1989/14/1/73
Before you get excited and buy a bunch of Oreos, you should take note of a couple things:
1. This "study" was done on one person, the one conducting the study.
2. This may only show that a Keto diet raises cholesterol; Oreos were chosen because of their reputation as only providing useless carbs.
I do say this needs an actual research program to find out why carbs worked to lower LDL cholesterol. I bet lots of people would volunteer to test eating 12 Oreo cookies a day.
No, not even if they lowered cholesterol would I eat Oreo cookies.
I'm fortunate in that my LDL levels are okay, it's my triglycerides which are the divils, but even then I would not eat Oreos. Tried them, didn't like them.
On the other hand, if only there were a study about how eating Jaffa cakes reduces bad cholesterol (sigh).
More research is clearly necessary. There probably isn't anything magical about Oreos specifically.
Looks like the study design is 12 additional Oreo cookies daily on top of "KD" diet. That this person has such a high baseline for their LDL on a ketogenic diet and responds so poorly to rosuvastatin I suspect something else is going on. They also note that they found LDL decreasing with oreo supplementation despite increasing saturated fat, which really contradicts all but a few studies. I'm going to have to do a deep dive on this one.
---------
Edit: OK, read through the entire paper in detail now and checked some of the background literature on the subject. Looks like this helps support the theory that some people on ketogenic diets end up using lipoproteins (LDL and HDL) to transport fat in the bloodstream to muscles, and thereby end up with high LDL/HLD-C. By restoring blood glucose through oreo cookies, they were able to decrease LDL.
This study isn't really applicable to the general population, but for people who are lean, on high-fat ketogenic diets, and have high cholesterol, and don't respond to statins, and are OK with weight gain, then this would work well.
I like your last paragraph — it almost reads like a Radio Yerevan joke.
Is there even any reason to believe that lowering LDL would be beneficial for such a population? It isn't obvious to me that the studies establishing a relationship between elevated LDL and mortality/morbidity would generalize to such an extreme outlier group.
This is not medical advice:
Yes. Keep in mind the subject in the study had LDL >400 on a high fat KD. Regardless of BMI/Diet/Activity level/Blood pressure etc., an LDL >190 is pathologic (we will screen anyone with such a reading for familial hypercholesterolemia and other genetic disorders). As for how prevalent this specific hyperresponder phenotype is, I don't know. I suspect the same benefits could be had simply by changing from a high fat KD to a high protein KD.
I'm gonna have to look up Radio Yerevan now.
I'm doing a a degree in philosophy and I have a hunch that they deliberately chose to teach us philosophers who are wrong so that we can get practice at arguing against famous wrong people.
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/most-philosophers-are-wrong
Locke, Kant, Descartes, Parfit, Rawls. All wrong.
>There is no immaterial substance and the mind is simply what the brain does.
Sure, but I doubt you can even conceptualize consciousness coherently by just saying the brain does X.
My brain builds a model of the world around me. It uses the model to make predictions of what I expect to see and hear and smell. I experience those predictions as changes to the model and, when a prediction is wrong, my brain gives it extra attention so that it can learn from its mistake and make better predictions in future.
Immanuel Kant was very rarely stable, and it's worth remembering that Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could drink you under the table.
Completely serious here: They're all wrong, but you have to learn all the specific ways they were wrong, before you have a chance of coming up with a novel philosophy that's wrong in a completely new way.
The way you phrased this sounds like you think there are some philosophers who were right, but we instead focus on the wrong ones. If you continue your study, I think what you’ll find is that all philosophers are wrong about lots of things, and even these ones have some points they were right about.
How do you tell? I mean, when the philosopher ventured into things that are now considered science or math maybe we know they were wrong, but for moral philosophy or metaphysics, say, how would we tell whether a particular philosopher was wrong or right?
Hume seemed to get quite a few things right. But, yes, there was plenty to disagree with there too.
(I mostly phrased it to be funny!)
Most famous philosophers have a 'second-album' problem (the problem many famous bands face where their first famous album is the sum total result of a dozen years toiling and experimenting in obscurity and is great, and their second album is pumped out under studio pressure 8 months after they get their first record deal and kinda sucks).
Most famous philosophers have some important insight or framework or question that they realized and verbalized and developed before anyone else or better than anyone else, and that thing on its own is an important contribution.
Then they have to make a living as a famous philosopher for the next 50 years of their life, which means writing more and more and more words, whether they have new insights or not.
Write enough words, eventually some of them will be wrong.
Well isn't it a nice thought?
That all the inadequacy of philosophy exists for a reason. That it serves its purpose. That it's part of some plan. And, who knows, maybe, when you graduate and prove your own abilities you will be allowed to learn about the "real philosophy", the compilation of state of the art works by the secret philosophers who appear to be mostly right, as far as it seems. You would have to still keep the appearance of course, publishing bullshit papers in the conventional philosophy journals, but you would also be able to contribute to a secret real philosophical works, if you are good enough.
Did you actually read Kant?
What I don't understand about philosophy is this whole "did you read X" thing. I was a physics major and never read Newton or Einstein to learn their theories. Many philosopher have a reputation for being terrible writers, and their ideas have been improved/eviscerated/augmented since their inception, so reading the primary source seems like it should be irrelevant in forming an understanding of the underlying ideas.
That's funny! I was a philosophy major (kind of) and I _did_ read Newton and Einstein.
Improving, eviscerating and augmenting other philosophers' ideas is the main thing that philosophers do. Aquinas was augmenting Plato's philosophy (he thought) with the truth (as he thought) of Christianity. At the time, he was considered to have corrected, distilled and completed Plato's as-yet-unfinished ideas. Yet, today, we recognize Aquinas's ideas and Plato's ideas as totally separate things. We see Aquinas as erasing and twisting important parts of Plato.
Every culture and time period does this. Descartes is improving, eviscerating and augmenting Aquinas. Hegel is improving, eviscerating and augmenting Kant. Deleuze is improving, eviscerating and augmenting Husserl. Figuring out what's true and what's false in the previous philosophers is, itself, the act of creating a new philosophy. Every era has its own philosophy, different but connected to all the others.
What Acquinas thought was true in Plato, we now think was boring and wrong. What we see as fascinating and fruitful in Plato, Acquinas dismissed as obviously false paganism. Each era has its own standpoint, and our own era has one too, just like the others.
So, if your goal is to stay within the bounds of your own era's philosophy, and you're not interested in whether your own culture is right or wrong about stuff, then your own era's summaries (and improvements, eviscerations and augmentations) of it are probably fine for that. But most philosophers are trying to get to some kind of real actual truth, separate from what current writers and thinkers are saying. So philosophers really value reading the original books, as a guarantee against being tainted by contemporary biases. (translation is a whole nother problem, for this!)
Also! Lots of times the words we're using for stuff are wrong or silly. You can't summarize Heidegger, because he objects to practically every word you could use. He's trying to redefine the word "is"! (in German, of course, but I hear he's just as difficult in German.) It would be like showing somebody a physics equation without explaining what each symbol means.
So, sometimes, the texts themselves resist summary, for reasons that are inherent to the problem the writer is trying to address. And, always, you shouldn't trust your own culture to convey an important philosopher's ideas to you untwisted.
The reason I asked in this case is that the OP seems to be working off of somebody else's augmented or eviscerated idea of Kant, and might possibly not have been taught some of his key ideas.
Reading this im not convinced that’s there anything worthwhile there at all. The idea that we read plato different than acquinas indicates that philosophers are generational group thinkers.
I guess I'd say to read The Republic before you dismiss philosophy entirely, don't take what I (some Internet rando) say too seriously.
But also, if you go deeply enough into any field, and you're really serious about it, you'll find at least some conceptual confusion and conflict. If you follow those down into their causes, you'll hit philosophical questions before long.
Like, here on Astral Codex Ten, you only have to go a few comments deep in a post on AI or Effective Altruism before people are asking "What is consciousness?" or "What is justice?", and contradicting each other and getting very confused. Well, until physics finds a Justice Particle, or medical science locates the Consciousness Gland, those questions are the domain of philosophy, and if you study them, you'll find yourself in the world of Plato before too long.
I have a pet theory that the "hardness" of a field of study is inversely proportional to how frequently students of that field are told to read the original papers or books.
I think this makes perfect sense.
In a proper "hard" field, the object of study is sufficiently well defined and unambiguous that different authors can all describe it while agreeing with each other. We usually don't read Einstein on relativity, because other authors have described relativity more clearly and more succinctly since him.
In puffy subjects, the object of study is sufficiently poorly defined that you can't rely on multiple authors to be talking about the same thing. Ten different paraphrases of one passage by Nietzsche will say ten different things, so you can't rely on any of them. Instead, you have to read the original Nietzsche (or pretend to read the original Nietzsche by reading a translation, if you don't speak pretty advanced German) and develop your own, equally wrong, view of what Nietzsche was trying to say.
Why even bother? I like David Stove's idea that the point of professional philosophers is to save ordinary, useful people from the trouble of needing to do philosophy for themselves. Intelligent people will inevitably start to have philosophical thoughts eventually, and it's good to have a stack of books that we can refer them to to reassure them that whatever thought they've had has already been had, written down, labelled, and debated ad nauseum.
https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/whyhave.html
>In a proper "hard" field, the object of study is sufficiently well defined and unambiguous that different authors can all describe it while agreeing with each other.
Agreed. To put it another way, these fields have well-established consensus conclusions (e.g. Maxwell's equations), and teachers can pick textbooks based on the clearest exposition of the consensus rather than the original publications.
I don't think modern physics students would benefit from a close study of Newton's Principia for example, quite the opposite.
The problem was that in his elaborate geometrical constructions he was explicitly reiterating the limiting processes underlying calculus. Modern presentations are far more streamlined and easier to follow once this has been factored out of every individual case and treated as just "part of the furniture".
Not yet.
I think you should. Whoever summarized his moral ideas to you doesn't seem to have captured what's really interesting about Kant.
Yeh I got that too. Descartes in particular starts off well and goes a bit crazy.
He was better at maths!
Plato kind of stacks the deck here. Like in The Republic, he creates various fictional guys who are wrong about stuff so that (fictional) Socrates can point out how they're wrong.
I read somewhere that Plato sometimes gave Socrates weak arguments because, if they were too strong, they would have less value as teaching aids with his students.
We read the Laches in an earlier class and Socrates was dead wrong about courage. Animals don't have courage? That's ridiculous!
Kierkegaard wrote as a series of pseudonyms, each of which gets certain things wrong. He was trying to make his readers reject his opinion and think about things for themselves. He hated the idea that anybody might believe something just because he, Kierkegaard, said so, as though he was some kind of prophet with special access to truth.
He wrote his university dissertation on Socratic irony, which is to say, when Socrates says one thing, but actually means something else.
I am a Berlin-based AI Engineer about to embark on 12 months of gardening leave. I am searching for interesting projects, potentially in the digital humanities / computational history or philanthropy, where I might be able to use my data science and ML skills to help drive the project forward.
If you know of any research groups or other deserving places that could perhaps use a bit of unpaid ML labor, please reach out!
Here are a few ideas:
-There's a thing called Code for Boston where volunteers do coding projects to help Boston or some subgroup of the population. They have projects you can join, or you can propose one of your own.
-A while ago some tech-savvy civilian developed a system that improved access to kidneys for those that needed a transplant. Each patient found one person who was willing to donate on their behalf, but was not necessarily a match for them, then person and a donor joined a pool. Software written by the founder figured out most efficient way of matching the various donors with the various people in need who had brought a donor into the pool. This project doesn't seen like one that uses ML (I'm a psychologist, so not deeply knowledgable abut tech) but I'll bet there are some ML projects that are like this one in that they solve some practical problem that medicine has not gotten around to developing a solution to.
-Look at 80,000 hours, the EA site.
-Jeremy Howard, an Australian entrepreneur and ML genius, teaches a bunch of courses in what he calls Fast AI. His thing is developing and teaching approaches to ML that can be done by an individual using a home computer, and achieve good results via clever techniques rather than huge volumes of training data. Was browsing the forum students in his class used, and came across a couple farmers who were using ML on photos of their fields to detect weeds! The forum is here, and seems to be a thriving ecosystem of people exchanging ideas and. helping each other.
https://forums.fast.ai/c/deep-learning/18
You might get some ideas from browsing on there, or you could even just ask on the forum. Also, in case you’re curious about fast AI, here’s a link to topics taught in one of Howard’s courses.
https://github.com/the-full-stack/course-gitbook/blob/master/guest-lectures/jeremy-howard-fast.ai.md
-MIT runs a thing called the D Lab, where they develop tech that’s appropriate for use in developing companies. For ex., a few years ago they were making these things sort of like lego sets that could be put together in ways that helped Africans set up improvised medical devices. I’ve forgotten a lot of the details, but the gist of it is that there are a bunch of smart Africans who are clever at improvising things like intravenous lines and other medical devices from bits and pieces they find or buy. The MIT group conferred with them and came up with this lego stuff that somehow worked well to make frameworks to help hold the improvised devices in place. Something like that. Awesome, IMO. Anyhow, don’t know what they’re doing now or how they’d feel about a volunteer like you being involved, but seems like ML could be useful either to the D lab or to the clever Africans they work with.
What are the largest sex gaps in polls?
I recently posted a poll in a rat adjacent forum asking: “Have you ever been on a passenger plane and wondered whether you could land it if the pilot was incapacitated?”
While the sample size for women respondents is low (it’s a rat adjacent forum), I find myself genuinely surprised by the complete absence of female affirmative responses.
Are there any other personality questions where the most common response among males, is not only much rarer but functionally non-existent among females?
I'm a woman who wondered that. That said, I had a period of being hyperfixated on aircraft communications and aren't exactly representative of general population.
Women make up ~7% of licensed pilots in the United States; that's probably a fair proxy for believing, "yes, really, flying an airplane is totally a thing I could do". So, yeah, that's really going to be skewed by gender. Which is unfortunate.
https://gizmodo.com/all-the-animals-american-men-think-they-can-beat-in-a-f-1846900005
This thread reminds me of Mike Tyson’s remark; “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.”
I should have known better to think gizmodo would not infuriate me.
Most of those are obvious why they're wrong (fight a grizzly bear and win? no).
But many are not (fight an eagle and win? why not?). And they of course haven't done even the slightest amount of research to show why or why not. We've all seen kangaroo fights, so we know how those turn out. But I'm fairly willing to bet if an eagle takes me on, odds are about 50/50 he's gonna regret it.
And for the record, I have fought a large iguana that was trying to take my food, so I know a little something about fighting animals with razor-sharp claws and teeth that are at least somewhat determined to win against you.
I think this gizmodo post is worse than useless. Wrong, and provides zero insight.
> But I'm fairly willing to bet if an eagle takes me on, odds are about 50/50 he's gonna regret it.
I don’t know, but having watched raptors my guess would be you wouldn’t know what hit you.
Seems like a major asymmetry with the eagle is that the fight ends when he decides to fly away, so if things are going well for him, the fight continues, but as soon as things seem to be going badly for him, if you haven't managed to break one of his wings or something, he just flies away and leaves you shaking your fist at him from the ground.
The people answering that they can beat a grizzly in a fight are just trolling, surely.
Absolutely there's trolling there. What kind of person hears "could you beat a grizzly bear in a fight" and thinks, "this is a serious question calling for a serious answer"?
I think there’s a misunderstanding of how eagles fight. And an underestimate of how large and sharp their talons are. I could be wrong.
I've seen dogs that got attacked by eagles. A hit an run by an eagle is extremely unlikely to do fatal damage to an adult human male and any kind of grappling (eagle's weapons are only close range) is going to favor the human I think (eagle's weight tops out at something like 15lbs, you pretty much just have to fall on it).
Well, I’ve never seen a man wrestle an eagle so I will bow out. Of course it all depends on the circumstances doesn’t it? If an eagle were stupid enough to hit you with a dive in the middle of nowhere, it certainly would not kill you, but I think it would do some damage. In a cage match a human definitely has an advantage. I don’t really know how Eagles fight when they can’t fly. A goose has a great advantage because it has a very long neck and a very sharp beak. They can strike pretty quickly, but I think it would take at least three of them to win a fight with a person, now of course it depends about whether we’re talking about Bruce Lee or myself
Surely that counts as a win? If there's a boxing match and one of the participants jumps out of the ring and runs away, we don't say "Wow the other guy is left shaking his fist impotently at him, there really ain't no way to decide the victor now".
Yeah, that poll went viral whenever it came out a couple years ago. I have a pet theory that respondents were answering a subtly different version of the question.
I personally interpret it as "You are in a cage match with this animal. Neither of you can leave. It's a fight to the death. Which one of you wins"?
I think many respondents were actually answering "You encounter this animal in the wild, what would the outcome be?" With many people believing they can either scare the animal off or alternatively, that they would choose not to fight.
For example, I am 100% confident that in a cage match to the death, I would easily beat a goose. But if I actually encountered a pissed off goose, I would probably just leave and avoid the fight ("lose", especially from the gooses perspective).
There's also the use of the word "could". At least to me, it means, "is there a physical possibility however remote you land the 1-to-a-million lucky punch that beats the creature?" Not at all whether you'll reliably win. With that outlook the numbers don't seem that wild to me.
Yeah, the parameters are undefined. As noted in another thread, someone thought eagle easily wins. Then I started wondering what they mean.
On one end of the spectrum, I'm on a cliff face trying to scale it, and an eagle attacks me. 0% chance I survive that encounter.
On the other end, we're in a small cage. Doesn't matter how sharp its claws/beak are. Yeah, I'll be bleeding and unhappy, but that is going to be a dead eagle.
In the middle, I'm in a field, minding my own business, and an eagle decides to take me out, swoops down on me, and catches me by surprise. I figure that's a 95% chance the eagle wins, but other humans I would change those odds.
And then there's "fair fight." Okay, the eagle and bear have very sharp, very hard knives built into their bodies. Does that mean I get to bring ten very large, very sharp knives to the fight? At that point, and with proper training, I think even my odds against a grizzy go up (not a lot, maybe from 0% to 2%, but again, other humans I might increase those odds...)
A fun thought experiment, but I'm sure every second I've put into this thing is wasted. When it comes down to it, none of these animals stand any chance against humans, because we have tools they can't even fathom, let alone utilise, in the fight we're actually engaged in. It turns out whatever the definition of "fair" is Gizmodo or anyone else is using is irrelevant. In the only fight that matters, humans are winning it, 99.9% of the time.
https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/35852-lions-and-tigers-and-bears-what-animal-would-win-f
Sex gap here isn’t particularly large by the normal standards of the sex gap, and most importantly; there’s no mystery as to why women should feel less confident than men in fighting wild animals.
Thinking you could beat an elephant in a fight isn't confidence. It's thinking, "This question is a joke and I'll play along."
Something like a Lizardman Constant?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
"Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas" is a lot of fun. 55% of male respondents and 22% of female respondents knew the word 'aileron'. 55% of female respondents and 18% of male respondents knew the word 'ruche'.
Reminds me of this from the XKCD guys blog on differences between men and women on descriptions of color https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
So googling it, it's just people answering whether they think they know the words, not giving a definition (although there were fake words to trip them up). No real guarantee they weren't lying or honestly mistaken. They give "whicker" as an example, surely a lot of people would think it's a possible spelling of wicker?
" They give "whicker" as an example, surely a lot of people would think it's a possible spelling of wicker?"
Maybe, but that's a word I do know, don't ask me how because I have no idea (the fruits of indiscriminate reading over decades?)
I looked up the definition for the word "ruche," read it carefully twice, and I still don't know what it is.
You probably would know it if you saw it, just don't know the word. If you've ever seen curtains or dresses you've seen ruching:
https://www.amityhome.com/product/ruched-linen-curtain-petal-pink/
Seemingly in French, it means "beehive".
Thanks for that. Once I saw it, I did indeed immediately know what that was!
It often happens, there are plenty of times I'm "is that what you call it, I know it by a different name" or "oh, so that's the name for the thingy" 😀
I knew both - of course an English-speaking girl knows "ruched" - but the reason I knew "aileron" was that I managed to get all the way to like age 30 before realizing I didn't know how airplanes stay up in the air and so I read basically a children's book about it. So I kind of illustrate the point even in the affirmative.
I sometimes wonder what they taught us in school and why.
I came up in the diagramming sentences era.
Something about combustion engines would have been useful. But we needed to read "Of Mice and Men".
What schools teach is a bit of a crap shoot based off of what people thought was important fifty to twenty years ago. At best, I see it as a bit of an intellectual sampler plater. Of Mice and Men might not have mattered in your life but may have been seminal to the next kid over.
Ok, I had to look up "ruche" since I had never heard it before. I asked my girlfriend if she knew it, and she said she recognized the word but forgot what it meant.
It's funny because I would have answered I knew the word, assuming it's a French loanword (it is!) for beehive (it isn't!). So that goes to show how flawed these things are.
Usually the term "ruching" is used when talking about clothes, so I can see why "ruche" out of context would be unfamiliar.
I have heard that men will apply for a job for which they find one thing they are qualified to do, and women won't apply for a job for which they find one thing they aren't qualified to do. I have nothing with which to back up either statement, and my own experience, as a man, would be an exception.
In computing, the requirements on the job ad are a wildly over optimistic list of skills/experience they'd like the candidate to have. If you meet even some of it (but not all of it) you're typically in with a chance.
I think I had better not give too specific an example, but in academia, if you should be so fortunate as to get two well-qualified applicants for the same job ad, what you actually do is to create another position and hire both of them.
I don't have firsthand experience but that sounds wildly different from the descriptions I've heard of the ratio of talented applicants to (funding for) open positions in the academic job market. It might vary some based on field I guess.
I was thinking of Research Associate positions, or jobs working for industrial research labs.
You want a permanent teaching position, that's harder.
One undergrad student of ours I was supervising was very good. We would have given him a phd position no problem. sadly, from our point of view if not his, he instead went and got a job in industry for $$$ more money.
A few years back, interview.io did an experiment where they disguised the voices of programmer interview candidates to make men sound like women and vice versa to test the theory that women are more likely to discriminated against. They found it made no difference.
What they did find was that women were 7x more likely to quit the interview process if they had a single bad interview while men were more likely to barrel on regardless.
https://www.raggedclown.com/2017/08/19/a-more-social-software-engineer/
The stereotype recently is "how often do you think about the Roman empire"
As a matter of mental hygiene, I only think about the Roman Republic.
I admit it, I laughed. Well played.
The answer is "a lot more often than I normally would, because I keep seeing this meme reminding me of it".
I have somehow avoided this meme, and have no clue what it's referring to. I would guess the Monty Python sketch somehow?
Nothing that grand, it was just something doing the rounds on Twitter, something like: "Ladies, have you any idea how often your husband/boyfriend thinks about the Roman Empire?".
Somewhere there's some dude whose parents named him Augustus Caesar Jones and he's like "hey, every time I sign my name."
I also know a few people here write their own blogs / do research, so two suggestions for anyone who has the time!
A) there's a boarding school in Switzerland, Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, whose boarding fees are amongst the highest in the world. However, tuition for day students is basically free. I imagine this can be used to analyse the effect of family wealth on school performance?
B) I've asked this many times in different places but have never found a definitive answer: what's the origin of the media play symbols (triangle for Play, lines for Pause, etc)? On which device were they first used? I imagine one could put together a compelling CGP Grey-like piece on this.
Relevant Reddit thread for B: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tasqz/eli5_why_is_the_play_button_a_sideways_triangle/
Interesting question, and one I'll admit never even occured to me.
Can't find a reference to Olsson though
I’m looking for a particular PSA I saw in my youth, ca. 1980–82. It was half an hour long (unless my ability to estimate time from so long ago is waaaay off) and lectured kids about the duplicity of toy commercials.
For example, it showed a [fake] commercial for action figures rocketing downstream on a raft, and the voiceover whispers hastily, “river not included”; the rafting action figures would be a lot less fun in a bathtub!
I’ve utterly failed to find this through conventional google methods, and was wondering if anyone had encountered it, or knew of a resource on classroom PSAs of that period.
I have one like this saved in my YouTube likes, I'll have a look when I'm home. Do you remember if the presenter was dressed as a pirate?
The ObscureMedia subreddit tends to have a lot of stuff like this.
Edit: Not the video you're looking for but I'll post it anyway since it's very similar and might still be of interest. https://youtu.be/pzEp65hNLq4?si=7yr5bM0tRAzcMB9C
Wow! Are you familiar with a PSA looking ad from the early 90s in which a man asks a librarian for a book, she says no, and as the man walks away she calls two men in suits, presumably to investigate him?
Don't think I've ever seen that one, sorry.
Thanks regardless.
Holy crow! That is it! Thank you so much!
"River not included" comes at 13:22.
I had totally forgotten about the pirate…until I started watching it, that is. Thank you again!
I know a lot of readers here are EAs, so I wanted to ask... I read Michael Lewis's book on SBF, and the thing I couldn't understand is, what are EAs solving for?
It looks like all the maths is around saving as many lives as possible, but to what end? Why are EAs focused on saving lives, if they don't value equally pleasure in life (and so, they make calls such as 'I shouldn't focus on my own happiness because it might lead to fewer lives saved' or 'no time to have children' etc)?
As others have said, "lives saved" is definitely a big oversimplification. The reason it gets focused on so much in surface-level public facing discussions is that saving lives is very easy to explain and it's something almost everyone agrees is good, without having to get into a lot of debates about what exactly constitutes quality of life, how it should be measured, etc.
I'd ignore the Very Online debates, basically none of it matters at all to real people who are actually suffering. I don't care about invisible organ harvesters, I don't care about trolley problems, I don't care about abstract trade offs of life Vs happiness. In the real world half a million children die of malaria every year, and many many more people get very sick from it. This is a disease which is relatively trivially prevented and treated. People feel better when they don't die of malaria, and I would also be rather upset if my children were to die of malaria. Everything else is commentary. There are a number of things in this category (lead poisoning, unclean water, intestinal worms, etc), and in a century's time if we've run out of incredibly low hanging fruit I'll start entertaining the philosophical questions.
Remaining alive is usually a prerequisite to experiencing pleasure. And Greek myths aside, it's usually rare that saving someone's life leaves them in a situation so miserable that they'd rather be dead.
EAs get into endless discussions over the details, but the basic unit of improvement is usually the quality adjusted life year (qaly). E.g. a lot of deworming charities don't actually save many lives but do cheaply massively improve many people's life quality.
Do any EA organization have a way of directing donors to proximity-weighted qaly increasing charities? E.g. if someone wanted to donate to the charity that was optimal for increasing qalys within 100 miles of the donor's home per dollar? Efficiency and cosmopolitanism are separate goals...
I don't know if the thing you're looking for exists (it takes a massive amount of resource to find the ten best charities in the world, it would be an impossible task to find the ten best charities operating in - say - every individual municipality). You might be interested that you can proximity-weight QALY through time, giving different weights to charities which produce a small number of QALYs today (say, cash transfer) vs a large number of QALYs in the future (say, vaccination). It is a very live question in the literature as to exactly how you make the tradeoff between the two.
Many Thanks! I wasn't thinking in terms of proliferating the number of charities covered, which, as you said, would be an impossible task. I was thinking more of just keeping track of the geographic span of each of the e.g. ten best charities that e.g. GiveWell already covers, so that e.g. donors could sort the list by proximity-weighted QALYs per dollar rather than by raw QALYs per dollar. That way, each donor could decide for their own donation in what ratio they value a QALY for a neighbor vs a QALY for someone halfway around the world.
>you can proximity-weight QALY through time, giving different weights to charities which produce a small number of QALYs today (say, cash transfer) vs a large number of QALYs in the future (say, vaccination)
Neat! So a _temporal_ discount rate is already supported, and I'm suggesting a _spatial_ discount rate.