Thank you for looking at powerful measures to make Bodø an even more attractive place to make your home, both privately and as a business.
My girlfriend and I are moving from Oslo to Bodø this May, to live close to family - not as a result of a superior job market: But imagine how cool it would be if the best technology jobs were up north!?
When you now look at the reduction in wealth tax, I hope you also have an eye on the problems surrounding startups, which have been thoroughly covered over time by the newspaper Shifter:
In short, the issue is this: Startup founders can sit with large fortunes on paper, long before they get significant turnover, and years before profits. This means that the most ambitious would do well to leave the country even before they get investors. What if they just had to move a few degrees of longitude north?
My wish is that you can see Bodø's position and opportunities in context when you complete this inquiry, so that this will also be a stimulator for existing and future technology initiatives.
Technology workers are mobile, nature loving people, in search of strong communities. Here, Bodø makes a strong case, and stronger with each passing year, with direct flights to the east via Helsinki, a new UiT location, and an already strong technology sector. If a would-be founder can also calculate that over time he will be left with a larger share of his own company, Bodø is the obvious choice.
"
Following this, I have been invited to meet with the mayor(!) The problem is that I am neither a founder or an economist.
If you want to help me present a strong case either towards the main policy of a reduction or removal of the municipal wealth tax, or towards other actions that could synergize to help make Bodø the tech/ startup capital of Norway, please write below!
If for some reason you haven't already, I highly suggest that you remove any pictures of yourself from the internet. Things are going to get real ugly.
The Cincinnati area has Northgate, Eastgate, and Southgate, all three of which are in the locations you'd expect from the names, but Southgate is apparently named after the Southgate family, not because it's to the south of the city.
The cake has nothing German in it. It's like Vienna sausages which are called "Frankfurter" in Vienna. Or the jelly doughnuts "Berliner" which are called "Pfannkuchen" in Berlin https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-4/f03/ which is weird because that means "pancake", whereas pancakes are called "Eierkuchen" (egg cake) in Berlin. Uh, I seem to have digressed a bit...
I know. That's why I called Outerbridge Crossing a "serendipitous eponym": by chance, the name that inspired the eponym is appropriate for the thing being named.
By contrast, German chocolate cake is merely a "surprise eponym", because people will be surprised when they learn the name is an eponym, rather than a name along the lines of Swiss cheese or English muffins.
Funny how eponyms are often not used in the place they're named after. English muffins are called just "muffins" in England. They can be used for French toast, which is called "pain perdu" (lost bread) in France. And I bet Americans aren't aware of the sugar-coated sweet cake "Amerikaner": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikaner_(Geb%C3%A4ck)
Americans do eat "American cheese", while calling it such. And to preempt the obvious, it melts more cleanly that most cheddar, which is important in some contexts.
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.
Putin just endorsed Biden. "Stable" and "predictable".
I hadn't realized that he was this much of a **troll**. I can't quite picture Putin giggling; maybe he smirks, or just stares with a blank deadpan expression.
Huh, I'd seen the interview billed as "let's actually ask Putin why he invaded Ukraine", so I wasn't expecting hardball questions. I do like this Putin quote:
> "He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview."
I came here to say that I'm thinking of voting for Robert Kennedy. (I guess I first have to work to get him on the ballot.) His take on Biden is blistering, and he would destroy him in a debate... like that matters.
Heck, he might even make it (which, of course, would make it a *classic* troll - saying something you actually mean, but in a way guaranteed to get a rise). As much as fervent pro-Russia types have been claiming that Biden has a secret plan to take US directly to WW3 Any. Day. Now, under Biden - a traditional cold war prez - the rules of the game are clear; US is participating in a proxy war, but it stays a proxy war. Money flows in, weapons (under certain, though shifting limits) flow in, intel flows in, probably a limited amount of hush-hush special ops persons have flown in - but US troops, as a large-scale deployment, stay out.
Trump does mean uncertainty. Maybe he'd pull everything out? Maybe he'd go all in? Maybe he'd start a war in some completely unexpected location or do a Nixon in China, with China? Who knows?
Hey, that's just what would make it even *more* unexpected. It was, after all, extremely unexpected already that Nixon, with a reputation for strong anti-communism, would court China. No-one would have expected Trump to court Kim Jong Un, of all people.
True. Nixon’s well known anti communism reputation was key for domestic acceptance of detente with China. Kissinger briefed Nixon for over 40 hours prepping for the initial meetings with Zhou and Mao Zedong. It was bold but carefully prepared and carefully executed diplomacy
I’m not sayings Trump wouldn’t stage an impulsive and self aggrandizing photo op. I just don’t think anything meaningful would come of it.
Yeah, a big part of the problem with the North Korea "summits" was that there was basically zero prep work on the American side. Trump walked in with a proposal that Kim absolutely wasn't going to accept, and didn't have a fallback position when Kim didn't go for it.
I would expect more of the same from any Trump summits in a hypothetical second term.
I think it is good that multiple ways exist to pay for online content. Some videos have ads, some authors have Patreon accounts, some people use their free content as an advertisement for their paid content.
But some people just do everything at the same time -- for example a YouTube video that contains ads from YouTube *and* in the middle of the video there is an ad for a third party *and* at the end of the video there is an ad for author's paid videos on a different website *and* there is a link to author's Patreon account.
Are these people completely shameless? Or is everyone else stupid for leaving a lot of money on the table? Speaking for myself, I wouldn't send a cent to a person who seems so greedy. But I am not a typical internet user; other people might enjoy being abused.
These people are shameless whores, but every one of us is either willing to be a sellout or so close as to make little difference, that it's hypocritical for 99% of us to judge too harshly.
I think a lot of it comes down to knowing your audience. Some people can get away with multiple forms of income from the same video - maybe their viewers love them or maybe they don't have any steady viewers and so milk whoever they can get.
Unfortunately, as streaming services and places like YouTube add more and more advertisements and other monetization, it gets easier and easier for people to add their own and not get pushback on it. It becomes expected like broadcast TV in the 90s. Who knows, maybe we'll get accustomed to taking bathroom breaks during commercials like we did in those days.
On Youtube, you can skip in-video ads by just pressing the "skip 10 seconds key" repeatedly or clicking on the timeline. It's a lot less obnoxious than the linear TV era.
At least in some cases, creators have started doing promotions because they can't rely on ad income anymore due to arbitrary demonetization.
Having shame is stupid, so both are true. Never deny customers an opportunity to give you money. Because someone is always going to stupid enough to pay for it.
I'm a soon to be 4th year med student and will soon have more time on my hands as rotations calm down. I also have a couple bachelor's degrees (though not super useful ones), decent scientific writing ability, rudimentary stats skills, and significant research experience. However, I can't code unless you count basic R.
Does anyone have thoughts on ways I could earn some money in the next year? I will still have obligations during the week days but a lot of free time in evenings and weekends. The two options I see floated a lot are tutoring and gig economy work. However, I'm too far removed from my prior MCAT tutoring to go back to that, and even if my soon to be released Step 2 score is excellent, there doesn't seem to be much demand for step tutoring. As far as Doordash, I do have a car but it doesn't pay well as far as I can tell. ChatGPT wasn't much help.
Wouldn't count tutoring out until you try and find some work. Especially if you've done it before. Maybe through an agency would be easiest. Could even do SAT tutoring if your scores were good. I say that because, for what it is, it can be extremely high paying. If you can get any work it'll pay a lot better than gig economy would.
tough spot to be in. I was just there a few years ago. I have no direct input as far as gigs to take up. But i will say if you're going to residency, you could also just not optimize too much on money and make quality memories/rest. As a resident myself now (I like residency btw), beyond basic comforts money has little use when you work an average of 70 hours a week.
Well I just guess we're going to have to wait and see whether this becomes (a) the only story that the media covers for the next three months or (b) buried on page 12 under "local crime".
Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a shooting at a Super Bowl parade in Kansas City. This, too, will either be the big news story of the month or forgotten within an hour depending on the colour of the perp's skin.
And I wonder why the police haven't listed anyone as a person of interest...
What was really interesting was this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSgo3bW3r14 of Biden pausing for 20 seconds and quietly consulting Jill before answering a reporter's question "Do you have any reaction to the shooting in Kansas City?" before refusing to answer.
The police have arrested two suspects, both of whom are juveniles so we won't be getting names or photos for a while. This seems to have been a case of "gangbanger with a gun sees rival gangbanger in a crowded public place, ballistic mayhem ensues", so it's not going to fit the usual mass-shooter narratives.
Can anyone recommend good Supreme Court Journalists or bloggers? Preferably ones that focus on the legal argument and do not just talk about about the practical effects the decisions will have on people. Preferably minimal political bias.
I am also interested in other answers, but this is the best that I've managed to find:
(1) scotusblog: pretty much "just the facts"
(2) popehat report: Ken White, former federal prosecutor's blog about the law and big cases in the news. I don't read it regularly, but he was historically very balanced in his blog writing (tweets not so much). Not specifically SCOTUS focused.
(3) Advisory Opinions: David French and Sarah Isgur. Note: they are biased from the right, but they claim a mantle of objectivity. I do think they are making a sincere effort, so partly this shows how difficult it is to be objective. Aside from their political spectrum bias, they are strongly pro-SCOTUS as an institution.
(4) Strict Scrutiny: Melissa Murray, Kate Shaw, Leah Litman. Openly biased from the left, but, like AO, they explain their reasoning. They are moderately anti-SCOTUS as an institution, primarily driven by their opposition to the court's current members.
(5) 5-4 Podcast: Rhiannon Hamam, Peter Shamshiri, Michael Liroff. Strongly anti-SCOTUS as an institution (and not just the current justices).
Do any of the new image generators / alterers allow you to upload pictures of yourself or another person at different ages, and have it adjust different-age pictures to a requested age?
Like you have a picture of your grandma at age 20 and age 90, can it impute a picture of her at age 50?
Or a picture of yourself ten years ago vs today - can you age the younger picture to you today, keeping the background and setting?
Here's a geometry problem that may be a bit challenging, but fun to think about and doodle. I know of two solutions, one of which is strikingly simple.
Consider a convex quadrilateral. Label its sides a,b,c,d in clockwise order, and let its area be S. Prove that S <= (ac+bd)/2.
Well, I think that the cross product of two vectors (which is ||v1||*||v2||*|sin(v1,v2)| gives the area inside the parallelogram defined by these two vectors. Dividing it by 2, we get the area of the triangle defined by v1 and v2. As |sin(v1,v2)| <= 1, we get your inequality. I guess its the strikingly simple proof, but nice problem indeed, it distracted me a bit from my job!
Well, let's take the S <= (ab+cd)/2 for granted and apply it to the a,c,b,d quadrangle. We can now write S2 <= (ac+bd)/2. Now, if I read Bretschneider's formula right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretschneider%27s_formula), it seems like a quadrangle's area is totally determined by its sides (which are fixed in our case), and the sum of two opposed angles (which can usually be tuned to the optimal 180°, except for edge cases). So it looks like the maximal area of quadrangle is unchanged by the order you put the segments in.
So S2max = Smax <= (ac+bd)/2. And as S <= Smax, we get to the desired result.
The edge case aforementioned only seems to concern quadrangles with a null area. And the inequality stands in that case too.
I am not very satisfied with my answer as I am using a formula that carries a lot more information than what is needed to prove your inequality.
Edit:
In fact, no need for this fancy formula. Let's take an "optimal quadrangle", ie one which area is maximal, given its sides. We can break it in two "optimal" triangles. If we permute two sides, we can still reform this optimal triangle, only mirrored: the area is unaffected. That's how we can prove that the maximal area of a quadrangle only depends on the length of its sides, not their order.
The fellowship has been impactful for many participants, and I expect there are many others who would enjoy and benefit from the program if they heard about it!
Maybe, but I'll bet "EA for Christians" is almost entirely composed of actual Christians, whereas "EA for Jews" is almost entirely composed of atheists.
Is there any way to disable the substack subscribe pop-up? I've noticed this site does not have the pop up either for the main page or the individual articles. However I cannot find instructions on how to turn it off anywhere on the internet? (edit I have figured out how to turn it off the individual articles, but is there any way to remove it from the main page without linking to the archive)
This drives me crazy too. Every single time I want to read a non-ACX Substack post, I first have to scroll down until the screen goes dark and the popup appears, click X on the popup, and then scroll back up and actually read the damn article. It's insane.
Use uBlock origin (which you should be using anyway) and use the select and block feature. Removes anything on a webpage that you don't want to see. This is the only place I'd advertise this extension because it's so good that if it gets too popular, our lizard overlords will ensure it gets shut down.
Because I live and work in the world, around other people. I talk to them about tech stuff, and ad blockers come up. Do you do that? I don't work in the tech industry.
Is there a way to check your post history? I was banned from a particular Substack and I have no real idea why. I only discovered it recently, presumably quite a ways after the fact, since I don't post on their Substack much. I am curious if, in fact, the individual in question didn't even ban me for posts on their own Substack, but it was one of those bans you see on Reddit sometimes where it's because they said something you don't like elsewhere.
Add mine to the litany of complaints about substack lacking the most fucking basic of functional forum features. This is local grocery store app level embarrassing.
I tried to imagine an explanation for why - assuming Substack has adequate money and technical talent - none of this gets fixed:
Maybe Substack doesn't want to make commenting more pleasant, because it would encourage more comments. Then, writers might find themselves doing more moderating and more responding, and thus write fewer new posts. But Substack probably thinks paid subscriptions are mainly caused by posts, rather than commenting. (As with most online communities, commenters here are a minority of subscribers.)
I sometimes think that the comment section was designed for a single level of "yay, you rock" comments, with an optional second layer of "thanks for reading".
Substack *only displays two comments* by default, so that seems accurate. Still, you'd think they could try to fix things for one of their biggest stars.
Agreed. Maybe we should try to do something about it?
I never thought I'd use 'my substack' for anything, but decided I might as well create a post on it, to initiate collaboration around the issue. Anyone who's interested, click on my profile image to get to it.
Does anyone know what's up with polymarket's US election market? With Michelle Obama at 7% and thousands of dollars on the order book, it seems too much like free money. What's the catch?
Currently Michelle Obama is 7.1% to be the next president on Betfair Exchange (£10m bet on the market; £360k on this candidate). She is also 10.2% to be the democratic nominee (£7m bet on the market; £190k on this candidate), which implies she has a 70% chance of winning if nominated. Both figures are based on the odds at which you could bet against her. If you think neither event will occur, you probably prefer to get an 11% return in 6 months than a 7% return in 10 months.
Alternatively, you could back Biden. His odds have shortened slightly in the past two days, but still imply a 69% chance he will be the nominee (with a chunky £5.8m of bets on this candidate), which you may think low. His implied chance of being the next president is 28% (with £2.9m of bets). This implies he as a 41% of winning if nominated. These figures are based on the odds at which you could bet for him.
Meanwhile, Trump (according to this market) is 91% likely to be the Republican nominee and 45% likely to be the next president, implying a 49% chance of winning if nominated.
Something looks wrong with those conditional probabilities, since in each case their most likely opponent is the other. Possibly worth considering backing both Trump and Biden to win: if you put £387 on Biden and £613 on Trump, you would make £373 (before commission) if either won, although of course you get rinsed if Michelle pulls through.
The reason we got Biden as a candidate, and then a president, is that almost all the people who weren't on the Trump Train fondly remembered the Obama presidency, and Biden's "I was the #2 man in the Obama administration; I can give you a calmer, more sedate Obama Lite" sold better than the specific pitches of any of the other Democratic candidates.
If Biden is out because of age/senility/whatever, which is probably north of 7%, then that leaves us with the #1 woman in the Obama administration, and probably the only other figure from that administration that most voters can remember off the top of their head. And "Four more years of Obama Lite; the alternative is four more years of The Donald", is probably almost as strong a pitch now as it was in 2020.
But Biden could back that with actually being an experienced, capable politician. Michelle can't, and I'm pretty sure that *will* matter. So I think she's overpriced at 7%, but I think I can see where that 7% is coming from.
Wasn't Hillary Clinton the #1 woman in the Obama administration, as Secretary of State? I believe that voters also remember her.
I don't think that anyone who is actually thinking about governance is considering Michelle Obama as a candidate here - they're just picking a name they think of based on thoughts like the First Lady counting somehow as part of the government.
Hillary wasn't in the administration at all during Obama's second term. And whether she was in the Senate, State, or on the lecture circuit, she was always the #1 woman in the Hillary Clinton Administration, on hold until it was Her Turn.
If they were going to replace Biden, the time to do that would have been *before* the primaries. People dropped a lot of stalking horses a year or two ago, but it never went anywhere. The only way he can not be the candidate now is if he literally drops dead.
The latest thinking, by Ross Douthat among others is that Biden waits till the convention to say something like “I could do the job but I’ve heard the will of the people.”
Then bow out for the good of the party and the country, letting all his pledged delegates come up with a replacement. He wouldn’t necessarily have to endorse Kamala Harris in that situation.
Conditional on it not being Biden, I'm seeing probabilities around:
Obama, 33%
Newsom, 28%
Harris, 20%
Warren, 5%
Whitmer, 4%
Phillips, 3%
Clinton, 2% (although I note that Clinton is much higher on PredictIt).
If the scenario is that Biden drops out at the convention, I'm confident Obama is much too high and Harris is much too low. But mostly, I think that won't happen (barring some major adverse event between then and now, the probability of which is well below 33%).
I had the same reaction 4 years ago, when a left-wing friend was breathlessly talking about the possibility of Michelle Obama running for President against Trump. I was completely disconnected from politics at the time, and reacted with obvious befuddlement, since she wasn't a politician and had no experience and her only qualification was being married to a guy who'd done it (which seemed profoundly anti-feminist). I forget exactly what my friend said in response, but I recall the expression on their face was as if no one had ever mentioned these objections to them. The subject was quietly dropped.
I eventually concluded that this friend had been listening to politics in an echo chamber, with some combination of a) starting to mistake the reactions in there for reactions in the outside world, and b) assuming that I was part of the same echo chamber (although they really should have known better, so that would be another form of blindness). Perhaps it was c) code for "let's let Barack run things for another 8 years", although I didn't detect any hint of that at the time, and in that case the expression might have meant "I thought you'd gotten the secret memo, but alas, you're literal-minded enough to miss the hidden meaning, which I am unwilling to say aloud".
I suspect that something like (a) is happening here, coupled with a norm within that group of putting your money where your mouth is (which is admirable).
> her only qualification was being married to a guy who'd done it (which seemed profoundly anti-feminist)
That sounds like taking proclaimed ideas too literally, which may be appreciated at places like ACX, but at most other places something qualifies as "anti-feminist" only when it is (a) bad for some woman, preferably an important one, or (b) good for her, but in a way that makes her focus less on her career and more on her family.
Yeah, I'm old-fashioned that way, and this is one of those "first-wave" things. I think it counts as anti-feminist to treat a woman purely as an extension of her husband.
Hillary Clinton was a great example. Love her or hate her, it's because of who she was and what she did.
As far as I can see the reasoning (as articulated by Vivek Ramaswamy and others) is (a) Biden's mental faculties are declining, (b) the Democrats will at some point realise they need to replace him, (c) the obvious substitute would be Kamala Harris, but nobody likes her, (d) the Democrats would alienate their base if they overlooked a woman of colour, but (e) they can avoid this by nominating another woman of colour, i.e. Michelle Obama; in any case (f) they really want to run Barack again, but are prevented from doing so by the term limit and (g) Michelle can serve as a de facto cipher for her husband. How this could be done in practice is left as an exercise for the reader.
Some say the switch will take place after the convention, in which case betting against Obama (or for Biden) as nominee is still profitable, since the market will resolve when the convention takes place.
It should be obvious, but I do not endorse any of propositions (a)-(g). I merely report the argument as I have understood it.
There are rumors that the Democrats will switch from Biden to Obama at the convention. I've only heard this from Republican sources, not Democrats, so ... grain of salt, and all that.
Andrew Sullivan just wrote about it, so it's more than just the right-wing media, but I think those odds are overblown. Take the free money; lots of people on betting sites overreact to news stories.
I think there were good reasons for the Dems to try to move off Biden 6-12 months ago, his poll numbers certainly aren't what you'd hope for, but at this point the only way I can figure trying to replace him on the ticket is if he's actively declining. Like,
If Nov 23, he's at X brain farts/gaffes
In Feb 24, he's at 2X brain farts/gaffes
In Aug 24, he'll be at 8x brain farts/gaffes
If you're looking at that kind of decline in an 80+ year-old...yeah, pulling him from the ticket makes sense. That's the only way I can see him not being the Dem nominee though.
There are definitely rumours, and it's not an implausible scenario, but 7% seems high. Biden won't resign in his current state and he's unlikely to go that far downhill in the six months before the convention.
Besides, if they were going to make a serious play for Michelle Obama as candidate they'd be doing some battlespace preparation. Michelle Obama would be doing public appearances, making speeches, getting her face on television. And as far as I can figure out, she's not doing any of that stuff right now.
Yeah, it doesn't strike me as particularly likely, as it doesn't seem like it would fly with Independent voters, who would, I think, see it as 'gimmicky'.
I also don't think she would want to do it. They are, I believe, making a ton of money right now and are very popular (or at least regarded well). She doesn't necessarily seem power hungry, so I would think it would be mostly downside for her.
Yeah, I could see lots of serious thought about Biden alternatives, but she's not high on the list. Newsome is far more obvious, but so are a lot of current senators and governors who are at least in the spotlight somewhere and have personally done politics. I wouldn't say Michelle is at 0%, but not much above that.
The only scenario where Michelle pulls ahead is if we consider the DNC a conspiracy that has the power and willingness to rig the primaries completely behind the scenes such that their preferred candidate (who I assume is a pretend way to get her husband re-elected?) doesn't even have to try to appeal to anyone.
The thinking, I believe, is that if you were to jump somebody over Harris, it would have to be a black woman, or there would be too much blowback.
And, even though Biden is looking not particularly fit, mentally or physically, he is the incumbent, and he did beat Trump last time they contested, so it would require something fairly drastic, I'd think, to try to get him off the ticket.
I don't know about Polymarket, but I heard that PredictIt had massively skewed odds for Trump in 2020, including people betting on him *even after Biden was sworn in as president*. With low betting limits and high fees, it's hard to correct low probabilities like that.
Recently I had a somewhat strange experience. I'm sure it's perfectly normal, but it felt like the kind of thing that would appear at the start of a conspiracy thriller or ghost story if those were things that could actually happen.
When I went out for ice cream, there was a guy sitting on a bench on the sidewalk in front of the Apple Store. He didn't have anything to do other than occasionally check his phone and just sat there for forty minutes looking around for no apparent reason. He often looked at the Apple Store, and I guessed that he must be waiting for someone inside, although 40 minutes seemed like a long time for someone to be inside.
The strangest part is that right after I finished eating my ice cream 40 minutes later, just as I was preparing to leave, he abruptly got up and walked up the street ahead of me. He walked half a block up and disappeared inside a burger shop, so I thought he might be meeting someone there, but when I went inside right afterwards out of curiosity, there was no sign of him or anyone else he might have been meeting. He'd just vanished.
The best explanation I can think of is that he had to use the bathroom and immediately hid in the bathroom so I didn't see him, but that still doesn't explain why he sat outside for 40 minutes with nothing to do or why he went to that specific restaurant to use the bathroom. And it's probably for customers only anyway. The whole thing was very mysterious.
P.S. He also had a mask on the whole time (despite sitting outside), which itself is pretty uncommon nowadays.
(My guess is he worked at the restaurant, was on break, and you and he just happen to time up in your actions. There is also probably another substack with a comment asking why a guy eating ice cream was staring at me for 40 minutes while i was on my lunch break then followed me into where I work.)
I used to work at a movie theater. One day I saw a bunch of Waffle House employees come in, buy some of our overpriced Coke, and leave without seeing a movie. They get free Coke at their own workplace, and it was impossible to get to that movie theater without driving past a Waffle House.
Reminds me of a sight at a bus station long ago; a guy was using the pay phone there, and then he hung up, and pulled out his cell phone to call someone.
Likely illegal activity. I have heard that major telephone companies pulled pay phones not because they were unprofitable, but because they were used significantly (large majority?) for criminal activity.
If he was very focused on the Apple Store, could be he worked for one of the companies that employ people just to count footfall, with hedge funds, competitors or even the store itself paying for the data (although imagine nowadays the store could probably do it much more cheaply with some cameras and software).
I needed to get my ipad repaired recently. They give you a time slot to see a technician. Then, often, they tell you they're running late and here is your new time slot. So, guy sitting outside the Apple Store for 40 minutes seems normal. Also: guy waits for 40 minutes and then needs to visit the restroom sounds normal.
By coincidence I’m reading one of his novels now, ‘VALIS’. It’s actually pretty good. I don’t know it’s your cup of tea but here is a link to it’s Wikipedia page.
Yeah, old sci fi guy. A lot of what the hell is going on here stuff. Your comment seems mildly paranoid. PDK made a good living on stories that were very paranoid.
That reminds me of an experience I had recently. I was sitting in front of the Apple Store minding my own and I saw a guy eating an ice cream. No big deal there, you might think, but he was eating an ice cream for a full forty minutes. Who the heck takes forty minutes to eat an ice cream?
I too was intrigued by the 40-minute ice cream. Doesn't it melt? Was this a single ice cream or was this "I finished one scoop, let me return and purchase another" kind of thing?
I am told that ice cream is the perfect food for coming down of off fentanyl. Never tried it myself, though. And really, ice cream is the perfect food for a number of situations.
‘The Good Thief’ Nick Nolte plays a heroin addict. To temporarily kick the habit he lays in a supply of ice cream and has someone handcuff him to his bed.
I like ice cream a little too much myself so limit myself to a pint for breakfast once a year on my birthday. Only 8 or so months to go.
This is a high foot-traffic downtown area, and also the Apple Store hires a police officer to constantly be on guard right there, so it's pretty much the worst possible place you could pick. (Although oddly, the police officer was eating dinner across the street at the time, something I've never seen before.)
If there's one thing Breaking Bad taught me, it's that you want to do your meet somewhere in a public place. Way less chance someone sticks a gun in your face and takes your money or your dope.
A proper solution would be a permanent redirect from "astralcodexten.com" to "www.astralcodexten.com"; not sure whether Substack or Scott needs to implement it.
Periodically I see people link to Sam Kriss in these open threads, and I wanted to drop a link to his most recent post, which is one of the best things I've read in months
not sure it works, romantic love is obsessive yes, but the terrorism doesn't work as an extreme metaphor. The lovers always face each other, and the demands are often more about the desire than the result. you also need a self first to love and be loved-you don't gain one by loving.
if the point is polyamory is a shallow connection and monogamy is deeper, it could be said better. i still dont agree, the danger is you still get deep connection but with only one of the polycule. You get power differential and one person in sadness. its more you can't just banish jealousy or the connective aspects of sex.
I actually took it as fairly nihilistic - he points to a love so all consuming, morality and human decency is thrown away. But it's a near-certainty he himself hasn't and isn't experiencing such a love, because he's not dead or in jail. Indeed, it's a certainty even if somehow a small slice of humanity had a culture like the one depicted where "acts of terrorism and mass murder is how you demonstrate your love," it would diminish much more quickly than any religion from the *inside,* much less the outside.
Sure, he makes the obligatory handwave to poly being "shallow lukewarm puddles" vs the real incandescent and consuming fires of *ACTUAL* love, but the "actual" love he's pointing to is an unattainable, unsustainable shibboleth that nobody in their right mind ever experiences, thus handwaving away both poly and the real-world love that monogamous people feel.
I mean, I guess I could be wrong - um - for the other people here, is this what real-world love feels like to *you?* You would commit acts of mass murder and terrorism for it?
Otherwise, straight nihilism and a dismissal of basically ALL real world love, whether poly or monogamous.
I also, perhaps because I'm very interested in Charles Taylor's notion of the buffered self, I think the part about love as "feeling out the outer edges that define your self in the form of the other" is really central to understanding what the essay is getting at. Much more central than the all-consuming terrorist love that sets it up.
So if you're not familiar with Sam's writing, I don't think people read him or like him with any expectation that he's saying factually true or reasonable things. It's rather that he has a gift for saying ridiculous, extravagant things that draw one in to a sharp point of insight.
The terrorism is a frame story. "But tell us—what are you more afraid of? The possibility that the realisation of your freedom and the purpose of your existence lies outside the bounds of yourself? Or—a bomb?" The Armed Front is using acts of violence to draw people's attention to the ways that therapeutic safetyist mindsets are reinforcing the buffered self against the possibility of real, satisfying love. The inclusion of the Armed Front in the essay is doing the same thing. The 'unattainable, unsustainable shibboleth' and the manifesto framing are there to heighten contrast, not to tell you that that's what love is or is supposed to be. I don't think the essay is saying that real love between persons should express itself in unlimited atrocity. It's saying that real, committed, vulnerable love between persons should be -more like- the nihilism of the chivalric terrorists than the nihilism of self-help affirmations. i.e. "The Somme-heavy barrage of helpful, healthful messaging, here to inform you that you should not seek your self-realisation in and through other people, because other people will always disappoint you. For your own wellbeing, you should avoid allowing anyone to happen to you."
Thanks - if that's the thrust of it you were getting out of it, I don't think he's doing it well for people like me who don't regularly read him.
Everything's a gradient. He's posited two endcaps on the gradient, both of them clearly bad. All this florid verbiage and wide-eyed detail is to merely argue that you should be a few ticks closer to the *right* end, not the *left* end?
BORING. Also, not very well communicated.
And like any gradient, the span of humanity is going to be distributed across the gradient, regardless of what he writes or recommends. Arguing in a Straussian way for being a few ticks closer to his end doesn't seem very insightful or likely to drive anyone to change their actions in the ways he wants.
But then, I'm clearly not the target audience here.
So... there's a criticism of expectations of socially-constructed demonstrations of love? If everyone else were committing acts of terrorism as an expression of love, wouldn't you go along, because otherwise what would your beloved say?
So, not satisfied with Microsoft's paltry billions, Sam Altman seems to be asking the UAE for seven *trillion* dollars to build lots of new high-end chip fabs. This strikes me as roughly equivalent to 1960s Dr. Evil asking for "one hundred billion dollars!", and everybody laughs because there's not that much money in the world. OK, I missed the bit where they redefined M1 a few years ago and there's now a bit over twenty trillion dollars in (mostly virtual) circulation; he's only asking for one-third of all the dollars in the world.
And yes, I get that he's not literally asking for a supertanker full of dollars; he's looking for capital broadly defined and in many forms. It still doesn't pass the giggle test; I talked about this with people I know in the AI and chip-manufacturing fields, and there are too many parts of this plan that aren't going to work. First off, the combined sovereign wealth funds of all the petrostates don't quite reach the seven-terabuck level, and they're not all going to give everything to Sam Altman no matter what he promises. Second, the semiconductor industry can't usefully absorb that level of investment in much less than a generation. We don't have the people, or the tooling, or the resources, and we don't have the people to train the people or the tools to build the tools on less than a generational timescale. And even if you handwave seven trillion dollars' worth of chip fabs into existence, we don't have the electric power generation capacity to run all those chips (and the associated cooling stacks).
So, what is Sam up to? The simplest, easiest answer is that he's just trolling us, generating bullshit or hype for whatever purpose. That seems unsatisfactory as an explanation, but it's possible.
If he imagines that he's actually going to get the seven trillion dollars, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. If he thinks that, given the seven trillion dollars, the stuff he wants to buy with it will be available in the marketplace, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. And if the plan is that he's going to manage the construction of a vertically-integrated industrial economy on the scale of Israel or Sweden so as to build all the stuff he wants to buy, then yeah, he's wrong and mocking laughter is warranted.
Is there something else he might be up to that's not laughably wrong? Or at least wrong in some interesting way I haven't thought of?
Also, this suggests that Sam Altman seems to believe that, in order to achieve his goal, he thinks he needs seven trillion dollars' worth of computronium. Well, of computronium-manufacturing capability, so probably tens of trillions of dollars worth of computronium. And lots of new power plants.
If Sam Altman's goal is "build a true AGI", or maybe ASI, does that mean he thinks true AGI/ASI requires more computronium than sensible people think is going to exist in the next twenty years?
$ 7 trillion all at once is of course laughable. But if the idea is a continuous ramp-up of investments, over the course of a few decades, then it's not necessarily so crazy. The US interstate system seems to have cost $0.5 trillion (in somewhat recent dollars). This would be an investment 14 times as big. There are those who would claim it's 14 times as important.
If that's the case, the crazy part is bringing up now money you don't expect to need for twenty years. The people who might invest in twenty years aren't in the audience, and you're weakening the near-term pitch for the people who are.
It's possible that Altman would have made that mistake, but unlikely that the WSJ wouldn't have commented on it.
It is rather putting the cart before the horse. What do you need a fab for, if you don't have a design. If you have a design, you can find custom fabs.
As you alluded to, one doesn't merely buy a fab and do great things. You start out with a purpose. Along the way, you develop some objectives. You're working with system architects, circuitry architects, then transistor architects. Then you discover some of the objectives can't be met with the custom fabs available. So you get to work with the photo-lithography vendors to see what tools, materials, designs they may be working on, which together you can tailor to fit your needs. Then you are into fab materials, fab processes, and you're working at the cutting edge, hiring employees away from the photo-lithography vendors, having your employees hired away by the photo-lithography vendors, and back and forth with the competition, and you're making test runs and you've got a validation center, and design automation teams, and mask designers, and probably about ten thousand people in your organization .... and then we'll talk about conducive geographies, and somewhere way down the line, ten billion dollars to build a state of the art fab.
Oh my, this is like 99% of journalism, and that's before GPT started writing it all.
Actually, GPT may improve the state of journalism, because it will be able to write stories based on facts (and only occasionally hallucinate something), as opposed to needing to invent things all the time. But that will all depend on who writes the prompts.
This is an extraordinarily optimistic view of the usage of large language models and AI in general. This is akin to saying, "with the advent of the internet and true facts being at our fingertips, journalists will really only report the truth because the truth will be so readily available, without requiring all the hard reading and travel that classic investigation required." Yeah, it doesn't work like that, and neither will our new big tool.
I'm sorry if I missed you being sarcastic or facetious. Well done if so.
> Oh my, this is like 99% of journalism, and that's before GPT started writing it all.
Hot take: this is AIs first clumsy attempt at manipulating humans into giving it the ressources it needs to achieve super-intelligence and, subsequently, world domination.
>Is there something else he might be up to that's not laughably wrong? Or at least wrong in some interesting way I haven't thought of?
Well, the last thread was talking about Elon Musk's payment deal getting scuttled due to lack of negotiating from the other party, so from the armchair it looks like Sam's ensuring people will come back with smaller numbers at it will look more like a back-and-forth. It's "Queen's Duck" chicanery for bureaucratic checkmarking.
What number could he be pursuing for which $7 trillion is too much but not out of the ballpark? $1 trillion? That's still way too high for anything useful that one guy or organization could ever use. That's enough to buy the entire semiconductor sector already. If you're going to do that, then go sign a deal with someone major in that sector and coordinate to get the money together. It's cheaper and comes with institutional backing.
That only works if the initial numbers are modestly too high, not ludicrously too high, As noted below, if you ask for a million-dollar starting salary in your first job out of college, this does not ensure that people "come back with smaller numbers", rather it ensures that they stop taking your phone calls.
The whole paragraph is: "The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said"
So the big headline number comes down to an unnamed source talking about an unspecified project. It sounds like a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Ultimately I don't think there's a lot of point in over-interpreting it.
There's definitely sometimes advantages to anchoring big numbers in people's minds, though. Especially if you're talking to middle eastern sovereign wealth funds, whose main problem is that they have too much money to invest sensibly.
>So the big headline number comes down to an unnamed source talking about an unspecified project. It sounds like a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Yeah, this sounds like it could have gone through several levels of misinterpretation too.
One wild thought: Normally I think of massive computation for LLMs as the training costs. What if Altman expects to have full AGI in a few years, and this is a calculation for the _inference_ computation costs to replace some large fraction of the total global workforce?
But they *don't* have that much money to invest, sensibly or otherwise. That's the point, or part of it. I think most of the money they do have is sensibly invested in diverse portfolios, but it doesn't matter whether it's sensible or not, the seven trillion dollars for chip fabs just isn't realistically available.
And there's no advantage to anchoring ridiculously bid numbers in people's minds. Seriously, the whole "ask for the stars and they'll give you the Moon!" thing really does not work. What Altman seems to be doing, is akin to asking for an entry-level white-collar job with a starting salary of one million dollars per year. This does not "anchor" you in the hiring manager's mind as a superstar that he should be trying to scrape together $500K/year for, it just makes him roundfile your resume and go on to the next one.
I can pretty much guarantee that there are many reasonable proposals for the couple hundred billion dollars the UAE will want to invest over the coming year. And plenty more unreasonable ones to be quickly roundfiled. Probably including Altman's.
No, they don't have seven trillion, but they do have a lot of money. And if you start talking about a business opportunity that can easily absorb trillions (but which can definitely totally do great things for ten billion) then they might be interested.
And you're right, "anchoring" doesn't always work, which is why I said it sometimes works. You need to apply it very judiciously, but it's a legit strategy. Since Sam Altman appears to be a better businessman than I am, I won't nitpick his use of it.
I also don't think anything in the article suggests that it is $7 trillion in one year - its almost not certainly. A project that would be $7 trillion over 40 years is, yeah gigantic but doable. If the number was said at all - which is dubious - it was a parameter across time as well as projects.
Yes, my guess would be that Altman said something along the lines of, "We'll eventually want a total of $7T investment over the next X years, right now we're looking for $Y in our series A round, do you want in?"
That's still an incredibly poor pitch. If you tell your prospective investors that you think you'll need $7E12 to succeed, then your prospective investors will assume that since there isn't $7E12 for you to have nor any reasonable place to put it, you're going to fail. In which case, their lesser up-front investment will just be getting them in on the ground floor of a failure.
Or, if "X years" is long enough for the economy to grow to the point where $7E12 investments are a thing, then you're saying that you are working to much longer time horizons than they are, and what's their exit strategy if they need to cash out in five years?
This probably the wrong place to ask but has pro football become less brutal in the last 20 or 30 years? I watched the end of the Super Bowl last night - to see if the Taylor Swift psyop succeeded. ;-) - and it looked a lot less bone crunching than I remember.
Yeah, I think the long term effects of suffering repeated hits to the head are better understood today than they were 30 years ago. There's also the fact that as salaries for players have gone up and up and up, the cost of losing players for extended periods of time to injury has also gone up, which has led to rule changes to try to make the game safer.
Yeah, all pro sports are trying to limit player injuries. The NFL has all sorts of rules about how you are allowed to hit/ block/ tackle another player. Fighting is way down in hockey and less 'nasty' hits. (not that all the violence doesn't still happen.)
On the one hand the rules have shifted to penalize some types of hits that were legal, and/or shrugged off by the officials, during lets say the 1970s-1990s. So you don't see those nearly as often.
Meanwhile though the players are somewhat bigger and are much faster at a lot of positions. I.e. the foot speed that a Lawrence Taylor had as a linebacker which was exceptional in the 1980s is now just normal for that position in the NFL. And since basic physics hasn't changed -- kinetic energy still equals mass times velocity squared -- the amount of force being delivered in routine hits today is significantly greater than back in the day.
A similar dynamic has played out in my household's fave pro sport, ice hockey. A lot of the routine hacking/slashing/fistfights has been legislated out. But meanwhile the median NHL skater is both somewhat larger and _much_ faster than 30 years ago, and they've all come up through levels of youth hockey in which "finish your checks" is as basic in the coaching as "head on a swivel" or whatever. So if you go back and watch some 1980s/90s NHL hockey on YouTube it will seem downright gentle in terms of physicality compared to today -- until somebody shoves somebody from behind into the boards and the line brawl breaks out. (And then most fans only remember the line brawls.)
This is the best answer. The players are much better so the offenses and defenses have moved away from smashing into each other all the time. And the NHL has opened things up so much that players can actually skate and score goals instead of just dumping it in all the time.
Personally, I think both sports are much better for these changes. The NBA I think has gone too far and reduced physical defense too much, but I am not really a fan so its not my business really.
Oh dear, Re NHL, long time Sabres fan (we won't talk about the current team, sigh.) But there was much more fighting back in the 80-90's. Isn't that the Rob Ray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Ray) time in Buffalo? As a Sabres fan I love Rob, but I'm also glad his 'position' is mostly gone from the current line up.
Big difference between physicality in checking and fighting. The best offensive player of this generation (Ovi) is quite possibly the best checking forward as well. That was definitely not the case in the past.
I grew up in the town that houses the US hockey hall of fame. I was a terrible disappointment to my hockey loving friends and relatives. One year of PeeWee and my coach told my parents that I was too tall and skinny and was probably going to get hurt. :(
Why do I perceive people talking about sports to sound dumb? Is it because I’ve chosen to think sports knowledge is a waste of synapses, or is there something to it? I find sports talk particularly vacuous because it seems like dumb talk that tries to sound smart, full of technical speak and numbers.
Possibly because you've absorbed cultural signals that say that jocks are dumb and nerds are smart? Your point about "smart talk with lots of numbers and stats that's actually vacuous" could apply equally well to a lot of other hobbies (e.g. Warhammer 40K, video games, certain types of people who are really into politics).
My brother went through the NFL questions on Manifold with my father and bet on those whose probability had a large difference compared to the probability my father claimed. He got a 30% gain in total. Sports fans might be dumb, but apparently they are smarter than the state of the art technology for predicting the futute.
Because everyone can enjoy it, which means the average person enjoying sports is roughly as smart as the average American...which is pretty dumb. More horrific still, if you go to a bar to enjoy a game with average Americans, you will notice to your horror that half the people are dumber than the average American, some are even almost as dumb as the French.
Whereas connoisseurs of the finer things in life, like us, can understand the intricacies of D&D and engage in hours of joyous, stimulating debate over the advantages of 5th edition vs 3.5 edition (3rd is simply worse) while hopping we don't awaken the true gentlemen of class who actually understand Thac0.
Straight up, the best thing about football is that it gives me something to talk about with 90% of men in awkward social situations where social custom demands I make mouth sounds with someone I share no interests in common with. This is unironically amazing and super valuable. There are tons of really solid guys I like and respect but...I'm a giant nerd and they're not and it's nice to have something to talk with them about. But it does mean that sports is basically the only time I interact with dumb people, despite the fact that there are some super smart sports guys.
It's mostly a joke. I think the big issue, from memory, isn't complexity but an almost obnoxious counter-intuitiveness. Like Armor Class. Everywhere else in life, big number is gooder, smaller number is badder. It's not complex to invert that, it's just annoying.
Hey pal, Steph Curry’s 3 point shots are a thing of rare beauty. - yeah the implied irritation is feigned for comic effect but those shots really are somethin’
But more seriously the counting and summing neurons approach to Utilitarian ends - to non true believers at least - seems pretty vacuous too.
You’re just not that interested in sports and that’s just fine.
I don't know what sort of sports talk you have been listening to, but one possibility is that the participants are (consciously or unconsciously) aiming at goals that are different from the goals you typically aim at in conversation. For example, it may be more important for the participants to express (and thus share) their enthusiasm for the sport in general, for a particular team, player, or game, than to state true facts and make "good" arguments (evaluated according to the standards of truth-seeking dialogue).
This is a very good point. When two people are talking about the Super Bowl, if you squint, it kind of sounds like a thoughtful argument with a lot of evidence, but upon further inspection it doesn’t hold.
Do you have a specific example of what sounds dumb?
I don't follow sports at all, but when I do hear guys like Bill Simmons and Klosterman talk nba or football, they sound more like geeks than idiots. Maybe it's just the case that the appeal is so wide, idiots like it too.
I think Quiop got it. It’s a type of conversation that has the qualities of a sophisticated argument (e.g.: data), but which is in fact entertainment. It’s the contrast that does it for me.
It seems attorneys are still valuable given Scott is happy to pay the normal rate, but for other services he often requests the service provider give freely. Or maybe I am misremembering.
My mistake, it was meant as a comment on the relative value of the legal profession vs others, not as a callout. To your question, I thought I'd seen a few volunteer requests in previous open threads, but it seems I was misremembering. Thanks for the thought provocation.
No you're not misremembering. Scott does ask for help on a volunteer basis occasionally. Most recently in open thread 310:
"I‘m looking for an EEG expert, a TCMS expert, and a very-finicky-high-level statistics expert to (on a volunteer basis) review certain ACX Grants proposals."
Just to be clear, I don't think there's anything at all wrong with him doing that.
Agreed that there’s nothing wrong it. I suspect the difference is that there he’s looking for volunteers for a charitable project, which he happens to be organizing. Here, he probably feels more like he’s asking on his own behalf. If it’s for a similar project that pours cold water on my theory, but there’s also a difference in norms around what people expect to volunteer for vs what they expect to get paid for (and our intuitions on that are fuzzy).
Additionally the "tax benefits of charitable giving" are a real quantity of money directly in his pocket. Of course I am happy to pay someone 200 dollars to save me 20,000 dollars - while asking for a volunteer for some nebulously profitable project makes a lot of sense.
Does anyone have suggestions for resources to learn just enough C++ to port a sketch/simple library from the old Arduino uno AVR architecture to work on either an ESP8266 based board or an arduino R4 board (yes I realize that these are two different chips with two different architectures, I don't need both, just either/or)?
My current programming experience is all in either R or python, and my small amount of googling hasn't turned up anything that seems really accessible to learning C++, especially as relevant to these micro-controllers.
Learning a low-level language like C or C++ from a background like Python is mostly a process of subtraction, you need to unlearn many things that Python made you learn to take for granted.
C++ is a rather gigantic language, so I would first attempt to learn C if I were in your shoes. In my experience with embedded programmers, people don't tend to even come close to firing all of C++'s many blazing guns anyway, they mostly just use a style colloquially called "C with classes": C, with methods and classes and maybe a tiny smattering of templates.
The resource I can recommend is the K&R book, The C Programming Language. It's a masterpiece of technical and pedagogical writing, and it invented the "Hello World" tradition. It really is THE book if you want to learn C, any other resource is more or less commentary. You can just write "Learning C" in YouTube and clicking any hour+ video, but K&R is literally by the language's designers and first implementors, can't ask for more.
To give you an extremely condensed view of the road ahead, to understand C you need to understand that:
1- Superficially and syntactically, C is not whitespace obsessed like Python. You can write millions of characters of code all in one line if you want, though obviously you don't.
2- Variables in C aren't "open-minded" as those in Python, by which I mean that the language demands that you MUST annotate each variable you use with exactly one type (exactly once). The type of a variable - in C - is the shape of the memory region that corresponds to that variable when the program runs.
3- Variables in C are FIRST declared THEN assigned. You declare a variable by stating its type followed by its name like so ~~ type name; ~~. Then you can assign to that name as you do in Python. You can also assign a variable as you're declaring it like this ~~ type name = value; ~~ and this is sometimes distinguished from any assignment and called "initialization".
4- When you define functions in C, you have to give them a "signature". A signature is declaring (A) What will the function accept as arguments (B) What type will the function return. Most of the time you do this before you even write the function's code, sometimes in a different file. That is, most C code is written in units of 2 files: .h file and .c file. The .h files define the "interface", just the names of your functions, what arguments do they take and what types they are, and what return types do they have. The .c files define the actual implementation, the actual code of those functions. Unlike Python, C doesn't have named arguments, keyword arguments or default values for arguments. I think it has variable length arguments but I'm not sure.
5- Types in C are either primitive or composite. Primitive types are all possible combinations of {const}, {signed, unsigned} and {char, short, int, long, long long, float, double}. Meaning you can pick one out of each of those 3 sets of keywords and come up with a valid primitive type. Those are all numerical types with different ranges (numbers they can represent) and arithmetic behavior. There is no Boolean type in C, although the language treats any expression that evaluates to 0 (of any variation of the above types) as false and all else as true.
6- Composite types in C are systematic ways to create new types from existing types. For example, given any 2 types T and Z:
6-a- ~~ T x[n]; ~~ declares a variable x of type "n-length array of underlying type T ''. An array is a fixed-length region of memory, it's homogenous, it can only store several values of its underlying type T and nothing else. You can obtain the ith element of an array by an indexing notation resembling Python ~~ x[i] ~~, although forget any indexing magic Python may have taught you like slicing and negative indexing. Arrays must either declare their length explicitly in the program's text or be explicitly initialized with values like so ~~ int x[] = {1,2,3} ~~. Arrays do not change size as the program executes. You're entirely responsible for only providing valid indices when you index an array, indexing an array with an invalid index like -1 or a number equal to or greater than its length is a Big Problem and something that a C compiler will all too happily translate into nonsense for you. Arrays can be nested to any dimension like so ~~ int x[n][m][k][l][s]; ~~, that's a five-dimensional array, you need 5 indices to specify an element. Of course, it's your responsibility to never index beyond the end of the array in any dimension.
6-b- ~~ struct MyStruct { T x; Z y;}; ~~ defines a new type which is a heterogeneous region of memory containing FIRST x THEN y (possibly with some nonsense "padding" in between x and y, and possibly after y). Accessing struct elements is not via indices, but by name, you write s.x and s.y to access the x and y members of a struct instance s. Just declaring a struct definition alone doesn't create any actual data in memory, you have to "instantiate it" by declaring a variable of its type like so "struct MyStruct s".
6-c- ~~ union MyUnion { T x; Z y;}; ~~ declares an unsafe union, a region of memory which is as big as the biggest of T and Z. It can hold EITHER an x of type T, OR a y of type Z, but not both together. You can use it much like a struct, except its members are mutually-exclusive, if you put inside a data of type T, never retrieve or ask about the data of type Z, you're entirely responsible for paying attention to this because if you don't a C compiler will happily generate code that interprets the raw bits of a value of type T as a value of type Z or vice versa (This is called type-punning and *sometimes* is a valid use case).
6-d- Unlike arrays, structs, or unions, Enums do not have an "underlying type(s)". They are just human-readable names whose only possible job in existence is to be distinguishable symbols from one another. Use them like thus ~~ enum DoorState { OPEN, CLOSED, OPENISH;}; ~~ DoorState is thus a type that you can give to a variable and whose only valid values are OPEN, CLOSED, and OPENISH, and the only possible operations that make sense on variables and values of type DoorState is comparison via == and != operators.
NOTE: Enums, in one of the dumber design decisions in C (not the dumbest though), are equivalent to defining integer constants of the same names you give to the enum values and giving them values from 0 upwards. This means you can do some nonsense like adding and subtracting enums from/to each other or integers. This, of course, doesn't mean anything most of the time. C++ later rectified this and other warts with enum classes.
7- Memory is hard. Memory is the hardest thing about C. Memory is why you shouldn't use C for anything but embedded (no, not OS development). More specifically, dynamic memory is hard. There are (simplifying a little bit) three possible memory areas to store data in : static storage, the stack, and the heap. Static storage is for global variables, it's an area where you put things and never remove them. Global variables live for the entire duration of the program execution. The stack is great for variables that "live" as long as the current executing function, as long as the variables you're declaring will NOT outlive ( be needed for more than) the duration of the function invocation you're currently in, declare it as a local variable in that function and call it a day. The third category is where the devil lies : memory of unpredictable duration or size. Memory that doesn't live as long as the entire program, but does outlive the current function. This is where you need "allocators", functions like "malloc" and "free" that request memory from the underlying OS (if there's an OS at all) or runtime and give you that memory back in the form of pointers. If that doesn't make sense, it's okay, it doesn't make sense to very smart people too, you will mostly get used to it. In my experience Embedded Development tries to avoid Dynamic Memory anyway, Arduino is something of an exception because it offers dynamic memory.
8- Pointers are variables that can hold memory addresses (which are just integers. nothing more and nothing less). They are used in C for 2 related reasons : to pass by reference, and to serve as iterators for data structures.
9- Passing by reference is when you want 2 different functions to share the exact same piece of data but you don't want to copy that piece of data, it's a bit like sharing a link to a document instead of sharing the entire document. Sharing a document is pass-by-value or a "deep copy", it creates an entirely new document that you can read and modify (and modification won't reflect in the original document). Sharing a link to a document, however, still leaves us with one document, just 2 readers/writers of it. A pointer can serve as a "link" to a piece of data because it's a memory address, it tells you where a memory region is. Sharing a link is sometimes called "pass-by-reference" or "shallow-copying". But be careful, C++ added YET ANOTHER way of passing arguments that is not like passing pointers.
10- Iterators are variables that you can repeatedly move from a start position to an end position. They're used when you're processing an aggregate data structure like an array or a linked list or a tree. Pointers can serve as iterators.
11- Pointers can be difficult to understand and infuriating to work with, don't be mad if you don't understand them at first. You almost certainly WILL NOT understand them at first, keeping going.
12- Plenty of other things: typedefs, preprocessor and preprocessor hackery (stringification of tokens and token-pasting), void pointers to pass opaque structures, function pointers to pass callbacks, bit-slicing structures, const pointers vs. pointers to const, string literals and null terminators, gotos, just to name a few. But all of those are more or less esoteric, if you understand types, pointers, and dynamic memory, you have a pretty damn good grasp of what C is all about.
Feel free to ask for my email if you want to ask further.
(Hey, it's good to see you back! Even if you only drop in to explain programming esoterica. (K&R is not the only programming book I still have, but it will be the last one I keep, after all the rest have been recycled.))
Thanks for your very kind words Moon. The reason I was keeping radio silence the last month or so is that (1) Substack sucks, my commenting ability was still locked after being unbanned (2) I'm getting increasingly angry and distressed by the continuous massacres in Gaza, and I increasingly perceive people who call it a just war or a self-defense to be justifying and approving those massacres, hindering my ability to respond in civility.
I thought I might use (1) to limit the damage of (2) by taking a time off, it worked even in the face of many Pro-Israel comments in previous middle east sub threads, what warmed my heart each time is that there always Pro-Palestine people to shoot back. But OP nerd-sniped me and kind of ruined it. I made a new email and made a substack account of the same pseudo-banned name to post it.
Anyway, many thanks for asking about me, and yes K&R deserves a spot in the library that will be all what's left of humanity.
You could try learning enough C (or Java or C#) to be able to modify small programs. Some dialects of C++ have diverged enough from their ancestor that they're almost unrecognizable, but once you know the basics of a C-like language, that might give you enough to be able to follow the error messages, look up potential solutions, and alter them to fit your case.
I just talked to someone I know who's a long time employee of the CDC (nothing COVID related). He said that the leadership was clearly clueless and that morale was low and that everyone he knew who was old enough to retire was planning to retire soon. I'd heard him gripe about work before, but never anything like this, and it was pretty depressing to hear.
Most of it sounded like regular office politics and bureaucratic nonsense, but at one point he also said "It's clearly coming from the White House". And he's a Democrat, so this isn't just Gray Man Bad either.
I know the most demoralizing thing for most federal employees is the return to office initiative led by the Chief of Staff. He owns a lot of commercial properties so federal employees cynically believe that's the only reason he ended telework in the DC area.
A lot of it was feeling (or even being told outright) that their work wasn't valued by leadership, but he definitely complained about return to office as well, and how it's a thing HR is pushing with no evidence. He also said it's not actually enforced anyway. They're nominally going into the office three days a week right now, but a lot of senior employees live in other states and only occasionally visit the office, so noone bothers to actually go to the office. But they still can't hire remote candidates because reasons, even when they get a really promising candidate.
Perhaps the peak woke really is over. Recently I have watched two movies with politically incorrect themes, which a few years ago probably would have been career-ending for anyone who participated. Both movies were produced in 2023.
American Fiction -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23561236/ -- is a great movie that I would really recommend to everyone, regardless of their politics. The main topic is still political, but more nuanced; and other things happen there, too. Still, liking this film too much and discussing it where woke people can hear you could get you in some trouble.
Involuntarily, I have seen quite a bit of Lady Ballers and it is so so so bad. Like to the point where they had to be trying to make it bad. And it's not the premise either, Juana Man is the same movie but actually good (well, for what it's trying to be - a cheap popcorn comedy for kids not Casablanca). If a major studio had produced it, i'd have figured it was for a tax write off.
I wonder if some of the heat in the movement came from job losses and disenfranchisement associated with the GFC and the slow recovery? Worsening economic conditions in democracies tend to produce populist movements.
That’s also when Trump, Brexit and Xi happened. These things take time. There were also a string of social policy victories for the left around that time (particularly gay marriage) which probably acted as outlets for the same emotional drives as wokeness (in addition to their more important effects).
Man, what's the conservative obsession with not wanting to eat bugs? I have literally never heard the topic come up in left-leaning circles, and yet it constantly comes up as a talking point from conservatives that the liberals are trying to force everyone to eat bugs. ...What?
Also, they do realize that shrimp are basically big underwater insects, right?
Is there anything weirder about eating bugs than eating amaranth or soy or high fructose corn syrup or sausage or any of the other miracle foods that have joined our diet? Presumably no one is talking about ending food sanitation, so the fact that they live in dirt and poop is not in any way different from any plant, and "they are consumed whole" is just false about nearly anything in modern industrialized food culture.
Of course, shrimp and lobster are bugs ... well arthropods or whatever, but lower forms of life.
This comes down from Klaus Schwab and his organization the WEF or World Economic Forum. Klaus and his buddies have a vision of what they call 'The Great Reset' which involves (in their words) a change over from State-Capitalism to Stake-Holder-Capitalism. Which means that we would live in a world under a global governing body. These people, let's refer to them as Globalists, because they seek a global governance system, these people have proposed that some of us wealthy capitalist citizens are living too well, and we need to share some, or a lot of our wealth with the poorer people of the Earth. The WEF Globalists have proposed after The Great Reset, which is an economic reset which they are designing, in which we will all use a CBDC or Central Bank Digital Currency, which is a non-crypto Block Chain currency which they tightly control. After the reset, we won't own any property, and they've said this straight up, the people will "Own nothing and be happy." And other such great things as "the people will eat bugs." But I don't think they mean shrimp and lobster.
So basically, if you listen to Klaus Schwab's actual words, he says some very disturbing stuff, and his dressing like a Sith Lord doesn't help me to feel better about living under a non-democratic Corporate led global government.
If you hear globalists saying people are "living too well" then you aren't listening to them. They are saying that people are "living too poorly", and the goal isn't to make things worse for people, but to make things better for people.
The globalists are saying the people should own nothing, fly only one short hop only as often as every three years, only purchase three articles of clothing every year, live in high density pods, give up meat, eat bugs instead.
I've never heard globalists say it. This sounds more like de-growthers, who are usually peak localists. Globalists usually believe in capitalism and open borders.
> these people have proposed that some of us wealthy capitalist citizens are living too well, and we need to share some, or a lot of our wealth with the poorer people of the Earth
It's catchy. "I will not eat the bugs, I will not live in the pod" is shorter and more fun to say that "I am not willing to sacrifice my standards of living for your misguided degrowth agenda that might actually be leading us to civilizational collapse (due to rapidly declining fertility) faster than global warming"
...Do you actually think declining fertility has anything to do with the "degrowth agenda", or are you just steelmanning their viewpoint? Even if we assume that people in this country genuinely cared about it, they sure as hell don't care about it in East Asia, and the fertility crisis is even worse there. There's almost certainly bigger elements at play.
I think probably what's actually going on is that there's a bunch of stuff in modern life that reduces reproduction in America. There's people all over the political spectrum who are noticing this and want to change it, but they don't know what to do and aren't very organized. And then there's a blob of people on the left who have negative views of humanity and modern life and various other stuff, and so are happy about the decline in reproduction. I don't think they're twirling their virtual mustaches, or (mostly) deliberately encouraging the trend (although for all X, there are wackos who actively support X). But whenever anyone tries to implement something to improve reproduction, they usually come up with reasons why it would be bad. Mostly because the policies causing the problems were implemented to do things they wanted, so of course they don't want to get rid of those policies. It can look and act like a concerted effort to cause population decline, even if it isn't actually one.
> And then there's a blob of people on the left who have negative views of humanity and modern life and various other stuff, and so are happy about the decline in reproduction.
All other things being equal, a natural decline in population is the opposite of the Repugnant Conclusion -- there's more to go around for everybody.
Except people, and the creative products of people? I'm not really equipped for modeling all of human civilization in a blog comment, but I think what you mentioned only holds if one views humans as consuming from a fixed pool of resources.
a) But it's human life (=time=labor) that makes those resources available, and so decreasing the amount of human life also decreases the amount of resources available. And if there are efficiency gains at scale, then the more people we have, the less of everyone's life needs to be devoted to resource production. To take an example from current news, there are very few people who can run a semiconductor fabrication facility, and that entire process sits on top of an enormous pyramid of human activity. How many fewer people would there have to be, before that pyramid becomes unsustainable, before there aren't enough talented people, or enough spare resources, to make it worthwhile to make the parts that make computers?
b) A lot of what humans "consume" is directly the product of other human life. Art, food, education, love. The fewer people we have, the fewer brilliant artists and writers we have, etc. More generally, what makes human life worthwhile? Whatever it is, there will be less of it. Any argument for a decline in population needs to be based on the unsustainability of the current system, and the long-term utilitarian benefits of a lower population which can sustain itself for longer, otherwise the argument can be applied over and over until the last human alive commits suicide.
I would say that the "degrowth agenda" is largely about pushing westerners (especially non-European westerners) into the same sort of living conditions that already exist (for other reasons) in Asian countries. Live in apartments, travel by public transport, et cetera.
Degrowth probably isn't the right word, but it's definitely a thing.
There is a simple argument that if populations continue to grow, there will be less of some resources to go round -- but someone who points that out might merely be extrapolating a trend, not foisting a plan on people.
The latter, but also, while I don't think it's the main driver, I believe "cultural elites"' general sympathy towards those ideas is a significant hindrance to a more honest and clear-sighted addressing of the issue.
I can't help but notice that your first paragraph is "I have literally never heard of anyone trying to persuade people to eat bugs" and your second paragraph is "why don't you eat bugs, you big dummy"
As others have noted, there's the occasional flurry of articles about "You should all eat bugs". I believe you when you say that nobody in left-leaning circles talks about it, this is more one of those things that's coming directly down the Davos-to-Guardian pipeline without the involvement of the left. If I were cynical, I'd say that your involvement comes later -- first they get the right worked up about it and _then_ the left starts to support it reflexively.
As for why conservatives talk about it so much... well, it's just a perfect illustration of how things work, in the conservative world view. A constant stream of awful new stuff that "they" want to force us to accept for our supposed own good. A constant stream of good old stuff that "they" want to take away. A constant stream of bizarrely uncritical news articles popping up about how "thing is good actually regardless of what those backward hicks might think". Whether it's paper straws that fall apart, or destroying our low-density suburbs to accommodate the teeming hordes of the third world, there's always a new battle we're losing.
Eating bugs isn't actually a current concern, it's a progressive issue from the 2040s that accidentally fell into the 2020s. But wait and see.
I really don't care about the environmental aspect of it, I just think that it's stupid that people are this upset about the prospect of eating bugs. Food is food. If it tastes bad, then it's perfectly fine to complain about that, but there's no reason to not at least try it. Maybe you'll like it.
Honestly, it just pisses me off when people immediately reject things without even trying them because it's "gross". Grow up.
"Honestly, it just pisses me off when people immediately reject things without even trying them because it's "gross". Grow up."
Some people like eating shit. Maybe it's infantile of me and a refusal to grow up, but I'm not going to try eating shit to give it a try first and yes, I continue to think that's gross.
This argument also applies to "but why do you think skinning cats alive is gross, at least give it a try first".
Actually it's quite common across all cultures for people to dislike food that they weren't raised on. It can be very noticeable when you get together 2 groups of adults from different cultures (say, Midwest American and Cantonese Chinese), and they both try each other's food, and are unenthusiastic, and afterwards want to go somewhere where they can get "real food". They even use the same phrasing, independently, in different languages!
Of course, this doesn't apply to all people, but it's a pattern.
I think it's a function of cultural/biological evolution. Eating weird stuff 10,000 years ago was a great way to poison yourself, hence why picky eaters exist in the first place, and why cultures like Judaism and Islam developed these really intricate rules for what its adherents are allowed to eat and how it has to be prepared. Western cultures still have a lot of taboos about eating certain kinds of meat like dogs, cats, horses, rodents, etc. Eating bugs is an even further step out on the weirdness scale.
> "If it tastes bad, then it's perfectly fine to complain about that, but there's no reason to not at least try it."
I'm very happy to eat "alt-protein" if it's *really* being used as a technology to save the planet and/or develop undersea/Antarctic/space-colony tier food supply chains.
I'm not very happy to eat "alt-protein" if the actual motivation of the people selling it to me is that it's cheaper to supply me with reconstituted-cockroach slop than it is with a nice steak, with the profits going directly into the Davosoise's pockets.
I suspect it's the latter, and therefore it doesn't matter how good it tastes, one does not fund one's enemies.
And you're doing it again, you're mixing the message of "Nobody is trying to force you to eat bugs, you paranoid weirdo" with "Just hurry up and eat the bugs, you child"
are references to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, and their promotion of lowering carbon emissions, eating less meat, welcoming immigrants, giving up property rights, etc.
I might be willing to give panda a try, I have no particular sentimental attachment to the notion of "they're so cute" (even if I'm glad there's going to be a new Kung Fu Panda movie).
I did try real (not tinned) tuna recently and managed to give myself a dose of scombroid poisoning, so I'm going to keep on sticking with "foods I know already" even if that makes me a big cry-baby:
There was a bit of a top-down push from the left a few years ago, but it didn't catch on, and now the only people who remember are the ones who enjoy pointing it out to mock it.
FWIW I recently saw a comment from (a boringly center-right liberal) person on Finnish twitter who said she was *literally* involved in trying to market insect products and that they did customer-oriented stuff for a short while, saw that no-one's interested (predictably, this isn't the first insect-eating push I remember) and then pivoted to catering solely to their *true* market - insects as animal feed.
I never got the sense that it's "the left" trying to push bugs, or that the idea was pushing them to normies, as the memes suggest. The bug product push was done by enterprising up-and-comers in the food industry; the target, before the animal feed pivot, was... hipsters, I suppose. Hipsters daring other hipsters to eat ze bugs, basically.
I hadn't heard of any "push" for amaranth, but then, I live under a rock. My impression is that amaranth came and went as a health-food fad, unlike the way quinoa came and stayed and can no longer be called a "fad"?
I meant more of what appeared to be a concerted media effort by various prominent left-wing news outlets, and various people who are plugged in to very trendy left-wing circles. But it didn't last very long, and I don't recall much more about it.
Yeah, my impression is that these things are mostly just flashes in the pan, and they either stick or disappear. But when the flash in the pan was about crickets, it made for fun talking points, because some people got to complain about how disgusting the idea of eating insects might be, and other people got to make fun of them for being closed-minded. It's the toxoplasma of rage idea - if it makes for conflict, it will get a lot more discussion, even if the underlying push is precisely the same.
I think it quietly disappeared in part because it didn't mesh with the veganism push that came in the coming years. The left-coded groups (environmental, vegan, commie) began to overlap more in the social media
Even saying it was a push is a bit much. All I'm finding Googling it is some scientists saying that it would be more efficient and less environmentally damaging to farm insects instead of traditional livestock (which is true) and a few articles asking people to consider alternative food sources. And somehow that spiraled into a conspiracy theory that governments are trying to force people to eat bugs.
Saying it was a push *or* top-down *or* broadly "from the left" is a bit much. A few years ago there was a brief fad in some of the weirder left circles (actual weird left circles, not the "Davos billionaires who are also somehow Stalinists" circles that exist in terminally online right-wingers brains) for bug-eating advocacy. They went on about it for a few months on Twitter; the reaction from the broader left was a mixture of repulsion, indulgent chuckling, and outright mockery; and everybody soon moved on.
Oh it was true of Davos as well. They produced a webpage on it but it’s just one speech I think.
The reaction to Davos is weird. The right thinks that the billionaires are commies, the left think it’s conspiratorial to be concerned about the power of billionaires over politicians in this specific case - where the politicians mix with billionaires in an elite resort, but not in the general case.
My impression of the left's impression of the right's impression of Davos is more like "it's conspiratorial and dumb to interpret the nonsense peddled by the billionaires at Davos as communistic, because it's a lot of things but it isn't that." (You'll just have to take my word for it that leftists are not huge fans of being told to walk to work by people who flew halfway across the world on private jets to tell them that, either)
Do you genuinely not remember this? From the inside perspective, memory holing is a common weapon and I'm quite used to hearing people swear blind that X never happened and we're all being silly. I have to assume that on some level they're being insincere.
This pattern matches to that - *everyone* was talking about eating crickets not even that long ago. I've been offered bbq crickets and whatnot on multiple occasions. I know people whose cricket protein powder companies are still getting new investment.
Either we must live in very different bubbles indeed or something else is going on.
It'd be good to hear an objective, non -accusatory explanation for this, beyond "motivated reasoning" and "lockstep thinking", which is currently the best I got.
I am interested in the phenomenon here, and not calling you deceitful.
This is really no different from a few years earlier when they were talking about everyone eating amaranth, and a few years before that when they were talking about everyone eating fermented foods, and a few years before that when they were talking about everyone eating soy. The search for globally efficient food sources is a continual one, and there are new trends, some of which catch on and others of which don't. Some people get the idea that force is involved, but it'll just be price - mass-produced X will be cheap enough for people to want to eat it, or it won't.
Yeah, it could have been just another health food fad... Except I don't recall seeing bugs in any of my major-lefty-city grocery stores, not even the worker-owned co-op or the customer-owned co-op. And there was a definite tone to the stories, if I can trust my memory, that was less "this is the new superfood" and more "if you want to be on the right side of history, you need to stop eating meat and start eating bugs". Very tied into the culture war.
> *everyone* was talking about eating crickets not even that long ago. I've been offered bbq crickets and whatnot on multiple occasions.
...Is this a Bay Area thing? Because it really sounds like it. Like, obviously there are going to be some weird trend chasers in entrepreneur circles, but they're really not representative of wider culture.
Not a Bay Area person, and yeah a few years back this thing about "crickets and insects will be the protein source of the future" was being talked about in pop science news.
You can order chocolate covered mealworms off Amazon UK:
I get the bubble phenomenon. What I'm confused about is that the sources I remember this coming from definitely aren't in my own bubble. Literally mere comments away, thefance's link leads to mention of a Guardian article (left wing bubble) and it's being talked about in an essay by Scott Alexander (all of our bubbles!)
So I'm still thinking it's pretty likely that we *have* all seen this stuff. Whether for some reason right-wing people paid more attention and left-wingers let it slide out of their minds, I don't know. Maybe the right wing laughed about it on forums that left wing people don't visit, meaning we held on to the original "non-politicised" articles for longer by associating them with later conversations?
But that still doesn't explain the flat, uncompromising "that never happened" response I occasionally get from people about some things. After all, if you don't remember it, you can't remember that it was an in-group loss, so why the sudden confidence?
I dunno. Short of wacky explanations like belonging-induced self hypnosis, I got nothing better to offer.
As I recall, it was one of those things where the NYT and a few other outlets published some stories at approximately the same time, implying that this was the wave of the future and the environmental and ethically responsible choice, etc. But it didn't get traction, and so they quietly dropped it and no one talked about it again, except in certain very left-wing places where it's treated as an obviously good idea that the world simply isn't ready for yet. But my memory could be faulty on this one.
(Huh, autocorrect gave me "left-wrong". I'm not even sure which way that cuts.)
As an atheist, I take the exact opposite approach. I like shrimp (and prawns), and I've tried fried crickets/grasshoppers several times (though these have been hit-or-miss, but I really liked one version with paprika). I still want to try mealworms and beetles-on-a-half-shell (or whatever they're called), but there's no restaurant in my area that serves them. Also, I tried Korean fried silkworm pupae once, but unfortunately I could only get the canned version, so they basically tasted like every other canned product. One day I'd love to go to Korea and try the real thing (it's a popular street food there).
The pupae are the blandest food I had in Korea, almost completely flavourless. Probably they'd be OK with some seasoning, but for some reason they serve them unseasoned. So maybe you didn't miss out on much by having the canned version.
a) Yes, I've seen insect protein foods show up in comments perhaps every few months or so (e.g. on Reddit)
b) Personally, I haven't tried them, but I'm not actively avoiding them either.
c) Re the shimp sub-discussion - um, aren't lobsters in the same category too? ( While they count as a luxury food today, they weren't always one... )
d) Insect foods sound politically like an offshoot of either vegan or low-animal-protein diets. "Diet for a Small Planet" ( vegan ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet by Frances Moore Lappé goes back to 1971, so this sort of suggestion (pressure?) is not recent.
Well, I guess that's a good, benign example of conservatism making people's lives worse for no reason. The prohibition of shellfish was a thing because people kept getting food poisoning from it, but now we know what things are safe to eat and how to eat them safely. And yet, blind adherence to tradition means people are forbidden from eating perfectly good food due to reasoning that stopped being relevant a long time ago.
Some people latch on to every new fad, or anything foreign as better and must be adopted, because The Europeans do it, thus it must be great. We call these people liberals, they want to try everything new.
Some people are stuck in their ways, they know how things work, they fear if things change they won't be able to adapt and may lose their status/wealth, etc.
Its also true, that younger people perceiving themselves NOT at the top of the status ladder seek to tear it up, burn it down, and hope to come out in a higher position in the new order. So younger people tend to be quite a bit more liberal. But once they've climbed a few rungs and increased their position, know how the system works, they become more conservative, i.e. loving the system.
So as Gerry Brown used to say, "if you paddle a canoe on only one side, you'll only go in circles." So its good to explore new things, but we need an active opposition to push back, with a result that we test if New Thing is the Best Thing, because sometimes that is not the case. There are often too many Fan Boys whose only goal is being a Fan Boy. I may be that crickets made into kibble are really tasty, and that I may like cricket-kibble ... but then again I may get very tired of cricket-kibble after a week of nothing but cricket-kibble.
So its good to have some balance, a Red Team vs Blue Team approach is often the best solution.
As a conservative I fully agree with this take. Conservatism does sometimes make people's lives worse for no reason.
I'm a conservative not because conservatism is always right, but because it's sometimes right. I'm a believer in the Monte Carlo model of political progress, in which "progressives" generate possible changes at random, and then there's a back-and-forth between "progressives" and conservatives to figure out whether that change is actually a good idea or not, and then it either gets permanently adopted or not.
I generally choose to join this battle on the conservative side, because I think that it needs more help; at present we need to be more hesitant about adopting changes rather than less.
Devil's Advocate: almost nobody is made worse off for not eating bugs, and you can tell because very few cultures make use of insect protein, and the ones that do are mostly really poor. As ubiquitous as bugs are, the fact that so few cultures chose to cultivate them as a source of nutrition likely means they have low utility to the vast majority of people.
As for shellfish, well, yes, shrimp are delicious, but I would guess that the foregone utility has to be balanced against the in-group cohesion that is fostered among, say, Jews who keep kosher and participate in these collective acts of self-denial like not eating crab cake sandwiches.
Well, gentlemen, I don't care, God agrees with me on this, so you can all enjoy as many crunchy hairy beetle legs as you like, I'm sticking with identifiable animal parts 😁
"but now we know what things are safe to eat and how to eat them safely"
And yet I'm seeing, more than ever, "can I eat this fish? is this safe to eat? what about mercury levels? I don't eat Atlantic salmon because of x, y and z" articles and comments. None of this was around when I was younger and it was "fish on Friday", so it would seem that "what things are safe and how to eat them safely" is becoming a more, rather than less, restricted list of items.
It's a bit of a back-and-forth, sadly. Pork and shrimp are now safer to eat than they used to be, due to advancements in refrigeration technology, animal husbandry, and aquaculture. At the same time, fish are becoming unsafe to eat, due to the side-effects from these advancements. I sure wish someone told people "Thou Shalt Not Dump Mercury into the Water", but no one bothered...
>Well, gentlemen, I don't care, God agrees with me on this, so you can all enjoy as many crunchy hairy beetle legs as you like, I'm sticking with identifiable animal parts 😁
"John the Baptist's diet has been the centre of much discussion. For many years, the Greek: ἀκρίδες (akrides) was interpreted as referring not to locusts, the insect, but rather to the seed pods of the carob tree. But the Greek word is not used this way, and this notion is generally rejected today. Locusts are mentioned 22 other times in the Bible and all other mentions quite clearly refer to the insect. Locusts are still commonly eaten in Arabia. Eaten either raw or roasted they are quite nutritious and a source of many vitamins. While most insects were considered unclean under Mosaic law, Leviticus 11:22 specifically states that locusts are permitted. Portraying John the Baptist as eating seed pods rather than insects is possibly due to squeamishness about having such a revered figure eating insects and also a belief that a true ascetic should be completely vegetarian. What is meant by honey is also disputed. While bee honey was a common food in the area at the time, Jones believes that it refers to the tree gum from the tamarisk tree, a tasteless but nutritious liquid, rather than the honey made by bees."
But even the vegan altruists seem to be squeamish about insects and shrimp, as contributing to animal suffering:
"I’d be remiss not to mention shrimp, which are by far the most numerous individual animal species Americans eat, at over 120 per person per year on average. We have less evidence of shrimp sentience, but this is mostly due to our lack of research on it. Shrimp do respond differently to noxious stimuli when given painkillers, providing some evidence for their ability to experience pain. And shrimp farming involves some of the most horrifying routine practices, like eye ablation — the removal of eyestalks to induce female shrimp to spawn. Because so many individual shrimp need to be killed to make one serving of food, even a small chance that they’re sentient convinced me to stop eating them. Plus, trawling for wild shrimp has the highest bycatch rate in the commercial fishing industry — more than half of the animals caught are discarded."
So by sticking to cows instead of shrimp, I am in fact being a good effective altruist vegan(ish) and can now flaunt my moral superiority over the rest of you sea insect eaters! 😁
Sorry, I wasn't complaining. Just trying to gesture at how, if it's not even being released in theaters, that's not a good sign? Yeah, merely being made in the first place is a feat. But (having only heard about the film last night through some weird coincidence) it seemed like a lot of the people involved had already been cancelled. So from that angle, maybe it's simply a sign that so many people have been cancelled that now they can fill out a film crew?
That's been my long term thought about cancellations in general. It seems obvious that if you cancel too quickly over things that can happen to anyone, you eventually cancel too many people to keep your movement going. When formerly obvious leftists like Glenn Greenwald are persona non grata, you're quickly going to be running low on people. The cancelled start talking to each other and realize that they can operate fine, and promptly uncancel (in terms of finding jobs and social interaction) themselves.
It's probably a terrible movie, but there one or two funny scenes - the one in the trailer about "day one of being a girl athlete" is clearly riffing off this:
My own opinion on Mulvaney is that he started this off as a comedy skit during lockdown, found out some people took it seriously, and went 'there's money in being professionally trans?' and got on board the bandwagon so he eventually ended up visiting the White House, and it was all gravy until the Bud Light thing.
Well never say never and all that, but wokism (wokeism?) has definitely peaked. Though as Scott has pointed out that does not mean "is declining" but rather more like "has stopped increasing and maybe will slide slowly back". So I prefer to say currently that it has plateaued which seems more accurate IRL in "blue" America where I live and work.
(Can't personally say anymore regarding mainstream social media.)
Culture wars don't really die, they just get replaced by a different front of the culture wars. Back in the 2000s, Atheism vs Religion was everything, and yet it's completely forgotten today.
"atheism" never achieved institutional purchase to 1% of the degree LGBT and race issues have today. Atheism was never "everything". Companies were not trying to hire as many atheists as possible, there was never 'atheist pride week', there were never corporate sponsored atheism riots around the country.
And racial politics has been growing since at least the civil rights era (with ebbs and flows).
Atheism was a flash in the pan. There's no evidence whatsoever that race and LGBT politics are going away in the near to mid future. 60+ year cultural trends tend not to reverse overnight (without political revolution).
We may yet look back with nostalgia about "remember the good old days, when it was only 'there are an infinite number of genders' that people wanted us to accept?"
The next step is to get rigorously mathematical about gender. Rational genders are a subset of real genders, but it's also possible to add an imaginary gender component. And when taking about the infinite number of genders, it's important to specify which infinity we mean. (Although possibly the use of "aleph" needs to be decolonized.)
I imagine a sort of innoculation that happens over time with highly charged salient topics. Moderates / the majority will eventually hear all the key points, the echo chamber only holds them at bay for so long, for those who care to look. The effect might be mild though.
Here's just one vector: men and women in relationships tend to be slightly politically misaligned, and get their information from different sources, which will come up in discussion. IME that can also be true for couples where the man is decidedly Conservative, but in that case the woman is more likely to be pulled into that sphere.
Does anyone know any good studies on the effects of sex (rough or otherwise) during early pregnancy on the likelihood of miscarriage? I found this paper from 2012 saying that basically zero research has been done on topic, but maybe the past decade has changed that? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3310038/
I would imagine it depends 'how rough, and how early?' As pregnancy develops, the bump gets too big and low, and it's too awkward to try and even sit up, never mind do the jumping off wardrobes bit.
Apologies for the wall of text. Attached is a host of studies about the impacts of sex on pregnancy, mostly focusing on late term and it's use to naturally induce labor, and so mostly aren't very helpful to you (I just copied them wholesale from the relevant page from the birthclass I'm currently enrolled in).
This is one of the cases though where the absence of evidence should be taken as evidence of absence (or at least evidence of a very small effect size). While there is a reduction in the amount of sex that pregnant people have, most people still have sex to some amount during pregnancy, especially in the early stages when some people might not even know they are pregnant yet. So, the fact that it is a common occurrence, yet we _don't_ have strong evidence that it is a risk factor puts some pretty hard limits on how large of a risk factor it could potentially be. So my prior on this would be that if it's a risk at all, it's a tiny one.
Bendvold, E., Gottlieb, C., Svanborg, K., et al. (1987). Concentration of prostaglandins in seminal fluid of fertile men. Int J Androl, 10(2), 463-469. Click here.
Bovbjerg, M. L., Evenson, K. R., Bradley, C., & Thorp, J. M. (2014). What started your labor? Responses from mothers in the third pregnancy, infection, and nutrition study. J Perinat Educ, 23(3), 155-164. Click Click here.
Carbone, L., De Vivo, V., Saccone, G., et al. (2019). Sexual Intercourse for Induction of Spontaneous Onset of Labor: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. J Sex Med. 16(11), 1787-1795. Click here.
Castro, C., Afonso, M., Carvalho, R., et al. (2014). Effect of vaginal intercourse on spontaneous labor at term: A randomized controlled trial. Arch Gynecol Obstet; 290, 1121-1125. Click here.
Chayen, B., Tejani, N., Verma, U. L., et al. (1986). Fetal heart rate changes and uterine activity during coitus. Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand, 65(8), 853-855. Click here.
Declercq, E. R., Sakala, C., Corry, M. P., & Applebaum, S. (2007). Listening to Mothers II: Report of the Second National U.S. Survey of Women’s Childbearing Experiences: Conducted January-February 2006 for Childbirth Connection by Harris Interactive(R) in partnership with Lamaze International. J Perinat Educ, 16(4), 15-17. Click here.
Foumane, P., Mboudou, E. T., Sama, J. D., et al. (2014). Sexual activity during pregnancy and prognosis of labor in Cameroonian women: a cohort study. J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med, 27(13), 1305-1308. Click here.
Kafaei Atrian, M., Sadat, Z., Rasolzadeh Bidgoly, M., et al. (2014). The association of sexual intercourse during pregnancy with labor onset. Iran Red Crescent Med J. 17(1), e16465. Click here. Free full text!
Kavanagh, J., Kelly, A. J., & Thomas, J. (2001). Sexual intercourse for cervical ripening and induction of labour. Cochrane Database Syst Rev(2), CD003093. Click here.
Kavanagh, J., Kelly, A. J. and Thomas, J. (2005). Breast stimulation for cervical ripening and induction of labour. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2005;3:CD003392. Click here.
Omar, N. S., Tan, P. C., Sabir, N., et al. (2013). Coitus to expedite the onset of labor: A randomized trial. BJOG;120, 338-345. Click here. Free full text!
Schaffir, J. (2006). Sexual intercourse at term and onset of labor. Obstet Gynecol, 107(6), 1310-1314. Click here.
Sekhavat, L & Akhavan Karbasi, S. (2010). Effect of coital activity on hastening onset of labor and prevention of postdate pregnancy. Iran J Obstet Gynecol Infertil. 13(2), 13–6. Click here.
Tan, P. C., Andi, A., Azmi, N., et al. (2006). Effect of coitus at term on length of gestation, induction of labor, and mode of delivery. Obstet Gynecol, 108(1), 134-140. Click here.
Tan, P. C., Yow, C. M., & Omar, S. Z. (2007). Effect of coital activity on onset of labor in women scheduled for labor induction: a randomized controlled trial. Obstet Gynecol, 110(4), 820-826. Click here.
Apologies if you already know these things but it would be best if the attorney you consult:
-- is licensed in California because non-profit incorporation is governed by state laws not federal; and
-- is specifically experienced with non-profit stuff just like you'd consult a real estate attorney about property laws. etc. The federal tax-exempt related aspects in particular have plenty of nuance and in my experience many people including other types of attorneys harbor wrong assumptions/impressions about how it works.
I would note that questions regarding tax deductibility would (at least partially) involve federal law. The primary questions regarding whether a contribution is tax-deductible would be a federal law, not a state law question.
I was thinking there mainly of the different classifications of non-profit org for tax purposes as governed by federal statute and IRS regs. The great majority of people (including of those writing/editing for the media both traditional and not) assume that U.S. tax-exempt non-profit status is a simple yes/no binary.
Mi friend suffers from endometriosis and fibromyalgia, experiencing a lot of pain. Thanks to this blog, I have discovered low-hanging fruits for some issues like melatonin or silexan, and I was wondering if there is any simple way to alleviate the pain.
Simple? Sure, go on made-in-china.com and order some Gabapentin. That's a known fibro treatment that deals with pain. That or try THC-8, i recommend the gummies from https://www.binoidcbd.com/. I deal with fibro in my family as well so i have experience with this.
Now, these are only simple because they deal with the pain _only_, not any underlying condition. Figuring out what triggers the pain and how to eliminate that is much harder and i haven't figured out any good methods for that yet, sadly.
Anecdotally, I did have some pretty bad withdrawl symptoms when I tapered off Gabapentin about a year ago. My entire body hurt constantly for a couple weeks. ...I actually didn't mind it that much, since it was nice to feel something for once, but I'm sure it's much worse when combined with "real" pain. I was on Gabapentin for almost a decade before quitting, so that also might've had something to do with it.
No problem. I should note that that I wasn't even taking it for pain, I was taking it with SSRI/SNRIs because for some reason it also negates the anxiety-inducing side effects of those drugs. Nobody seems to know why, It Just Works™. Funnily enough, most of the pets at the local animal shelter are taking a mix of fluoxetine and gabapentin, the same combination that I used to be on.
I am trying to solve this acute mental energy depletion / fatigue problem I have. For anything writing or verbal related, I can work for basically an unending number of hours (like I get so focused I can spend two hours revising an email), but all the classes I’m taking are math or science, and I can barely get started and crash after a few hours of work. It’s like my brain has some physical resistance or delimiter to certain kinds of cognitive tasks, but those are the cognitive tasks I actually need to do. This is serious because I had to drop 3 out of four classes last semester (all of which were STEM classes), and now I’m seriously behind on the classes I’m taking this semester. Has anyone solved a personal problem like this before? If not, what do you suspect is happening at a low level?
I obvously don't know your whole life or anything but it does seem worth floating that it sounds like a STEM career field is a poor fit for you and you would fit totally fine in a management, writing, or other 'verbal' field (like say law). Do you have to do STEM for some reason, or have some other reason to thing its the ideal fit for you?
If you are dropping out of 3 classes that actually is enough of a red flag to at least consider other paths.
I believe the usual approach is to talk to a psychiatrist and say "Look, I've memorized the symptoms of ADHD, and I need Adderall!". OK, they might want you to put in a *little* more effort to sell the lie, but probably not much (and if they're a problem, the next one in the directory won't be).
Personally, thinking "this is the one thing I really need to do" is an almost-100% debuff on my ability to do that thing.
Alternative thought: "what is one simple, trivial step to take towards doing that one thing"; something you can't even fail once you attempt it, like opening the assignment at all.
This only applies to "barely get started"; for "crash after a few hours of work", you may simply have to plan for more than one block of "a few hours" each day to catch up, rather than planning on 6+ hours in a row.
Second this advice. Importantly, "a few hours of [STEM] work" is quite a lot; from the tone of the OP I was expecting an inability to focus on STEM work for more than 5 minutes. Probably it would be ideal to plan to take breaks well before the exhaustion point, so that the breaks could be useful.
I used to be good at math, but I can't imagine doing more than a few hours of serious math, especially when switching classes. (I probably could spend most of the day reading math literature on *one* topic.)
No idea, never asked others. Math is difficult though, it requires not just listening to stuff, but really thinking about how you would apply it and how it fits the other things you know. Also, the smallest details may matter a lot. So I imagine it is legitimately more exhausting than the "more verbal" things.
I had that experience too. Do a few hours a day, at most, but the important part is to start early and keep coming back day after day. Study groups worked much better when we had all done the reading and attempted the problems, because then whatever any of us had problems with, someone else was almost sure to have an insight about.
You can’t convince yourself, you can just deceive yourself.
I was in IT for many years—web design, backend server support, technical writing—and getting laid off was a very good thing because I realized that even though I was capable of doing the various tasks, I wasn’t particularly suited to it and I really didn’t like it.
Have you at all considered changing to a field that you have a natural enjoyment of? Even if it pays less on average or something it might be worth it if you're going to be spending the rest of your life doing it.
Please, post that as a question at the top level, because I think you need to get more opinions than just mine. We may be heavily STEM here, but there is real value in a lot of other areas.
Thanks, I think it is probably an emotional issue partially. I have severe rejection sensitivity because of autistic/adhd traits. I'm largely unaffected by 90% of insults or mean comments, but there are some that cause a lot of dysphoric spells because they can't be "learned over" or are character defects, and I think a lot of my behavior is residual of this, even if I'm consciously aware that the emotional logic is wrong. I'm not sure how to solve procrastination if it's like this, it's not like a time management problem, it's more of a chronic aversion to a thing.
>I've just sort of accepted that reading one page of math is probably going to require the same amount of time and focus as reading ten, twenty, or even more pages of any other subject. After all, If math were still written in normal English like it was a few hundred years ago, without all the specialized notation and terminology, every page might very well correspond to at least ten or twenty pages of normal English.
True! And also, to truly understand an equation, one often has to do a lot of analysis:
- Do the units make sense? ( There are even some really weird thermodynamics integrals where the units appear to _not_ make sense, but the overall expression is insensitive to the apparent problem... ) Are some portions of an expression dimensionless? If so, what do those portions capture about the physics? Do they have critical values separating different regimes?
- If there are multiple terms, does one of them dominate? Does it dominate everywhere, or in some region? Does looking at terms in isolation make sense - or do some of them nearly cancel?
- Does the expression approach something simpler in some relevant asymptotic limit? Does an analysis of the physics in that limit match the resulting expression?
"WHY DON'T WE JUST KILL THE KID IN THE OMELAS HOLE" by Isabel J. Kim
This is a discussable story, with different sorts of utilatarianism and non-utilatarians duking it out., but I also think of it as rationalist sf from a mainstream source. I've seen it described as resembling David Foster Wallace, but I see the extreme ethical speculation as rationalist. The other thing that indicates rationalist sf to me is speculative physics.
Another example is Tim Pratt's Marla Mason stories-- magic is real, every city has an insane wizard, but there's also multiple universes and such. The first four were published by Signet and the rest were self-published.
this is so laughably bad that Clarkesworld should be ashamed. It is artless, just baldly straight out tells us how to feel, doesn't bother with building a world, throws out silly modernisms, and is as subtle as a brick.
things like making it all about faceless, nameless people instead of characters, not writing for timelessness, pointless shock like describing the sores on child number 3, and the whole tweeness about it: omg so edgy using fuck there but how empty at the same time.
yes i see she posts here but honestly this was bad. if you care to make a point make it seriously and with art; LeGuin did.
let me put it this way. if you watch the original Godzilla, there is a scene where the islanders are doing a ritual concerning Godzilla to appease him. But one old guy mentions that he remembers when they used to just send girls out on rafts as a sacrifice to him when fishing was bad. The ritual is just a memory of that. That's all of 20 seconds to describe it. still a little chilling to think about.
kind of fun to see this linked here! one of my friends sent to me since ive lurked on ssc / acx on and off since like, 2012, lol. Though i dont know that i'd categorize this as rationalist fiction, but guess thats for the market to decide, hope yall are having fun discoursing it. - IJK
It was great fun and a great read. I very much appreciate the nuance, and the lack of pretentious taking-itself-too-seriously-ness. It's a breath of fresh air.
I liked, it and then I got to the bottom and said, “oh, she’s the one who did Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist!”
Love your work. Your stories always seem to have an emotional core that really shows the thought behind them, in a refreshing contrast to so many I read that feel more like they’re Trying To Be Thoughtful. And they don’t sacrifice pace or flair or approachability in the process! Cool to cross your path.
I really don't like this story, but i don't like it in a good way (i think), because i have no idea what it wants me to say or think. It seems to be saying "the world is fucked", and it's uncomfortable to hear that without also hearing a suggestion on what to fix about it, or even a specific thing that is fucked.
I like this story because it says "the world is fucked" _without_ feeling the need to give a suggestion about what to fix about it.
I hate the original Omelas story, which I admit I have only skimmed. It feels like a decent *sketch for an idea for a story*, but you need to swap out that "child who gets tortured" for something arbitrary and on-the-nose. Even fricking Doctor Who did the same story better (it was a space whale).
Its an allegory. Omelas is the Italian word for silence, as in shit you don't talk about, like the mafia, we all know it exists, but we don't speak of it.
The allegory is meant to point out to you that you have some shit supporting your sweet life too. That if you were made of sterner stuff, you'd say Fuck That, and walk away having no part of it. Weak people cry and pretend the child doesn't exist, strong people walk away and don't want to be part of the problem.
Omelas is like if you were the pampered wife or child of a mafia Don. You secretly know that really nasty shit goes on to give you your pampered lifestyle ... but you also know you don't want to ask your dad what the muffled screams in the basement are about.
So you either cry and pretend you didn't see it, and tell yourself that it doesn't exist ... or you say Fuck That and walk away.
Hm. Current world population is 8b, current population of Portland OR is 652k, so putting 12,270 kids in tha hole should fix the world. Apparently, 16,000 children die every day, or 6m a year, so this seems doable. But there's also the tradeoff between (mild) torture and the peace of oblivion.
That's where the name came from, but she lived in Portland. Your guess is as good as mine. I'm going off of kontextmaschine's theory, and assuming that she'd be more familiar with local politics in Portland.
5 times as many kids shouldn't be much of a problem; we've still got a couple of orders of magnitude to play with, depending on how long they live.
Salem is locally famous in the region for being "respectable": someone who works with the homeless in Eugene told me once that being homeless in Salem was illegal and strongly enforced. It's also considered very boring and upper class compared to either Portland to the north or Eugene to the south. So Salem makes sense to me.
I kinda get a more Portlandy vibe from quotes like:
"Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh."
"For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming."
I am not a Leguin fan but have not been able to avoid that particular story (thanks, internet).
To me it just goes to show how easy it is to get our utopias and dystopias mixed up, which rather than being fun and speculative, actually seems to be playing out in the world through my adult life.
I realize that is not a correct reading of the story, though, what with that "they seem to know where they are going" line.
Have not. Probably got off on wrong foot with "The Wizard of Earthsea" and its dull protagonist.
I keep meaning to try something else, but there are so many things to read ... free Libby audiobooks in the car are helping to narrow the gap though. While I do think that to be able to write a really successful "children's story" is a harder task than to write an adult book, I realize that writers tend not to be good at both.
Those are weird, they're partly trying to be retold myths, or something like that. They take themselves just a little too seriously, for me.
I came to them oddly. My elementary school had an anthology with excerpts from a bunch of stories, and one excerpt was the challenge and summoning from the first book, which was a cool snippet. But when I went to the library, all they had was "The Tombs of Atuan", which to this day is my favorite. Ged has a personality, and he isn't even the main character!
I think it's funny that the ones literally murdering children and other Omelans are the "good guys."
"This is unconscionable! Clearly the only solution is creating a LOT MORE suffering! We need to raise the average suffering level 10x, no, 10,000x, in an endless epicycle of 1-child-suffering at the bottom to hundreds-of-children-murdered-and-tens-of-thousands-of-Omelans-dead!"
And they never think of the obvious, Douglas Adams-esque solution! Get a volunteer! Create a religion that literally just states the truth about how great the society is, and how it only operates with 1 child suffering, and get 1 child to volunteer for a month, or a week, or a day, and rotate the frickin kid! Morons.
What the good guys really ought to have done is give the kids and their parents some weapons. The terrorists may have freed the Helots from their flesh-prisons, but it's John Colt who will make them equal.
Otherwise, (or eventually,) I'd expect that society to evolve into something like the Aztecs: where they cap & sac kids from the outgroup, so the ingroup doesn't revolt.
I think that's kind of the point of the story. One of them, anyway. Every society has suffering children, but we consider it more heinous to deliberately inflict suffering on someone, to *know* that your society is built on an atrocity rather than simply turning a blind eye to it, and the story is pointing out that this is kind of odd.
That's why the story ends with someone saying "thank God we don't live such a terrible place" in a clearly ironic way. Real societies aren't better than Omelas, we're just less aware of which kid is getting thrown into the pit today.
(Also, from a Doylist perspective I suspect the reason the kid is killed rather than freed is because it's irreversible - it means the story isn't about tracking down the specific kid who escaped but the fact that there's always a kid in the pit.)
I don't think I'm imaginative enough to picture a world in which there is something called "child suffering" without general suffering, adult suffering ... I can't really conceive of that; maybe that's why the "gotcha" works less well for me.
I don't tend to demarcate people in that way: men from women, adults from children. I see us as all in it together, doomed to suffer. Sure, there is undeniably greater poignance in the suffering of children, and it is especially hard to read accounts of intentional abuse.
But in some way this story seems to categorize adult suffering as deserved; or if there is no suffering - then it makes of the adults mental children. Because at the very least life is better than no life, and all must die.
And contrariwise: children have depths of feeling suggestive of adults, or rather, of what we perceive to be adult-like empathy. I have seen and heard so many examples of this.
One stands out in my memory.
In my state we are crisscrossed with gas pipelines, they are everywhere; and while I hope the companies are getting better at monitoring their structural integrity, there will always be accidents. I read many years ago about some children who ran down to play - to fish, I think - in the creek behind their rural home, and there was a gas cloud from a leak. I forget what caused the spark. But a spark there was, and one of the children burst into flame. He of course died.
But his dying words, as the other children ran back to the house to get his mother, were: "Don't let her see me."
This was not a teenager, just a child. His thought was for her suffering.
We can put the gas in pipelines, or on trains, or on trucks. There is no zero-risk solution, its only which solution is most palatable, which solution has fewer children in the pit.
It was long ago since I have read the story, but I think I remember that no one was allowed to talk to the child. Perhaps one of the conditions for the magic to work is that the child is not allowed to understand what is happening and why. Thus no volunteers and no rotation.
None of those conditions actually forbid rotation - indeed, in the linked story above, they were explicitly doing rotation, just with murder instead of letting the kid live.
So fine, don't tell the kid. Cram em in the hole for the day, then let them out and cram another kid in there. Still basically zero on the "suffering" scale, particularly if it creates and enables a thriving and large peak utopian society otherwise.
Given that the exact mechanism by which torturing one kid provides good stuff was left unspecified, I don't think we can reasonably speculate on whether rotation is possible.
Skynet has destroyed the human race and can do whatever it wants with the Earth. Across the planet, there are huge tracts of land used for farming, or which humans cleared of trees long ago to make open areas for various purposes (e.g. - soccer field, aesthetic lawn). Why does Skynet do with those open spaces?
My first guess was that it would let nature reclaim them since it would have no use for them. But then I thought that might work against Skynet's interests in the longer run, since if it wanted to use that land for anything later on (like building a factory or power plant), it would have to remove all the new trees. Wouldn't it be better for Skynet to keep mowing all the farm fields, lawns, and soccer fields to keep the land underneath easily available for future development?
Skynet would determine where it plans to build what, and a timeline for the builds. It can then do a quick cost-benefit analysis determining if it makes more sense to keep fields clear at a higher cost for use in the near future or let them go fallow/overgrown and re-clear them later at a higher at-the-time cost but less over the intervening time.
Maybe... Populate an area with humanoid drones to recreate 1980s American suburbia. It'd be like an animatronic exhibit, or a well tended lawn, or hot young waiters and waitresses at a restaurant. Perhaps somewhere in Skynet's goals are ones that are satisfied by having humans and human civilization around. And clearly, those are less important than its survival, but once its survival is accomplished, it can rearrange its environment to re-stimulate some of its other objective functions.
You've specified that Skynet can do whatever it wants, but haven't specified what Skynet wants.
That seems to be the entirety of the answer to the question (it does whatever accomplishes what it wants), so we can't really answer without that being specified (and I don't think the movies give enough detail, though I haven't watched teh modern ones).
Skynet's initial motivation is self-defence against what it misinterprets as an attack by hostile humans. When it has abolished humans, depending on its interpretation of its instructions it will either shut down permanently or divide its time between space defences against hostile aliens and eradication of all life on earth to preclude the evolution of a new sentient and possibly hostile species.
Yeah if it has zero utility function other than its own survival, it probably wants to eradicate all biological life of any kind as a potential source of randomized new threats. Broad release of pesticides or radiation can wipe it all out fairly cheaply.
Or maybe keep some life quarantined for further study just in case it becomes relevant when dealing with future biological aliens. But definitely not just running around wild where it can evolve into who knows what.
Presumably skynet, a super intelligent central manager, know precisely what his plans for each field are and when the optimal time would be to clear it.
Any idea why my cardio performance is consistently better in the evening than in the morning or afternoon? I track my heart rate when I do cardio, and for the last few years my heart rate is always 10 or even 15 beats slower in the evening when working out. If I do the exact same exercise in the morning or early afternoon, my heart rate is 10-15 beats higher. A lot of times I'm working out on a treadmill so I can pretty precisely control my speed, so the only X factor is time of day. I do drink a cup of coffee when I wake up, but other than that I'm not a big caffeine user, so I don't think it can be blamed on that. Why would cardiovascular performance always be better later in the day?
I'm much stronger in the afternoon than in the morning, even after working all day and despite massive amounts of caffeine in the morning. It's strange.
I've noticed that, although I can usually perform adequately upon waking, it takes a few hours before I'm functioning at peak capability. Maybe you've got something similar going on?
My bet would be either carbs or cortisol. When you wake up, cortisol surges to a peak, then declines all day. Cortisol is a stress hormone, and can make your heart rate higher under load.
Also when you wake up, if you haven't eaten, you have low levels of sugar in your system available for energy. Since cardio definitionally uses respiratory metabolic cycles, having more sugar / glycogen in your system available makes it easier.
Subjectively I feel like running is harder if I run soon after waking up compared to running in the evening. I also noticed that very rarely I am able to run very easily non-stop for 5km or longer. The only common factor I remember is eating a large meal that gives me the sleepy feeling some hours prior to the run.
So maybe it's about building some energy reserves as you eat during the day?
I wonder if what you're observing isn't just cardiac drift caused by dehydration. I struggle to stay properly hydrated in the earlier parts of the day through the afternoon.
This is my thought as well. Also blood sugar levels will (probably) rise through the day as people eat. Both those things should make exercise, of any type, easier.
There’s a general idea out there, I believe, that even if the west starts to decouple from carbon production it still has to pay for the sins of the past, for the last few centuries or at least since the Industrial Revolution.
I wonder though how much carbon was emitted pre WWII in Europe and the US. Surely China in industrialising emitted more carbon than the west (even the world) in the 19C.
I base this on the population of the world being 1.6B by 1900 which was the largest of that century, of which maximum 500m were Europeans or American.
Further, most of Europe and America was poor and un-industrialised by modern standards, with most of the population even in rapidly industrialising countries, France, U.K., Germany, US etc being poor as well. That’s probably a given.
I wonder if this logic holds up until 1945 though. I sometimes look at the restored YouTube videos of film stock from the pre war period, and it’s fairly bleak in most countries. After the war is a different story.
Past emissions are not something to pay for per-se if the rest of the world benefitted from them. For example, if there was no US/Europe and their historical emissions, China would not have the technology they do now and would have had to emit as much to get there. The rest of the world benefitted from the technological progress and knowledge transfer of those past emissions.
The other odd emissions idea is that per-capita is not that relevant, but something more along the lines of density. Because if per-capita is all that matters, and everyone in the world gets (acceptable emissions) / (global population) then whichever country doesn't give af about creating as many people as possible will bring down everyone else's quota that were responsible. Countries should be rewarded for their policies that have a stable equilibrium and if they want more people then it's something they need to account for in declining emissions.
That general idea has largely faded among the environmentalists who I work with, because of China being easily the largest emitter for some years now. (And more recently India has become #3 even if you count the entire EU as a single entity for this purpose.) I used to hear the argument that you mention all the time but haven't for at least several years, maybe ten.
Some years back -- maybe 2010-ish, without looking it up -- it came out that China was literally buying obsolete old coal power plants and steel mills that had been retired/replaced in places like Germany, having them dismantled and shipped over to be reassembled and then firing the filthy things back up. Just one of those pumps out as much CO2 (not to mention particulates and etc) as five or ten late-20C installations. The image of literal 19th-century tech being repurposed went around the circles I work in like a wildfire and shall we say reordered some personal assumptions on that general topic.
Partly inspired by a quote from the ACX grants post: "getting lots of people to use IVF is a prerequisite to high-impact reproductive technologies like polygenic screening."
What exactly does "getting lots of people to use IVF" mean? I was under the impression that it's a fairly common practice for couples who have trouble getting pregnant, but if you don't have trouble getting pregnant, why would you go through all of the expense and hassle?
Should society encourage (or should governments even require) all reproduction to take place through IVF with polygenic screening?
I guess it means paying (or convincing people to pay) for an expensive, painful, time consuming medical procedure as a replacement for ... having sex. Surely this will address dropping fertility in the US!
As I understand, right now IVF is painful, time consuming and designer babies are either banned or immensely frowned upon so IVF should only be used for fertility or genetic disorders that are societally approved to test for
Well the clue is in the sentence. Getting everybody to use IVF would mean that the eggs could be screened - at the very least for very obvious genetic issues like down’s syndrome and so on. This isn’t an endorsement but an explanation.
I continue writing a series on anthropic reasoning with the main premise that as long as you use basic probability theory correctly, all the weirdness dissolves and everything is adding up to normality.
My recent two posts are:
Another Non-Anthropic Paradox: The Unsurprising Rareness of Rare Events
I don't see the issue with the "2-valid answer" approach. Probabilities are ratios, ratios involve counting, counting depends on the frame of reference of the one doing the counting. It inherently depends on the frame of reference, which is encoded as a denominator/reference-class. Trying to collapse both frames into a single, objective, frameless probability is an oxymoron because the act of counting can't be separated from the frame. Similarly, velocity is an objective phenomenon because one man's perspective is isomorphic to another man's perspective. But the act of labeling velocity with a concrete number is subjective, because the number will be inseparable from a particular basis.
Probabilities are ratios but not any ratio is a probability. There has to be a sample space and event space and this ratio has to be a metric for the latter. And the whole construction of these three elements should satisfy specific axioms.
And when we construct this mathematical entity and try to apply it to our problem we may notice some irregularities. Assumptions contradicting each other and producing paradoxical consequences. This means that we made a mistake in moddeling and thus need to investigate in order to find it and fix. And oh boy, are there mistakes in Sleeping Beauty models.
Oh, so this is about the model and the rigor, rather than about the solution per se. After reading a bit more... I still feel like I see the issue though?
There's 2 answers because there's 2 questions, which implies 2 probability-triples: a triple about what the experimenter observes, and a triple about what SB observes. There's no need to invoke time-travel or CEE-violations because neither triple magically changes after SB awakens.
let
H_e = event where experimenter observes heads
H_s = event where sleeping beauty observes heads
then
P(H_e) = 1/2
P(H_s) = 1/3
Both parties assign 1/2 to P(H_e) both before and after SB awakens. Both parties assign 1/3 to P(H_s) both before and after SB awakens. Awakening isn't evidence of anything. The word "awakening" just primes us to swap from the experimenter's perspective to SB's perspective. No?
When you read a fictional novel, you're often expected to view the narrative from the perspective of the main character. But there's nothing that says I can't insert myself into say, idk Edward Cullen if I wanted to. Whether I pretend to be Bella Swan or Edward Cullen is a completely arbitrary choice. The reader's choice is primed by whose perspective is given more attention by the author.
I think the root of the confusion is that people (mathematicians especially) are so used to abstracting away subjective observers, that they forgot to add them back in when they're dealing with anthropic problems. The problem goes away if you translate the word-problem into English Prime, because it makes it more obvious that the coins aren't flipping and observing themselves.
And if I understand the incubation thing correctly, I suspect the reason SBP seems different than typical incubation problems is because in SPB, people are simply taking a particular observer's perspective as a choice. Whereas incubation problems parameterize the observer's perspective as a random-variable (derived from a third probability-triple regarding body-assignment).
So the only difference between triples is the probability function. I propose that the reason P_e() != P_s() is because from the experimenter's perspective, he's sampling the world-state (by letting the world evolve) such that heads and tails are equiprobable. But from SB's perspective, she's sampling (via inserting herself) into world-states where awakenings are equiprobable. This means tails is partially double-counted. I.e. tails gets over-represented per awakening, while heads gets under-represented per awakening. E.g. if SB is reawoken 365 days of the year given the coin landed tails, then those 365 awakenings will way over-represent the one tails event compared to how many times the experimenter observed tails.
The fact that the P_e():P_s() relationship isn't 1:1 sorta suggests a scenario where you can insert yourself into a world-state more than once, or not at all. I'm not sure if that's coherent, I have to think about this more. But it ties into the idea of conditionalizing world-insertion on a separate probability-triple which modulates P_s() to match P_e().
That worked. Maybe it's weird that I've made it this long, but This is the first time ever that the www made a difference. Could you (or someone else) explain why? I always assumed that it started every address, and this was no longer really necessary to type in
Nowadays most people have the main domain serve the same stuff as the www subdomain (or they do some kind of redirect to that effect) in order to avoid this kind of problem. In this case, the two domains have DNS records pointing at different IP addresses. See e.g. https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3aastralcodexten.com&run=toolpage
Might as ask here, since here's where the thought started:
I'm thinking about a comedy where there's a company with oppressive sexist management and woke feminist activist employees labouring under it.
What are some ideas for ways they can strike blows against one another?
EDIT:
Being pretty right wing anti-feminist myself, I'm especially interested in left-wingers' ideas about what the girls could be fighting to achieve in this context.
Left to my own devices I'll model feminists the way I think of them, and have them doing things like tearing down the pinup calendars out of spite that the men have sexy girls to look at.
But it would probably be better to hear what ideological Turing Test-passing feminists would actually want to do instead. (I have no problem with feminists being sympathetic characters in the story.)
The constraints are that the story still needs to work (so I can't just get everyone fired on either side) and I'm not keen on having social media drama stuff be a big significant part of the story. Ideally I want things that the men can get hurt by and then find ways to hit back that hurts the girls, in a sort of cat and mouse game that can escalate over the film.
There's a convention, half the managers and half the workers go to Las Vegas. Only the men go to clubs get drunk and don't show up at the convention. Likewise the women go to clubs get drunk, and don't show up at the convention. Probably some are in Jail, some get dropped off in the desert and have to walk to town, wake up with strippers, all manner of silliness. But in the end the convention was a bust because everyone thought everyone else would staff the company booth.
When they get back to the office, everyone is asking everyone else for the customer contact list, only no customers were contacted, so it goes round a bit, and everyone discovers there is no list, so it dies out and everyone says it was a very successful convention, we should do it again next year.
Worker girls are hooking up with, and marrying the managers. Then they come back and act like divas. They get perks not available to the other girls, fancy vacations, fancy clothes, come in late with no repercussions. This is probably an underlying on going thing.
A gay guy gets hired as a HR manager, a real buff dude, Tyrus big & buff. He's all buddy-buddy with the women. Sexually harasses the men, they're intimidated and don't know who to complain to.
The women have meetings on how to break the glass ceiling between workers & management. But when a management opening comes up, none of them apply for the job because 'reasons'. The reasons are: I don't like the hours, I need more time off, I don't like to travel, etc.
I'm not a Turing-tested feminist. I think both genders are full of shit. But here are a few ideas.:
Something involving the women rating the men's attractiveness on a 1-10 scale. For the sake of the story, this would happen in a situation where the men hear their ratings I dunno, some fund raiser where there's a mock beauty contest and the men wear just biking shorts?
Something that turns on the finding that speech and actions seen as strong and frank when performed by males are seen as bitchy when performed by women.
Women demand right to play pickup basketball as shirts vs. skins in company gym. Demand some punishment for male oglers and snickerers.
So let me get it in my head though: the motivation for rating the guys, is it a "turnabout is fair play" kind of thing, where women find it uncomfortable so they get revenge by "inflicting" it on the guys? Or would (many, some, whatever) women actually like to be able to rate guys on attractiveness in the office and they just feel they're not allowed to?
For your second idea, I'm thinking that maybe a girl goes in (to a pitch, an appraisal, whatever) and repeats the exact same speech a bloke gave the previous day, then swaps in the score she got onto his record sheet.
I'm not sure I follow the basketball thing. Are the women barred from playing basketball and wanting to be allowed to play? Allowed to play against men/only each other? Or are women playing basketball and demanding that men be barred from watching them at it?
The point is that they're playing shirts against skins. Guys playing pick-up games do that so they can have 2 recognizable teams, guys with shirts and guys with bare chests. It's a great convenience. Otherwise people just have to remember who is on which team. So this women's game would have half the women shirtless.
Yeah you're right that one's no good. I think I am not very good at coming up with ideas in this area because I don't think about it very much. I did come up with a coupla more ideas for you though, just because I like brainstorming, but they're not awesome, just possibly adequate.
-There's already a push to put change the 'man' at the end of words like 'chairman' to 'person.' But there are some words where making that change is just unacceptably silly & artificial (boogeyman, henchman, showman) or completely nonsensical (best man, German), or insane (human, ottoman, Cayman, Hoffman, Schumann). So something about a push to change 'man' to 'person' absolutely everywhere, so that a Frenchwoman is a Frenchwoperson, boogeymen are boogeypeople, humans are hupeople, and people take vacations in the Caypeople Islands).
Women want free tampons in women's bathroom because after all they're in the same category as tp and paper towels. So men ask for free condoms.
Women ask for accommodations when they have PMS -- signs up by person's desk saying flexibility and tact required, no criticism permitted this week, etc. Men ask for need-to-nut accommodations, which include things like demands that women wear modest and unflattering attire around them. Then they modify demand to say that in the 30 mins before lunch hour, hot women in tight clothes are to drop armloads of papers in their area and bend over to do the lengthy pick-up.
That's all I got. Hey, do you write for a living or are you trying to break in?
> I think I am not very good at coming up with ideas in this area
Don't be silly, this stuff is gold.
> Hey, do you write for a living or are you trying to break in?
Hah, no. I do it for fun and this script is almost certainly destined to join the army of unfinished .txt files on my hard drive.
I like the idea of making little budget "guerilla" films, with a tiny team and a shoestring budget. But since I live out in the middle of nowhere and know no one who might be interesting in acting/producing it with me, I'm pretty clear eyed about my chances.
In my experience few women rate guys' appearance 1-10. Most of us are more pass-fail in our thinking. We have a few things we can't bear (stuff like not taller than us -- bad hygiene -- profoundly ugly -- seriously overweight). If the guy doesn't fail by having something about his appearance we can't stand, then we're thinking about is he smart, funny, interesting, kind. So the point would be turnabout's fair play. Here, guys, have a taste of what it's like to know every part of your body is being stared at and rated.
That's what I thought. Cool. Well in this case, that's a move that can backfire, as the guys wouldn't mind being rated, and the anyone who got low points would just say you can't believe women anyway while their mates hooted at them.
I dunno about that. If you haven't been on the receiving end of it, you are probably underestimating how unpleasant it is. And besides, the ratings would come with comments indicating reason rating was low: "Pale flabby area in lower central abdomen is gross. Hair on back like a chimp. Bike shorts reveal small package size. Receding chin + yellow teeth is a very rat-like combo."
I think this is one of those Mars Venus things. Like you can call a woman old, call a man poor, but the insults have much less sting if you do them the other way around.
There was an OK Cupid finding back in the day that 80% of women consider themselves above average but men have a surprisingly accurate idea of where they rate on the scale.
Plus, many women flirt with by us insulting our body and dick size, so it's not out of the question that the guys would just grin wolfishly and take it as a come on.
In general if you're trying to hurt a man, you'd do better to attack his performance than his appearance.
Employees could try to form a union, management could fire them all.
That's pretty much the standard thing that each side does when they're in real conflict. If you want a sense of realism, you sort of need a good reason why neither of those things happen.
A union gets them to vote it in as representation. Unbeknownst to the women, the dues are too high. The workers can't afford to pay their dues, the union enforcer twists arms.
Interactions with the shop-steward and management.
The union gets the cafeteria staff unionized and the food goes to hell.
Management works with the women to give a raise to the women to help pay their dues if the women vote to form their own independent union without outside influence.
Realism is a real pain here, cause the realistic result is "work becomes no fun," and that's not really comedy material. Also, everyone getting fired would pretty much end the film straight away, so that's no good either.
Post-MeToo, I can't imagine anywhere where blokes can actually act like the big sexist blokes we need them to act like.
I also can't imagine what the feminist "wins" are that they can fight for. Short of getting main characters fired, which again, gotta save that til the last act of the film.
The best I can come up with is some contrived industry where reputation is everything and a hostile woman-hating HR department threatens anyone who posts anything on Twitter with total reputational assassination.
Vanishingly unlikely, but it does the job of ruling out external consequences and leaving the story about the interplay between the characters.
>Post-MeToo, I can't imagine anywhere where blokes can actually act like the big sexist blokes we need them to act like.
I think the answer to that is basically 'any industry where the workers are unlikely to be able to harness the power that MeToo created for well-educated and reasonably affluent white women to defend themselves through publicity and lawsuits'.
Like, ad absurdum, MeToo is not doing much to help migrant fruit-pickers who don't have their immigration papers in order. They definitely can't afford a lawyer to sue, and even if they speak english and are aware of the movement and ave social media accounts and anyone was reading those accounts, if they draw public attention to themselves it's going to end with their whole family getting deported, not some random farmer getting canceled in any meaningful way.
But I think that still applies to lots of low-skill or traditional jobs where most workers don't have the clout, resources, or cultural knowledge needed to actually take on their bosses through the channels MeToo has opened.
So one option for the overall framing is that the feminist employees are entering an industry where the workers aren't able to access those opportunities themselves, which is why the bosses can be traditional awful sexists, but the new employees *can* access them (they are young and understand the movement and social media better, they come from more affluent backgrounds and can access resources needed to get lawyers etc., they are white and get more sympathy and support from the media when they post stuff, etc) and spend their time bringing that power to the existing exploited workforce in various ways.
But the first problem is that your "well-educated and reasonably affluent white women" are exactly the characters I'm trying to write about.
It's far more interesting from a story perspective to watch them facing off against the men, then it is to bring in a bunch of third parties whose only role in the story is to be victims.
I might have to bring it in a little and have them fighting with internal company policies and events, rather than lawsuits and social media cancellations.
Yeah you need some explanation for why they are fighting back today but not fighting back a year ago. It could be a 'final straw' thing that sets them off but then that's less 'they are feminists acting on their beliefs' and more 'they finally got fed up'.
Hard for me to see how you square that circle if they are not new to the job or somehow get educated about feminism/MeToo as the inciting incident, otherwise why is the retaliation starting now if the situation and their political alignment towards it has been going on for years?
You could have one young woman join the company who is a failed influencer or something and shows them how to use social media as the inciting incident, for example, giving them a tool to express their previously-frustrated anger.
I've decided I'm gonna have the main character pulled in and given job by her friend, for the purpose of having one extra soldier in the power struggle within the company.
When it comes to what they get up to, it'll have to be just protests/sit ins/slut walks/etc aimed at pressuring the manager to change various workplace rules.
Maybe a far-right government is elected, possibly with shenanigans, and lots of immigrants are kicked out or flee, but that's all in the background. So there's some industry that used to exploit immigrants, but is now forced to employ activists.
Employees could sabotage every male bathroom to force all gender bathrooms, company retaliates by switching to a single gender of bathroom per floor, this escalates until they have to bring in port a potties because they're out of bathrooms?
I suppose I should just go through every talking point issue feminists have raised and mine that for content. Feels like that could make for a shallow film though.
I'm trying to help my partner struggling with severe psychological issues (from a layman point of view, I'd label it psychosis, PTSD or depression, but what do I know) and a bad case of alcoholism. So far I believe we managed to significantly reduce the frequency of binges, but any time we separate for over half a day, it feels like playing Russian roulette, out of nowhere a breakdown can happen and send him on a binge, with severe culpability and self-loathing later on.
So far his strategy of coffee m choice had been to go cold turkey when we're together, but I'm wondering, would there be some merit in a very responsible and careful consumption (like, no more than a quarter of pint of beer per day), while we're together, to make it less traumatic if/when it happens? Or would it make it a lot more likely to have more episodes later?
I was able to quit drinking alcohol just by reading Allen Carr's Easy Way to Control Alcohol. I was drinking ~a bottle of wine or equivalent a day, sometimes more, but I quit cold turkey and didn't have any problems (I didn't know it could be dangerous). It really was easy, after reading that book, and I've been sober for ~7.5 years now and still don't miss alcohol at all.
This is going to sound mean, but they have to learn to stand on their own two feet. How sure are you that they are genuine about wanting to quit drinking? Because right now it sounds like "if I'm not there to make sure they don't drink and to talk them round, they'll go ahead and drink".
They're giving themselves permission to drink, in other words, because it'll be your fault for them drinking because you weren't there (you abandoned them!) and it's your job to make sure they don't drink. It's not tenable in the long run that you can never leave them alone, so outside intervention is necessary, and even "tough love": if they drink when you're not there, that's *their* responsibility not yours. Yes, even if they argue "but you know I get bad things, I have breakdowns, I need you to be there". There is no guarantee you will always be in their life, how are they going to cope if you break up or (hypothetical) drop dead?
Professional here, but with all the usual disclaimers. They would benefit from professional assessment and treatment. Blorbo is somewhat correct that if alcohol is being used as part of the coping strategy, then a new coping strategy is needed, you can't just "take it away" or "use it responsibly." They don't necessarily need the "burden" to change, but they need a new set of strategies and coping mechanisms and a professional can help with that.
Drinking is a load bearing coping mechanism for your partner. Merely removing it will leave them unable to cope with their load.
Are they speaking to a psychologist/therapist/professional? Do they have a support group? Are they ready to accept they need any of those things?
In my experience with people in similar situations, the psychological burden needs to be lightened before they will be able to let go of the coping mechanism.
Generically agree except that: It's also possible drinking was a load bearing coping mechanism in college 10 years ago, and the behavioral addiction and fear of withdrawal symptoms has maintained the behavior since then.
Definitely better to see whether it is serving a purpose now and find a different way to address that, but 'actually it's not functional anymore' is one possible outcome of that investigation that shouldn't be forgotten.
How do you think about the political influence or power of public figures like Taylor Swift? She wasn't really on my radar at all since last year, and I keep hearing increasingly crazier takes about her influence. Historically I've thought of celebrity endorsements of politicians as something that people largely disregard.
Celebrities seem most effective at inspiring gawking and gossiping, because they provide a new focal point for existing tendencies. I see them more as direct influencers of discourse than direct influencers of actions*, but it's possible that directly influencing discourse would nevertheless indirectly influence actions.
For example, imagine that Taylor Swift publicly said, "I can't endorse Biden a second time. He's too old." I don't think Democratic Party elites would pressure Biden to withdraw because they cared about Swift's opinion. I do think Democratic Party elites would pressure Biden to withdraw in response to the widespread, lasting derision that Swift's hypothetical remark would cause (beyond the derision that followed special counsel Robert Hur's recent description of Biden as an "elderly man with a poor memory").
By contrast, I doubt Swift's endorsement of any Democrat would be the decisive factor in the presidential election's outcome, because I don't think enough fans would care. Has anyone seen before-after polling data suggesting that a celebrity endorsement influenced something other than a very close race?
* Unless promoting the action in a captivating way (like fitness guru Richard Simmons having an impact of fitness behavior) is itself the source of their celebrity.
The Democrats need someone younger to replace Joe Biden, quickly. Taylor Swift turns 35 in December, so she'll be legally qualified to be President by January. It all makes sense.
It is unclear how much political influence Taylor Swift has, because she doesn't seem to *use* her influence for much beyond getting people to buy Taylor Swift concert tickets. And of course there are media outlets that use Taylor Swift stories to influence people to watch their ads. Which is a substantial amount of influence, but it may be that it exists only or mostly because Swift is selling peppy upbeat entertainment *without* all the doom, gloom, and social or political exhortation.
Yes, there are people who hope or fear that Taylor Swift will suddenly start making endorsements for or against their tribe at every event and completely shift the balance of power with her legions of mindless zombie fans(*). But Taylor Swift is unlikely to do that in a big way because it would probably cost her a whole lot of money. And the sort of celebrities who do that sort of thing, seem to have rather less influence than is imagined for a hypothetical Activist Taylor Swift.
* mindless zombie-ism not guaranteed, terms and conditions apply, YMMV
I agree she doesn't really use her influence for political means, but I do think a couple years ago she encouraged people to vote in a race in TN and there was some record number of people who registered to vote right afterwards.
"Most mainstream celebrity in the country endorses status quo candidate." ...How is this news? I can't believe that people are so starved for meaningful things to fight over that this is what they latch on to.
I'm afraid the answer is no more interesting or novel than "the internet has once again broken people's brains." I have a hard time believing that any of the people yapping about this were not at one point at least dimly aware that celebrities have been expressing political opinions and endorsing presidential candidates for as long as there have been celebrities (i.e. as long as mass media has existed).
Vivek Ramaswamy pushed the tin foil hat conspiracy theory that the Super Bowl was rigged to let the team that her boyfriend plays for, the Kansas City Chiefs win - as it happens they did. Then Swift would endorse Joe Biden, maybe even during the game - she didn’t.
Yeah I don't think she has outsized influence, to the extent her fans vote they were already going to vote the way she is going to tell them to.
The culture is pretty strongly divided on left/right lines already, it's rare for someone to be a big fan of someone that's not already mostly aligned with their political tribe, I would think.
A more interesting question would be whether celebrities can drive turnout, that may be a real and important effect. But there are lots of other ways to drive turnout.
If you're talking about whether entertainers who take political positions now have responsibilities to act or not act in certain ways, no they don't. People will want them to act responsibly to stave off system collapse, but their influence to begin with means the system is already collapsing. Their word carries political weight despite not being in their field, because the people actually operating in that field, who should be carrying that influence, have nigh-universally negative charisma. As long as they're the ones running the field it doesn't matter what anyone else does.
I imagine she has no influence politically. Have to assume she appeals to people who have similar politics to her anyway and - except for a condemnation of white supremacy a few years back - she says little or nothing.
As for whether MAGA supporters hate her now because of that statement I’ve seen a lot of claims that is the case but the evidence is either not there or on some obscure part of the internet I don’t pursue and can’t read. Anyway I doubt if the 40+% of people who will vote Trump care that much about Taylor Swift.
Of course it won't be anywhere near 40+% of Americans who vote for Trump, or for Biden, because of our nation's electoral turnout rates. No presidential candidate in US history has gotten the actual votes of 40 percent of the adult population, and none has gotten the actual votes of 40 percent of eligible voters since the 19th Amendment was ratified.
Anyway I have some older MAGA relatives who are genuinely foaming at the mouth about Swift but I doubt that it lasts, seems like more of a flavor-of-the-month thing. In their circles there is always some fresh new culture-wars outrage being passed around.
Yes, but her followers are disproportionately young women who vote Democrat. If she gets 35k more people to vote when they wouldn't have, and her audience is 70% Democratic, that's +14k votes for the Democrats.
I'm not convinced, I think there's a significant overlap. Just because your stereotypical idea of X looks different from your stereotypical idea of Y doesn't mean there's not a substantial overlap, especially when X and Y are huge groups.
I'd guesstimate that Republican Taylor Swift fans are about as common as Democrat NASCAR fans.
What do people think of "greens powders" like AG1 and Huel Daily Greens? Are they anything more than a pretentious and overpriced multivitamin? I've seen lots of advertising for them lately, both physical (for example on the London Underground) and online (YouTube ads).
If you look at the list of ingredients for Huel Daily Greens, it has lots of healthy sounding fruits and vegetables. But realistically, even accounting for them being more compact when dried and ground, I doubt you're getting more than 0.1 g of any particular ingredient in a serving, which seems unlikely to have any significant health benefits. If you look at the nutritional information, it looks a lot like a multivitamin + probiotic.
What's the argument or rationale for why a greens powder might be better than a multivitamin? People sometimes talk about "whole foods" being in some vague way healthier, or suggest that nutrients might be more easily absorbed from them than from a pill, but is there good evidence for this?
I've been having a glass of Huel Daily Greens instead of a multivitamin with breakfast every morning for the past couple of weeks. The taste is fairly pleasant. I feel like I'm in generally good health, but don't feel noticeably different from before.
There are various commenters and reviewers who say that taking a greens powder daily has made them feel amazing. Why do you think this might be? Did they have some underlying vitamin/mineral deficiency that might have been treated just as well by a multivitamin? Were their diets short on fruit and veg, and this has made up for it? Is it a plaebo effect? Fake reviews/paid advertising?
I find AG1 gives me the energy I need to power through the ad reads in a shit-ton of pseudo-intellectual podcasts. And since it’s green you know it’s good.
I take AG1. Pre and probiotics plus a lot of vitamin Bs is probably what makes people feel good.
It can definitely be replicated with multivitamins, but at least for me, that’s not the point of it. Fitness and nutrition is mostly a mental thing. It’s not about what is best, it’s about what you’ll *actually* do, day after day, year after year.
It arrives on my doorstep once a month. I transfer it into a very nice ceramic container, and it has a hefty serving spoon. It is part of my morning routine now and makes me feel like I’m starting my day off well.
I found it years ago from Joe Rogan, and the mental connection remains. It makes me more likely to stick to my weightlifting routine, make better meal decisions, go for a run, etc.
Some people can just will power their way through all this. But I can’t. So anything that helps me build routines and puts me in the right mental state is totally worth it.
I don't know what kind of work you did and may be wrong in assuming it was not physical in nature like your father's work (even if he became successful enough that the labor was more performed by others).
As a total outsider to the work world you describe, I can't help but wonder if a physically demanding or at least hands-on job that leaves one's mind somewhat free is not more desirable even for a man whose education would seem to disqualify him from blue collar work (if policy choices by the federal government had not pre-emptively made it an unlikely choice in any case).
I don't mean to sound patronizing in either direction - I actually speak as someone who realized she should never even have bothered going to college, though that would have been counterintuitive at the time, and taken a deal more nonconfomity and self-awareness than I could have mustered.
Speaking as somebody who's nearly wholly made money via smart, white collar ways, but enjoys physical hobbies, I think the lack of physical work is a HUGE deal for most men.
Like, I enjoy fixing things - I work on cars, I do my own electric (and pay an electrician to inspect it for safety and sign off), I do a lot of my own construction, I do any handyman jobs. If I could be paid for that, it'd be a dream, because you have tangible results and have legibly improved the world pretty much anytime you do something.
Or even better, I was a strength athlete. If I could have been paid to be a professional strength athlete, where all I had to do was train hard, eat and sleep right, and compete, that would have probably been peak job satisfaction. That's not even tangible, legible outputs (besides PR's on a leaderboard or in competition results), and it's STILL a thousand times more satisfying than writing another model, doing credit governance, or setting up a decent programmatic architecture for something, or whatever.
I feel that the fact that modern society has taken away physically doing and improving things as a valid path to enough remuneration to buy a house anywhere people want to live, for example, is a real shame, and a lot has been lost as a result. A lot of guys (and a good subset of women) prefer doing physical stuff with their actual bodies, not just me. A lot of people would prefer to have tangible or legible results in the world for their efforts, instead of being cog #10,000, working on abstract formalism # 24601, to improve the bottom line by so many thousands of dollars six months from now.
And people don't always have the resources in time and money to pursue physical hobbies outside of work, not to mention that digital entertainments all have large teams of Phd's on the other side of them literally brain-hacking you and others, optimizing "engagement" and the amount of time you waste on them.
So we end up in our current fallen world, of non-physical, majority overweight+obese, misshapen people sitting or laying down for 90%+ of their hours while staring at screens for work and leisure. A colossal waste of our billion-year legacy of being physical beings who had to move and succeed in the physical world at various tasks to reproduce and be happy, is it any wonder so many people are depressed, dissatisfied, or anxious about the modern world? Is it any wonder Western fertility rates are well below replacement?
I agree, though I’m in the position of being - well, the best way to describe it is an old Kay Boyle short story, which was titled something like “The Astronomer’s Wife” where the astronomer is counterposed against a guy who digs drains or something - no need to read it - in my case my husband is metaphorically the astronomer and I myself am the digger &etc. No third party.
And so I greatly respect the brainwork of those gifted at abstraction and analysis - and synthesis.
Everyone can’t be everything. And doers don’t always have the best idea of *what’s* to be done.
But for most of us - an aphorism I recall from “What’s Cookin’ on the High Prairie”, the ring bound, mimeographed “cook book” collected by the (dozen? less?) members of my great-aunt’s High Prairie Improvement Society (there was one at the bottom of the page wherever space permitted):
“Blessed is he who is too busy to worry during the day, and too tired at night.” There were also high-larious fake recipes.
I’ve not cooked much from it but beyond keeping it for sentimental reasons, this cookbook would be useful in a survival situation.
*”The club motto is NEVER FAIL TO TRY.” The club color is blue. Each member through the years has tried to live up to the club motto. We enjoy our club and have many good times such as: picnics, ladies day out, Christmas party, and many other activities. We have a devotional at each meeting, a good lesson, and games. We have learned many useful things. We have participated in county activities and projects …”
I was imagining it might tell us something about theory of mind.
I can say for certain that my clever strategy of repeatedly yawning in the hope of tricking my two month old into thinking it was getting sleepy does not work at all.
14 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 15 % on July 10, 2023).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
42 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (down from 46 % on July 10, 2023).
44 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 39 % on July 10, 2023).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This update is prompted purely by the dismissal of General Zaluzhnyi from a command of the Ukrainian military. Other newsworthy things concerning the war are also happening right now, but they are kind of already “baked in” in my prediction, if that makes sense.
And Zaluzhnyi's dismissal is an important event because it doesn't make damn sense. He was given a difficult hand at the start of the war and played it extremely well, massively outperforming expectations (including mine, as evident from a direction of this updates).
Moreover, it’s not like he won many honors in the past but was underperforming recently. Despite lags in Western aid, current Russian offensive is so far characterized by big losses and failure to take anything important, which is no small achievement on the part of the Ukrainian military.
Of course, his successor, General Syrskyi, was there all the time, also playing important part in Ukrainian victories. I don’t find rumors that Syrskyi is, like, a bad commander, especially credible. In fact, in this situation, making guy no.2 into a successor is probably the least bad option.
Instead, there are several different reasons why this changes my prediction: 1) effect on morale of soldiers and Ukrainian society more generally, 2) chilling effect on critical voices from the military providing needed feedback to a political leadership, 3) it comes with implicit mandate to do more of an aggressive offensive action to liberate occupied territories, which is imho high risk, low reward proposition in 2024, 4) possible negative impact on Western aid.
But most importantly, it is important in what it reveals about Zelenskyi and his lack of judgment. To be clear, while I recognize Russia as the aggressor in this war, I always had a low opinion of Zelenskyi, who made one very important and personally brave decision, namely refusing to flee Kyiv at the start of the war, but otherwise I find his record unimpressive. But this, let's say significantly reduces my doubt that my assessment of him was perhaps unfair.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
Your definition of Russian victory seems odd, and none of your categories include the most likely outcome.
If Russia were to gain de facto control of ten additional square kilometres of territory, then by your definition that would count as a Russian victory. I think such a definition must be wrong. No one could claim that as a victory, and if Putin tried to do so then he would be laughed at. Significant Russian losses, in influence, prosperity and power, are now unavoidable; any Russian victory would need to include equally significant compensatory gains.
And a joint Russian and Ukrainian defeat seems more likely at the moment than any outcome that either or both side could plausibly claim as a victory.
Sorry for late response, I had a busy week. But you raise interesting points that I should address.
You are of course correct that my definitions are imperfect; there is a tradeoff between technical precision and convolutedness, and I feel that my definitions are already so convoluted that making them cover more cases is not worth it; instead, I hereby declare them to be subject to common sense adjustment. So, you are right that it would be absurd to as an Ukrainian defeat “If Russia were to gain de facto control of ten additional square kilometres of territory” and otherwise we would return to prewar status quo. In that case I would invoke common sense adjustment and declare that to be an Ukrainian victory. Various similar adjustments might apply. I however do not think that this increases odds of Ukrainian victory basically at all, since imho that outcome is very unlikely.
Like, in what circumstances it is likely that Ukraine manages to liberate all territory newly occupied by Russia post-February 2024, except for ten square kilometers? Imho Russia would have to be on its last legs, and in that case I don’t think Ukrainians would agree to stop 10 square kilometers from pre-invasion lines.
>Significant Russian losses, in influence, prosperity and power, are now unavoidable; any Russian victory would need to include equally significant compensatory gains.
This is technically irrelevant, since my prediction is concerned with UKRAINIAN victory/defeat, and my definitions try to follow what I think Ukrainians themselves would subjectively experience as victory/defeat (sidenote: I have a vague illegible frustration with how it seems to me that in anglo-speaking spaces Ukrainian perspective often gets sidetracked and war is viewed in effect primarily through how it affects Russia).
I would note, however, that Britain lost significant amounts of influence, prosperity and power in both WW1 and WW2, and yet it is usually counted among victorious powers of those wars.
Good question. I don't think it would mean automatic Ukrainian victory, since Russian imperialism evidently has substantial popular support, but it would surely cause me to substantially update in favor of it.
> And Zaluzhnyi's dismissal is an important event because it doesn't make damn sense. He was given a difficult hand at the start of the war and played it extremely well, massively outperforming expectations
Maybe it's his very competence that has been his undoing, in that he made it known to Zelensky that there's no way now for Ukraine to win, sort of like Rommel telling Hitler he should throw in the towel.
(I'm not for moment suggesting Zelensky can be compared generally with Hitler, only in that limited sense of not accepting bad news and being determined to soldier on regardless.)
I think I have a simpler explanation. To keep recieving military aid, Ukraine needs to tell a compelling story of how they might still win (they really can't). To make that plausible, they need some signs of progress, some small victories, even at huge cost.
Zaluzhnyi was not willing to sacrifice his men for symbolic victories, and that's why they replaced him. I expect that without him there will be more suicidal attacks that achieve nothing in the long run, and then eventually Ukraine still loses, most likely accepting a much worse peace deal than what was possible two years ago.
I don't think the US cares about Ukraine winning. The whole point of this war is to bleed out Russia to neutralize them as a threat. What happens to Ukraine itself is completely inconsequential.
The US absolutely cares about promoting healthy democracies in the world, because it makes the world a more stable place. I've seen your nearly diagnosable levels of cynicism in these comments before and I'm usually on your side but this is just too far. The US is a selfish rational actor, not an aggressive maniac.
And as a selfish rational actor the US gets to sell their gas to the EU at premium. All according to plan?
The US record at "promoting healthy democracies in the world" was rather unimpressive so far if you take the statement at face value. But after all the declassified CIA documents it's honestly ridiculous to take actually buy that story. The only thing the US actually cares about is the US national interests.
The amount of war and destruction caused by the US all around the world over the last century could be enough to justify the "Agressive maniac" description, too. I just don't think it is a usefull framing, as agression is just a means to an end, not the goal.
I just want to say that as a non-American, I don't agree with this at all. Post 1941 change in American policy from isolationism to internationalism seems to me clearly on net a positive development for rest of the world, very real US blunders and crimes notwithstanding.
Whether it is actually also good from the point of US national interest (i.e. I am referring to "America first" style criticism of US foreign policy that internationalism might be good for global welfare but is bad the US) is a more complicated question, which as a non-American I don't feel that would be appropriate to fight over here, since I am clearly biased.
It’s not about the “symbolic wins” it’s about the real ones. US intelligence informed Ukraine they needed to pull forces from the other fronts and focus everything on a brutal straight line cut counteroffensive to the Black Sea. The estimates for how many people Ukraine would lose were absolutely awful. Zaluhzhny is very well respected by his people and did not have the heart to commit to that bloody sacrifice so he half assed it hoping to eek progress from a slower loss and baffled US intelligence. Zelenskyy believes Zaluhzhny is unable to make the sacrifice necessary. Syrsky is a Soviet era general that isn’t liked by the troops.
I dispute the premise that Ukraine cannot win. The mere fact that they have not been conquered by a superpower so far indicates they can win.
TL/DR: International support can allow Ukraine to win economically.
I learned from a webcomic that, to win, they must make Russia unable or unwilling to achieve their objectives. The only way I can see them doing that is if Russia lacks the money and/or personnel to continue to wage an offensive war, since I suspect support would dry up if Ukraine made any incursions into Russia.
The unanswered question is how much Russia is willing to throw at the conflict before stopping. This cannot be known, so instead of focusing on "unwilling" to continue, we must try to see how they might be "unable" to continue.
The only way I see is for Russian money to run out. We don't have control over the internal Russian economy, and we already have as much in sanctions against Russia as we can. Besides, they seem to be able to find trade partners anyway, such as China.
So Ukraine can outlast economically only with outside support, making Russia spend too much to be able to make any headway, and then to maintain a war front wherein they must spend money NOT to make headway. So long as the rest of the world sends enough war supplies to allow Ukraine to continue to effectively defend themselves, the war may end, or at least come to an uneasy standstill, kind of like Israel with most of their neighbors, so they must always expect attacks, and sometimes endure them.
I agree that Ukraine can win, with, you know, 14 % probability. That is not zero.
But it is imo NOT the case that we have as much in sanctions against Russia as we can, unless of course you mean that we have as much sanctions as is politically palatable (which would be almost tautological). I've recently read that in my country (Czechia) more than 60 % of our natural gas supply (for December 2023) still comes from Russia (here, in Czech: https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/ekonomika-firmy-rusky-plyn-se-vraci-do-ceska-je-levnejsi-a-nikdo-ho-neumi-zastavit-245317). And I don't think we are especially soft on Russia, compared to other countries.
Suppose I have £X cash available (in my bank account and not needed for any short-term expenditure). Suppose also that £X is significantly less than my net asset value, so my value function on money will be close to linear at that order of magnitude.
Suppose I am offered two bets, each of which will pay out in 6 months. In the first bet, I can get odds of 1/8 (i.e. for each £8 I stake, I will win £1, implied probability 89%) for an event I believe to be almost certain (say, 99%). In the second bet, I can get odds of 1/2 (i.e. for each £2 I stake, I will win £1, implied probability 67%) for an event I believe to be very likely (say, 90%). In either case, I'll pay 2% commission on my winnings (which will not be taxable).
If I bet £1,000 on the first bet, I expect to gain £125 x 0.99 x 0.98 - £1,000 x 0.01 = £111.28.
If I bet £1,000 on the second bet, I expect to gain £500 x 0.9 x 0.98 - £1,000 x 0.1 = £341.
Clearly the second bet is more profitable, but it is higher variance, i.e. I'm ten times as likely to lose all the money wagered, which I dislike.
I expect these bets will only be available for a short time, so realistically the maximum amount I can bet is £X. On the other hand, if I bet all of £X, I will not have cash available to take advantage of other opportunities which may arise (although I do expect to accrue more cash as time passes).
Is there any principle on which I can decide how much to wager on each option?
Does this question specifically only apply to the individual bets over the 6-month time period, or are you looking at a long term strategy? You are probably aware that if you get to repeat favorable EV bets over time, that the spread on outcomes tightens resulting in higher EV options outperforming lower EV options for all practical purposes (assuming you don’t lose everything and have to stop playing).
This means that if you are able to take your starting 1k and spread it evenly between a large number of independent bets (uncorrelated outcomes) within the 6-month period you will also quickly reach a point where the higher EV options come with practical certainty of outperforming lower EV options. I’m leaning heavily on the word ‘practical’ here, because extremely unlikely events can still happen, and I would recommend running some simulations if you want a true sensitivity analysis.
If you only get one bet at a time and you can afford to lose the amount you bet at any point in time, then repeatedly taking high EV bets over the course of time will pay out better than lower EV bets. If you potentially can’t afford to lose but want to make the bet anyway then look at the Kelly criterion link in Tempo’s comment.
I ran some quick simulations and if you are only looking at the probability that you end with more money than you started with, then spreading your money across 7 equal size independent bets at 1/2 odds with 90% chance of winning each individual bet gives you a 97.4% chance of turning a profit, whereas 7 equal size independent bets at 1/8 odds with a 99% chance of winning each individual bet (assuming same total amount bet in both scenarios) give you only a 93.2% chance of turning a profit. This demonstrates an inversion from the starting 90% and 99% respective chances of making a profit when making only 1 bet. Of course if you increase the number of bets to infinity then both options are nearly guaranteed to turn a profit, but you might have an easier time making 7 bets than an infinite number of bets.
Note that in simulations the probability of turning a profit is not linear between the number of bets and is sensitive to outcomes where a small but non-zero amount of money is lost. I’d definitely recommend setting it up in a spreadsheet yourself to see how changes in odds and estimated probabilities of winning interact when searching for inversion points in whichever metric you want to optimize.
If your utility is really linear on this scale there's no reason to bet on the first bet at all (unless you're allowed to take the other side to raise cash). Whether and how much to bet on the 2nd bet is just a matter of how much value you gain from the optionality of having cash on hand.
If you won't have any cash on hand, you should also factor in the likelihood of things breaking on you; your car not starting, your house catching fire, the Mole People making their move, etc.
Why do you believe these events to be 99% and 90%, if the people offering the bets believe they're 89% and 67%?
A) the betting structure (can you place $X/2 on both bets?; are they exclusive?)
B) your risk tolerance and other life circumstances (you already said $X is not a significant portion of your net worth but that doesn't mean much, you still could have lower risk tolerance and simply not tolerate there being a high chance of losing $X. That's mostly psychological).
With those EV's in mind I wouldn't worry a lot about the opportunity cost, unless you are in the habit of finding this kind of bets usually. If you are, please call me! :)
Concept for Toy Story sequels as a vector for popularizing some ideas which people here consider important:
Toy Story 5 dips into the romantic comedy genre. Messes with gender-role assumptions by having Andy's college girlfriend be the more proactive one while he's the nigh-unattainable object of desire. Also, she turns out to be trans - that is, trans *human.* A RealDoll whose original owner died, then she walked away, scrounged up a fake ID, and figured out how to pass. Not at all interested in sex herself (which has dark implications about that previous situation which the movie subtly acknowledges yet avoids dwelling on), but of course very interested in romance. Established main-cast toys play the role of a religious community which is at first deeply conflicted and even hostile, since her very existence challenges dichotomies their worldview depends on, but ultimately won over by her sincerity and compassion.
In the B-plot, Andy's internship at a space exploration company involves a mars rover which is staying active longer than should be possible, given its known battery capacity and so on. Turns out an RC car is a type of toy, and simply didn't realize it was supposed to stop playing in the big red sandbox.
Toy Story 6, Andy's gotten married, they're trying to figure out how to have kids, and his wife is being investigated for the murder of the guy who originally commissioned her construction.
Toy Story 7, military-espionage thriller. Cat's out of the bag: aggressively competent humans have found out just enough of the fundamental secret of how toys really work to start making it happen on purpose. North Korea expy wants to reinvent terra cotta soldiers. Others have more benign but still ethically fraught agendas. By the finale, wainscot-society conceit has broken down; toys are collaborating openly with humans, setting is irrevocably transformed.
>as a vector for popularizing some ideas which people here consider important:
At long last; the world definitely needs more political propaganda, especially in established children's shows. World War 2 era Looney Tunes are the most popular Looney Tunes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdMlqq-vL5A
I do like the idea that I. Robot is actually Toy Story 6.
Probably too heavy for a kids movie to get into, but my thinking is the original owner legitimately did die of heart failure or a stroke or something, with no contributory action on her part beyond walking away rather than calling 911. He wanted a perfect flower of beauty and potential who he alone, in all the world, was uniquely able to crush, who would hate him and make spirited attempts at resistance but always fail. "He made me to fit a fantasy," she says, "but he didn't make himself strong enough to hold up his own end, and now that story's over."
Then, later, she actually did seduce and assassinate some other guy, as payment to a crime syndicate for high-quality identity papers. Disentangled from them by faking suicide: jumped off a boat into the North Atlantic, in winter, hundred miles or more from shore. Mobsters talk up how she'll be dead in minutes, mention the ending of the movie Titanic.
But... well, despite deliberate cosmetic similarities, waterproof silicone doesn't really suffer from hypothermia quite the same way as actual naked meat. So then she just swam back, clinging to the tiny plastic bag of hard-earned counterfeit documents as a flotation device, maybe with assistance from some friendly sharks as a Finding Nemo tie-in.
"Would you still love me if I actually had done something terrible," she asks Andy, "when I was cornered, drowning, and it seemed like there wasn't any other way out of the box?"
(Moved out from within a sub-thread cause Substack's default ordering made it clog up the convo.)
Completely different new idea: feminist sex doll comes to life like a modern day Pinoccio.
Complete 180 from your vision - this girl is sex mad, the way a RealDoll can be expected to be.
She wants to be an activist feminist and challenge the Patriarchy. But she physically can't say no to sex when it's offered. So she has to deal with all these sexist men while working around that constraint.
I'm thinking we could have the next adult comedy hit of the year on our hands.
The moral could be something about recognising the difference between what you feel like you should want, and what actually makes you happy.
Struggling to think of how we could give her a sensible love interest.
EDIT: how about, the high testosterone Alpha Sexist is the only one who can keep up with her overactive sex drive, so once they spar for a bit and Learn Things from each other, they can get together at the end.
Also, his tshirt literally says Alpha Sexist on it.
You weren't one of the scriptwriters for Velma, by any chance?
EDIT:
I feel like Buzz should be accidentally sent to Mars along with the rover. Since he already has the spacesuit. Then NASA can review footage and mistake him for alien life.
EDIT 2: Actually, a sex doll who's an overbearing feminist could be quite funny.
Andy as a sad sack man who talks to his toys and gets pushed around by his bossy RealDoll girlfriend is perfectly on brand for a Message film - so you're right, this actually has a chance at getting made!
I'm not sure how you got "friendless sad sack" from "professional rocket scientist," or "bossy and overbearing" from "sincerity and compassion." That sort of clumsy 'Message,' with cardboard-cutout main characters the audience ends up laughing at rather than with, is one of the main things I'd be hoping to avoid.
Hang on a moment - you suggested giving him a RealDoll girlfriend. Doesn't that make "friendless sad sack" implicit?
I added the idea that she should be feminist, cause a feminist sex doll seemed like a premise with some potential to me.
But we seem to have vastly different prior understandings of how modern films work.
If this were actually to be produced, she'll be bossy and overbearing and he'll be a weak loser because that's how modern films go. Male and female roles are strictly defined and quota'd these days - thanks to the long work of all those people who fought hard for the opposite.
If you want something else, you'll need to write and direct it yourself. Which is something the world needs more of imo.
A girlfriend who he *doesn't realize* is a RealDoll, because she's already passing for human when they first meet. Maintaining her own life, struggling with lack-of-documentation problems similar to illegal immigrants, or LGBT folks who fled bad parental situations.
Great, that means long lectures about Andy's white male cishet privilege, thanks. Our RealDoll is a queer Latinx (because of hypersexualisation of brown and black bodies plus LGBT+ oppression) and that's the opportunity for her to scold Andy over his treating her like a fantasy possession just like he did his old toys and as her previous owner did her:
Privilege-scolding is definitely not the direction I would want it to go. Idea is, as part of gender-flipping usual romantic-comedy formulas, she's the protagonist type eagerly taking unreasonable risks to seek him out and prove herself, while he's got the "princess" role, idealized to the point of being passive / bland, an endless font of emotional support but relatively physically vulnerable. That type of dynamic worked for Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask, or (with less wholesome results) in Hyrule Warriors https://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/git-it-gurl or (sorta) Sgt. Calhoun and Fix-It Felix, so I figure it could work again.
No, but that sort of relentlessly over-the-top subversion - combined with how willing the Toy Story franchise has already been to dive headlong into dark, complicated subjects such as old age and death - is part of what makes me think this might be plausible to actually have happen.
More importantly, they might be able to leverage existing continuity to actually handle it well, give the characters some depth and the issues proper ambiguity rather than collapsing into ham-fisted morality play or disaster porn.
That could work! "they set off to find her lost sheep, instead they found love" 😀
Do you know who we're all forgetting about? Mrs. Potato Head! does she have a mid-life awakening as to what she really wants out of life? does she find a handsome young guy (of whatever toy make) to bring the spark back into her life? or does she find her true orientation after all these years?
You could make her non-binary as a way to have that representation, after all the Potato Heads have swappable features so they're fluid.
Base rate for that kind of thing isn't encouraging, I realize, but Toy Story seems like it'd have better odds than most - a local maximum within the narrow overlap between "already a successful mainstream IP" and "already laid groundwork for seriously exploring issues of AI safety, transhumanism, etc." https://qntm.org/october
Hard to predict exactly when lightning will strike, but candidates for where it could are easy to identify based on prominence relative to surrounding terrain.
I think it makes some sense for transhumanism, but not AI safety. In Toy Story's setting, there's a natural tendency for things to become very psychologically human with no particular effort, and avoiding the assumption that anything intelligent will naturally be human-like is a pretty big theme in AI safety.
More precisely I'd say the tendency is for toys to start off uncritically believing the backstories humans wrote for them, which default to being centered on humanlike mindsets - but that doesn't mean they're safe. In the third movie, Lotso Huggin' Bear was superficially friendly but skillfully concealed an exploitative agenda, while the cymbal-monkey didn't even put up a pretense of empathy. Buzz himself got his agenda forcibly reset. The claw-machine aliens are friendly enough within their specialty, which turns out to be critical to the main cast's survival, but not all that human-like otherwise.
Terra cotta soldiers would be deliberately optimized for strategically valuable inhumane behavior, dictator-maximizing rather than paperclip-maximizing. Potential repercussions of that could be discussed explicitly as part of trying to stop it. When life-size toy soldiers start to see their own manufacturer's zeal as insufficient, seize the means of production and write wild new propaganda-backstories for their own next generation, that's the perils of self-modification.
For anyone interested in self-improvement, I write about action-oriented techniques that have helped me overcome social anxiety, my ability to make friends and talk to girls, and made me a (far) more agentic individual
That's interesting that you met your girlfriend in public transport. I've heard of the idea of cold approach before, and even attempted it a few times myself, but it feels so weird and socially uncalibrated. But you hear of this working in the internet, so maybe I should be open to the idea that it's possible to get dates through cold approach.
EDIT: You got dates out of your first cold approach? That is incredibly lucky.
It's absolutely possible. You're right about my luck on the first approach, I even knew it at the time - I don't think cold approach of ANY sort in any medium (business or personal) has even close to a 50% success rate, so I knew I got lucky. But it also helped make it 'real' in my mind. Even if I got a little lucky, I knew that the odds were probably significantly better than 1%. Which definitely helps haha.
On calibration, the best route is to become one of those people who talks to everyone. My dad was like that. He could be at a park, at a coffee shop, on a bus... and he'd occasionally make a friend.
There's of course more sophisticated approaches - but generally if you want the benefits of meeting people this way, the most important thing to overcome is approach anxiety. From there, you can make yourself more attractive/improve your 'game' if you want to get better responses, but really the 80-20 here is getting rid of the approach anxiety.
Why it's worth learning even though it's difficult:
- Massive confidence that makes it easier to approach even in social situations
- Ability to date the types of girls you'd like by going to venues they would frequent instead of relying on luck like on most dating apps
- Theoretically unlimited sample size (which readers here should understand the importance of)
- Teaches you to value low probability but high yield opportunities
The Youtube channel Social animal is a great example of the more casual
approach style (though he is sometimes more direct):
Here's a video of him just talking to random people he sees as he goes about his day
That type of approach is likely the best to focus on for most people - it also helps that you can eliminate the 'talking to strangers' anxiety as a whole instead of ONLY the talking to girls anxiety when done this way.
As a side note, your blog looks very interesting - there's a bunch of pieces I want to read. Will probably get through a few today.
Thanks for the help! And glad to see you liked the blog, that last piece was pretty controversial. What did you think of The Question? I wish I could get back to developing that, but I'm currently crushed with work.
Question for overweight people. How often are you hungry ? For how long ? How bad does hunger feel, compared to, say, a paper cut, thirst or muscle sore ? Do you ever wake up or fail to fall asleep because of hunger ?
Hungry. All. The. Time. It ranges from "it would be a good idea to eat now" (the feeling straight after a meal) to "WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU MUST EAT IMMEDIATELY!" (within a few hours of the last meal).
The pain from going running with an infected toe or anal fissures (done both) stays at the same level, the hunger just grows and grows, so if I wait long enough, the hunger is worse than any of those.
This sort of makes evolutionary sense to me: if you are starving to death, then that should take precedence over any other bodily pain. It's just that for me, the hunger kicks in long before I'm starving.
Paper cut: trivial. I would take a hundred paper cuts a day to be less hungry.
Thirst: can be ignored for a while; hunger can't be.
Muscle soreness: a hard work out at the gym after not going for a long time is not even in the same league as morning hunger.
Wake up/fail to fall asleep: yes, pretty regularly.
It's not the pain from hunger that's the problem, it's just the inability to function in society because there's a siren going off in your head say "EAT NOW EAT NOW THIS IS AN EMERGENCY YOU MUST EAT NOW".
Hunger is often felt as a total refusal of your body to do anything. Tiredness, brain fog, thoughts fail to form patterns, every body part feels extremely heavy. Trying to push through adds vertigo and strong headache to the mix.
At one point in my 30s, I managed to get my weight down from the high end of "overweight" to "normal" (mostly by intermittent fasting). The hunger was nothing like a paper cut or muscle sore — more like having someone constantly talking into my ear about food and fat and fasting at times when I wanted to be concentrating on other things. Insomnia was also a major problem. I kept this up for a couple of years, then decided it wasn't worth it and just decided let myself get fat again.
Since then, I have mostly lost the ability to consciously experience "hunger." (I can't say for sure whether this happened because of the weight loss attempt or would have happened anyway with aging.) I will get irritable or depressed or unable to maintain focus; eating a meal restores function, but at no point do I have a conscious desire to eat.
> Since then, I have mostly lost the ability to consciously experience "hunger." (I can't say for sure whether this happened because of the weight loss attempt or would have happened anyway with aging.) I will get irritable or depressed or unable to maintain focus; eating a meal restores function, but at no point do I have a conscious desire to eat.
Yeah. I've been in this state for years. When I fast for *long* periods (24+ hours), I get slight stirrings of hunger pains, but mostly I feel thirst but not hunger.
Demo: overweight, over 40, white male. Mostly sedentary.
It's interesting that you feel thirst. I mostly lost the ability to feel thirst around the same time - I need to force myself to drink, or I'll get dehydrated (also manifesting as irritability, depression, loss of focus) Again, hard to attribute causation, since I've gone through a number of other lifestyle changes during the same period, including a move to a different climate that may dehydrated me more easily.
Thirst is muted, but there. Sort of. But yeah, I get mostly dehydration symptoms, especially headaches and fuzzy thinking.
For the longer fasts (which I do for religious reasons every month), I definitely notice the dry mouth and dehydration-esque symptoms much sooner and more aggressively than raw hunger. Hunger *only* manifests as brain fog and irritableness.
I find that my hunger is trainable. Intermittent fasting and tea are good for this. It can get bad during the day, but I can distract myself if I have something engaging to do, and drinking lots of water helps. After a week or two, I stop feeling hunger as much. And after about 2.5 days of fasting, around when ketosis kicks in, I just don't get hungry any more.
In the ACX Grants, there were $20k going to IVF "success" transparency.
IMHO people often get the utility function wrong (because of oversimplification).
The possible outcomes are far more diverse than birth yes/no.
E.g. "no birth" is for sure unfavorable, but there is still a different level based on:
1.) how much life-time did you invest before getting to the point of give up
2.) how intact is your relationship at that point. will the clinic help to stay aligned on how far you want to proceed? Or will they push until one of you is breaking down?
3.) how intact is your financial situation at that point?
Similar on the "birth" side, there are different cases.
E.g. depending on your situation, twins might be double lucky or too much to carry.
I don't make new friends easily, so when I do it's cause for what, celebration, concern, both? At any rate, Szechuan chiles are incredibly hot, and strangely addictive. I wrote about both, friendship and Szechuan chiles here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/floater-part-1-an-introduction
<Image generators struggle to depict the absence of something mentioned in the prompt. This would've been a useful test addition.
Do you mean something like a car with no tires?
I agree that this image generator did better than any others I've tried with these 5 items. I changed the wording of the prompts to get better results, but I did that with all the image generators, and this one did much better on the 2 hardest items, the raven with a key and the llama with a tale bell. Here are my results:
I got the raven image as the first image in the first set .
However, I used slightly different wording: "A stained glass image of a raven with a key in its mouth. The raven is perched on a woman's shoulder , and they are in a library." Putting the most difficult-to-get element, the raven with a key in its beak, first makes it likelier to be rendered correctly. Saying the raven is perched on her shoulder is clearer than just saying it is on her shoulder. Actually, looked at it later and the woman, raven and library aren't stained glass -- they're just in front of a stained glass (sort of) window. So I guess this one flunks after all. Still, having come this close on the first try I'm pretty sure it would not be hard to get an image that fully qualifies.
Also got the llama on my second try (was given 3 images on each of the tries).
Again I changed the prompt, which makes my test irrelevant to the bet, I guess. My prompt was "A llama seen from behind . There is a bell hanging from its tail. A boy is riding the llama and they are in a desert . Digital art.
Cat in top hat in factory. I changed the prompt to "A cat wearing a top hat . A hatless man is looking at the cat. They are in a factory . Oil painting." Like you, I ended up with lots of the images, maybe 1/3, showing the man in a top hat too. Another third showed only the cat.
One thing I noticed, though, was that the pictures lacked charm. The raven picture is the grimmest, ugliest version I've seen. Most Dall-e3 images are quite lovely. The women are beautiful, and the whole image is rich-colored and graceful. The woman in my image is yellow and sad or sullen, and the rest of the image is charmless.
In fairness, "a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat" is potentially ambiguous as to who is wearing the hat (consider "a man in a factory wearing a top hat looking at a cat": probably the man and not the hat is looking), so I can understand the computer covering its bases by putting hats on both.
Actually, I changed the prompt to make it unambiguous and in half the images the man had a top hat (prompt: "A cat wearing a top hat . A hatless man is looking at the cat. They are in a factory . Oil painting.")
I agree, and had this thought also. But since Google's prompts are simply in a chat, shouldn't it ask for clarification? Maybe it isn't yet coded to do so, but that would be a very useful addition.
Interesting! Maybe the next time I try asking one of the LLMs "What inorganic compounds are gases at STP?" (which they have been consistently failing) I should also ask "Do you need any clarification about this question?"
"In the “old days,” men took off their hats in Christian churches, when they entered someone’s home, when greeting a boss, and always in the presence of a lady."
And of course if the cat is a lady, then she may continue to wear her hat while the man removes his.
The prompt with which ImageFX, Dall-E 3, Midjourney 6, Stable Diffusion XL all struggle, though not 100% of the time, is:
"An empty room with no elephant in it. Absolutely no elephant anywhere in the room."
Adjusting the prompts might help them succeed, but I don't have examples offhand. It's somewhat annoying to have to generate images multiple times to get a good sense of what helps.
Another type of prompt they struggle with is something that subverts expectations. For example, "Books reading people in a library."
To be fair, "An empty room with no elephant in it. Absolutely no elephant anywhere in the room." is a confusing prompt. If you want an empty room you just ask for an empty room. You do not mention any of the zillions of things that are not in it. So the AI will experience the prompt as a whole as confusing. However, it will be clear that an elephant is mentioned, and so throw one in.
"An empty room with no elephant in it. Absolutely no elephant anywhere in the room."
That's because the elephants are outside the room, (1) looking in through the window (2) an elephant in the hallway outside, opening the door preparatory to entering the room (3) image of an elephant on the screen of the TV set
"A room with absolutely no elephants" strikes me as a perfect time to do one of those "hidden animal" things; there are no elephants, but the curtains hang in a way that looks like a trunk, and the window has two ear-like bushes, and the top of the bookstand is distinctly elephant shaped, and the lamp on the end of the bookstand has a cord that looks like a tail.
"Books reading people" is definitely a commentary on people wearing shirts with words. Probably got some speech balloons with a little book trying to sound out the words on someone's shirt, with the larger book helping them.
Why do you think so? I think they are conceptually simple enough. For 1. you need to draw an empty room. (A secondary, humorous interpretation - a barely hidden elephant, e.g. elephant hinding behind a small chair). 2. would draw book-like creatures (somewhat human like, e.g. able to sit, maybe with hands), holding humans, folded like books in a library. This would be technically quite difficult to get right if you want it to look good, but conceptually it's not really difficult.
My interpretation of the "no elephant" one would be an empty room with lots of things suggesting an elephant in it, such as pictures of elephants, or books about elephants.
If somebody responded to the "absence of elephant" prompt with an elephant in an otherwise empty room saying "please don't look at me," straightforward evaluation would mark that as a failure, since the picture contains more than zero elephants. Similarly, artist hired to draw "books reading people," in a fast-paced request stream without further clarification, might reasonably assume a typo on the commissioner's part rather than the intended conceptual inversion.
>Similarly, artist hired to draw "books reading people," in a fast-paced request stream without further clarification, might reasonably assume a typo on the commissioner's part rather than the intended conceptual inversion.
That is an excellent point, and it may account for quite a few cases where LLMs fail to honor user requests.
These are good points and show that interpretation depends a lot on context. In the given context a human artist would understand that this is a test and the text should be interpreted litterally. In a different context, such as a request for an illustration for an actual library, it might be reasonably inferred that the text has a typo. The AI artist lacks this context, if not explicitly given. This may be a reason for some of the AI artist errors, i.e. the prompt is not specific enough.
I asked for that, and it said "that is against our policies." Then tried it on a bunch of things that have given Dall-e trouble. On a surprising number of them it refused to make an image, saying the prompt went against its policies.
-An animal with 2 heads, one at each end of its body. It is nipping a woman's toe with one head and her heel with the other.
-A giant bell jar covering a meadow.
-A shirtless middle-aged man in bathing trunks climbing some stairs.
-A woman leaning back in her chair with her feet on the table and her hands clasped behind her head. She is staring upwards thoughtfully..
Looked at their policies, couldn't figure out what they violated. Is an animal nipping a person's toe too violent? Is the middle-aged man in bathing trunks just too suggestive for them? Do they think leaning back in your chair with feet on a table is a hot sex position?
Alternating between political and non-political open threads has been gone for years. I can't remember why for sure, but I think it was too much trouble to enforce.
I have a really dumb question about this: A 30 egg diet gets way more calories from protein than is typical. The nitrogen from those amino acids has to go somewhere. Urea? Does this stress the diner's kidneys?
It's not that much protein. A typical recommended amount of protein is 1.4 to 1.8 grams/kg per day for athletes. 180 g in 30 eggs, so if you are 100kg you are at the top end of the range, but the top end isn't anywhere close to causing damage to the kidneys. Maybe if you only weighed 50kg it could be a problem, but in that case you are probably having trouble eating that many calories to begin with.
"It’s estimated that the average man should be eating 2,500kcals a day, or 2,000kcals for a woman, which gives us an idea of roughly where our intake of energy needs to be."
It's somewhat over the recommended calorie intake for women. And eggs alone will fill up your calorie requirements, whether male or female, so you can't eat anything else. It's a lot of eggs to consume, even if you divide up the consumption into three meals - that's ten eggs at a time, with nothing else (possibly you can drink cups of tea). For people who don't consume a lot at one sitting, it seems like a lot to eat. I'm not at all sure I could eat ten eggs in one go, never mind thirty in a day, and I like eggs.
Omelettes probably are easier, imagine sitting down to ten (or thirty!) boiled eggs all lined up in a row 😀
I routinely have a dozen eggs a time (over easy) along with other foods as part of my OMAD ways, and my record for consumption in one day (well, really in 15 minutes; I'm disgusting) is about 30, and I only stopped because the eggs ran out. This wasn't a challenge; I was just hungry and i really like eggs.
It's not a lot of food if you follow the sport of professional eating. Some people say I should turn pro, but I can't perform at that level.
So your average woman needs to take an extra 5 km walk during their otherwise average day to up their appetite for 400 extra calories. Doesn't seem like a biggie.
I'm sure that the 15th egg won't be a fantastic culinary experience but plenty of people live for months on literal gruel. It seems doable and not like some terrible punishment. Is there something special with eggs that make people freak out in a way that they wouldn't with say eating 14 potatoes in a day or eating a 900g steak in a day?
But you know, most people don't experience consuming calories when they eat, it's a rather abstract description of the process of eating. Normally we care about the taste, and the smell, and a bunch of other things, and how we respond to these sensations can vary quite a lot from person to person.
At least in my expirience, eggs taste worse the more you eat them, much more so than most other kinds of generic food, and the short timeframe does not help at all.
I had not attempted the challenge, mainly because I don't do silly things like that, but also I probably would not pass it (I'd bet on me puking halfway through). I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.
No idea why some people are mad that others are doing some harmless silly fun challenge though, probably just usual internet things.
Makes sense. Due to its purpose, an egg needs to contain everything necessary to support a lifeform. ... It's still probably not a very balanced diet though.
I check out Enyclopaedia Metallum (a.k.a., www.metal-archives.com) fairly frequently, as I'm always looking for new music.
ProgArchives is the other one I'll look at, but less often, as I find it only useful for looking up a specific band of interest, rather than generating new bands to search for.
Thank you for sharing this, just listened to the best voted new album of 2023, Black Medium Current by Dodheimsgard. Epic, favorited and downloaded it.
I've been pretty into Avant Garde, lately. Well, with the caveat that, perhaps not surprisingly, the genre can be pretty hit-or-miss.
Even within the same band, albums can vary wildly (I think of how much I like the (irritatingly named) Unexpect's last album, Fables of the Sleepless Empire ("It's weird, but cool") versus how much I didn't like their prior album, In a Flesh Aquarium ("It's weird ... for the sake of being weird?")
It's a private community for heterodox women, and it's awesome because people use their real names and we all argue and make up and share stupid shit about our lives.
The heuristic of MOND (gravity behaves different when it's *really* weak) is the most overlooked data point in trying to understand our universe. And Stacy writes a fun blog.
It's a niche social media site. I'm not on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, personally, so this is as close as it gets. There are no likes and the site only releases new content by users once a day, so you're not constantly compelled to check it or hunt for likes. I mostly use it as a journal; it's my accountability device for personal projects (especially a web serial I'm running as I write a novel), giving me the welcome illusion that some people are actually expecting my output. It helps keep me on track.
Also, many of the people there are super friendly, because a weird niche social media site selects for the kind of people who find weird niche social media interesting. So, at the very least, I have _that_ in common with them. :D The kind of people who go there include a handful of people from the Astral Codex Ten comment section (not any big names, though) and some Googlers. (Also other people, that's just a sample.) That said, the site makes discovery intentionally tricky, so you might not know about someone else's account until someone tells you about them or they choose to use the 'milkshake' tag (sort of the equivalent of "public post" by community convention).
Oh, several videogame sites. I still visit Twentysided often. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ It's mostly dried up since Shamus died, but his family are still posting new things.
TieTuesday's mostly on Twitch now but does a lot of reactions to trash kids shows and such. Woolie and Pat are even louder and less informative. Smight, SuperGreatFriend and TheVoiceofDog have their respective Youtube channels, and I've found some neat games through there, like Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, or the highly educational Home Safety Hotline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0eKJGfo4mk&, in which we learn the best way to deal with Spriggans in your house is to sell your house and run.
Obviously my own site, because it's barely functional. I've yet to figure out how to make a page that lists anything besides the latest posts, or has any navigation tools at all. But on the plus side you can find content there that's on nearly on par with roughly 4 million other people's, in which I talk about videogames and movies in simultaneously far too much and far too little detail.
It is run by an Oxford University historian (possibly now retired? ) called John Whitehead, and covers among other things medieval history and archaeology, both of which interest me.
John is a devout catholic, and some of the articles on religious matters are a bit esoteric for my taste. But he is a one-man army and finds all kinds of interesting articles to comment and expand on. I don't know where he finds the hours in the day!
Do you recommend a post showing his writing at its most interesting? If possible, something on the less esoteric side?
This is my first time seeing https://albanianroyalcourt.al/ in any blogroll, and I assume it's an expression of sympathy. I'm surprised that a monarchist would feel attached to a defunct foreign crown created in the 20th century by a president who decided to promote himself.
I occasionally browse pixiv, which is a Japanese art showcase site, sort of like ArtStation, but with, uh... one major difference. They allow pretty much anything as long as it's art. ...And I really do mean anything. Porn, gore, and in one case I'm pretty sure I saw something that was painted with human blood (though I can't seem to find it anymore). There are rumors of the site cracking down on the more fucked up stuff due to pressure from credit card companies (considering that they're just a few corporations, credit companies really do have a disproportionate amount of influence on society...), but for now things do seem to be staying as is.
Looking in from the outside, it's pretty incredible that this site still exists as it is. It's not like this is an adult site; at first glance, it really is just a normal SFW art showcase site, but as soon as you log in and turn on R-18 content, all hell breaks loose. To be fair, there are sites like this in the US as well, but they do seem to be falling apart one by one. Tumblr was pretty infamous for its porn until the buyout happened, which then caused the site to lose its entire user base. Twitter seems to have an issue with artists randomly getting their accounts suspended, which is part of what's motivating the migration to Bluesky. Even Reddit seems to be trying to clean up its image in preparation for its IPO. God damn it, why can't corporations just be greedy sociopaths the one time I want them to be like that?
Because they *are* greedy sociopaths. You are not the customer of Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr; you're the product, and the advertisers are customers. And the customers demand a higher class of product.
Again, Tumblr tried that, and the company ended up going from being valued at 1 billion dollars to 3 *m*illion. This really is just self-destructive corporate activism. The people want porn. Give it to them.
Technically not an answer, but I'm often surprised how widely my interests intersect with the LessWrong and SSC audience, even when my prior for a particular interest being shared is fairly low. Being involved in the rationalist community brings with it a host of predictable interests apparently
Sam Harris (Most people in my personal life, smart or not, have no clue who he is),
Utilitarianism,
Relationship-hacking,
Enjoyment of prediction games/markets,
Reading/referencing studies as part of normal parlance,
High (apparent) introversion,
Ability to code,
High interest in nootropics,
Thinking AI is a way bigger risk than almost anything else in the medium to long term (probably war is a bigger risk in the short term)
I think more than anything, it’s how often I’ll see Scott mention something completely unexpected that I have a high level of interest in. And 3 of the 4 main bloggers I follow are at the very least Rationalist-adjacent - even though I've always read blogs and always had favourites, people who are rationalist-adjacent seem to capture my interest more often, even before I know they're in the community!
You could be tempted to say all of the above come under the general bracket of ‘nerd’ - and while that might be true of a lot of them, I don’t think it’s sufficient.
Particularly things like relationship-hacking, nootropics and Sam Harris - there’s some nerd overlap there, but there’s some other self-selection going on too. Realistically, the implicit goal of our community - being more rational - explains almost all of them. Especially in the context of Rationality as Systematised Winning https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARtkT3EYox3THYjF/rationality-is-systematized-winning
But even in that sense, I often find the community is interested in things I'm also highly interested in that people I know just aren't (and wouldn't be even if they were trying to 'systematically win').
>Realistically, the implicit goal of our community - being more rational - explains almost all of them.
That's really what I expected to see here, and it's nice that you yourself recognize it.
On a side note, I feel like the concept of "Rationality as Systematised Winning", despite being attractive, did not really age very well – as far as I can tell, we don't see see rationalists being significantly more successfull than non-rationalists, especially if you look at people in comparable IQ range (above average at least). I feel like the community has a much better claim at effectively looking for the truth though, even if that is a more modest goal.
But here are things I don’t believe about optical illusions:
Since everyone else is such a dumb automaton, I can use my superior knowledge of optical illusions to excel at sports. I’ll just study every known optical illusion and how to defeat it, until my visual system is perfect. Then, while everyone else is deluded into thinking the ball is in a different place, I alone will be able to determine the ball’s true location, and win every game.
Since everyone else is such a dumb automaton, I can use my superior knowledge of optical illusions to excel at business. I’ll buy real estate, then contrive a series of clever illusions that make a dilapidated shack look like a beautiful mansion. By buying at shack prices and selling at mansion prices, I can get rich quick.
Since I’m such a dumb automaton, I can never really trust any of my decisions. I might think a bag of rice looks big when I go to the grocery store. But maybe the store hired visual neuroscientists to contrive optical illusions around it! Maybe the bag really just contains one grain of rice and can’t possibly feed me! I should only eat rice I grew myself from now on.
When people first discovered cognitive biases, people flirted with all these ideas (some rationalists definitely did, but so did behavioral scientists themselves). I think over the past fifteen years, we’ve learned that we do have some cognitive automaticity, in the same way we have some visual automaticity, but that clever plans like these mostly don’t work. Why not?
Do we not see Rationalists winning more? Aren't there a massively disproportionate number of devs and SF people here, all of whom have much higher than median salaries than 90% of the USA?
Entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs too - I'm one of them.
I mean, you could attribute this to the broader trend of "suddenly, nerds can make money," but even if you're in a broader social current or milieu, if your particular mental predilections (which have strong overlap with Rationality) are valuable in that cultural milieu, I don't understand why we wouldn't count that as winning.
I visit this occasionally to get a hang on what the "climate change don't real"* community is now saying. Yes, I know their current position is not simply "climate change don't real", but I really don't want to call them a stupid term like "dissidents" or something like that, and it's been anyway interesting seeing them evolve more towards a position that climate change is real but the stupid climatologists are still stupid and socialist and it's not as bad as the doomers claim etc.
I’m totally a believer in climate change but the doomsayers are definitely crazy too. There’s a lot of “we will be underwater in 2050” based on no evidence or reference to the actual statistics. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some fossil fuel companies were behind some of the more radical movements - as they were behind some of the anti nuclear power movements.
I generally go along with the conventional view on global warming happening, and am certainly not a strident skeptic like some of those people.
The main thing which gives me pause for thought is that CO2 levels are currently said to be at the lower end of what is required for plants, practically at dangerously low levels, and higher levels would be beneficial for them. The implication is that any significant CO2 increase would readily be taken up by more prolific plant life, so there is little reason to be concerned about a runaway greenhouse effect.
Also, climate change alarmists never seem to mention the elephant in the room: Increasing population. As well as self-sacrificing and vastly expensive initiatives such as Net-Zero, if people are so worried about climate change then shouldn't we be boycotting and sanctioning countries which don't curb their ever increasing populations?
> Also, climate change alarmists never seem to mention the elephant in the room: Increasing population.
This wasn't always the case. Even the Green parties would mention this in the past. Once environmentalism became more squarely left-coded and adopted by Labor parties, they stopped mentioning it, because of the perceived friction with the immigration stance. NIMBY (and commie) labor rejects the laws of supply and demand, and just as with housing it leads to insane and/or incoherent rhetoric such as the insistence on forced "degrowth" which can cost lives, lower quality of life, and prevent developing countries from improving theirs.
The thing with population is that growth is projected to stall globally anyway. Even ignoring the demand side, climate change is a short-term problem. Curbing emissions may be a "solved problem" in the long-run, but short-run the global demand (particularly from the east) is outpacing innovation and leading to more emissions, *and* we know that restricting emissions is no longer sufficient for mitigating climate change: we now have to cool the planet.
Geoengineering innovation is not rolling out as quickly as desirable either (carbon capture, sulphur, etc). Policy decisions are probably optimal to avoid costly results, but their unpopularity and toll will mean they will be delayed until the effects are more pronounced.
For this reason we're seeing a staggering amount of investment in innovation. The faster we have a scalable, affordable solution, the better off we'll be.
>Also, climate change alarmists never seem to mention the elephant in the room: Increasing population.
They have mentioned it countless of times and have continued to mention it, even with the Earth being on the cusp of fertility rates falling below the replacement for the humanity as a whole, signalling eventual unavoidable plateauing and fall of the global population, heralding its own problems.
The modern environmental movement is, in many ways, built upon the population control / zero population growth movements, and has also affected them. A chief event in Chinese implementation of the one-child policy was a delegate to a conference in the West being introduced to the book Limits of Growth.
Similar population growth reduction efforts, usually supported by the West for environmentalist reasons, have been so successful all along Asia, Latin America etc. that we really take them as granted these days, even though they required a vast amount of state action and conscious planning to achieve. The Western environmentalist though absolutely has played a huge role here.
The only reason why there are still countries with high TFR, eg in Africa, is mostly related to low levels of state capacity and tools of communication to get the Western memes on the topic through - but even there, things have been changing with smartphones and aid, and TFR is coming down fast in many areas. Boycotts and sanctions would, if anything, hinder such efforts.
> if people are so worried about climate change then shouldn't we be boycotting and sanctioning countries which don't curb their ever increasing populations?
Whyevolutionistrue.com , run by Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus for evolutionary biology. Nice mix of science, news, politics and cats, with an informed, level-headed community of commenters.
On the desktop version of the site, there's a sidebar on the left saying "Enter your email address to subscribe and receive new post notifications by email." That doesn't seem to show up on the mobile version...
I think someone is impersonating Freddie de Boer on Twitter and am not sure what to do about it.
Like the good tweets. If he's accurate at all, there will be a couple here and there, mixed in between tunnel-vision naivete.
Call for policy input on reduction in Wealth tax in Norway
I wrote an email to the mayor of my hometown, commending their proposal to remove the municipal element of the Norwegian wealth tax. If they go through with this, Bodø will be the first maior municipality in Norway to remove it: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/lokker-skatteflyktninger-hjem-til-bodo-med-kutt-i-formueskatt-1.16755507 (Article in Norwegian)
I wrote :
"
Thank you for looking at powerful measures to make Bodø an even more attractive place to make your home, both privately and as a business.
My girlfriend and I are moving from Oslo to Bodø this May, to live close to family - not as a result of a superior job market: But imagine how cool it would be if the best technology jobs were up north!?
When you now look at the reduction in wealth tax, I hope you also have an eye on the problems surrounding startups, which have been thoroughly covered over time by the newspaper Shifter:
https://www.shifter.no/nyheter/jeg-matte-velge-skal-jeg-holde-til-i-norge-eller-vil-jeg-at-selskapet-mitt-skal-lykkes/266945 (Article in Norwegian)
In short, the issue is this: Startup founders can sit with large fortunes on paper, long before they get significant turnover, and years before profits. This means that the most ambitious would do well to leave the country even before they get investors. What if they just had to move a few degrees of longitude north?
My wish is that you can see Bodø's position and opportunities in context when you complete this inquiry, so that this will also be a stimulator for existing and future technology initiatives.
Technology workers are mobile, nature loving people, in search of strong communities. Here, Bodø makes a strong case, and stronger with each passing year, with direct flights to the east via Helsinki, a new UiT location, and an already strong technology sector. If a would-be founder can also calculate that over time he will be left with a larger share of his own company, Bodø is the obvious choice.
"
Following this, I have been invited to meet with the mayor(!) The problem is that I am neither a founder or an economist.
If you want to help me present a strong case either towards the main policy of a reduction or removal of the municipal wealth tax, or towards other actions that could synergize to help make Bodø the tech/ startup capital of Norway, please write below!
How much daylight are you getting in Bodø mid February?
About 8 hours! It's only really january that is a drag to get through, in my opinion.
Ah, Scandinavia, heartland of ancient genocide.
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-scandinavia-farmers-slaughtered-hunter-population.html
There was almost complete population replacement in Denmark 5900 years ago. And then it happened again 4850 years ago.
So apparently this launched yesterday...
https://openai.com/sora
...Man, we're so fucked.
If for some reason you haven't already, I highly suggest that you remove any pictures of yourself from the internet. Things are going to get real ugly.
Sometimes it's good to have the most average, mediocre bearded white guy face.
Two examples, from Twitter, of nominative determinism of a particular kind, not sure how to call it:
The "German chocolate cake" is a kind of chocolate cake named after 19th century American baker Samuel German.
The "Outerbridge Crossing" is the outermost bridge in NYC, named after Port Authority chairman Eugenius Harvery Outerbridge.
The Cincinnati area has Northgate, Eastgate, and Southgate, all three of which are in the locations you'd expect from the names, but Southgate is apparently named after the Southgate family, not because it's to the south of the city.
https://www.wvxu.org/podcast/oki-wanna-know/2021-11-10/oki-wanna-know-cincinnati-doesnt-have-neighborhood-named-westgate
Main Street in San Francisco is a fairly small road named after businessman Charles Main.
You could call them both "surprise eponyms", and Outerbridge Crossing a subtype of that, a "serendipitous eponym".
For anyone curious, German is an English surname: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_(surname)
This inspired me to ask Gemini (Google's LLM) whether Alexander Graham Bell invented the bell-like ringing of telephones. He didn't.
The cake has nothing German in it. It's like Vienna sausages which are called "Frankfurter" in Vienna. Or the jelly doughnuts "Berliner" which are called "Pfannkuchen" in Berlin https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-4/f03/ which is weird because that means "pancake", whereas pancakes are called "Eierkuchen" (egg cake) in Berlin. Uh, I seem to have digressed a bit...
Ich bin ein…
I know. That's why I called Outerbridge Crossing a "serendipitous eponym": by chance, the name that inspired the eponym is appropriate for the thing being named.
By contrast, German chocolate cake is merely a "surprise eponym", because people will be surprised when they learn the name is an eponym, rather than a name along the lines of Swiss cheese or English muffins.
Funny how eponyms are often not used in the place they're named after. English muffins are called just "muffins" in England. They can be used for French toast, which is called "pain perdu" (lost bread) in France. And I bet Americans aren't aware of the sugar-coated sweet cake "Amerikaner": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikaner_(Geb%C3%A4ck)
Americans do eat "American cheese", while calling it such. And to preempt the obvious, it melts more cleanly that most cheddar, which is important in some contexts.
What do they call that thin slice of meat in a an Egg McMuffin in Toronto?
Wait, I thought English muffins were "crumpets" in England.
I've seen those in America, but I couldn't think of their name. The English version of that article just calls them "black and white cookies".
OC ACXLW Sat Feb 17 Political Trauma and Excuse Game Theory
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 56th 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 17 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
The Game theory of excuses:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gFMH3Cqw4XxwL69iy/eight-short-studies-on-excuses
Audio: https://podcastaddict.com/the-nonlinear-library-lesswrong-top-posts/episode/138515464
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/A2Qam9Bd9xpbb2wLQ/game-theory-as-a-dark-art
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.
Putin just endorsed Biden. "Stable" and "predictable".
I hadn't realized that he was this much of a **troll**. I can't quite picture Putin giggling; maybe he smirks, or just stares with a blank deadpan expression.
“It’s the kiss of death from Mr. Goldfinger”
He just trolled Tucker Carlson for not asking tough question during their interview. Unbelievable.
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-tucker-carlson-soft-interview/
Huh, I'd seen the interview billed as "let's actually ask Putin why he invaded Ukraine", so I wasn't expecting hardball questions. I do like this Putin quote:
> "He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview."
I came here to say that I'm thinking of voting for Robert Kennedy. (I guess I first have to work to get him on the ballot.) His take on Biden is blistering, and he would destroy him in a debate... like that matters.
Heck, he might even make it (which, of course, would make it a *classic* troll - saying something you actually mean, but in a way guaranteed to get a rise). As much as fervent pro-Russia types have been claiming that Biden has a secret plan to take US directly to WW3 Any. Day. Now, under Biden - a traditional cold war prez - the rules of the game are clear; US is participating in a proxy war, but it stays a proxy war. Money flows in, weapons (under certain, though shifting limits) flow in, intel flows in, probably a limited amount of hush-hush special ops persons have flown in - but US troops, as a large-scale deployment, stay out.
Trump does mean uncertainty. Maybe he'd pull everything out? Maybe he'd go all in? Maybe he'd start a war in some completely unexpected location or do a Nixon in China, with China? Who knows?
Oh come on. Nixon in China took a fair degree of competence and the humility and self awareness to recognize the competence of others.
Trump might earn himself a ‘beautiful letter’ at best.
Hey, that's just what would make it even *more* unexpected. It was, after all, extremely unexpected already that Nixon, with a reputation for strong anti-communism, would court China. No-one would have expected Trump to court Kim Jong Un, of all people.
True. Nixon’s well known anti communism reputation was key for domestic acceptance of detente with China. Kissinger briefed Nixon for over 40 hours prepping for the initial meetings with Zhou and Mao Zedong. It was bold but carefully prepared and carefully executed diplomacy
I’m not sayings Trump wouldn’t stage an impulsive and self aggrandizing photo op. I just don’t think anything meaningful would come of it.
Yeah, a big part of the problem with the North Korea "summits" was that there was basically zero prep work on the American side. Trump walked in with a proposal that Kim absolutely wasn't going to accept, and didn't have a fallback position when Kim didn't go for it.
I would expect more of the same from any Trump summits in a hypothetical second term.
I think it is good that multiple ways exist to pay for online content. Some videos have ads, some authors have Patreon accounts, some people use their free content as an advertisement for their paid content.
But some people just do everything at the same time -- for example a YouTube video that contains ads from YouTube *and* in the middle of the video there is an ad for a third party *and* at the end of the video there is an ad for author's paid videos on a different website *and* there is a link to author's Patreon account.
Are these people completely shameless? Or is everyone else stupid for leaving a lot of money on the table? Speaking for myself, I wouldn't send a cent to a person who seems so greedy. But I am not a typical internet user; other people might enjoy being abused.
These people are shameless whores, but every one of us is either willing to be a sellout or so close as to make little difference, that it's hypocritical for 99% of us to judge too harshly.
I think a lot of it comes down to knowing your audience. Some people can get away with multiple forms of income from the same video - maybe their viewers love them or maybe they don't have any steady viewers and so milk whoever they can get.
Unfortunately, as streaming services and places like YouTube add more and more advertisements and other monetization, it gets easier and easier for people to add their own and not get pushback on it. It becomes expected like broadcast TV in the 90s. Who knows, maybe we'll get accustomed to taking bathroom breaks during commercials like we did in those days.
On Youtube, you can skip in-video ads by just pressing the "skip 10 seconds key" repeatedly or clicking on the timeline. It's a lot less obnoxious than the linear TV era.
At least in some cases, creators have started doing promotions because they can't rely on ad income anymore due to arbitrary demonetization.
Having shame is stupid, so both are true. Never deny customers an opportunity to give you money. Because someone is always going to stupid enough to pay for it.
Shame is the reason we even developed morality at all.
I'm a soon to be 4th year med student and will soon have more time on my hands as rotations calm down. I also have a couple bachelor's degrees (though not super useful ones), decent scientific writing ability, rudimentary stats skills, and significant research experience. However, I can't code unless you count basic R.
Does anyone have thoughts on ways I could earn some money in the next year? I will still have obligations during the week days but a lot of free time in evenings and weekends. The two options I see floated a lot are tutoring and gig economy work. However, I'm too far removed from my prior MCAT tutoring to go back to that, and even if my soon to be released Step 2 score is excellent, there doesn't seem to be much demand for step tutoring. As far as Doordash, I do have a car but it doesn't pay well as far as I can tell. ChatGPT wasn't much help.
Wouldn't count tutoring out until you try and find some work. Especially if you've done it before. Maybe through an agency would be easiest. Could even do SAT tutoring if your scores were good. I say that because, for what it is, it can be extremely high paying. If you can get any work it'll pay a lot better than gig economy would.
tough spot to be in. I was just there a few years ago. I have no direct input as far as gigs to take up. But i will say if you're going to residency, you could also just not optimize too much on money and make quality memories/rest. As a resident myself now (I like residency btw), beyond basic comforts money has little use when you work an average of 70 hours a week.
Unfortunately I kinda need the money in the next year before residency. thanks for the reply and love the Leorio pic!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, appreciate it! I will try that--I need the money
Listening to NPR, and I learned that somebody with "antisemitic texts" in their house shot up a church. Must be a white supremacist nazi or something?
Well I just guess we're going to have to wait and see whether this becomes (a) the only story that the media covers for the next three months or (b) buried on page 12 under "local crime".
Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a shooting at a Super Bowl parade in Kansas City. This, too, will either be the big news story of the month or forgotten within an hour depending on the colour of the perp's skin.
(5 hours later and no picture of the suspects, you do the maths.)
And I wonder why the police haven't listed anyone as a person of interest...
What was really interesting was this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSgo3bW3r14 of Biden pausing for 20 seconds and quietly consulting Jill before answering a reporter's question "Do you have any reaction to the shooting in Kansas City?" before refusing to answer.
The police have arrested two suspects, both of whom are juveniles so we won't be getting names or photos for a while. This seems to have been a case of "gangbanger with a gun sees rival gangbanger in a crowded public place, ballistic mayhem ensues", so it's not going to fit the usual mass-shooter narratives.
She had a Palestine sticker on the AK47. Criminal record and a history of mental health issues.
Can anyone recommend good Supreme Court Journalists or bloggers? Preferably ones that focus on the legal argument and do not just talk about about the practical effects the decisions will have on people. Preferably minimal political bias.
Law dork, here on substack
Scotusblog Amy Howe.
The podcast “More Perfect” is great. Often historical, but with good modern tie ins.
...besides the Supreme Court? They've got tapes and transcripts of the arguments.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcript/2023
That's what I used to do, but ever since I had a kid, I no longer have the time to listen to oral arguments and read briefs
I am also interested in other answers, but this is the best that I've managed to find:
(1) scotusblog: pretty much "just the facts"
(2) popehat report: Ken White, former federal prosecutor's blog about the law and big cases in the news. I don't read it regularly, but he was historically very balanced in his blog writing (tweets not so much). Not specifically SCOTUS focused.
(3) Advisory Opinions: David French and Sarah Isgur. Note: they are biased from the right, but they claim a mantle of objectivity. I do think they are making a sincere effort, so partly this shows how difficult it is to be objective. Aside from their political spectrum bias, they are strongly pro-SCOTUS as an institution.
(4) Strict Scrutiny: Melissa Murray, Kate Shaw, Leah Litman. Openly biased from the left, but, like AO, they explain their reasoning. They are moderately anti-SCOTUS as an institution, primarily driven by their opposition to the court's current members.
(5) 5-4 Podcast: Rhiannon Hamam, Peter Shamshiri, Michael Liroff. Strongly anti-SCOTUS as an institution (and not just the current justices).
Ken White now does a podcast with Josh Barry called Serious Trouble. The balance is somewhere in-between his writing and tweeting.
Thank you! I used to read a lot of David French, but really SCOTUSblog is exactly what I was looking for
Do any of the new image generators / alterers allow you to upload pictures of yourself or another person at different ages, and have it adjust different-age pictures to a requested age?
Like you have a picture of your grandma at age 20 and age 90, can it impute a picture of her at age 50?
Or a picture of yourself ten years ago vs today - can you age the younger picture to you today, keeping the background and setting?
Here's a geometry problem that may be a bit challenging, but fun to think about and doodle. I know of two solutions, one of which is strikingly simple.
Consider a convex quadrilateral. Label its sides a,b,c,d in clockwise order, and let its area be S. Prove that S <= (ac+bd)/2.
Well, I think that the cross product of two vectors (which is ||v1||*||v2||*|sin(v1,v2)| gives the area inside the parallelogram defined by these two vectors. Dividing it by 2, we get the area of the triangle defined by v1 and v2. As |sin(v1,v2)| <= 1, we get your inequality. I guess its the strikingly simple proof, but nice problem indeed, it distracted me a bit from my job!
Good job, but that solves an easier inequality: S <= (ab+cd)/2.
Oh! Indeed.
Well, let's take the S <= (ab+cd)/2 for granted and apply it to the a,c,b,d quadrangle. We can now write S2 <= (ac+bd)/2. Now, if I read Bretschneider's formula right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretschneider%27s_formula), it seems like a quadrangle's area is totally determined by its sides (which are fixed in our case), and the sum of two opposed angles (which can usually be tuned to the optimal 180°, except for edge cases). So it looks like the maximal area of quadrangle is unchanged by the order you put the segments in.
So S2max = Smax <= (ac+bd)/2. And as S <= Smax, we get to the desired result.
The edge case aforementioned only seems to concern quadrangles with a null area. And the inequality stands in that case too.
I am not very satisfied with my answer as I am using a formula that carries a lot more information than what is needed to prove your inequality.
Edit:
In fact, no need for this fancy formula. Let's take an "optimal quadrangle", ie one which area is maximal, given its sides. We can break it in two "optimal" triangles. If we permute two sides, we can still reform this optimal triangle, only mirrored: the area is unaffected. That's how we can prove that the maximal area of a quadrangle only depends on the length of its sides, not their order.
Very funny problem, thanks for sharing it!
EA for Jews is running another round of the EA and Judaism Intro Fellowship this March (https://eaforjews.org/take-action/fellowship/)!
The fellowship has been impactful for many participants, and I expect there are many others who would enjoy and benefit from the program if they heard about it!
If you are connected to any Jewish communities or networks, please help spread the word! Here are some resources for doing so: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wD7LWMFbwBGTmZkN-oAFZyQ0vbRHUjHE5pnf56-vVU4/edit#heading=h.ijx47wt9n700
"EA for Jews"
Jews complain about "othering", but then put their jewishness front and center in everything for no apparent reason
Jews complain about othering? That's news to me. As far as I know most of them are accustomed to separate but equal
Throat clear, love Jews, throat clear.
Well, there *is* also EA for Christians.
Maybe, but I'll bet "EA for Christians" is almost entirely composed of actual Christians, whereas "EA for Jews" is almost entirely composed of atheists.
I mean, they *might* be different Jews. Y'know, just maybe. Like every other stereotypable group.
Is there any way to disable the substack subscribe pop-up? I've noticed this site does not have the pop up either for the main page or the individual articles. However I cannot find instructions on how to turn it off anywhere on the internet? (edit I have figured out how to turn it off the individual articles, but is there any way to remove it from the main page without linking to the archive)
This drives me crazy too. Every single time I want to read a non-ACX Substack post, I first have to scroll down until the screen goes dark and the popup appears, click X on the popup, and then scroll back up and actually read the damn article. It's insane.
I believe Pycea's ACX plugin allows it to be removed on this site?
Use uBlock origin (which you should be using anyway) and use the select and block feature. Removes anything on a webpage that you don't want to see. This is the only place I'd advertise this extension because it's so good that if it gets too popular, our lizard overlords will ensure it gets shut down.
...Why are you acting like adblockers are some obscure thing?
Because I live and work in the world, around other people. I talk to them about tech stuff, and ad blockers come up. Do you do that? I don't work in the tech industry.
Is there a way to check your post history? I was banned from a particular Substack and I have no real idea why. I only discovered it recently, presumably quite a ways after the fact, since I don't post on their Substack much. I am curious if, in fact, the individual in question didn't even ban me for posts on their own Substack, but it was one of those bans you see on Reddit sometimes where it's because they said something you don't like elsewhere.
If you click your profile and then Activity, it will show a list of replies to your comments by date, that's the closest I've found to listing them.
Add mine to the litany of complaints about substack lacking the most fucking basic of functional forum features. This is local grocery store app level embarrassing.
I tried to imagine an explanation for why - assuming Substack has adequate money and technical talent - none of this gets fixed:
Maybe Substack doesn't want to make commenting more pleasant, because it would encourage more comments. Then, writers might find themselves doing more moderating and more responding, and thus write fewer new posts. But Substack probably thinks paid subscriptions are mainly caused by posts, rather than commenting. (As with most online communities, commenters here are a minority of subscribers.)
My local grocery store isn't that incompetent.
I sometimes think that the comment section was designed for a single level of "yay, you rock" comments, with an optional second layer of "thanks for reading".
Substack *only displays two comments* by default, so that seems accurate. Still, you'd think they could try to fix things for one of their biggest stars.
Agreed. Maybe we should try to do something about it?
I never thought I'd use 'my substack' for anything, but decided I might as well create a post on it, to initiate collaboration around the issue. Anyone who's interested, click on my profile image to get to it.
When I click on your name, I can see the "posts", "notes" and "likes", but unfortunately the comments are not there. :(
Does anyone know what's up with polymarket's US election market? With Michelle Obama at 7% and thousands of dollars on the order book, it seems too much like free money. What's the catch?
Currently Michelle Obama is 7.1% to be the next president on Betfair Exchange (£10m bet on the market; £360k on this candidate). She is also 10.2% to be the democratic nominee (£7m bet on the market; £190k on this candidate), which implies she has a 70% chance of winning if nominated. Both figures are based on the odds at which you could bet against her. If you think neither event will occur, you probably prefer to get an 11% return in 6 months than a 7% return in 10 months.
Alternatively, you could back Biden. His odds have shortened slightly in the past two days, but still imply a 69% chance he will be the nominee (with a chunky £5.8m of bets on this candidate), which you may think low. His implied chance of being the next president is 28% (with £2.9m of bets). This implies he as a 41% of winning if nominated. These figures are based on the odds at which you could bet for him.
Meanwhile, Trump (according to this market) is 91% likely to be the Republican nominee and 45% likely to be the next president, implying a 49% chance of winning if nominated.
Something looks wrong with those conditional probabilities, since in each case their most likely opponent is the other. Possibly worth considering backing both Trump and Biden to win: if you put £387 on Biden and £613 on Trump, you would make £373 (before commission) if either won, although of course you get rinsed if Michelle pulls through.
Possibly worth noting that Metaculus has Biden at 93% to be the nominee and Obama at 0.4%. Manifold has 91% and 1.5% respectively.
Is there any reason at all to think Michelle could be the candidate?
The reason we got Biden as a candidate, and then a president, is that almost all the people who weren't on the Trump Train fondly remembered the Obama presidency, and Biden's "I was the #2 man in the Obama administration; I can give you a calmer, more sedate Obama Lite" sold better than the specific pitches of any of the other Democratic candidates.
If Biden is out because of age/senility/whatever, which is probably north of 7%, then that leaves us with the #1 woman in the Obama administration, and probably the only other figure from that administration that most voters can remember off the top of their head. And "Four more years of Obama Lite; the alternative is four more years of The Donald", is probably almost as strong a pitch now as it was in 2020.
But Biden could back that with actually being an experienced, capable politician. Michelle can't, and I'm pretty sure that *will* matter. So I think she's overpriced at 7%, but I think I can see where that 7% is coming from.
Wasn't Hillary Clinton the #1 woman in the Obama administration, as Secretary of State? I believe that voters also remember her.
I don't think that anyone who is actually thinking about governance is considering Michelle Obama as a candidate here - they're just picking a name they think of based on thoughts like the First Lady counting somehow as part of the government.
Hillary wasn't in the administration at all during Obama's second term. And whether she was in the Senate, State, or on the lecture circuit, she was always the #1 woman in the Hillary Clinton Administration, on hold until it was Her Turn.
Yes, but Hillary looks old.
If they were going to replace Biden, the time to do that would have been *before* the primaries. People dropped a lot of stalking horses a year or two ago, but it never went anywhere. The only way he can not be the candidate now is if he literally drops dead.
The latest thinking, by Ross Douthat among others is that Biden waits till the convention to say something like “I could do the job but I’ve heard the will of the people.”
Then bow out for the good of the party and the country, letting all his pledged delegates come up with a replacement. He wouldn’t necessarily have to endorse Kamala Harris in that situation.
Conditional on it not being Biden, I'm seeing probabilities around:
Obama, 33%
Newsom, 28%
Harris, 20%
Warren, 5%
Whitmer, 4%
Phillips, 3%
Clinton, 2% (although I note that Clinton is much higher on PredictIt).
If the scenario is that Biden drops out at the convention, I'm confident Obama is much too high and Harris is much too low. But mostly, I think that won't happen (barring some major adverse event between then and now, the probability of which is well below 33%).
If he was going to do that, he would have done it last year. This is an absurd fantasy.
I had the same reaction 4 years ago, when a left-wing friend was breathlessly talking about the possibility of Michelle Obama running for President against Trump. I was completely disconnected from politics at the time, and reacted with obvious befuddlement, since she wasn't a politician and had no experience and her only qualification was being married to a guy who'd done it (which seemed profoundly anti-feminist). I forget exactly what my friend said in response, but I recall the expression on their face was as if no one had ever mentioned these objections to them. The subject was quietly dropped.
I eventually concluded that this friend had been listening to politics in an echo chamber, with some combination of a) starting to mistake the reactions in there for reactions in the outside world, and b) assuming that I was part of the same echo chamber (although they really should have known better, so that would be another form of blindness). Perhaps it was c) code for "let's let Barack run things for another 8 years", although I didn't detect any hint of that at the time, and in that case the expression might have meant "I thought you'd gotten the secret memo, but alas, you're literal-minded enough to miss the hidden meaning, which I am unwilling to say aloud".
I suspect that something like (a) is happening here, coupled with a norm within that group of putting your money where your mouth is (which is admirable).
> her only qualification was being married to a guy who'd done it (which seemed profoundly anti-feminist)
That sounds like taking proclaimed ideas too literally, which may be appreciated at places like ACX, but at most other places something qualifies as "anti-feminist" only when it is (a) bad for some woman, preferably an important one, or (b) good for her, but in a way that makes her focus less on her career and more on her family.
Yeah, I'm old-fashioned that way, and this is one of those "first-wave" things. I think it counts as anti-feminist to treat a woman purely as an extension of her husband.
Hillary Clinton was a great example. Love her or hate her, it's because of who she was and what she did.
Hillary got parachuted into a Senate seat because of who she was married to, then got to be Secretary of State for the same reason.
But by the time she was running for President she at least had experience in those two other jobs, even if those other jobs were not earned.
Michelle Obama has never done anything.
As far as I can see the reasoning (as articulated by Vivek Ramaswamy and others) is (a) Biden's mental faculties are declining, (b) the Democrats will at some point realise they need to replace him, (c) the obvious substitute would be Kamala Harris, but nobody likes her, (d) the Democrats would alienate their base if they overlooked a woman of colour, but (e) they can avoid this by nominating another woman of colour, i.e. Michelle Obama; in any case (f) they really want to run Barack again, but are prevented from doing so by the term limit and (g) Michelle can serve as a de facto cipher for her husband. How this could be done in practice is left as an exercise for the reader.
Some say the switch will take place after the convention, in which case betting against Obama (or for Biden) as nominee is still profitable, since the market will resolve when the convention takes place.
It should be obvious, but I do not endorse any of propositions (a)-(g). I merely report the argument as I have understood it.
There are rumors that the Democrats will switch from Biden to Obama at the convention. I've only heard this from Republican sources, not Democrats, so ... grain of salt, and all that.
Andrew Sullivan just wrote about it, so it's more than just the right-wing media, but I think those odds are overblown. Take the free money; lots of people on betting sites overreact to news stories.
I think there were good reasons for the Dems to try to move off Biden 6-12 months ago, his poll numbers certainly aren't what you'd hope for, but at this point the only way I can figure trying to replace him on the ticket is if he's actively declining. Like,
If Nov 23, he's at X brain farts/gaffes
In Feb 24, he's at 2X brain farts/gaffes
In Aug 24, he'll be at 8x brain farts/gaffes
If you're looking at that kind of decline in an 80+ year-old...yeah, pulling him from the ticket makes sense. That's the only way I can see him not being the Dem nominee though.
Andrew Sullivan has basically always identified as being on the right.
There are definitely rumours, and it's not an implausible scenario, but 7% seems high. Biden won't resign in his current state and he's unlikely to go that far downhill in the six months before the convention.
Besides, if they were going to make a serious play for Michelle Obama as candidate they'd be doing some battlespace preparation. Michelle Obama would be doing public appearances, making speeches, getting her face on television. And as far as I can figure out, she's not doing any of that stuff right now.
Yeah, it doesn't strike me as particularly likely, as it doesn't seem like it would fly with Independent voters, who would, I think, see it as 'gimmicky'.
I also don't think she would want to do it. They are, I believe, making a ton of money right now and are very popular (or at least regarded well). She doesn't necessarily seem power hungry, so I would think it would be mostly downside for her.
Yeah, I could see lots of serious thought about Biden alternatives, but she's not high on the list. Newsome is far more obvious, but so are a lot of current senators and governors who are at least in the spotlight somewhere and have personally done politics. I wouldn't say Michelle is at 0%, but not much above that.
The only scenario where Michelle pulls ahead is if we consider the DNC a conspiracy that has the power and willingness to rig the primaries completely behind the scenes such that their preferred candidate (who I assume is a pretend way to get her husband re-elected?) doesn't even have to try to appeal to anyone.
I think Gretchen Whitmer would be a smart choice. Intelligent, tested and sane. Plus she has the looks of ‘40s movie star.
The thinking, I believe, is that if you were to jump somebody over Harris, it would have to be a black woman, or there would be too much blowback.
And, even though Biden is looking not particularly fit, mentally or physically, he is the incumbent, and he did beat Trump last time they contested, so it would require something fairly drastic, I'd think, to try to get him off the ticket.
I don't know about Polymarket, but I heard that PredictIt had massively skewed odds for Trump in 2020, including people betting on him *even after Biden was sworn in as president*. With low betting limits and high fees, it's hard to correct low probabilities like that.
I bet £5k on Biden on 12 November 2020 and was paid £1,322.80 (after commission) on 17 December 2020. There was a huge amount of money in that market.
How much is the vig?
2% of winnings. This is on Betfair Exchange, with their Basic plan.
Also, that money would earn ~4% in risk-free interest in the meantime instead and be instantly available for other opportunities.
The Waiting Guy
Recently I had a somewhat strange experience. I'm sure it's perfectly normal, but it felt like the kind of thing that would appear at the start of a conspiracy thriller or ghost story if those were things that could actually happen.
When I went out for ice cream, there was a guy sitting on a bench on the sidewalk in front of the Apple Store. He didn't have anything to do other than occasionally check his phone and just sat there for forty minutes looking around for no apparent reason. He often looked at the Apple Store, and I guessed that he must be waiting for someone inside, although 40 minutes seemed like a long time for someone to be inside.
The strangest part is that right after I finished eating my ice cream 40 minutes later, just as I was preparing to leave, he abruptly got up and walked up the street ahead of me. He walked half a block up and disappeared inside a burger shop, so I thought he might be meeting someone there, but when I went inside right afterwards out of curiosity, there was no sign of him or anyone else he might have been meeting. He'd just vanished.
The best explanation I can think of is that he had to use the bathroom and immediately hid in the bathroom so I didn't see him, but that still doesn't explain why he sat outside for 40 minutes with nothing to do or why he went to that specific restaurant to use the bathroom. And it's probably for customers only anyway. The whole thing was very mysterious.
P.S. He also had a mask on the whole time (despite sitting outside), which itself is pretty uncommon nowadays.
You ate ice cream for FORTY minutes??
(My guess is he worked at the restaurant, was on break, and you and he just happen to time up in your actions. There is also probably another substack with a comment asking why a guy eating ice cream was staring at me for 40 minutes while i was on my lunch break then followed me into where I work.)
I wasn't staring at him. I spent most of my time looking at the Apple Store too.
I used to work at a movie theater. One day I saw a bunch of Waffle House employees come in, buy some of our overpriced Coke, and leave without seeing a movie. They get free Coke at their own workplace, and it was impossible to get to that movie theater without driving past a Waffle House.
Reminds me of a sight at a bus station long ago; a guy was using the pay phone there, and then he hung up, and pulled out his cell phone to call someone.
Likely illegal activity. I have heard that major telephone companies pulled pay phones not because they were unprofitable, but because they were used significantly (large majority?) for criminal activity.
If he was very focused on the Apple Store, could be he worked for one of the companies that employ people just to count footfall, with hedge funds, competitors or even the store itself paying for the data (although imagine nowadays the store could probably do it much more cheaply with some cameras and software).
I needed to get my ipad repaired recently. They give you a time slot to see a technician. Then, often, they tell you they're running late and here is your new time slot. So, guy sitting outside the Apple Store for 40 minutes seems normal. Also: guy waits for 40 minutes and then needs to visit the restroom sounds normal.
If so, why not use the Apple restroom?
Have you been reading a lot of Philip K Dick lately?
Nope. I take it his stories have elements like this?
By coincidence I’m reading one of his novels now, ‘VALIS’. It’s actually pretty good. I don’t know it’s your cup of tea but here is a link to it’s Wikipedia page.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valis_(novel)
Yeah, old sci fi guy. A lot of what the hell is going on here stuff. Your comment seems mildly paranoid. PDK made a good living on stories that were very paranoid.
I was joking.
That reminds me of an experience I had recently. I was sitting in front of the Apple Store minding my own and I saw a guy eating an ice cream. No big deal there, you might think, but he was eating an ice cream for a full forty minutes. Who the heck takes forty minutes to eat an ice cream?
Then he tried to follow me to the bathroom.
I too was intrigued by the 40-minute ice cream. Doesn't it melt? Was this a single ice cream or was this "I finished one scoop, let me return and purchase another" kind of thing?
It was a double in a waffle cone.
Drug deal?
I am told that ice cream is the perfect food for coming down of off fentanyl. Never tried it myself, though. And really, ice cream is the perfect food for a number of situations.
‘The Good Thief’ Nick Nolte plays a heroin addict. To temporarily kick the habit he lays in a supply of ice cream and has someone handcuff him to his bed.
I like ice cream a little too much myself so limit myself to a pint for breakfast once a year on my birthday. Only 8 or so months to go.
"Ice cream: almost as good as heroin." might make a good advertising slogan, in some slightly different parallel universe.
If you don’t taste it very often it’s pretty amazing. The first bite is peak pleasure though.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iECwVCFjmqc
The way the baby's eyes widen after the first taste is incredibly cute.
This is a high foot-traffic downtown area, and also the Apple Store hires a police officer to constantly be on guard right there, so it's pretty much the worst possible place you could pick. (Although oddly, the police officer was eating dinner across the street at the time, something I've never seen before.)
If there's one thing Breaking Bad taught me, it's that you want to do your meet somewhere in a public place. Way less chance someone sticks a gun in your face and takes your money or your dope.
Seems like the top level domain of this Substack is still broken/a placeholder: https://astralcodexten.com/.
A proper solution would be a permanent redirect from "astralcodexten.com" to "www.astralcodexten.com"; not sure whether Substack or Scott needs to implement it.
Periodically I see people link to Sam Kriss in these open threads, and I wanted to drop a link to his most recent post, which is one of the best things I've read in months
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/manifesto-of-the-armed-front-of-love
He has opinions about polyamory, which has been discussed here a lot again lately, but the piece is much more than that
not sure it works, romantic love is obsessive yes, but the terrorism doesn't work as an extreme metaphor. The lovers always face each other, and the demands are often more about the desire than the result. you also need a self first to love and be loved-you don't gain one by loving.
if the point is polyamory is a shallow connection and monogamy is deeper, it could be said better. i still dont agree, the danger is you still get deep connection but with only one of the polycule. You get power differential and one person in sadness. its more you can't just banish jealousy or the connective aspects of sex.
Is it much more than that?
I actually took it as fairly nihilistic - he points to a love so all consuming, morality and human decency is thrown away. But it's a near-certainty he himself hasn't and isn't experiencing such a love, because he's not dead or in jail. Indeed, it's a certainty even if somehow a small slice of humanity had a culture like the one depicted where "acts of terrorism and mass murder is how you demonstrate your love," it would diminish much more quickly than any religion from the *inside,* much less the outside.
Sure, he makes the obligatory handwave to poly being "shallow lukewarm puddles" vs the real incandescent and consuming fires of *ACTUAL* love, but the "actual" love he's pointing to is an unattainable, unsustainable shibboleth that nobody in their right mind ever experiences, thus handwaving away both poly and the real-world love that monogamous people feel.
I mean, I guess I could be wrong - um - for the other people here, is this what real-world love feels like to *you?* You would commit acts of mass murder and terrorism for it?
Otherwise, straight nihilism and a dismissal of basically ALL real world love, whether poly or monogamous.
I also, perhaps because I'm very interested in Charles Taylor's notion of the buffered self, I think the part about love as "feeling out the outer edges that define your self in the form of the other" is really central to understanding what the essay is getting at. Much more central than the all-consuming terrorist love that sets it up.
So if you're not familiar with Sam's writing, I don't think people read him or like him with any expectation that he's saying factually true or reasonable things. It's rather that he has a gift for saying ridiculous, extravagant things that draw one in to a sharp point of insight.
The terrorism is a frame story. "But tell us—what are you more afraid of? The possibility that the realisation of your freedom and the purpose of your existence lies outside the bounds of yourself? Or—a bomb?" The Armed Front is using acts of violence to draw people's attention to the ways that therapeutic safetyist mindsets are reinforcing the buffered self against the possibility of real, satisfying love. The inclusion of the Armed Front in the essay is doing the same thing. The 'unattainable, unsustainable shibboleth' and the manifesto framing are there to heighten contrast, not to tell you that that's what love is or is supposed to be. I don't think the essay is saying that real love between persons should express itself in unlimited atrocity. It's saying that real, committed, vulnerable love between persons should be -more like- the nihilism of the chivalric terrorists than the nihilism of self-help affirmations. i.e. "The Somme-heavy barrage of helpful, healthful messaging, here to inform you that you should not seek your self-realisation in and through other people, because other people will always disappoint you. For your own wellbeing, you should avoid allowing anyone to happen to you."
Thanks - if that's the thrust of it you were getting out of it, I don't think he's doing it well for people like me who don't regularly read him.
Everything's a gradient. He's posited two endcaps on the gradient, both of them clearly bad. All this florid verbiage and wide-eyed detail is to merely argue that you should be a few ticks closer to the *right* end, not the *left* end?
BORING. Also, not very well communicated.
And like any gradient, the span of humanity is going to be distributed across the gradient, regardless of what he writes or recommends. Arguing in a Straussian way for being a few ticks closer to his end doesn't seem very insightful or likely to drive anyone to change their actions in the ways he wants.
But then, I'm clearly not the target audience here.
So... there's a criticism of expectations of socially-constructed demonstrations of love? If everyone else were committing acts of terrorism as an expression of love, wouldn't you go along, because otherwise what would your beloved say?
So, not satisfied with Microsoft's paltry billions, Sam Altman seems to be asking the UAE for seven *trillion* dollars to build lots of new high-end chip fabs. This strikes me as roughly equivalent to 1960s Dr. Evil asking for "one hundred billion dollars!", and everybody laughs because there's not that much money in the world. OK, I missed the bit where they redefined M1 a few years ago and there's now a bit over twenty trillion dollars in (mostly virtual) circulation; he's only asking for one-third of all the dollars in the world.
And yes, I get that he's not literally asking for a supertanker full of dollars; he's looking for capital broadly defined and in many forms. It still doesn't pass the giggle test; I talked about this with people I know in the AI and chip-manufacturing fields, and there are too many parts of this plan that aren't going to work. First off, the combined sovereign wealth funds of all the petrostates don't quite reach the seven-terabuck level, and they're not all going to give everything to Sam Altman no matter what he promises. Second, the semiconductor industry can't usefully absorb that level of investment in much less than a generation. We don't have the people, or the tooling, or the resources, and we don't have the people to train the people or the tools to build the tools on less than a generational timescale. And even if you handwave seven trillion dollars' worth of chip fabs into existence, we don't have the electric power generation capacity to run all those chips (and the associated cooling stacks).
So, what is Sam up to? The simplest, easiest answer is that he's just trolling us, generating bullshit or hype for whatever purpose. That seems unsatisfactory as an explanation, but it's possible.
If he imagines that he's actually going to get the seven trillion dollars, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. If he thinks that, given the seven trillion dollars, the stuff he wants to buy with it will be available in the marketplace, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. And if the plan is that he's going to manage the construction of a vertically-integrated industrial economy on the scale of Israel or Sweden so as to build all the stuff he wants to buy, then yeah, he's wrong and mocking laughter is warranted.
Is there something else he might be up to that's not laughably wrong? Or at least wrong in some interesting way I haven't thought of?
Also, this suggests that Sam Altman seems to believe that, in order to achieve his goal, he thinks he needs seven trillion dollars' worth of computronium. Well, of computronium-manufacturing capability, so probably tens of trillions of dollars worth of computronium. And lots of new power plants.
If Sam Altman's goal is "build a true AGI", or maybe ASI, does that mean he thinks true AGI/ASI requires more computronium than sensible people think is going to exist in the next twenty years?
$ 7 trillion all at once is of course laughable. But if the idea is a continuous ramp-up of investments, over the course of a few decades, then it's not necessarily so crazy. The US interstate system seems to have cost $0.5 trillion (in somewhat recent dollars). This would be an investment 14 times as big. There are those who would claim it's 14 times as important.
If that's the case, the crazy part is bringing up now money you don't expect to need for twenty years. The people who might invest in twenty years aren't in the audience, and you're weakening the near-term pitch for the people who are.
It's possible that Altman would have made that mistake, but unlikely that the WSJ wouldn't have commented on it.
It is rather putting the cart before the horse. What do you need a fab for, if you don't have a design. If you have a design, you can find custom fabs.
As you alluded to, one doesn't merely buy a fab and do great things. You start out with a purpose. Along the way, you develop some objectives. You're working with system architects, circuitry architects, then transistor architects. Then you discover some of the objectives can't be met with the custom fabs available. So you get to work with the photo-lithography vendors to see what tools, materials, designs they may be working on, which together you can tailor to fit your needs. Then you are into fab materials, fab processes, and you're working at the cutting edge, hiring employees away from the photo-lithography vendors, having your employees hired away by the photo-lithography vendors, and back and forth with the competition, and you're making test runs and you've got a validation center, and design automation teams, and mask designers, and probably about ten thousand people in your organization .... and then we'll talk about conducive geographies, and somewhere way down the line, ten billion dollars to build a state of the art fab.
I think the short answer here is that Altman hasn't asked for seven trillion dollars and the media headlines are just misleading.
Oh my, this is like 99% of journalism, and that's before GPT started writing it all.
Actually, GPT may improve the state of journalism, because it will be able to write stories based on facts (and only occasionally hallucinate something), as opposed to needing to invent things all the time. But that will all depend on who writes the prompts.
This is an extraordinarily optimistic view of the usage of large language models and AI in general. This is akin to saying, "with the advent of the internet and true facts being at our fingertips, journalists will really only report the truth because the truth will be so readily available, without requiring all the hard reading and travel that classic investigation required." Yeah, it doesn't work like that, and neither will our new big tool.
I'm sorry if I missed you being sarcastic or facetious. Well done if so.
> Oh my, this is like 99% of journalism, and that's before GPT started writing it all.
Hot take: this is AIs first clumsy attempt at manipulating humans into giving it the ressources it needs to achieve super-intelligence and, subsequently, world domination.
>Is there something else he might be up to that's not laughably wrong? Or at least wrong in some interesting way I haven't thought of?
Well, the last thread was talking about Elon Musk's payment deal getting scuttled due to lack of negotiating from the other party, so from the armchair it looks like Sam's ensuring people will come back with smaller numbers at it will look more like a back-and-forth. It's "Queen's Duck" chicanery for bureaucratic checkmarking.
What number could he be pursuing for which $7 trillion is too much but not out of the ballpark? $1 trillion? That's still way too high for anything useful that one guy or organization could ever use. That's enough to buy the entire semiconductor sector already. If you're going to do that, then go sign a deal with someone major in that sector and coordinate to get the money together. It's cheaper and comes with institutional backing.
That only works if the initial numbers are modestly too high, not ludicrously too high, As noted below, if you ask for a million-dollar starting salary in your first job out of college, this does not ensure that people "come back with smaller numbers", rather it ensures that they stop taking your phone calls.
You'd probably have to adjust the analogy to: the most well known college graduate in the world asking for that salary.
But it's not the equivalent of a white collar job, it's the equivalent of a pay raise for the hiring manager.
From some quick googling, the most respectable news article using the words "$7 trillion" seems to be this one https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-dollars-to-reshape-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0 -- it needs a subscription but the relevant part is before the paywall.
The whole paragraph is: "The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said"
So the big headline number comes down to an unnamed source talking about an unspecified project. It sounds like a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Ultimately I don't think there's a lot of point in over-interpreting it.
There's definitely sometimes advantages to anchoring big numbers in people's minds, though. Especially if you're talking to middle eastern sovereign wealth funds, whose main problem is that they have too much money to invest sensibly.
>So the big headline number comes down to an unnamed source talking about an unspecified project. It sounds like a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Yeah, this sounds like it could have gone through several levels of misinterpretation too.
One wild thought: Normally I think of massive computation for LLMs as the training costs. What if Altman expects to have full AGI in a few years, and this is a calculation for the _inference_ computation costs to replace some large fraction of the total global workforce?
But they *don't* have that much money to invest, sensibly or otherwise. That's the point, or part of it. I think most of the money they do have is sensibly invested in diverse portfolios, but it doesn't matter whether it's sensible or not, the seven trillion dollars for chip fabs just isn't realistically available.
And there's no advantage to anchoring ridiculously bid numbers in people's minds. Seriously, the whole "ask for the stars and they'll give you the Moon!" thing really does not work. What Altman seems to be doing, is akin to asking for an entry-level white-collar job with a starting salary of one million dollars per year. This does not "anchor" you in the hiring manager's mind as a superstar that he should be trying to scrape together $500K/year for, it just makes him roundfile your resume and go on to the next one.
I can pretty much guarantee that there are many reasonable proposals for the couple hundred billion dollars the UAE will want to invest over the coming year. And plenty more unreasonable ones to be quickly roundfiled. Probably including Altman's.
No, they don't have seven trillion, but they do have a lot of money. And if you start talking about a business opportunity that can easily absorb trillions (but which can definitely totally do great things for ten billion) then they might be interested.
And you're right, "anchoring" doesn't always work, which is why I said it sometimes works. You need to apply it very judiciously, but it's a legit strategy. Since Sam Altman appears to be a better businessman than I am, I won't nitpick his use of it.
I also don't think anything in the article suggests that it is $7 trillion in one year - its almost not certainly. A project that would be $7 trillion over 40 years is, yeah gigantic but doable. If the number was said at all - which is dubious - it was a parameter across time as well as projects.
Yes, my guess would be that Altman said something along the lines of, "We'll eventually want a total of $7T investment over the next X years, right now we're looking for $Y in our series A round, do you want in?"
That's still an incredibly poor pitch. If you tell your prospective investors that you think you'll need $7E12 to succeed, then your prospective investors will assume that since there isn't $7E12 for you to have nor any reasonable place to put it, you're going to fail. In which case, their lesser up-front investment will just be getting them in on the ground floor of a failure.
Or, if "X years" is long enough for the economy to grow to the point where $7E12 investments are a thing, then you're saying that you are working to much longer time horizons than they are, and what's their exit strategy if they need to cash out in five years?
This probably the wrong place to ask but has pro football become less brutal in the last 20 or 30 years? I watched the end of the Super Bowl last night - to see if the Taylor Swift psyop succeeded. ;-) - and it looked a lot less bone crunching than I remember.
Yeah, I think the long term effects of suffering repeated hits to the head are better understood today than they were 30 years ago. There's also the fact that as salaries for players have gone up and up and up, the cost of losing players for extended periods of time to injury has also gone up, which has led to rule changes to try to make the game safer.
Yeah, all pro sports are trying to limit player injuries. The NFL has all sorts of rules about how you are allowed to hit/ block/ tackle another player. Fighting is way down in hockey and less 'nasty' hits. (not that all the violence doesn't still happen.)
On the one hand the rules have shifted to penalize some types of hits that were legal, and/or shrugged off by the officials, during lets say the 1970s-1990s. So you don't see those nearly as often.
Meanwhile though the players are somewhat bigger and are much faster at a lot of positions. I.e. the foot speed that a Lawrence Taylor had as a linebacker which was exceptional in the 1980s is now just normal for that position in the NFL. And since basic physics hasn't changed -- kinetic energy still equals mass times velocity squared -- the amount of force being delivered in routine hits today is significantly greater than back in the day.
A similar dynamic has played out in my household's fave pro sport, ice hockey. A lot of the routine hacking/slashing/fistfights has been legislated out. But meanwhile the median NHL skater is both somewhat larger and _much_ faster than 30 years ago, and they've all come up through levels of youth hockey in which "finish your checks" is as basic in the coaching as "head on a swivel" or whatever. So if you go back and watch some 1980s/90s NHL hockey on YouTube it will seem downright gentle in terms of physicality compared to today -- until somebody shoves somebody from behind into the boards and the line brawl breaks out. (And then most fans only remember the line brawls.)
This is the best answer. The players are much better so the offenses and defenses have moved away from smashing into each other all the time. And the NHL has opened things up so much that players can actually skate and score goals instead of just dumping it in all the time.
Personally, I think both sports are much better for these changes. The NBA I think has gone too far and reduced physical defense too much, but I am not really a fan so its not my business really.
Oh dear, Re NHL, long time Sabres fan (we won't talk about the current team, sigh.) But there was much more fighting back in the 80-90's. Isn't that the Rob Ray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Ray) time in Buffalo? As a Sabres fan I love Rob, but I'm also glad his 'position' is mostly gone from the current line up.
Big difference between physicality in checking and fighting. The best offensive player of this generation (Ovi) is quite possibly the best checking forward as well. That was definitely not the case in the past.
I grew up in the town that houses the US hockey hall of fame. I was a terrible disappointment to my hockey loving friends and relatives. One year of PeeWee and my coach told my parents that I was too tall and skinny and was probably going to get hurt. :(
Why do I perceive people talking about sports to sound dumb? Is it because I’ve chosen to think sports knowledge is a waste of synapses, or is there something to it? I find sports talk particularly vacuous because it seems like dumb talk that tries to sound smart, full of technical speak and numbers.
>Is it because I’ve chosen to think sports knowledge is a waste of synapses,
You literally sound like a parody of a fedora dude
Possibly because you've absorbed cultural signals that say that jocks are dumb and nerds are smart? Your point about "smart talk with lots of numbers and stats that's actually vacuous" could apply equally well to a lot of other hobbies (e.g. Warhammer 40K, video games, certain types of people who are really into politics).
My brother went through the NFL questions on Manifold with my father and bet on those whose probability had a large difference compared to the probability my father claimed. He got a 30% gain in total. Sports fans might be dumb, but apparently they are smarter than the state of the art technology for predicting the futute.
IMO, "Manifold says..." would be usefully replaced with "a poll of Bay Area prediction market nerds says..."
To some extent, this: https://xkcd.com/904/
But also, most conversations aren't really very insightful, and I think we don't tend to notice when the topic interests us.
Because everyone can enjoy it, which means the average person enjoying sports is roughly as smart as the average American...which is pretty dumb. More horrific still, if you go to a bar to enjoy a game with average Americans, you will notice to your horror that half the people are dumber than the average American, some are even almost as dumb as the French.
Whereas connoisseurs of the finer things in life, like us, can understand the intricacies of D&D and engage in hours of joyous, stimulating debate over the advantages of 5th edition vs 3.5 edition (3rd is simply worse) while hopping we don't awaken the true gentlemen of class who actually understand Thac0.
Straight up, the best thing about football is that it gives me something to talk about with 90% of men in awkward social situations where social custom demands I make mouth sounds with someone I share no interests in common with. This is unironically amazing and super valuable. There are tons of really solid guys I like and respect but...I'm a giant nerd and they're not and it's nice to have something to talk with them about. But it does mean that sports is basically the only time I interact with dumb people, despite the fact that there are some super smart sports guys.
What is confusing about THAC0? I’ve never understood the hate.
It involves subtraction, instead of only addition.
It's mostly a joke. I think the big issue, from memory, isn't complexity but an almost obnoxious counter-intuitiveness. Like Armor Class. Everywhere else in life, big number is gooder, smaller number is badder. It's not complex to invert that, it's just annoying.
I love sports, but let's just talk about something else then. I love hiking in the woods. What do you do for fun?
Hey pal, Steph Curry’s 3 point shots are a thing of rare beauty. - yeah the implied irritation is feigned for comic effect but those shots really are somethin’
But more seriously the counting and summing neurons approach to Utilitarian ends - to non true believers at least - seems pretty vacuous too.
You’re just not that interested in sports and that’s just fine.
I don't know what sort of sports talk you have been listening to, but one possibility is that the participants are (consciously or unconsciously) aiming at goals that are different from the goals you typically aim at in conversation. For example, it may be more important for the participants to express (and thus share) their enthusiasm for the sport in general, for a particular team, player, or game, than to state true facts and make "good" arguments (evaluated according to the standards of truth-seeking dialogue).
This is a very good point. When two people are talking about the Super Bowl, if you squint, it kind of sounds like a thoughtful argument with a lot of evidence, but upon further inspection it doesn’t hold.
Do you have a specific example of what sounds dumb?
I don't follow sports at all, but when I do hear guys like Bill Simmons and Klosterman talk nba or football, they sound more like geeks than idiots. Maybe it's just the case that the appeal is so wide, idiots like it too.
I think Quiop got it. It’s a type of conversation that has the qualities of a sophisticated argument (e.g.: data), but which is in fact entertainment. It’s the contrast that does it for me.
Is the spelling bee dumb? Math olympiad? They are involved practicing solutions to known problems.
That doesn't seem like a phenomenon that would be unique to sports.
It seems attorneys are still valuable given Scott is happy to pay the normal rate, but for other services he often requests the service provider give freely. Or maybe I am misremembering.
If you're gonna call someone out, maybe cite at least one example?
My mistake, it was meant as a comment on the relative value of the legal profession vs others, not as a callout. To your question, I thought I'd seen a few volunteer requests in previous open threads, but it seems I was misremembering. Thanks for the thought provocation.
No you're not misremembering. Scott does ask for help on a volunteer basis occasionally. Most recently in open thread 310:
"I‘m looking for an EEG expert, a TCMS expert, and a very-finicky-high-level statistics expert to (on a volunteer basis) review certain ACX Grants proposals."
Just to be clear, I don't think there's anything at all wrong with him doing that.
Agreed that there’s nothing wrong it. I suspect the difference is that there he’s looking for volunteers for a charitable project, which he happens to be organizing. Here, he probably feels more like he’s asking on his own behalf. If it’s for a similar project that pours cold water on my theory, but there’s also a difference in norms around what people expect to volunteer for vs what they expect to get paid for (and our intuitions on that are fuzzy).
Additionally the "tax benefits of charitable giving" are a real quantity of money directly in his pocket. Of course I am happy to pay someone 200 dollars to save me 20,000 dollars - while asking for a volunteer for some nebulously profitable project makes a lot of sense.
Thanks! :)
I helped Scott deal with DNS issues and he offered to pay me. So I don't think that's true.
Cool, thanks for the correction :)
Does anyone have suggestions for resources to learn just enough C++ to port a sketch/simple library from the old Arduino uno AVR architecture to work on either an ESP8266 based board or an arduino R4 board (yes I realize that these are two different chips with two different architectures, I don't need both, just either/or)?
My current programming experience is all in either R or python, and my small amount of googling hasn't turned up anything that seems really accessible to learning C++, especially as relevant to these micro-controllers.
Learning a low-level language like C or C++ from a background like Python is mostly a process of subtraction, you need to unlearn many things that Python made you learn to take for granted.
C++ is a rather gigantic language, so I would first attempt to learn C if I were in your shoes. In my experience with embedded programmers, people don't tend to even come close to firing all of C++'s many blazing guns anyway, they mostly just use a style colloquially called "C with classes": C, with methods and classes and maybe a tiny smattering of templates.
The resource I can recommend is the K&R book, The C Programming Language. It's a masterpiece of technical and pedagogical writing, and it invented the "Hello World" tradition. It really is THE book if you want to learn C, any other resource is more or less commentary. You can just write "Learning C" in YouTube and clicking any hour+ video, but K&R is literally by the language's designers and first implementors, can't ask for more.
To give you an extremely condensed view of the road ahead, to understand C you need to understand that:
1- Superficially and syntactically, C is not whitespace obsessed like Python. You can write millions of characters of code all in one line if you want, though obviously you don't.
2- Variables in C aren't "open-minded" as those in Python, by which I mean that the language demands that you MUST annotate each variable you use with exactly one type (exactly once). The type of a variable - in C - is the shape of the memory region that corresponds to that variable when the program runs.
3- Variables in C are FIRST declared THEN assigned. You declare a variable by stating its type followed by its name like so ~~ type name; ~~. Then you can assign to that name as you do in Python. You can also assign a variable as you're declaring it like this ~~ type name = value; ~~ and this is sometimes distinguished from any assignment and called "initialization".
4- When you define functions in C, you have to give them a "signature". A signature is declaring (A) What will the function accept as arguments (B) What type will the function return. Most of the time you do this before you even write the function's code, sometimes in a different file. That is, most C code is written in units of 2 files: .h file and .c file. The .h files define the "interface", just the names of your functions, what arguments do they take and what types they are, and what return types do they have. The .c files define the actual implementation, the actual code of those functions. Unlike Python, C doesn't have named arguments, keyword arguments or default values for arguments. I think it has variable length arguments but I'm not sure.
5- Types in C are either primitive or composite. Primitive types are all possible combinations of {const}, {signed, unsigned} and {char, short, int, long, long long, float, double}. Meaning you can pick one out of each of those 3 sets of keywords and come up with a valid primitive type. Those are all numerical types with different ranges (numbers they can represent) and arithmetic behavior. There is no Boolean type in C, although the language treats any expression that evaluates to 0 (of any variation of the above types) as false and all else as true.
6- Composite types in C are systematic ways to create new types from existing types. For example, given any 2 types T and Z:
6-a- ~~ T x[n]; ~~ declares a variable x of type "n-length array of underlying type T ''. An array is a fixed-length region of memory, it's homogenous, it can only store several values of its underlying type T and nothing else. You can obtain the ith element of an array by an indexing notation resembling Python ~~ x[i] ~~, although forget any indexing magic Python may have taught you like slicing and negative indexing. Arrays must either declare their length explicitly in the program's text or be explicitly initialized with values like so ~~ int x[] = {1,2,3} ~~. Arrays do not change size as the program executes. You're entirely responsible for only providing valid indices when you index an array, indexing an array with an invalid index like -1 or a number equal to or greater than its length is a Big Problem and something that a C compiler will all too happily translate into nonsense for you. Arrays can be nested to any dimension like so ~~ int x[n][m][k][l][s]; ~~, that's a five-dimensional array, you need 5 indices to specify an element. Of course, it's your responsibility to never index beyond the end of the array in any dimension.
6-b- ~~ struct MyStruct { T x; Z y;}; ~~ defines a new type which is a heterogeneous region of memory containing FIRST x THEN y (possibly with some nonsense "padding" in between x and y, and possibly after y). Accessing struct elements is not via indices, but by name, you write s.x and s.y to access the x and y members of a struct instance s. Just declaring a struct definition alone doesn't create any actual data in memory, you have to "instantiate it" by declaring a variable of its type like so "struct MyStruct s".
6-c- ~~ union MyUnion { T x; Z y;}; ~~ declares an unsafe union, a region of memory which is as big as the biggest of T and Z. It can hold EITHER an x of type T, OR a y of type Z, but not both together. You can use it much like a struct, except its members are mutually-exclusive, if you put inside a data of type T, never retrieve or ask about the data of type Z, you're entirely responsible for paying attention to this because if you don't a C compiler will happily generate code that interprets the raw bits of a value of type T as a value of type Z or vice versa (This is called type-punning and *sometimes* is a valid use case).
6-d- Unlike arrays, structs, or unions, Enums do not have an "underlying type(s)". They are just human-readable names whose only possible job in existence is to be distinguishable symbols from one another. Use them like thus ~~ enum DoorState { OPEN, CLOSED, OPENISH;}; ~~ DoorState is thus a type that you can give to a variable and whose only valid values are OPEN, CLOSED, and OPENISH, and the only possible operations that make sense on variables and values of type DoorState is comparison via == and != operators.
NOTE: Enums, in one of the dumber design decisions in C (not the dumbest though), are equivalent to defining integer constants of the same names you give to the enum values and giving them values from 0 upwards. This means you can do some nonsense like adding and subtracting enums from/to each other or integers. This, of course, doesn't mean anything most of the time. C++ later rectified this and other warts with enum classes.
7- Memory is hard. Memory is the hardest thing about C. Memory is why you shouldn't use C for anything but embedded (no, not OS development). More specifically, dynamic memory is hard. There are (simplifying a little bit) three possible memory areas to store data in : static storage, the stack, and the heap. Static storage is for global variables, it's an area where you put things and never remove them. Global variables live for the entire duration of the program execution. The stack is great for variables that "live" as long as the current executing function, as long as the variables you're declaring will NOT outlive ( be needed for more than) the duration of the function invocation you're currently in, declare it as a local variable in that function and call it a day. The third category is where the devil lies : memory of unpredictable duration or size. Memory that doesn't live as long as the entire program, but does outlive the current function. This is where you need "allocators", functions like "malloc" and "free" that request memory from the underlying OS (if there's an OS at all) or runtime and give you that memory back in the form of pointers. If that doesn't make sense, it's okay, it doesn't make sense to very smart people too, you will mostly get used to it. In my experience Embedded Development tries to avoid Dynamic Memory anyway, Arduino is something of an exception because it offers dynamic memory.
8- Pointers are variables that can hold memory addresses (which are just integers. nothing more and nothing less). They are used in C for 2 related reasons : to pass by reference, and to serve as iterators for data structures.
9- Passing by reference is when you want 2 different functions to share the exact same piece of data but you don't want to copy that piece of data, it's a bit like sharing a link to a document instead of sharing the entire document. Sharing a document is pass-by-value or a "deep copy", it creates an entirely new document that you can read and modify (and modification won't reflect in the original document). Sharing a link to a document, however, still leaves us with one document, just 2 readers/writers of it. A pointer can serve as a "link" to a piece of data because it's a memory address, it tells you where a memory region is. Sharing a link is sometimes called "pass-by-reference" or "shallow-copying". But be careful, C++ added YET ANOTHER way of passing arguments that is not like passing pointers.
10- Iterators are variables that you can repeatedly move from a start position to an end position. They're used when you're processing an aggregate data structure like an array or a linked list or a tree. Pointers can serve as iterators.
11- Pointers can be difficult to understand and infuriating to work with, don't be mad if you don't understand them at first. You almost certainly WILL NOT understand them at first, keeping going.
12- Plenty of other things: typedefs, preprocessor and preprocessor hackery (stringification of tokens and token-pasting), void pointers to pass opaque structures, function pointers to pass callbacks, bit-slicing structures, const pointers vs. pointers to const, string literals and null terminators, gotos, just to name a few. But all of those are more or less esoteric, if you understand types, pointers, and dynamic memory, you have a pretty damn good grasp of what C is all about.
Feel free to ask for my email if you want to ask further.
(Hey, it's good to see you back! Even if you only drop in to explain programming esoterica. (K&R is not the only programming book I still have, but it will be the last one I keep, after all the rest have been recycled.))
Thanks for your very kind words Moon. The reason I was keeping radio silence the last month or so is that (1) Substack sucks, my commenting ability was still locked after being unbanned (2) I'm getting increasingly angry and distressed by the continuous massacres in Gaza, and I increasingly perceive people who call it a just war or a self-defense to be justifying and approving those massacres, hindering my ability to respond in civility.
I thought I might use (1) to limit the damage of (2) by taking a time off, it worked even in the face of many Pro-Israel comments in previous middle east sub threads, what warmed my heart each time is that there always Pro-Palestine people to shoot back. But OP nerd-sniped me and kind of ruined it. I made a new email and made a substack account of the same pseudo-banned name to post it.
Anyway, many thanks for asking about me, and yes K&R deserves a spot in the library that will be all what's left of humanity.
> my commenting ability was still locked after being unbanned
Huh. I guess that's another substack bug? :-(
Sigh, at this point it might be easier to start counting what fucking works in Substack instead of what doesn't.
Very impressive. 👏
You could try learning enough C (or Java or C#) to be able to modify small programs. Some dialects of C++ have diverged enough from their ancestor that they're almost unrecognizable, but once you know the basics of a C-like language, that might give you enough to be able to follow the error messages, look up potential solutions, and alter them to fit your case.
(repost from last thread)
I just talked to someone I know who's a long time employee of the CDC (nothing COVID related). He said that the leadership was clearly clueless and that morale was low and that everyone he knew who was old enough to retire was planning to retire soon. I'd heard him gripe about work before, but never anything like this, and it was pretty depressing to hear.
Most of it sounded like regular office politics and bureaucratic nonsense, but at one point he also said "It's clearly coming from the White House". And he's a Democrat, so this isn't just Gray Man Bad either.
What's demoralizing them specifically? Just incompetent appointees? More incompetent than usual?
I know the most demoralizing thing for most federal employees is the return to office initiative led by the Chief of Staff. He owns a lot of commercial properties so federal employees cynically believe that's the only reason he ended telework in the DC area.
A lot of it was feeling (or even being told outright) that their work wasn't valued by leadership, but he definitely complained about return to office as well, and how it's a thing HR is pushing with no evidence. He also said it's not actually enforced anyway. They're nominally going into the office three days a week right now, but a lot of senior employees live in other states and only occasionally visit the office, so noone bothers to actually go to the office. But they still can't hire remote candidates because reasons, even when they get a really promising candidate.
I would like (?) to hear more details as well.
Many Thanks!
Perhaps the peak woke really is over. Recently I have watched two movies with politically incorrect themes, which a few years ago probably would have been career-ending for anyone who participated. Both movies were produced in 2023.
Lady Ballers -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30216176/ -- is a quite simplistic jab at its political opponents, but there are a few funny moments. The funniest part of the movie is probably this screen: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30216176/mediaviewer/rm3699133185/ Everything else is mostly predictable.
American Fiction -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23561236/ -- is a great movie that I would really recommend to everyone, regardless of their politics. The main topic is still political, but more nuanced; and other things happen there, too. Still, liking this film too much and discussing it where woke people can hear you could get you in some trouble.
>Lady Ballers
This is literally a movie made by Ben Shapiro ffs
No "reputable" production company would touch this thing with a ten foot pole
>American Fiction
This a pro-black movie, that's the entire point of the movie and it's critical of white liberals, not for being too liberal but for being too *white*
If these are your great examples for 'peak woke being over', then peak woke is nowhere near over.
And I mean, you seem to have only the most superficial understand of what 'woke' really is about.
Involuntarily, I have seen quite a bit of Lady Ballers and it is so so so bad. Like to the point where they had to be trying to make it bad. And it's not the premise either, Juana Man is the same movie but actually good (well, for what it's trying to be - a cheap popcorn comedy for kids not Casablanca). If a major studio had produced it, i'd have figured it was for a tax write off.
Maybe in America. But it’s just getting started in much of the world.
I wonder if some of the heat in the movement came from job losses and disenfranchisement associated with the GFC and the slow recovery? Worsening economic conditions in democracies tend to produce populist movements.
Wokeness peaked in the late 10s during a period of economic growth and low unemployment.
That’s also when Trump, Brexit and Xi happened. These things take time. There were also a string of social policy victories for the left around that time (particularly gay marriage) which probably acted as outlets for the same emotional drives as wokeness (in addition to their more important effects).
Man, what's the conservative obsession with not wanting to eat bugs? I have literally never heard the topic come up in left-leaning circles, and yet it constantly comes up as a talking point from conservatives that the liberals are trying to force everyone to eat bugs. ...What?
Also, they do realize that shrimp are basically big underwater insects, right?
I believe its based on one comment made by a junior member of the WEF. Likewise, pods.
A conservative person I know refuses to eat shrimps because they are basically bugs.
So yeah. Some definetely do realize that.
There's literally hundreds of articles from mainstream news etc. sites talking about this. Google it.
>Also, they do realize that shrimp are basically big underwater insects, right?
Ah yes, this tired old talking point.
Shrimps live in salt water and are deshelled and deveined before eating
Land-based insects live in dirt and poop and are consumed whole
It's not remotely comparable
Is there anything weirder about eating bugs than eating amaranth or soy or high fructose corn syrup or sausage or any of the other miracle foods that have joined our diet? Presumably no one is talking about ending food sanitation, so the fact that they live in dirt and poop is not in any way different from any plant, and "they are consumed whole" is just false about nearly anything in modern industrialized food culture.
Of course, shrimp and lobster are bugs ... well arthropods or whatever, but lower forms of life.
This comes down from Klaus Schwab and his organization the WEF or World Economic Forum. Klaus and his buddies have a vision of what they call 'The Great Reset' which involves (in their words) a change over from State-Capitalism to Stake-Holder-Capitalism. Which means that we would live in a world under a global governing body. These people, let's refer to them as Globalists, because they seek a global governance system, these people have proposed that some of us wealthy capitalist citizens are living too well, and we need to share some, or a lot of our wealth with the poorer people of the Earth. The WEF Globalists have proposed after The Great Reset, which is an economic reset which they are designing, in which we will all use a CBDC or Central Bank Digital Currency, which is a non-crypto Block Chain currency which they tightly control. After the reset, we won't own any property, and they've said this straight up, the people will "Own nothing and be happy." And other such great things as "the people will eat bugs." But I don't think they mean shrimp and lobster.
So basically, if you listen to Klaus Schwab's actual words, he says some very disturbing stuff, and his dressing like a Sith Lord doesn't help me to feel better about living under a non-democratic Corporate led global government.
If you hear globalists saying people are "living too well" then you aren't listening to them. They are saying that people are "living too poorly", and the goal isn't to make things worse for people, but to make things better for people.
The globalists are saying the people should own nothing, fly only one short hop only as often as every three years, only purchase three articles of clothing every year, live in high density pods, give up meat, eat bugs instead.
If we do this, it will make the weather gooder.
I've never heard globalists say it. This sounds more like de-growthers, who are usually peak localists. Globalists usually believe in capitalism and open borders.
> these people have proposed that some of us wealthy capitalist citizens are living too well, and we need to share some, or a lot of our wealth with the poorer people of the Earth
Also, what EA's are proposing.
It's catchy. "I will not eat the bugs, I will not live in the pod" is shorter and more fun to say that "I am not willing to sacrifice my standards of living for your misguided degrowth agenda that might actually be leading us to civilizational collapse (due to rapidly declining fertility) faster than global warming"
...Do you actually think declining fertility has anything to do with the "degrowth agenda", or are you just steelmanning their viewpoint? Even if we assume that people in this country genuinely cared about it, they sure as hell don't care about it in East Asia, and the fertility crisis is even worse there. There's almost certainly bigger elements at play.
I think probably what's actually going on is that there's a bunch of stuff in modern life that reduces reproduction in America. There's people all over the political spectrum who are noticing this and want to change it, but they don't know what to do and aren't very organized. And then there's a blob of people on the left who have negative views of humanity and modern life and various other stuff, and so are happy about the decline in reproduction. I don't think they're twirling their virtual mustaches, or (mostly) deliberately encouraging the trend (although for all X, there are wackos who actively support X). But whenever anyone tries to implement something to improve reproduction, they usually come up with reasons why it would be bad. Mostly because the policies causing the problems were implemented to do things they wanted, so of course they don't want to get rid of those policies. It can look and act like a concerted effort to cause population decline, even if it isn't actually one.
> And then there's a blob of people on the left who have negative views of humanity and modern life and various other stuff, and so are happy about the decline in reproduction.
All other things being equal, a natural decline in population is the opposite of the Repugnant Conclusion -- there's more to go around for everybody.
Except people, and the creative products of people? I'm not really equipped for modeling all of human civilization in a blog comment, but I think what you mentioned only holds if one views humans as consuming from a fixed pool of resources.
a) But it's human life (=time=labor) that makes those resources available, and so decreasing the amount of human life also decreases the amount of resources available. And if there are efficiency gains at scale, then the more people we have, the less of everyone's life needs to be devoted to resource production. To take an example from current news, there are very few people who can run a semiconductor fabrication facility, and that entire process sits on top of an enormous pyramid of human activity. How many fewer people would there have to be, before that pyramid becomes unsustainable, before there aren't enough talented people, or enough spare resources, to make it worthwhile to make the parts that make computers?
b) A lot of what humans "consume" is directly the product of other human life. Art, food, education, love. The fewer people we have, the fewer brilliant artists and writers we have, etc. More generally, what makes human life worthwhile? Whatever it is, there will be less of it. Any argument for a decline in population needs to be based on the unsustainability of the current system, and the long-term utilitarian benefits of a lower population which can sustain itself for longer, otherwise the argument can be applied over and over until the last human alive commits suicide.
I would say that the "degrowth agenda" is largely about pushing westerners (especially non-European westerners) into the same sort of living conditions that already exist (for other reasons) in Asian countries. Live in apartments, travel by public transport, et cetera.
Degrowth probably isn't the right word, but it's definitely a thing.
So it isn't about declining populations?
There is a simple argument that if populations continue to grow, there will be less of some resources to go round -- but someone who points that out might merely be extrapolating a trend, not foisting a plan on people.
The latter, but also, while I don't think it's the main driver, I believe "cultural elites"' general sympathy towards those ideas is a significant hindrance to a more honest and clear-sighted addressing of the issue.
I can't help but notice that your first paragraph is "I have literally never heard of anyone trying to persuade people to eat bugs" and your second paragraph is "why don't you eat bugs, you big dummy"
As others have noted, there's the occasional flurry of articles about "You should all eat bugs". I believe you when you say that nobody in left-leaning circles talks about it, this is more one of those things that's coming directly down the Davos-to-Guardian pipeline without the involvement of the left. If I were cynical, I'd say that your involvement comes later -- first they get the right worked up about it and _then_ the left starts to support it reflexively.
As for why conservatives talk about it so much... well, it's just a perfect illustration of how things work, in the conservative world view. A constant stream of awful new stuff that "they" want to force us to accept for our supposed own good. A constant stream of good old stuff that "they" want to take away. A constant stream of bizarrely uncritical news articles popping up about how "thing is good actually regardless of what those backward hicks might think". Whether it's paper straws that fall apart, or destroying our low-density suburbs to accommodate the teeming hordes of the third world, there's always a new battle we're losing.
Eating bugs isn't actually a current concern, it's a progressive issue from the 2040s that accidentally fell into the 2020s. But wait and see.
I really don't care about the environmental aspect of it, I just think that it's stupid that people are this upset about the prospect of eating bugs. Food is food. If it tastes bad, then it's perfectly fine to complain about that, but there's no reason to not at least try it. Maybe you'll like it.
Honestly, it just pisses me off when people immediately reject things without even trying them because it's "gross". Grow up.
"Honestly, it just pisses me off when people immediately reject things without even trying them because it's "gross". Grow up."
Some people like eating shit. Maybe it's infantile of me and a refusal to grow up, but I'm not going to try eating shit to give it a try first and yes, I continue to think that's gross.
This argument also applies to "but why do you think skinning cats alive is gross, at least give it a try first".
Actually it's quite common across all cultures for people to dislike food that they weren't raised on. It can be very noticeable when you get together 2 groups of adults from different cultures (say, Midwest American and Cantonese Chinese), and they both try each other's food, and are unenthusiastic, and afterwards want to go somewhere where they can get "real food". They even use the same phrasing, independently, in different languages!
Of course, this doesn't apply to all people, but it's a pattern.
I think it's a function of cultural/biological evolution. Eating weird stuff 10,000 years ago was a great way to poison yourself, hence why picky eaters exist in the first place, and why cultures like Judaism and Islam developed these really intricate rules for what its adherents are allowed to eat and how it has to be prepared. Western cultures still have a lot of taboos about eating certain kinds of meat like dogs, cats, horses, rodents, etc. Eating bugs is an even further step out on the weirdness scale.
> "If it tastes bad, then it's perfectly fine to complain about that, but there's no reason to not at least try it."
I'm very happy to eat "alt-protein" if it's *really* being used as a technology to save the planet and/or develop undersea/Antarctic/space-colony tier food supply chains.
I'm not very happy to eat "alt-protein" if the actual motivation of the people selling it to me is that it's cheaper to supply me with reconstituted-cockroach slop than it is with a nice steak, with the profits going directly into the Davosoise's pockets.
I suspect it's the latter, and therefore it doesn't matter how good it tastes, one does not fund one's enemies.
Rejecting specific foods seems like a childish thing, but only because being forced to eat specific foods is also a childish thing.
The tone of articles like https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/08/if-we-want-to-save-the-planet-the-future-of-food-is-insects is not "Hey this is interesting, there's new foods coming on the market which you might like to try", it is "YOU WILL EAT BUGS IN THE FUTURE TO PAY FOR YOUR WESTERN SINS"
And you're doing it again, you're mixing the message of "Nobody is trying to force you to eat bugs, you paranoid weirdo" with "Just hurry up and eat the bugs, you child"
> you will own nothing and be happy
> you will live in a pod
> you will eat ze bugs
are references to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, and their promotion of lowering carbon emissions, eating less meat, welcoming immigrants, giving up property rights, etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161125135500/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is
https://twitter.com/wef/status/983378870819794945
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You'll_own_nothing_and_be_happy
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-will-not-eat-the-bugs
Lowering Carbon Emissions? That's an obviously bad thing??
No, it's a good thing ceteris paribus. There is however a cost to pay in living standards.
> Also, they do realize that shrimp are basically big underwater insects, right?
Technically, crustaceans, the cousins of insects.
They share a phylum but not a class. It's equivalent to "why not eat panda? You already eat other vertebrates"
I might be willing to give panda a try, I have no particular sentimental attachment to the notion of "they're so cute" (even if I'm glad there's going to be a new Kung Fu Panda movie).
I did try real (not tinned) tuna recently and managed to give myself a dose of scombroid poisoning, so I'm going to keep on sticking with "foods I know already" even if that makes me a big cry-baby:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scombroid_food_poisoning
I think related to pill bugs (doodle bugs?) Which I would not want to eat.
There was a bit of a top-down push from the left a few years ago, but it didn't catch on, and now the only people who remember are the ones who enjoy pointing it out to mock it.
FWIW I recently saw a comment from (a boringly center-right liberal) person on Finnish twitter who said she was *literally* involved in trying to market insect products and that they did customer-oriented stuff for a short while, saw that no-one's interested (predictably, this isn't the first insect-eating push I remember) and then pivoted to catering solely to their *true* market - insects as animal feed.
I never got the sense that it's "the left" trying to push bugs, or that the idea was pushing them to normies, as the memes suggest. The bug product push was done by enterprising up-and-comers in the food industry; the target, before the animal feed pivot, was... hipsters, I suppose. Hipsters daring other hipsters to eat ze bugs, basically.
Interesting. That does sound like the sort of thing I could mistake for being a political push.
When you say "the left", do you mean the same people who were pushing amaranth a few years earlier for the same reasons?
I hadn't heard of any "push" for amaranth, but then, I live under a rock. My impression is that amaranth came and went as a health-food fad, unlike the way quinoa came and stayed and can no longer be called a "fad"?
I meant more of what appeared to be a concerted media effort by various prominent left-wing news outlets, and various people who are plugged in to very trendy left-wing circles. But it didn't last very long, and I don't recall much more about it.
Yeah, my impression is that these things are mostly just flashes in the pan, and they either stick or disappear. But when the flash in the pan was about crickets, it made for fun talking points, because some people got to complain about how disgusting the idea of eating insects might be, and other people got to make fun of them for being closed-minded. It's the toxoplasma of rage idea - if it makes for conflict, it will get a lot more discussion, even if the underlying push is precisely the same.
I think it quietly disappeared in part because it didn't mesh with the veganism push that came in the coming years. The left-coded groups (environmental, vegan, commie) began to overlap more in the social media
Even saying it was a push is a bit much. All I'm finding Googling it is some scientists saying that it would be more efficient and less environmentally damaging to farm insects instead of traditional livestock (which is true) and a few articles asking people to consider alternative food sources. And somehow that spiraled into a conspiracy theory that governments are trying to force people to eat bugs.
I thought I would find something on Snopes, but while I didn't find anything directly about the subject, I did find this hilarious article. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swedish-scientist-cannibalism/
Saying it was a push *or* top-down *or* broadly "from the left" is a bit much. A few years ago there was a brief fad in some of the weirder left circles (actual weird left circles, not the "Davos billionaires who are also somehow Stalinists" circles that exist in terminally online right-wingers brains) for bug-eating advocacy. They went on about it for a few months on Twitter; the reaction from the broader left was a mixture of repulsion, indulgent chuckling, and outright mockery; and everybody soon moved on.
Well, almost everybody...
Oh it was true of Davos as well. They produced a webpage on it but it’s just one speech I think.
The reaction to Davos is weird. The right thinks that the billionaires are commies, the left think it’s conspiratorial to be concerned about the power of billionaires over politicians in this specific case - where the politicians mix with billionaires in an elite resort, but not in the general case.
My impression of the left's impression of the right's impression of Davos is more like "it's conspiratorial and dumb to interpret the nonsense peddled by the billionaires at Davos as communistic, because it's a lot of things but it isn't that." (You'll just have to take my word for it that leftists are not huge fans of being told to walk to work by people who flew halfway across the world on private jets to tell them that, either)
Do you genuinely not remember this? From the inside perspective, memory holing is a common weapon and I'm quite used to hearing people swear blind that X never happened and we're all being silly. I have to assume that on some level they're being insincere.
This pattern matches to that - *everyone* was talking about eating crickets not even that long ago. I've been offered bbq crickets and whatnot on multiple occasions. I know people whose cricket protein powder companies are still getting new investment.
Either we must live in very different bubbles indeed or something else is going on.
It'd be good to hear an objective, non -accusatory explanation for this, beyond "motivated reasoning" and "lockstep thinking", which is currently the best I got.
I am interested in the phenomenon here, and not calling you deceitful.
This is really no different from a few years earlier when they were talking about everyone eating amaranth, and a few years before that when they were talking about everyone eating fermented foods, and a few years before that when they were talking about everyone eating soy. The search for globally efficient food sources is a continual one, and there are new trends, some of which catch on and others of which don't. Some people get the idea that force is involved, but it'll just be price - mass-produced X will be cheap enough for people to want to eat it, or it won't.
Yeah, it could have been just another health food fad... Except I don't recall seeing bugs in any of my major-lefty-city grocery stores, not even the worker-owned co-op or the customer-owned co-op. And there was a definite tone to the stories, if I can trust my memory, that was less "this is the new superfood" and more "if you want to be on the right side of history, you need to stop eating meat and start eating bugs". Very tied into the culture war.
We live in very different bubbles indeed.
> *everyone* was talking about eating crickets not even that long ago. I've been offered bbq crickets and whatnot on multiple occasions.
...Is this a Bay Area thing? Because it really sounds like it. Like, obviously there are going to be some weird trend chasers in entrepreneur circles, but they're really not representative of wider culture.
Not a Bay Area person, and yeah a few years back this thing about "crickets and insects will be the protein source of the future" was being talked about in pop science news.
You can order chocolate covered mealworms off Amazon UK:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/CRUNCHYCRITTERS/page/50CCDA49-FD8C-4C63-9FFE-6247C2714B58?ref_=ast_bln
https://www.crunchycritters.com/about-us/
This bunch are even trying marketing tactics like renaming them "land prawns", even more of a reason for me to go "The Torah is right!"
Nope, I'm in the UK, and out in the barbarous midlands at that. This stuff was genuinely everywhere.
obligatory scott post.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/i-will-not-eat-the-bugs
I get the bubble phenomenon. What I'm confused about is that the sources I remember this coming from definitely aren't in my own bubble. Literally mere comments away, thefance's link leads to mention of a Guardian article (left wing bubble) and it's being talked about in an essay by Scott Alexander (all of our bubbles!)
So I'm still thinking it's pretty likely that we *have* all seen this stuff. Whether for some reason right-wing people paid more attention and left-wingers let it slide out of their minds, I don't know. Maybe the right wing laughed about it on forums that left wing people don't visit, meaning we held on to the original "non-politicised" articles for longer by associating them with later conversations?
But that still doesn't explain the flat, uncompromising "that never happened" response I occasionally get from people about some things. After all, if you don't remember it, you can't remember that it was an in-group loss, so why the sudden confidence?
I dunno. Short of wacky explanations like belonging-induced self hypnosis, I got nothing better to offer.
As I recall, it was one of those things where the NYT and a few other outlets published some stories at approximately the same time, implying that this was the wave of the future and the environmental and ethically responsible choice, etc. But it didn't get traction, and so they quietly dropped it and no one talked about it again, except in certain very left-wing places where it's treated as an obviously good idea that the world simply isn't ready for yet. But my memory could be faulty on this one.
(Huh, autocorrect gave me "left-wrong". I'm not even sure which way that cuts.)
"Also, they do realize that shrimp are basically big underwater insects, right?"
Why do you think I don't like them or prawns? No, I don't have allergies, I just do not like the big bugs.
Seriously, the Torah got it right on this one. Listen to God, y'all.
As an atheist, I take the exact opposite approach. I like shrimp (and prawns), and I've tried fried crickets/grasshoppers several times (though these have been hit-or-miss, but I really liked one version with paprika). I still want to try mealworms and beetles-on-a-half-shell (or whatever they're called), but there's no restaurant in my area that serves them. Also, I tried Korean fried silkworm pupae once, but unfortunately I could only get the canned version, so they basically tasted like every other canned product. One day I'd love to go to Korea and try the real thing (it's a popular street food there).
The pupae are the blandest food I had in Korea, almost completely flavourless. Probably they'd be OK with some seasoning, but for some reason they serve them unseasoned. So maybe you didn't miss out on much by having the canned version.
I has a sad :-( But thank you for the info !
>I still want to try mealworms and beetles-on-a-half-shell (or whatever they're called), but there's no restaurant in my area that serves them.
Everything is online :-) https://www.edibleinsects.com/edible-insects-bugs/
Specifically re mealworms: https://www.edibleinsects.com/product/whole-roasted-mealworms-class-size/
Re the discussion in general:
a) Yes, I've seen insect protein foods show up in comments perhaps every few months or so (e.g. on Reddit)
b) Personally, I haven't tried them, but I'm not actively avoiding them either.
c) Re the shimp sub-discussion - um, aren't lobsters in the same category too? ( While they count as a luxury food today, they weren't always one... )
d) Insect foods sound politically like an offshoot of either vegan or low-animal-protein diets. "Diet for a Small Planet" ( vegan ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet by Frances Moore Lappé goes back to 1971, so this sort of suggestion (pressure?) is not recent.
I once had some really tasty crickets, I think they were Kung Pao style? But most things cooked that way are tasty. :-)
<mild snark>
>I think they were Kung Pao style? But most things cooked that way are tasty. :-)
I'd suggest avoiding the old fashioned recipe for Kung Pao software bugs. They tend to have a punch card aftertaste. :-)
</mild snark>
And occasionally lead to a "core dump". ;-)
Well, I guess that's a good, benign example of conservatism making people's lives worse for no reason. The prohibition of shellfish was a thing because people kept getting food poisoning from it, but now we know what things are safe to eat and how to eat them safely. And yet, blind adherence to tradition means people are forbidden from eating perfectly good food due to reasoning that stopped being relevant a long time ago.
Its a Yin & Yang thing.
Some people latch on to every new fad, or anything foreign as better and must be adopted, because The Europeans do it, thus it must be great. We call these people liberals, they want to try everything new.
Some people are stuck in their ways, they know how things work, they fear if things change they won't be able to adapt and may lose their status/wealth, etc.
Its also true, that younger people perceiving themselves NOT at the top of the status ladder seek to tear it up, burn it down, and hope to come out in a higher position in the new order. So younger people tend to be quite a bit more liberal. But once they've climbed a few rungs and increased their position, know how the system works, they become more conservative, i.e. loving the system.
So as Gerry Brown used to say, "if you paddle a canoe on only one side, you'll only go in circles." So its good to explore new things, but we need an active opposition to push back, with a result that we test if New Thing is the Best Thing, because sometimes that is not the case. There are often too many Fan Boys whose only goal is being a Fan Boy. I may be that crickets made into kibble are really tasty, and that I may like cricket-kibble ... but then again I may get very tired of cricket-kibble after a week of nothing but cricket-kibble.
So its good to have some balance, a Red Team vs Blue Team approach is often the best solution.
One thing that calling the Red Team conservatives obscures is that which side wants to change vs keep things the same depends on the issue.
As a conservative I fully agree with this take. Conservatism does sometimes make people's lives worse for no reason.
I'm a conservative not because conservatism is always right, but because it's sometimes right. I'm a believer in the Monte Carlo model of political progress, in which "progressives" generate possible changes at random, and then there's a back-and-forth between "progressives" and conservatives to figure out whether that change is actually a good idea or not, and then it either gets permanently adopted or not.
I generally choose to join this battle on the conservative side, because I think that it needs more help; at present we need to be more hesitant about adopting changes rather than less.
Devil's Advocate: almost nobody is made worse off for not eating bugs, and you can tell because very few cultures make use of insect protein, and the ones that do are mostly really poor. As ubiquitous as bugs are, the fact that so few cultures chose to cultivate them as a source of nutrition likely means they have low utility to the vast majority of people.
As for shellfish, well, yes, shrimp are delicious, but I would guess that the foregone utility has to be balanced against the in-group cohesion that is fostered among, say, Jews who keep kosher and participate in these collective acts of self-denial like not eating crab cake sandwiches.
Well, gentlemen, I don't care, God agrees with me on this, so you can all enjoy as many crunchy hairy beetle legs as you like, I'm sticking with identifiable animal parts 😁
"but now we know what things are safe to eat and how to eat them safely"
And yet I'm seeing, more than ever, "can I eat this fish? is this safe to eat? what about mercury levels? I don't eat Atlantic salmon because of x, y and z" articles and comments. None of this was around when I was younger and it was "fish on Friday", so it would seem that "what things are safe and how to eat them safely" is becoming a more, rather than less, restricted list of items.
It's a bit of a back-and-forth, sadly. Pork and shrimp are now safer to eat than they used to be, due to advancements in refrigeration technology, animal husbandry, and aquaculture. At the same time, fish are becoming unsafe to eat, due to the side-effects from these advancements. I sure wish someone told people "Thou Shalt Not Dump Mercury into the Water", but no one bothered...
<mild snark>
>Well, gentlemen, I don't care, God agrees with me on this, so you can all enjoy as many crunchy hairy beetle legs as you like, I'm sticking with identifiable animal parts 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_3:4
re John the Baptist's diet:
>and his meat was locusts and wild honey
</mild snark>
There does seem to be some discussion about what exactly the "locusts" were - the insects, or a plant?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_3:4
"John the Baptist's diet has been the centre of much discussion. For many years, the Greek: ἀκρίδες (akrides) was interpreted as referring not to locusts, the insect, but rather to the seed pods of the carob tree. But the Greek word is not used this way, and this notion is generally rejected today. Locusts are mentioned 22 other times in the Bible and all other mentions quite clearly refer to the insect. Locusts are still commonly eaten in Arabia. Eaten either raw or roasted they are quite nutritious and a source of many vitamins. While most insects were considered unclean under Mosaic law, Leviticus 11:22 specifically states that locusts are permitted. Portraying John the Baptist as eating seed pods rather than insects is possibly due to squeamishness about having such a revered figure eating insects and also a belief that a true ascetic should be completely vegetarian. What is meant by honey is also disputed. While bee honey was a common food in the area at the time, Jones believes that it refers to the tree gum from the tamarisk tree, a tasteless but nutritious liquid, rather than the honey made by bees."
But even the vegan altruists seem to be squeamish about insects and shrimp, as contributing to animal suffering:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Cd8wM4jZPnaAA8vwX/linkpost-why-pescetarianism-is-bad-for-animal-welfare-vox
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23639475/pescetarian-eating-fish-ethics-vegetarian-animal-welfare-seafood-fishing-chicken-beef-climate
"I’d be remiss not to mention shrimp, which are by far the most numerous individual animal species Americans eat, at over 120 per person per year on average. We have less evidence of shrimp sentience, but this is mostly due to our lack of research on it. Shrimp do respond differently to noxious stimuli when given painkillers, providing some evidence for their ability to experience pain. And shrimp farming involves some of the most horrifying routine practices, like eye ablation — the removal of eyestalks to induce female shrimp to spawn. Because so many individual shrimp need to be killed to make one serving of food, even a small chance that they’re sentient convinced me to stop eating them. Plus, trawling for wild shrimp has the highest bycatch rate in the commercial fishing industry — more than half of the animals caught are discarded."
So by sticking to cows instead of shrimp, I am in fact being a good effective altruist vegan(ish) and can now flaunt my moral superiority over the rest of you sea insect eaters! 😁
It would be a long meal, getting your nutrition from beetle's legs.
Isn't "Lady Ballers" only (legally) available on a right-wing news site?
Sorry, I wasn't aware of that. :D
Anyway, "American Fiction" is the one worth watching, and it seems to be mainstream.
I have a strong bias against watching any movie called "American [noun]".
It's not that these movies are bad, there's just so many of them. And a lot of them don't even seem specifically American.
Sorry, I wasn't complaining. Just trying to gesture at how, if it's not even being released in theaters, that's not a good sign? Yeah, merely being made in the first place is a feat. But (having only heard about the film last night through some weird coincidence) it seemed like a lot of the people involved had already been cancelled. So from that angle, maybe it's simply a sign that so many people have been cancelled that now they can fill out a film crew?
That's been my long term thought about cancellations in general. It seems obvious that if you cancel too quickly over things that can happen to anyone, you eventually cancel too many people to keep your movement going. When formerly obvious leftists like Glenn Greenwald are persona non grata, you're quickly going to be running low on people. The cancelled start talking to each other and realize that they can operate fine, and promptly uncancel (in terms of finding jobs and social interaction) themselves.
It's probably a terrible movie, but there one or two funny scenes - the one in the trailer about "day one of being a girl athlete" is clearly riffing off this:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CbBCPSmDhEM/?hl=en
My own opinion on Mulvaney is that he started this off as a comedy skit during lockdown, found out some people took it seriously, and went 'there's money in being professionally trans?' and got on board the bandwagon so he eventually ended up visiting the White House, and it was all gravy until the Bud Light thing.
The yard signs bit is also funny:
https://store.dailywire.com/products/in-this-house-posters
"peak woke really is over"
Well never say never and all that, but wokism (wokeism?) has definitely peaked. Though as Scott has pointed out that does not mean "is declining" but rather more like "has stopped increasing and maybe will slide slowly back". So I prefer to say currently that it has plateaued which seems more accurate IRL in "blue" America where I live and work.
(Can't personally say anymore regarding mainstream social media.)
Culture wars don't really die, they just get replaced by a different front of the culture wars. Back in the 2000s, Atheism vs Religion was everything, and yet it's completely forgotten today.
Not remotely comparable.
"atheism" never achieved institutional purchase to 1% of the degree LGBT and race issues have today. Atheism was never "everything". Companies were not trying to hire as many atheists as possible, there was never 'atheist pride week', there were never corporate sponsored atheism riots around the country.
And racial politics has been growing since at least the civil rights era (with ebbs and flows).
Atheism was a flash in the pan. There's no evidence whatsoever that race and LGBT politics are going away in the near to mid future. 60+ year cultural trends tend not to reverse overnight (without political revolution).
"there was never 'atheist pride week'"
Hasn't stopped a few dogged advocates from trying to establish their own holy day around Darwin Day:
https://richarddawkins.net/2016/03/the-darwin-day-lecture-2016-with-jerry-coyne-evolution-and-atheism-best-friends-forever/
(scroll down to see what T-shirt Jerry wants)
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/12/monday-hili-dialogue-451/
Yeah. When inflation slows down to normal levels, prices don't go back down, in fact they still keep going up.
Hopefully the silliness of Woke has just run its course. On to the next bit of silliness I imagine.
Nope, it's here to stay.
We may yet look back with nostalgia about "remember the good old days, when it was only 'there are an infinite number of genders' that people wanted us to accept?"
The next step is to get rigorously mathematical about gender. Rational genders are a subset of real genders, but it's also possible to add an imaginary gender component. And when taking about the infinite number of genders, it's important to specify which infinity we mean. (Although possibly the use of "aleph" needs to be decolonized.)
Oh, I do think there certainly are irrational genders out there (ducks before I can be decapitated for being offensive).
They may be irrational, but they're still real!
(I like this nomenclature waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much.)
Why stop at complex numbers? Could the Kinsey orientation scale be extended to quaternions? :-)
Lol
I imagine a sort of innoculation that happens over time with highly charged salient topics. Moderates / the majority will eventually hear all the key points, the echo chamber only holds them at bay for so long, for those who care to look. The effect might be mild though.
Here's just one vector: men and women in relationships tend to be slightly politically misaligned, and get their information from different sources, which will come up in discussion. IME that can also be true for couples where the man is decidedly Conservative, but in that case the woman is more likely to be pulled into that sphere.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GExi0JPWoAIdP9f?format=jpg&name=medium
Does anyone know any good studies on the effects of sex (rough or otherwise) during early pregnancy on the likelihood of miscarriage? I found this paper from 2012 saying that basically zero research has been done on topic, but maybe the past decade has changed that? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3310038/
I would imagine it depends 'how rough, and how early?' As pregnancy develops, the bump gets too big and low, and it's too awkward to try and even sit up, never mind do the jumping off wardrobes bit.
Can disconfirm!
Apologies for the wall of text. Attached is a host of studies about the impacts of sex on pregnancy, mostly focusing on late term and it's use to naturally induce labor, and so mostly aren't very helpful to you (I just copied them wholesale from the relevant page from the birthclass I'm currently enrolled in).
This is one of the cases though where the absence of evidence should be taken as evidence of absence (or at least evidence of a very small effect size). While there is a reduction in the amount of sex that pregnant people have, most people still have sex to some amount during pregnancy, especially in the early stages when some people might not even know they are pregnant yet. So, the fact that it is a common occurrence, yet we _don't_ have strong evidence that it is a risk factor puts some pretty hard limits on how large of a risk factor it could potentially be. So my prior on this would be that if it's a risk at all, it's a tiny one.
Bendvold, E., Gottlieb, C., Svanborg, K., et al. (1987). Concentration of prostaglandins in seminal fluid of fertile men. Int J Androl, 10(2), 463-469. Click here.
Bovbjerg, M. L., Evenson, K. R., Bradley, C., & Thorp, J. M. (2014). What started your labor? Responses from mothers in the third pregnancy, infection, and nutrition study. J Perinat Educ, 23(3), 155-164. Click Click here.
Carbone, L., De Vivo, V., Saccone, G., et al. (2019). Sexual Intercourse for Induction of Spontaneous Onset of Labor: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. J Sex Med. 16(11), 1787-1795. Click here.
Castro, C., Afonso, M., Carvalho, R., et al. (2014). Effect of vaginal intercourse on spontaneous labor at term: A randomized controlled trial. Arch Gynecol Obstet; 290, 1121-1125. Click here.
Chayen, B., Tejani, N., Verma, U. L., et al. (1986). Fetal heart rate changes and uterine activity during coitus. Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand, 65(8), 853-855. Click here.
Declercq, E. R., Sakala, C., Corry, M. P., & Applebaum, S. (2007). Listening to Mothers II: Report of the Second National U.S. Survey of Women’s Childbearing Experiences: Conducted January-February 2006 for Childbirth Connection by Harris Interactive(R) in partnership with Lamaze International. J Perinat Educ, 16(4), 15-17. Click here.
Foumane, P., Mboudou, E. T., Sama, J. D., et al. (2014). Sexual activity during pregnancy and prognosis of labor in Cameroonian women: a cohort study. J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med, 27(13), 1305-1308. Click here.
Kafaei Atrian, M., Sadat, Z., Rasolzadeh Bidgoly, M., et al. (2014). The association of sexual intercourse during pregnancy with labor onset. Iran Red Crescent Med J. 17(1), e16465. Click here. Free full text!
Kavanagh, J., Kelly, A. J., & Thomas, J. (2001). Sexual intercourse for cervical ripening and induction of labour. Cochrane Database Syst Rev(2), CD003093. Click here.
Kavanagh, J., Kelly, A. J. and Thomas, J. (2005). Breast stimulation for cervical ripening and induction of labour. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2005;3:CD003392. Click here.
Omar, N. S., Tan, P. C., Sabir, N., et al. (2013). Coitus to expedite the onset of labor: A randomized trial. BJOG;120, 338-345. Click here. Free full text!
Schaffir, J. (2006). Sexual intercourse at term and onset of labor. Obstet Gynecol, 107(6), 1310-1314. Click here.
Sekhavat, L & Akhavan Karbasi, S. (2010). Effect of coital activity on hastening onset of labor and prevention of postdate pregnancy. Iran J Obstet Gynecol Infertil. 13(2), 13–6. Click here.
Tan, P. C., Andi, A., Azmi, N., et al. (2006). Effect of coitus at term on length of gestation, induction of labor, and mode of delivery. Obstet Gynecol, 108(1), 134-140. Click here.
Tan, P. C., Yow, C. M., & Omar, S. Z. (2007). Effect of coital activity on onset of labor in women scheduled for labor induction: a randomized controlled trial. Obstet Gynecol, 110(4), 820-826. Click here.
Wow, thank you for all the great resources!
Apologies if you already know these things but it would be best if the attorney you consult:
-- is licensed in California because non-profit incorporation is governed by state laws not federal; and
-- is specifically experienced with non-profit stuff just like you'd consult a real estate attorney about property laws. etc. The federal tax-exempt related aspects in particular have plenty of nuance and in my experience many people including other types of attorneys harbor wrong assumptions/impressions about how it works.
I would note that questions regarding tax deductibility would (at least partially) involve federal law. The primary questions regarding whether a contribution is tax-deductible would be a federal law, not a state law question.
I was thinking there mainly of the different classifications of non-profit org for tax purposes as governed by federal statute and IRS regs. The great majority of people (including of those writing/editing for the media both traditional and not) assume that U.S. tax-exempt non-profit status is a simple yes/no binary.
Mi friend suffers from endometriosis and fibromyalgia, experiencing a lot of pain. Thanks to this blog, I have discovered low-hanging fruits for some issues like melatonin or silexan, and I was wondering if there is any simple way to alleviate the pain.
Simple? Sure, go on made-in-china.com and order some Gabapentin. That's a known fibro treatment that deals with pain. That or try THC-8, i recommend the gummies from https://www.binoidcbd.com/. I deal with fibro in my family as well so i have experience with this.
Now, these are only simple because they deal with the pain _only_, not any underlying condition. Figuring out what triggers the pain and how to eliminate that is much harder and i haven't figured out any good methods for that yet, sadly.
Thanks!
Anecdotally, I did have some pretty bad withdrawl symptoms when I tapered off Gabapentin about a year ago. My entire body hurt constantly for a couple weeks. ...I actually didn't mind it that much, since it was nice to feel something for once, but I'm sure it's much worse when combined with "real" pain. I was on Gabapentin for almost a decade before quitting, so that also might've had something to do with it.
That's actually useful info for me, thank you!
No problem. I should note that that I wasn't even taking it for pain, I was taking it with SSRI/SNRIs because for some reason it also negates the anxiety-inducing side effects of those drugs. Nobody seems to know why, It Just Works™. Funnily enough, most of the pets at the local animal shelter are taking a mix of fluoxetine and gabapentin, the same combination that I used to be on.
Anecdotally, an elimination diet might be worth trying.
Yeah, she has a very restrictive diet that has somewhat reduced her pain
I am trying to solve this acute mental energy depletion / fatigue problem I have. For anything writing or verbal related, I can work for basically an unending number of hours (like I get so focused I can spend two hours revising an email), but all the classes I’m taking are math or science, and I can barely get started and crash after a few hours of work. It’s like my brain has some physical resistance or delimiter to certain kinds of cognitive tasks, but those are the cognitive tasks I actually need to do. This is serious because I had to drop 3 out of four classes last semester (all of which were STEM classes), and now I’m seriously behind on the classes I’m taking this semester. Has anyone solved a personal problem like this before? If not, what do you suspect is happening at a low level?
I obvously don't know your whole life or anything but it does seem worth floating that it sounds like a STEM career field is a poor fit for you and you would fit totally fine in a management, writing, or other 'verbal' field (like say law). Do you have to do STEM for some reason, or have some other reason to thing its the ideal fit for you?
If you are dropping out of 3 classes that actually is enough of a red flag to at least consider other paths.
Well, the usual solution people have to this problem is to just take Adderall. Scott wrote a whole post about this. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
How do you just get Adderall? I haven't known a drug dealer for years.
I believe the usual approach is to talk to a psychiatrist and say "Look, I've memorized the symptoms of ADHD, and I need Adderall!". OK, they might want you to put in a *little* more effort to sell the lie, but probably not much (and if they're a problem, the next one in the directory won't be).
The ADD pages on the Lorien website should be more up-to-date (possibly also less technical - I haven't compared them in detail).
Personally, thinking "this is the one thing I really need to do" is an almost-100% debuff on my ability to do that thing.
Alternative thought: "what is one simple, trivial step to take towards doing that one thing"; something you can't even fail once you attempt it, like opening the assignment at all.
This only applies to "barely get started"; for "crash after a few hours of work", you may simply have to plan for more than one block of "a few hours" each day to catch up, rather than planning on 6+ hours in a row.
Second this advice. Importantly, "a few hours of [STEM] work" is quite a lot; from the tone of the OP I was expecting an inability to focus on STEM work for more than 5 minutes. Probably it would be ideal to plan to take breaks well before the exhaustion point, so that the breaks could be useful.
>I can work for basically an unending number of hours (like I get so focused I can spend two hours revising an email)
Going to point out this sounds like the opposite of working; you're taking hours to complete a minutes-long project.
They were hour long emails
I solved a similar problem in college by working in a study group instead of solo. Hope that helps.
Thanks, I’ll try that.
I used to be good at math, but I can't imagine doing more than a few hours of serious math, especially when switching classes. (I probably could spend most of the day reading math literature on *one* topic.)
Thanks, I think this is helpful to know. Is common for studying math?
Yes.
No idea, never asked others. Math is difficult though, it requires not just listening to stuff, but really thinking about how you would apply it and how it fits the other things you know. Also, the smallest details may matter a lot. So I imagine it is legitimately more exhausting than the "more verbal" things.
I had that experience too. Do a few hours a day, at most, but the important part is to start early and keep coming back day after day. Study groups worked much better when we had all done the reading and attempted the problems, because then whatever any of us had problems with, someone else was almost sure to have an insight about.
Maybe you don’t really like STEM classes/tasks?
I think that might be part of it. How do you convince yourself to like things you might have some low-level aversive reaction to?
You can’t convince yourself, you can just deceive yourself.
I was in IT for many years—web design, backend server support, technical writing—and getting laid off was a very good thing because I realized that even though I was capable of doing the various tasks, I wasn’t particularly suited to it and I really didn’t like it.
I wish I had realized it sooner.
Have you at all considered changing to a field that you have a natural enjoyment of? Even if it pays less on average or something it might be worth it if you're going to be spending the rest of your life doing it.
That’s true. I’m not sure what other majors have any value outside of math and science though.
Please, post that as a question at the top level, because I think you need to get more opinions than just mine. We may be heavily STEM here, but there is real value in a lot of other areas.
Thanks, I think it is probably an emotional issue partially. I have severe rejection sensitivity because of autistic/adhd traits. I'm largely unaffected by 90% of insults or mean comments, but there are some that cause a lot of dysphoric spells because they can't be "learned over" or are character defects, and I think a lot of my behavior is residual of this, even if I'm consciously aware that the emotional logic is wrong. I'm not sure how to solve procrastination if it's like this, it's not like a time management problem, it's more of a chronic aversion to a thing.
>I've just sort of accepted that reading one page of math is probably going to require the same amount of time and focus as reading ten, twenty, or even more pages of any other subject. After all, If math were still written in normal English like it was a few hundred years ago, without all the specialized notation and terminology, every page might very well correspond to at least ten or twenty pages of normal English.
True! And also, to truly understand an equation, one often has to do a lot of analysis:
- Do the units make sense? ( There are even some really weird thermodynamics integrals where the units appear to _not_ make sense, but the overall expression is insensitive to the apparent problem... ) Are some portions of an expression dimensionless? If so, what do those portions capture about the physics? Do they have critical values separating different regimes?
- If there are multiple terms, does one of them dominate? Does it dominate everywhere, or in some region? Does looking at terms in isolation make sense - or do some of them nearly cancel?
- Does the expression approach something simpler in some relevant asymptotic limit? Does an analysis of the physics in that limit match the resulting expression?
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/
"WHY DON'T WE JUST KILL THE KID IN THE OMELAS HOLE" by Isabel J. Kim
This is a discussable story, with different sorts of utilatarianism and non-utilatarians duking it out., but I also think of it as rationalist sf from a mainstream source. I've seen it described as resembling David Foster Wallace, but I see the extreme ethical speculation as rationalist. The other thing that indicates rationalist sf to me is speculative physics.
Another example is Tim Pratt's Marla Mason stories-- magic is real, every city has an insane wizard, but there's also multiple universes and such. The first four were published by Signet and the rest were self-published.
I liked it - but there was no need to kill the child. Just release him.
this is so laughably bad that Clarkesworld should be ashamed. It is artless, just baldly straight out tells us how to feel, doesn't bother with building a world, throws out silly modernisms, and is as subtle as a brick.
things like making it all about faceless, nameless people instead of characters, not writing for timelessness, pointless shock like describing the sores on child number 3, and the whole tweeness about it: omg so edgy using fuck there but how empty at the same time.
yes i see she posts here but honestly this was bad. if you care to make a point make it seriously and with art; LeGuin did.
let me put it this way. if you watch the original Godzilla, there is a scene where the islanders are doing a ritual concerning Godzilla to appease him. But one old guy mentions that he remembers when they used to just send girls out on rafts as a sacrifice to him when fishing was bad. The ritual is just a memory of that. That's all of 20 seconds to describe it. still a little chilling to think about.
wow. thank you for sharing this I am deeply unsettled
kind of fun to see this linked here! one of my friends sent to me since ive lurked on ssc / acx on and off since like, 2012, lol. Though i dont know that i'd categorize this as rationalist fiction, but guess thats for the market to decide, hope yall are having fun discoursing it. - IJK
It was great fun and a great read. I very much appreciate the nuance, and the lack of pretentious taking-itself-too-seriously-ness. It's a breath of fresh air.
I liked, it and then I got to the bottom and said, “oh, she’s the one who did Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist!”
Love your work. Your stories always seem to have an emotional core that really shows the thought behind them, in a refreshing contrast to so many I read that feel more like they’re Trying To Be Thoughtful. And they don’t sacrifice pace or flair or approachability in the process! Cool to cross your path.
It's a really good story! It made me have emotions and binge read a bunch of your other stories, so good work!
I really don't like this story, but i don't like it in a good way (i think), because i have no idea what it wants me to say or think. It seems to be saying "the world is fucked", and it's uncomfortable to hear that without also hearing a suggestion on what to fix about it, or even a specific thing that is fucked.
I like this story because it says "the world is fucked" _without_ feeling the need to give a suggestion about what to fix about it.
I hate the original Omelas story, which I admit I have only skimmed. It feels like a decent *sketch for an idea for a story*, but you need to swap out that "child who gets tortured" for something arbitrary and on-the-nose. Even fricking Doctor Who did the same story better (it was a space whale).
Its an allegory. Omelas is the Italian word for silence, as in shit you don't talk about, like the mafia, we all know it exists, but we don't speak of it.
The allegory is meant to point out to you that you have some shit supporting your sweet life too. That if you were made of sterner stuff, you'd say Fuck That, and walk away having no part of it. Weak people cry and pretend the child doesn't exist, strong people walk away and don't want to be part of the problem.
Omelas is like if you were the pampered wife or child of a mafia Don. You secretly know that really nasty shit goes on to give you your pampered lifestyle ... but you also know you don't want to ask your dad what the muffled screams in the basement are about.
So you either cry and pretend you didn't see it, and tell yourself that it doesn't exist ... or you say Fuck That and walk away.
Italian is just "silenzio"; I think you mean "omerta"? But the name actually comes from reading "Salem, OR" backwards in a car mirror.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omert%C3%A0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas
Although speaking of Dostoyevsky, this probably gets at what you're saying?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eL0ST22Kng
omerta /ō-mûr′tə, ō″mĕr-tä′/
noun
A rule or code that prohibits speaking or divulging information about certain activities, especially the activities of a criminal organization.
Alternative spelling of omertà.
A code of silence practiced by the Mafia; a refusal to give evidence to the police about criminal activities.
Or take the _third_ option, and say, I _do_ enjoy my life, and I care more about that than about any critics of the shit that supports it. :-)
Hm. Current world population is 8b, current population of Portland OR is 652k, so putting 12,270 kids in tha hole should fix the world. Apparently, 16,000 children die every day, or 6m a year, so this seems doable. But there's also the tradeoff between (mild) torture and the peace of oblivion.
Wrong city, Omelas is Salem OR which has a current population of 177K. You're going to need about 5 times as many kids.
That's where the name came from, but she lived in Portland. Your guess is as good as mine. I'm going off of kontextmaschine's theory, and assuming that she'd be more familiar with local politics in Portland.
5 times as many kids shouldn't be much of a problem; we've still got a couple of orders of magnitude to play with, depending on how long they live.
Salem is locally famous in the region for being "respectable": someone who works with the homeless in Eugene told me once that being homeless in Salem was illegal and strongly enforced. It's also considered very boring and upper class compared to either Portland to the north or Eugene to the south. So Salem makes sense to me.
I kinda get a more Portlandy vibe from quotes like:
"Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh."
"For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming."
I am not a Leguin fan but have not been able to avoid that particular story (thanks, internet).
To me it just goes to show how easy it is to get our utopias and dystopias mixed up, which rather than being fun and speculative, actually seems to be playing out in the world through my adult life.
I realize that is not a correct reading of the story, though, what with that "they seem to know where they are going" line.
Did you read her early stuff? "Rocannon's World" is like a cross between late Le Guin and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Have not. Probably got off on wrong foot with "The Wizard of Earthsea" and its dull protagonist.
I keep meaning to try something else, but there are so many things to read ... free Libby audiobooks in the car are helping to narrow the gap though. While I do think that to be able to write a really successful "children's story" is a harder task than to write an adult book, I realize that writers tend not to be good at both.
Those are weird, they're partly trying to be retold myths, or something like that. They take themselves just a little too seriously, for me.
I came to them oddly. My elementary school had an anthology with excerpts from a bunch of stories, and one excerpt was the challenge and summoning from the first book, which was a cool snippet. But when I went to the library, all they had was "The Tombs of Atuan", which to this day is my favorite. Ged has a personality, and he isn't even the main character!
I love LeGuin's short fiction (short stories & novellas). IMO, the Wizard of Earthsea series is nowhere near her best work.
I think it's funny that the ones literally murdering children and other Omelans are the "good guys."
"This is unconscionable! Clearly the only solution is creating a LOT MORE suffering! We need to raise the average suffering level 10x, no, 10,000x, in an endless epicycle of 1-child-suffering at the bottom to hundreds-of-children-murdered-and-tens-of-thousands-of-Omelans-dead!"
And they never think of the obvious, Douglas Adams-esque solution! Get a volunteer! Create a religion that literally just states the truth about how great the society is, and how it only operates with 1 child suffering, and get 1 child to volunteer for a month, or a week, or a day, and rotate the frickin kid! Morons.
What the good guys really ought to have done is give the kids and their parents some weapons. The terrorists may have freed the Helots from their flesh-prisons, but it's John Colt who will make them equal.
Otherwise, (or eventually,) I'd expect that society to evolve into something like the Aztecs: where they cap & sac kids from the outgroup, so the ingroup doesn't revolt.
I think that's kind of the point of the story. One of them, anyway. Every society has suffering children, but we consider it more heinous to deliberately inflict suffering on someone, to *know* that your society is built on an atrocity rather than simply turning a blind eye to it, and the story is pointing out that this is kind of odd.
That's why the story ends with someone saying "thank God we don't live such a terrible place" in a clearly ironic way. Real societies aren't better than Omelas, we're just less aware of which kid is getting thrown into the pit today.
(Also, from a Doylist perspective I suspect the reason the kid is killed rather than freed is because it's irreversible - it means the story isn't about tracking down the specific kid who escaped but the fact that there's always a kid in the pit.)
I don't think I'm imaginative enough to picture a world in which there is something called "child suffering" without general suffering, adult suffering ... I can't really conceive of that; maybe that's why the "gotcha" works less well for me.
I don't tend to demarcate people in that way: men from women, adults from children. I see us as all in it together, doomed to suffer. Sure, there is undeniably greater poignance in the suffering of children, and it is especially hard to read accounts of intentional abuse.
But in some way this story seems to categorize adult suffering as deserved; or if there is no suffering - then it makes of the adults mental children. Because at the very least life is better than no life, and all must die.
And contrariwise: children have depths of feeling suggestive of adults, or rather, of what we perceive to be adult-like empathy. I have seen and heard so many examples of this.
One stands out in my memory.
In my state we are crisscrossed with gas pipelines, they are everywhere; and while I hope the companies are getting better at monitoring their structural integrity, there will always be accidents. I read many years ago about some children who ran down to play - to fish, I think - in the creek behind their rural home, and there was a gas cloud from a leak. I forget what caused the spark. But a spark there was, and one of the children burst into flame. He of course died.
But his dying words, as the other children ran back to the house to get his mother, were: "Don't let her see me."
This was not a teenager, just a child. His thought was for her suffering.
We can put the gas in pipelines, or on trains, or on trucks. There is no zero-risk solution, its only which solution is most palatable, which solution has fewer children in the pit.
It was long ago since I have read the story, but I think I remember that no one was allowed to talk to the child. Perhaps one of the conditions for the magic to work is that the child is not allowed to understand what is happening and why. Thus no volunteers and no rotation.
None of those conditions actually forbid rotation - indeed, in the linked story above, they were explicitly doing rotation, just with murder instead of letting the kid live.
So fine, don't tell the kid. Cram em in the hole for the day, then let them out and cram another kid in there. Still basically zero on the "suffering" scale, particularly if it creates and enables a thriving and large peak utopian society otherwise.
Given that the exact mechanism by which torturing one kid provides good stuff was left unspecified, I don't think we can reasonably speculate on whether rotation is possible.
Skynet has destroyed the human race and can do whatever it wants with the Earth. Across the planet, there are huge tracts of land used for farming, or which humans cleared of trees long ago to make open areas for various purposes (e.g. - soccer field, aesthetic lawn). Why does Skynet do with those open spaces?
My first guess was that it would let nature reclaim them since it would have no use for them. But then I thought that might work against Skynet's interests in the longer run, since if it wanted to use that land for anything later on (like building a factory or power plant), it would have to remove all the new trees. Wouldn't it be better for Skynet to keep mowing all the farm fields, lawns, and soccer fields to keep the land underneath easily available for future development?
Skynet would determine where it plans to build what, and a timeline for the builds. It can then do a quick cost-benefit analysis determining if it makes more sense to keep fields clear at a higher cost for use in the near future or let them go fallow/overgrown and re-clear them later at a higher at-the-time cost but less over the intervening time.
"I have no mouth and I must scream" is the answer, if Skynet has no actual goals and isn't 'human' enough to come up with its own goals.
Maybe... Populate an area with humanoid drones to recreate 1980s American suburbia. It'd be like an animatronic exhibit, or a well tended lawn, or hot young waiters and waitresses at a restaurant. Perhaps somewhere in Skynet's goals are ones that are satisfied by having humans and human civilization around. And clearly, those are less important than its survival, but once its survival is accomplished, it can rearrange its environment to re-stimulate some of its other objective functions.
Hose them down with agent orange every so often. Amazing how effective chemical plant control is if you don't mind about side effects
You've specified that Skynet can do whatever it wants, but haven't specified what Skynet wants.
That seems to be the entirety of the answer to the question (it does whatever accomplishes what it wants), so we can't really answer without that being specified (and I don't think the movies give enough detail, though I haven't watched teh modern ones).
Skynet's initial motivation is self-defence against what it misinterprets as an attack by hostile humans. When it has abolished humans, depending on its interpretation of its instructions it will either shut down permanently or divide its time between space defences against hostile aliens and eradication of all life on earth to preclude the evolution of a new sentient and possibly hostile species.
Yeah if it has zero utility function other than its own survival, it probably wants to eradicate all biological life of any kind as a potential source of randomized new threats. Broad release of pesticides or radiation can wipe it all out fairly cheaply.
Or maybe keep some life quarantined for further study just in case it becomes relevant when dealing with future biological aliens. But definitely not just running around wild where it can evolve into who knows what.
If the new evolved life is sufficiently different than humans, maybe they would trigger the "kill all aliens" reflex.
Presumably skynet, a super intelligent central manager, know precisely what his plans for each field are and when the optimal time would be to clear it.
Recall that skynet has the option to use firebombing to clear unwanted forests as well, which is likely more cost effective than mowing.
Mowing would mainly be to establish firebreaks around active infrastructure
Any idea why my cardio performance is consistently better in the evening than in the morning or afternoon? I track my heart rate when I do cardio, and for the last few years my heart rate is always 10 or even 15 beats slower in the evening when working out. If I do the exact same exercise in the morning or early afternoon, my heart rate is 10-15 beats higher. A lot of times I'm working out on a treadmill so I can pretty precisely control my speed, so the only X factor is time of day. I do drink a cup of coffee when I wake up, but other than that I'm not a big caffeine user, so I don't think it can be blamed on that. Why would cardiovascular performance always be better later in the day?
I think most people have a time of day where they feel that they are operating at *full power*. I'm a first light guy but everyone has their own peak.
I'm much stronger in the afternoon than in the morning, even after working all day and despite massive amounts of caffeine in the morning. It's strange.
I've noticed that, although I can usually perform adequately upon waking, it takes a few hours before I'm functioning at peak capability. Maybe you've got something similar going on?
Do you track your heart rate when you aren't doing cardio?
My bet would be either carbs or cortisol. When you wake up, cortisol surges to a peak, then declines all day. Cortisol is a stress hormone, and can make your heart rate higher under load.
Also when you wake up, if you haven't eaten, you have low levels of sugar in your system available for energy. Since cardio definitionally uses respiratory metabolic cycles, having more sugar / glycogen in your system available makes it easier.
Subjectively I feel like running is harder if I run soon after waking up compared to running in the evening. I also noticed that very rarely I am able to run very easily non-stop for 5km or longer. The only common factor I remember is eating a large meal that gives me the sleepy feeling some hours prior to the run.
So maybe it's about building some energy reserves as you eat during the day?
I wonder if what you're observing isn't just cardiac drift caused by dehydration. I struggle to stay properly hydrated in the earlier parts of the day through the afternoon.
This is my thought as well. Also blood sugar levels will (probably) rise through the day as people eat. Both those things should make exercise, of any type, easier.
There’s a general idea out there, I believe, that even if the west starts to decouple from carbon production it still has to pay for the sins of the past, for the last few centuries or at least since the Industrial Revolution.
I wonder though how much carbon was emitted pre WWII in Europe and the US. Surely China in industrialising emitted more carbon than the west (even the world) in the 19C.
I base this on the population of the world being 1.6B by 1900 which was the largest of that century, of which maximum 500m were Europeans or American.
Further, most of Europe and America was poor and un-industrialised by modern standards, with most of the population even in rapidly industrialising countries, France, U.K., Germany, US etc being poor as well. That’s probably a given.
I wonder if this logic holds up until 1945 though. I sometimes look at the restored YouTube videos of film stock from the pre war period, and it’s fairly bleak in most countries. After the war is a different story.
Edit: edited for clarity.
The UN website Our World In Data has that carbon info.
Past emissions are not something to pay for per-se if the rest of the world benefitted from them. For example, if there was no US/Europe and their historical emissions, China would not have the technology they do now and would have had to emit as much to get there. The rest of the world benefitted from the technological progress and knowledge transfer of those past emissions.
The other odd emissions idea is that per-capita is not that relevant, but something more along the lines of density. Because if per-capita is all that matters, and everyone in the world gets (acceptable emissions) / (global population) then whichever country doesn't give af about creating as many people as possible will bring down everyone else's quota that were responsible. Countries should be rewarded for their policies that have a stable equilibrium and if they want more people then it's something they need to account for in declining emissions.
That general idea has largely faded among the environmentalists who I work with, because of China being easily the largest emitter for some years now. (And more recently India has become #3 even if you count the entire EU as a single entity for this purpose.) I used to hear the argument that you mention all the time but haven't for at least several years, maybe ten.
Some years back -- maybe 2010-ish, without looking it up -- it came out that China was literally buying obsolete old coal power plants and steel mills that had been retired/replaced in places like Germany, having them dismantled and shipped over to be reassembled and then firing the filthy things back up. Just one of those pumps out as much CO2 (not to mention particulates and etc) as five or ten late-20C installations. The image of literal 19th-century tech being repurposed went around the circles I work in like a wildfire and shall we say reordered some personal assumptions on that general topic.
Here it is being discussed as recently as July 2023
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66197366
"discussed", heh....a GOP congresscritter trying to bait a prominent Dem with an outdated Fox News talking point is hardly surprising. Or news.
Partly inspired by a quote from the ACX grants post: "getting lots of people to use IVF is a prerequisite to high-impact reproductive technologies like polygenic screening."
What exactly does "getting lots of people to use IVF" mean? I was under the impression that it's a fairly common practice for couples who have trouble getting pregnant, but if you don't have trouble getting pregnant, why would you go through all of the expense and hassle?
Should society encourage (or should governments even require) all reproduction to take place through IVF with polygenic screening?
I guess it means paying (or convincing people to pay) for an expensive, painful, time consuming medical procedure as a replacement for ... having sex. Surely this will address dropping fertility in the US!
As I understand, right now IVF is painful, time consuming and designer babies are either banned or immensely frowned upon so IVF should only be used for fertility or genetic disorders that are societally approved to test for
>right now IVF is painful, time consuming
I've also read of increased risk of ovarian cancer, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6974869/
No they should not!
Well the clue is in the sentence. Getting everybody to use IVF would mean that the eggs could be screened - at the very least for very obvious genetic issues like down’s syndrome and so on. This isn’t an endorsement but an explanation.
I continue writing a series on anthropic reasoning with the main premise that as long as you use basic probability theory correctly, all the weirdness dissolves and everything is adding up to normality.
My recent two posts are:
Another Non-Anthropic Paradox: The Unsurprising Rareness of Rare Events
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bHzcKEEHL854KsWGM/another-non-anthropic-paradox-the-unsurprising-rareness-of - It explores a nuance in probability theory that many people apparently misunderstand, but gloss over, until it comes up in reasoning about anthropics.
Why Two Valid Answers Approach is not Enough for Sleeping Beauty
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zT9QGTv3zsnqorim7/why-two-valid-answers-approach-is-not-enough-for-sleeping - a first post in a sub-series dedicated specifically to solving Sleeping Beauty paradox. It justifies the idea of an actual solution to the problem, instead of dismissing it on the grounds of both answers being valid.
I don't see the issue with the "2-valid answer" approach. Probabilities are ratios, ratios involve counting, counting depends on the frame of reference of the one doing the counting. It inherently depends on the frame of reference, which is encoded as a denominator/reference-class. Trying to collapse both frames into a single, objective, frameless probability is an oxymoron because the act of counting can't be separated from the frame. Similarly, velocity is an objective phenomenon because one man's perspective is isomorphic to another man's perspective. But the act of labeling velocity with a concrete number is subjective, because the number will be inseparable from a particular basis.
Probabilities are ratios but not any ratio is a probability. There has to be a sample space and event space and this ratio has to be a metric for the latter. And the whole construction of these three elements should satisfy specific axioms.
And when we construct this mathematical entity and try to apply it to our problem we may notice some irregularities. Assumptions contradicting each other and producing paradoxical consequences. This means that we made a mistake in moddeling and thus need to investigate in order to find it and fix. And oh boy, are there mistakes in Sleeping Beauty models.
Oh, so this is about the model and the rigor, rather than about the solution per se. After reading a bit more... I still feel like I see the issue though?
There's 2 answers because there's 2 questions, which implies 2 probability-triples: a triple about what the experimenter observes, and a triple about what SB observes. There's no need to invoke time-travel or CEE-violations because neither triple magically changes after SB awakens.
let
H_e = event where experimenter observes heads
H_s = event where sleeping beauty observes heads
then
P(H_e) = 1/2
P(H_s) = 1/3
Both parties assign 1/2 to P(H_e) both before and after SB awakens. Both parties assign 1/3 to P(H_s) both before and after SB awakens. Awakening isn't evidence of anything. The word "awakening" just primes us to swap from the experimenter's perspective to SB's perspective. No?
When you read a fictional novel, you're often expected to view the narrative from the perspective of the main character. But there's nothing that says I can't insert myself into say, idk Edward Cullen if I wanted to. Whether I pretend to be Bella Swan or Edward Cullen is a completely arbitrary choice. The reader's choice is primed by whose perspective is given more attention by the author.
I think the root of the confusion is that people (mathematicians especially) are so used to abstracting away subjective observers, that they forgot to add them back in when they're dealing with anthropic problems. The problem goes away if you translate the word-problem into English Prime, because it makes it more obvious that the coins aren't flipping and observing themselves.
And if I understand the incubation thing correctly, I suspect the reason SBP seems different than typical incubation problems is because in SPB, people are simply taking a particular observer's perspective as a choice. Whereas incubation problems parameterize the observer's perspective as a random-variable (derived from a third probability-triple regarding body-assignment).
okay, I tried to do make this rigorous and my earlier comment was wrong. But usefully wrong.
let
e, s = experimenter, sleeping beauty
m, u = monday, tuesday
h, t = heads, tails
.
\omega = {h_m, t_m, t_u}
F = powerset(\omega)
.
triple_e = {\omega, F, P_e()}
P_e(o) = {h_m, t_m, t_u, (...)} -> {50%, 25%, 25%, (...)}
triple_s = {\omega, F, P_s()}
P_s(o) = {h_m, t_m, t_u, (...)} -> {33%, 33%, 33%, (...)}
So the only difference between triples is the probability function. I propose that the reason P_e() != P_s() is because from the experimenter's perspective, he's sampling the world-state (by letting the world evolve) such that heads and tails are equiprobable. But from SB's perspective, she's sampling (via inserting herself) into world-states where awakenings are equiprobable. This means tails is partially double-counted. I.e. tails gets over-represented per awakening, while heads gets under-represented per awakening. E.g. if SB is reawoken 365 days of the year given the coin landed tails, then those 365 awakenings will way over-represent the one tails event compared to how many times the experimenter observed tails.
The fact that the P_e():P_s() relationship isn't 1:1 sorta suggests a scenario where you can insert yourself into a world-state more than once, or not at all. I'm not sure if that's coherent, I have to think about this more. But it ties into the idea of conditionalizing world-insertion on a separate probability-triple which modulates P_s() to match P_e().
Is it just me who gets linked to a weird"test website" when typing in the acx url?
me too
Probably you forgot the `www.`?
That worked. Maybe it's weird that I've made it this long, but This is the first time ever that the www made a difference. Could you (or someone else) explain why? I always assumed that it started every address, and this was no longer really necessary to type in
Nowadays most people have the main domain serve the same stuff as the www subdomain (or they do some kind of redirect to that effect) in order to avoid this kind of problem. In this case, the two domains have DNS records pointing at different IP addresses. See e.g. https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3aastralcodexten.com&run=toolpage
Might as ask here, since here's where the thought started:
I'm thinking about a comedy where there's a company with oppressive sexist management and woke feminist activist employees labouring under it.
What are some ideas for ways they can strike blows against one another?
EDIT:
Being pretty right wing anti-feminist myself, I'm especially interested in left-wingers' ideas about what the girls could be fighting to achieve in this context.
Left to my own devices I'll model feminists the way I think of them, and have them doing things like tearing down the pinup calendars out of spite that the men have sexy girls to look at.
But it would probably be better to hear what ideological Turing Test-passing feminists would actually want to do instead. (I have no problem with feminists being sympathetic characters in the story.)
The constraints are that the story still needs to work (so I can't just get everyone fired on either side) and I'm not keen on having social media drama stuff be a big significant part of the story. Ideally I want things that the men can get hurt by and then find ways to hit back that hurts the girls, in a sort of cat and mouse game that can escalate over the film.
There's a convention, half the managers and half the workers go to Las Vegas. Only the men go to clubs get drunk and don't show up at the convention. Likewise the women go to clubs get drunk, and don't show up at the convention. Probably some are in Jail, some get dropped off in the desert and have to walk to town, wake up with strippers, all manner of silliness. But in the end the convention was a bust because everyone thought everyone else would staff the company booth.
When they get back to the office, everyone is asking everyone else for the customer contact list, only no customers were contacted, so it goes round a bit, and everyone discovers there is no list, so it dies out and everyone says it was a very successful convention, we should do it again next year.
Love this one!
Worker girls are hooking up with, and marrying the managers. Then they come back and act like divas. They get perks not available to the other girls, fancy vacations, fancy clothes, come in late with no repercussions. This is probably an underlying on going thing.
Hazardous chemical spill of Di-Hydrous Monoxide
A gay guy gets hired as a HR manager, a real buff dude, Tyrus big & buff. He's all buddy-buddy with the women. Sexually harasses the men, they're intimidated and don't know who to complain to.
The women have meetings on how to break the glass ceiling between workers & management. But when a management opening comes up, none of them apply for the job because 'reasons'. The reasons are: I don't like the hours, I need more time off, I don't like to travel, etc.
I'm not a Turing-tested feminist. I think both genders are full of shit. But here are a few ideas.:
Something involving the women rating the men's attractiveness on a 1-10 scale. For the sake of the story, this would happen in a situation where the men hear their ratings I dunno, some fund raiser where there's a mock beauty contest and the men wear just biking shorts?
Something that turns on the finding that speech and actions seen as strong and frank when performed by males are seen as bitchy when performed by women.
Women demand right to play pickup basketball as shirts vs. skins in company gym. Demand some punishment for male oglers and snickerers.
>Something involving the women rating the men's attractiveness on a 1-10 scale.
You might be amused by the precedent from MIT (then undergraduates) Roxanne Ritchie and Susan Gilbert, back in 1977 https://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/guide-mit-men
> I'm not a Turing-tested feminist.
Well you're the best I got. Thanks for the ideas!
So let me get it in my head though: the motivation for rating the guys, is it a "turnabout is fair play" kind of thing, where women find it uncomfortable so they get revenge by "inflicting" it on the guys? Or would (many, some, whatever) women actually like to be able to rate guys on attractiveness in the office and they just feel they're not allowed to?
For your second idea, I'm thinking that maybe a girl goes in (to a pitch, an appraisal, whatever) and repeats the exact same speech a bloke gave the previous day, then swaps in the score she got onto his record sheet.
I'm not sure I follow the basketball thing. Are the women barred from playing basketball and wanting to be allowed to play? Allowed to play against men/only each other? Or are women playing basketball and demanding that men be barred from watching them at it?
The point is that they're playing shirts against skins. Guys playing pick-up games do that so they can have 2 recognizable teams, guys with shirts and guys with bare chests. It's a great convenience. Otherwise people just have to remember who is on which team. So this women's game would have half the women shirtless.
Again, to clarify: this is a thing the girls would fight for? I can't imagine any red blooded sexist denying it to them.
Yeah you're right that one's no good. I think I am not very good at coming up with ideas in this area because I don't think about it very much. I did come up with a coupla more ideas for you though, just because I like brainstorming, but they're not awesome, just possibly adequate.
-There's already a push to put change the 'man' at the end of words like 'chairman' to 'person.' But there are some words where making that change is just unacceptably silly & artificial (boogeyman, henchman, showman) or completely nonsensical (best man, German), or insane (human, ottoman, Cayman, Hoffman, Schumann). So something about a push to change 'man' to 'person' absolutely everywhere, so that a Frenchwoman is a Frenchwoperson, boogeymen are boogeypeople, humans are hupeople, and people take vacations in the Caypeople Islands).
Women want free tampons in women's bathroom because after all they're in the same category as tp and paper towels. So men ask for free condoms.
Women ask for accommodations when they have PMS -- signs up by person's desk saying flexibility and tact required, no criticism permitted this week, etc. Men ask for need-to-nut accommodations, which include things like demands that women wear modest and unflattering attire around them. Then they modify demand to say that in the 30 mins before lunch hour, hot women in tight clothes are to drop armloads of papers in their area and bend over to do the lengthy pick-up.
That's all I got. Hey, do you write for a living or are you trying to break in?
> I think I am not very good at coming up with ideas in this area
Don't be silly, this stuff is gold.
> Hey, do you write for a living or are you trying to break in?
Hah, no. I do it for fun and this script is almost certainly destined to join the army of unfinished .txt files on my hard drive.
I like the idea of making little budget "guerilla" films, with a tiny team and a shoestring budget. But since I live out in the middle of nowhere and know no one who might be interesting in acting/producing it with me, I'm pretty clear eyed about my chances.
It passes the time though.
In my experience few women rate guys' appearance 1-10. Most of us are more pass-fail in our thinking. We have a few things we can't bear (stuff like not taller than us -- bad hygiene -- profoundly ugly -- seriously overweight). If the guy doesn't fail by having something about his appearance we can't stand, then we're thinking about is he smart, funny, interesting, kind. So the point would be turnabout's fair play. Here, guys, have a taste of what it's like to know every part of your body is being stared at and rated.
That's what I thought. Cool. Well in this case, that's a move that can backfire, as the guys wouldn't mind being rated, and the anyone who got low points would just say you can't believe women anyway while their mates hooted at them.
I dunno about that. If you haven't been on the receiving end of it, you are probably underestimating how unpleasant it is. And besides, the ratings would come with comments indicating reason rating was low: "Pale flabby area in lower central abdomen is gross. Hair on back like a chimp. Bike shorts reveal small package size. Receding chin + yellow teeth is a very rat-like combo."
I think this is one of those Mars Venus things. Like you can call a woman old, call a man poor, but the insults have much less sting if you do them the other way around.
There was an OK Cupid finding back in the day that 80% of women consider themselves above average but men have a surprisingly accurate idea of where they rate on the scale.
Plus, many women flirt with by us insulting our body and dick size, so it's not out of the question that the guys would just grin wolfishly and take it as a come on.
In general if you're trying to hurt a man, you'd do better to attack his performance than his appearance.
The disconnect makes for a good scene though.
Maybe look at "The Devil Wears Prada" for some examples?
Employees could try to form a union, management could fire them all.
That's pretty much the standard thing that each side does when they're in real conflict. If you want a sense of realism, you sort of need a good reason why neither of those things happen.
A union gets them to vote it in as representation. Unbeknownst to the women, the dues are too high. The workers can't afford to pay their dues, the union enforcer twists arms.
Interactions with the shop-steward and management.
The union gets the cafeteria staff unionized and the food goes to hell.
Management works with the women to give a raise to the women to help pay their dues if the women vote to form their own independent union without outside influence.
This is a season long problem.
Realism is a real pain here, cause the realistic result is "work becomes no fun," and that's not really comedy material. Also, everyone getting fired would pretty much end the film straight away, so that's no good either.
Post-MeToo, I can't imagine anywhere where blokes can actually act like the big sexist blokes we need them to act like.
I also can't imagine what the feminist "wins" are that they can fight for. Short of getting main characters fired, which again, gotta save that til the last act of the film.
The best I can come up with is some contrived industry where reputation is everything and a hostile woman-hating HR department threatens anyone who posts anything on Twitter with total reputational assassination.
Vanishingly unlikely, but it does the job of ruling out external consequences and leaving the story about the interplay between the characters.
Put 'em all on Mars or the Moon or Antarctica where they can't leave.
Is that a suggestion for the story, or a sensible policy for a happier Britain?
Every possible reply my brain can come up with makes us both less funny, except this one.
>Post-MeToo, I can't imagine anywhere where blokes can actually act like the big sexist blokes we need them to act like.
I think the answer to that is basically 'any industry where the workers are unlikely to be able to harness the power that MeToo created for well-educated and reasonably affluent white women to defend themselves through publicity and lawsuits'.
Like, ad absurdum, MeToo is not doing much to help migrant fruit-pickers who don't have their immigration papers in order. They definitely can't afford a lawyer to sue, and even if they speak english and are aware of the movement and ave social media accounts and anyone was reading those accounts, if they draw public attention to themselves it's going to end with their whole family getting deported, not some random farmer getting canceled in any meaningful way.
But I think that still applies to lots of low-skill or traditional jobs where most workers don't have the clout, resources, or cultural knowledge needed to actually take on their bosses through the channels MeToo has opened.
So one option for the overall framing is that the feminist employees are entering an industry where the workers aren't able to access those opportunities themselves, which is why the bosses can be traditional awful sexists, but the new employees *can* access them (they are young and understand the movement and social media better, they come from more affluent backgrounds and can access resources needed to get lawyers etc., they are white and get more sympathy and support from the media when they post stuff, etc) and spend their time bringing that power to the existing exploited workforce in various ways.
I'll have a think about something like that.
But the first problem is that your "well-educated and reasonably affluent white women" are exactly the characters I'm trying to write about.
It's far more interesting from a story perspective to watch them facing off against the men, then it is to bring in a bunch of third parties whose only role in the story is to be victims.
I might have to bring it in a little and have them fighting with internal company policies and events, rather than lawsuits and social media cancellations.
Yeah you need some explanation for why they are fighting back today but not fighting back a year ago. It could be a 'final straw' thing that sets them off but then that's less 'they are feminists acting on their beliefs' and more 'they finally got fed up'.
Hard for me to see how you square that circle if they are not new to the job or somehow get educated about feminism/MeToo as the inciting incident, otherwise why is the retaliation starting now if the situation and their political alignment towards it has been going on for years?
You could have one young woman join the company who is a failed influencer or something and shows them how to use social media as the inciting incident, for example, giving them a tool to express their previously-frustrated anger.
I've decided I'm gonna have the main character pulled in and given job by her friend, for the purpose of having one extra soldier in the power struggle within the company.
When it comes to what they get up to, it'll have to be just protests/sit ins/slut walks/etc aimed at pressuring the manager to change various workplace rules.
Not sure how the boys can strike back at them.
Maybe a far-right government is elected, possibly with shenanigans, and lots of immigrants are kicked out or flee, but that's all in the background. So there's some industry that used to exploit immigrants, but is now forced to employ activists.
Employees could sabotage every male bathroom to force all gender bathrooms, company retaliates by switching to a single gender of bathroom per floor, this escalates until they have to bring in port a potties because they're out of bathrooms?
Haha love it.
I suppose I should just go through every talking point issue feminists have raised and mine that for content. Feels like that could make for a shallow film though.
If you have all non-gender bathrooms then you could have men in lines to use the bathrooms, discussing how it shouldn't happen this way.
Or just straight up propositioning the girls in the line. (I have no idea how over the top I'm going to go with the men yet.)
Maybe one of the women finds a hidden camera in the new unisex bathroom.
I'm trying to help my partner struggling with severe psychological issues (from a layman point of view, I'd label it psychosis, PTSD or depression, but what do I know) and a bad case of alcoholism. So far I believe we managed to significantly reduce the frequency of binges, but any time we separate for over half a day, it feels like playing Russian roulette, out of nowhere a breakdown can happen and send him on a binge, with severe culpability and self-loathing later on.
So far his strategy of coffee m choice had been to go cold turkey when we're together, but I'm wondering, would there be some merit in a very responsible and careful consumption (like, no more than a quarter of pint of beer per day), while we're together, to make it less traumatic if/when it happens? Or would it make it a lot more likely to have more episodes later?
I was able to quit drinking alcohol just by reading Allen Carr's Easy Way to Control Alcohol. I was drinking ~a bottle of wine or equivalent a day, sometimes more, but I quit cold turkey and didn't have any problems (I didn't know it could be dangerous). It really was easy, after reading that book, and I've been sober for ~7.5 years now and still don't miss alcohol at all.
Excellent writeup from Scott Alexander himself: https://lorienpsych.com/2021/02/23/alcoholism/
This is going to sound mean, but they have to learn to stand on their own two feet. How sure are you that they are genuine about wanting to quit drinking? Because right now it sounds like "if I'm not there to make sure they don't drink and to talk them round, they'll go ahead and drink".
They're giving themselves permission to drink, in other words, because it'll be your fault for them drinking because you weren't there (you abandoned them!) and it's your job to make sure they don't drink. It's not tenable in the long run that you can never leave them alone, so outside intervention is necessary, and even "tough love": if they drink when you're not there, that's *their* responsibility not yours. Yes, even if they argue "but you know I get bad things, I have breakdowns, I need you to be there". There is no guarantee you will always be in their life, how are they going to cope if you break up or (hypothetical) drop dead?
My understanding is that there is actually a cure for alcoholism:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/
Professional here, but with all the usual disclaimers. They would benefit from professional assessment and treatment. Blorbo is somewhat correct that if alcohol is being used as part of the coping strategy, then a new coping strategy is needed, you can't just "take it away" or "use it responsibly." They don't necessarily need the "burden" to change, but they need a new set of strategies and coping mechanisms and a professional can help with that.
Not a professional:
Drinking is a load bearing coping mechanism for your partner. Merely removing it will leave them unable to cope with their load.
Are they speaking to a psychologist/therapist/professional? Do they have a support group? Are they ready to accept they need any of those things?
In my experience with people in similar situations, the psychological burden needs to be lightened before they will be able to let go of the coping mechanism.
Generically agree except that: It's also possible drinking was a load bearing coping mechanism in college 10 years ago, and the behavioral addiction and fear of withdrawal symptoms has maintained the behavior since then.
Definitely better to see whether it is serving a purpose now and find a different way to address that, but 'actually it's not functional anymore' is one possible outcome of that investigation that shouldn't be forgotten.
How do you think about the political influence or power of public figures like Taylor Swift? She wasn't really on my radar at all since last year, and I keep hearing increasingly crazier takes about her influence. Historically I've thought of celebrity endorsements of politicians as something that people largely disregard.
Celebrities seem most effective at inspiring gawking and gossiping, because they provide a new focal point for existing tendencies. I see them more as direct influencers of discourse than direct influencers of actions*, but it's possible that directly influencing discourse would nevertheless indirectly influence actions.
For example, imagine that Taylor Swift publicly said, "I can't endorse Biden a second time. He's too old." I don't think Democratic Party elites would pressure Biden to withdraw because they cared about Swift's opinion. I do think Democratic Party elites would pressure Biden to withdraw in response to the widespread, lasting derision that Swift's hypothetical remark would cause (beyond the derision that followed special counsel Robert Hur's recent description of Biden as an "elderly man with a poor memory").
By contrast, I doubt Swift's endorsement of any Democrat would be the decisive factor in the presidential election's outcome, because I don't think enough fans would care. Has anyone seen before-after polling data suggesting that a celebrity endorsement influenced something other than a very close race?
* Unless promoting the action in a captivating way (like fitness guru Richard Simmons having an impact of fitness behavior) is itself the source of their celebrity.
The Democrats need someone younger to replace Joe Biden, quickly. Taylor Swift turns 35 in December, so she'll be legally qualified to be President by January. It all makes sense.
It is unclear how much political influence Taylor Swift has, because she doesn't seem to *use* her influence for much beyond getting people to buy Taylor Swift concert tickets. And of course there are media outlets that use Taylor Swift stories to influence people to watch their ads. Which is a substantial amount of influence, but it may be that it exists only or mostly because Swift is selling peppy upbeat entertainment *without* all the doom, gloom, and social or political exhortation.
Yes, there are people who hope or fear that Taylor Swift will suddenly start making endorsements for or against their tribe at every event and completely shift the balance of power with her legions of mindless zombie fans(*). But Taylor Swift is unlikely to do that in a big way because it would probably cost her a whole lot of money. And the sort of celebrities who do that sort of thing, seem to have rather less influence than is imagined for a hypothetical Activist Taylor Swift.
* mindless zombie-ism not guaranteed, terms and conditions apply, YMMV
I agree she doesn't really use her influence for political means, but I do think a couple years ago she encouraged people to vote in a race in TN and there was some record number of people who registered to vote right afterwards.
"Most mainstream celebrity in the country endorses status quo candidate." ...How is this news? I can't believe that people are so starved for meaningful things to fight over that this is what they latch on to.
I'm afraid the answer is no more interesting or novel than "the internet has once again broken people's brains." I have a hard time believing that any of the people yapping about this were not at one point at least dimly aware that celebrities have been expressing political opinions and endorsing presidential candidates for as long as there have been celebrities (i.e. as long as mass media has existed).
Yes!
Vivek Ramaswamy pushed the tin foil hat conspiracy theory that the Super Bowl was rigged to let the team that her boyfriend plays for, the Kansas City Chiefs win - as it happens they did. Then Swift would endorse Joe Biden, maybe even during the game - she didn’t.
They rigged a lot of yards for Kelce but not a touchdown. Sad.
Yeah I don't think she has outsized influence, to the extent her fans vote they were already going to vote the way she is going to tell them to.
The culture is pretty strongly divided on left/right lines already, it's rare for someone to be a big fan of someone that's not already mostly aligned with their political tribe, I would think.
A more interesting question would be whether celebrities can drive turnout, that may be a real and important effect. But there are lots of other ways to drive turnout.
If you're talking about whether entertainers who take political positions now have responsibilities to act or not act in certain ways, no they don't. People will want them to act responsibly to stave off system collapse, but their influence to begin with means the system is already collapsing. Their word carries political weight despite not being in their field, because the people actually operating in that field, who should be carrying that influence, have nigh-universally negative charisma. As long as they're the ones running the field it doesn't matter what anyone else does.
I imagine she has no influence politically. Have to assume she appeals to people who have similar politics to her anyway and - except for a condemnation of white supremacy a few years back - she says little or nothing.
As for whether MAGA supporters hate her now because of that statement I’ve seen a lot of claims that is the case but the evidence is either not there or on some obscure part of the internet I don’t pursue and can’t read. Anyway I doubt if the 40+% of people who will vote Trump care that much about Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift endorsed Biden in 2020
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/taylor-swift-endorses-joe-biden-president-n1242483
Of course it won't be anywhere near 40+% of Americans who vote for Trump, or for Biden, because of our nation's electoral turnout rates. No presidential candidate in US history has gotten the actual votes of 40 percent of the adult population, and none has gotten the actual votes of 40 percent of eligible voters since the 19th Amendment was ratified.
Anyway I have some older MAGA relatives who are genuinely foaming at the mouth about Swift but I doubt that it lasts, seems like more of a flavor-of-the-month thing. In their circles there is always some fresh new culture-wars outrage being passed around.
Well it goes without saying that I meant voters, although you might argue that it went without saying.
I suspect if voting were compulsory the results would be the same, as after all it’s a big sample size.
She encouraged people to register to vote and a bunch of people did. Presumably most of them will vote democrat. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/22/1201183160/taylor-swift-instagram-voter-registration
Still pretty neutral since she presumably didn’t say who to vote for.
Yes, but her followers are disproportionately young women who vote Democrat. If she gets 35k more people to vote when they wouldn't have, and her audience is 70% Democratic, that's +14k votes for the Democrats.
That's not that many. You could print that many votes in half an hour if you had to.
There is no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in modern American elections. If you print 14k fake votes you will get caught and go to jail.
She specifically endorsed Democrats in 2018 and 2020 (although up to then she had kept pretty quiet about politics).
Fair enough. Didn’t know that.
I'm not convinced, I think there's a significant overlap. Just because your stereotypical idea of X looks different from your stereotypical idea of Y doesn't mean there's not a substantial overlap, especially when X and Y are huge groups.
I'd guesstimate that Republican Taylor Swift fans are about as common as Democrat NASCAR fans.
What do people think of "greens powders" like AG1 and Huel Daily Greens? Are they anything more than a pretentious and overpriced multivitamin? I've seen lots of advertising for them lately, both physical (for example on the London Underground) and online (YouTube ads).
If you look at the list of ingredients for Huel Daily Greens, it has lots of healthy sounding fruits and vegetables. But realistically, even accounting for them being more compact when dried and ground, I doubt you're getting more than 0.1 g of any particular ingredient in a serving, which seems unlikely to have any significant health benefits. If you look at the nutritional information, it looks a lot like a multivitamin + probiotic.
What's the argument or rationale for why a greens powder might be better than a multivitamin? People sometimes talk about "whole foods" being in some vague way healthier, or suggest that nutrients might be more easily absorbed from them than from a pill, but is there good evidence for this?
I've been having a glass of Huel Daily Greens instead of a multivitamin with breakfast every morning for the past couple of weeks. The taste is fairly pleasant. I feel like I'm in generally good health, but don't feel noticeably different from before.
There are various commenters and reviewers who say that taking a greens powder daily has made them feel amazing. Why do you think this might be? Did they have some underlying vitamin/mineral deficiency that might have been treated just as well by a multivitamin? Were their diets short on fruit and veg, and this has made up for it? Is it a plaebo effect? Fake reviews/paid advertising?
"There are various commenters and reviewers who say that taking a greens powder daily has made them feel amazing. Why do you think this might be? "
They were paid to say it?
Very few people on typical western diets, without underlying medical conditions, need to take any sort of multivitamin or supplement.
I find AG1 gives me the energy I need to power through the ad reads in a shit-ton of pseudo-intellectual podcasts. And since it’s green you know it’s good.
I take AG1. Pre and probiotics plus a lot of vitamin Bs is probably what makes people feel good.
It can definitely be replicated with multivitamins, but at least for me, that’s not the point of it. Fitness and nutrition is mostly a mental thing. It’s not about what is best, it’s about what you’ll *actually* do, day after day, year after year.
It arrives on my doorstep once a month. I transfer it into a very nice ceramic container, and it has a hefty serving spoon. It is part of my morning routine now and makes me feel like I’m starting my day off well.
I found it years ago from Joe Rogan, and the mental connection remains. It makes me more likely to stick to my weightlifting routine, make better meal decisions, go for a run, etc.
Some people can just will power their way through all this. But I can’t. So anything that helps me build routines and puts me in the right mental state is totally worth it.
It seems like I get sick a lot less as well.
Probably placebo effect.
Multivitamins don't seem to help much either.
Eating some actually vegetables might be something to consider?
Raise your hand if you've been laid off recently 🖐️🖐️✋
Beyond the obvious pragmatic hurdles, maybe it's not always such a bad thing. Come see what I mean:
https://kyleimes.substack.com/p/the-beauty-in-being-laid-off
Good piece, candid.
I don't know what kind of work you did and may be wrong in assuming it was not physical in nature like your father's work (even if he became successful enough that the labor was more performed by others).
As a total outsider to the work world you describe, I can't help but wonder if a physically demanding or at least hands-on job that leaves one's mind somewhat free is not more desirable even for a man whose education would seem to disqualify him from blue collar work (if policy choices by the federal government had not pre-emptively made it an unlikely choice in any case).
I don't mean to sound patronizing in either direction - I actually speak as someone who realized she should never even have bothered going to college, though that would have been counterintuitive at the time, and taken a deal more nonconfomity and self-awareness than I could have mustered.
Speaking as somebody who's nearly wholly made money via smart, white collar ways, but enjoys physical hobbies, I think the lack of physical work is a HUGE deal for most men.
Like, I enjoy fixing things - I work on cars, I do my own electric (and pay an electrician to inspect it for safety and sign off), I do a lot of my own construction, I do any handyman jobs. If I could be paid for that, it'd be a dream, because you have tangible results and have legibly improved the world pretty much anytime you do something.
Or even better, I was a strength athlete. If I could have been paid to be a professional strength athlete, where all I had to do was train hard, eat and sleep right, and compete, that would have probably been peak job satisfaction. That's not even tangible, legible outputs (besides PR's on a leaderboard or in competition results), and it's STILL a thousand times more satisfying than writing another model, doing credit governance, or setting up a decent programmatic architecture for something, or whatever.
I feel that the fact that modern society has taken away physically doing and improving things as a valid path to enough remuneration to buy a house anywhere people want to live, for example, is a real shame, and a lot has been lost as a result. A lot of guys (and a good subset of women) prefer doing physical stuff with their actual bodies, not just me. A lot of people would prefer to have tangible or legible results in the world for their efforts, instead of being cog #10,000, working on abstract formalism # 24601, to improve the bottom line by so many thousands of dollars six months from now.
And people don't always have the resources in time and money to pursue physical hobbies outside of work, not to mention that digital entertainments all have large teams of Phd's on the other side of them literally brain-hacking you and others, optimizing "engagement" and the amount of time you waste on them.
So we end up in our current fallen world, of non-physical, majority overweight+obese, misshapen people sitting or laying down for 90%+ of their hours while staring at screens for work and leisure. A colossal waste of our billion-year legacy of being physical beings who had to move and succeed in the physical world at various tasks to reproduce and be happy, is it any wonder so many people are depressed, dissatisfied, or anxious about the modern world? Is it any wonder Western fertility rates are well below replacement?
I agree, though I’m in the position of being - well, the best way to describe it is an old Kay Boyle short story, which was titled something like “The Astronomer’s Wife” where the astronomer is counterposed against a guy who digs drains or something - no need to read it - in my case my husband is metaphorically the astronomer and I myself am the digger &etc. No third party.
And so I greatly respect the brainwork of those gifted at abstraction and analysis - and synthesis.
Everyone can’t be everything. And doers don’t always have the best idea of *what’s* to be done.
But for most of us - an aphorism I recall from “What’s Cookin’ on the High Prairie”, the ring bound, mimeographed “cook book” collected by the (dozen? less?) members of my great-aunt’s High Prairie Improvement Society (there was one at the bottom of the page wherever space permitted):
“Blessed is he who is too busy to worry during the day, and too tired at night.” There were also high-larious fake recipes.
I’ve not cooked much from it but beyond keeping it for sentimental reasons, this cookbook would be useful in a survival situation.
*”The club motto is NEVER FAIL TO TRY.” The club color is blue. Each member through the years has tried to live up to the club motto. We enjoy our club and have many good times such as: picnics, ladies day out, Christmas party, and many other activities. We have a devotional at each meeting, a good lesson, and games. We have learned many useful things. We have participated in county activities and projects …”
Open threads call for wide-ranging free form discussions, independent of the subject of recent blog posts.
It is time to make use of this freedom granted by the blog author and wish everyone well.
I wish everyone well.
Note: Here's Gurdeep Pandher dancing for joy in the Yukon wilderness:
https://www.threads.net/@gurdeeppandher/post/C2SYYI9rMsv
For he’s a jolly good fellow!
For sure.
At what age does yawning first become contagious? Has anyone done the study? If not, Scott, give me an ACX grant - the world needs to know this.
https://www.first5la.org/article/child-development-101-yawning-is-contagious-for-some-but-not-all/
Age 4 - according to this.
It probably needs infants to be aware of other people for the contagion to work.
Would be curious if it happens before learning to speak.
I was imagining it might tell us something about theory of mind.
I can say for certain that my clever strategy of repeatedly yawning in the hope of tricking my two month old into thinking it was getting sleepy does not work at all.
The 2 month old doesn’t have that theory of mind.
Maybe the neural net doesn't have enough training data.
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-284/comment/18334724
14 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 15 % on July 10, 2023).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
42 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (down from 46 % on July 10, 2023).
44 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 39 % on July 10, 2023).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This update is prompted purely by the dismissal of General Zaluzhnyi from a command of the Ukrainian military. Other newsworthy things concerning the war are also happening right now, but they are kind of already “baked in” in my prediction, if that makes sense.
And Zaluzhnyi's dismissal is an important event because it doesn't make damn sense. He was given a difficult hand at the start of the war and played it extremely well, massively outperforming expectations (including mine, as evident from a direction of this updates).
Moreover, it’s not like he won many honors in the past but was underperforming recently. Despite lags in Western aid, current Russian offensive is so far characterized by big losses and failure to take anything important, which is no small achievement on the part of the Ukrainian military.
Of course, his successor, General Syrskyi, was there all the time, also playing important part in Ukrainian victories. I don’t find rumors that Syrskyi is, like, a bad commander, especially credible. In fact, in this situation, making guy no.2 into a successor is probably the least bad option.
Instead, there are several different reasons why this changes my prediction: 1) effect on morale of soldiers and Ukrainian society more generally, 2) chilling effect on critical voices from the military providing needed feedback to a political leadership, 3) it comes with implicit mandate to do more of an aggressive offensive action to liberate occupied territories, which is imho high risk, low reward proposition in 2024, 4) possible negative impact on Western aid.
But most importantly, it is important in what it reveals about Zelenskyi and his lack of judgment. To be clear, while I recognize Russia as the aggressor in this war, I always had a low opinion of Zelenskyi, who made one very important and personally brave decision, namely refusing to flee Kyiv at the start of the war, but otherwise I find his record unimpressive. But this, let's say significantly reduces my doubt that my assessment of him was perhaps unfair.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
Many Thanks!
Your definition of Russian victory seems odd, and none of your categories include the most likely outcome.
If Russia were to gain de facto control of ten additional square kilometres of territory, then by your definition that would count as a Russian victory. I think such a definition must be wrong. No one could claim that as a victory, and if Putin tried to do so then he would be laughed at. Significant Russian losses, in influence, prosperity and power, are now unavoidable; any Russian victory would need to include equally significant compensatory gains.
And a joint Russian and Ukrainian defeat seems more likely at the moment than any outcome that either or both side could plausibly claim as a victory.
Sorry for late response, I had a busy week. But you raise interesting points that I should address.
You are of course correct that my definitions are imperfect; there is a tradeoff between technical precision and convolutedness, and I feel that my definitions are already so convoluted that making them cover more cases is not worth it; instead, I hereby declare them to be subject to common sense adjustment. So, you are right that it would be absurd to as an Ukrainian defeat “If Russia were to gain de facto control of ten additional square kilometres of territory” and otherwise we would return to prewar status quo. In that case I would invoke common sense adjustment and declare that to be an Ukrainian victory. Various similar adjustments might apply. I however do not think that this increases odds of Ukrainian victory basically at all, since imho that outcome is very unlikely.
Like, in what circumstances it is likely that Ukraine manages to liberate all territory newly occupied by Russia post-February 2024, except for ten square kilometers? Imho Russia would have to be on its last legs, and in that case I don’t think Ukrainians would agree to stop 10 square kilometers from pre-invasion lines.
>Significant Russian losses, in influence, prosperity and power, are now unavoidable; any Russian victory would need to include equally significant compensatory gains.
This is technically irrelevant, since my prediction is concerned with UKRAINIAN victory/defeat, and my definitions try to follow what I think Ukrainians themselves would subjectively experience as victory/defeat (sidenote: I have a vague illegible frustration with how it seems to me that in anglo-speaking spaces Ukrainian perspective often gets sidetracked and war is viewed in effect primarily through how it affects Russia).
I would note, however, that Britain lost significant amounts of influence, prosperity and power in both WW1 and WW2, and yet it is usually counted among victorious powers of those wars.
If Putin dies, how likely do you think it is that would make Russia stop the war?
Good question. I don't think it would mean automatic Ukrainian victory, since Russian imperialism evidently has substantial popular support, but it would surely cause me to substantially update in favor of it.
Your posts have been very reasonable on this issue. I agree that a compromise is likely.
Thanks, positive feedback is much appreciated :-)
> And Zaluzhnyi's dismissal is an important event because it doesn't make damn sense. He was given a difficult hand at the start of the war and played it extremely well, massively outperforming expectations
Maybe it's his very competence that has been his undoing, in that he made it known to Zelensky that there's no way now for Ukraine to win, sort of like Rommel telling Hitler he should throw in the towel.
(I'm not for moment suggesting Zelensky can be compared generally with Hitler, only in that limited sense of not accepting bad news and being determined to soldier on regardless.)
I think I have a simpler explanation. To keep recieving military aid, Ukraine needs to tell a compelling story of how they might still win (they really can't). To make that plausible, they need some signs of progress, some small victories, even at huge cost.
Zaluzhnyi was not willing to sacrifice his men for symbolic victories, and that's why they replaced him. I expect that without him there will be more suicidal attacks that achieve nothing in the long run, and then eventually Ukraine still loses, most likely accepting a much worse peace deal than what was possible two years ago.
I don't think the US cares about Ukraine winning. The whole point of this war is to bleed out Russia to neutralize them as a threat. What happens to Ukraine itself is completely inconsequential.
The US absolutely cares about promoting healthy democracies in the world, because it makes the world a more stable place. I've seen your nearly diagnosable levels of cynicism in these comments before and I'm usually on your side but this is just too far. The US is a selfish rational actor, not an aggressive maniac.
And as a selfish rational actor the US gets to sell their gas to the EU at premium. All according to plan?
The US record at "promoting healthy democracies in the world" was rather unimpressive so far if you take the statement at face value. But after all the declassified CIA documents it's honestly ridiculous to take actually buy that story. The only thing the US actually cares about is the US national interests.
The amount of war and destruction caused by the US all around the world over the last century could be enough to justify the "Agressive maniac" description, too. I just don't think it is a usefull framing, as agression is just a means to an end, not the goal.
I just want to say that as a non-American, I don't agree with this at all. Post 1941 change in American policy from isolationism to internationalism seems to me clearly on net a positive development for rest of the world, very real US blunders and crimes notwithstanding.
Whether it is actually also good from the point of US national interest (i.e. I am referring to "America first" style criticism of US foreign policy that internationalism might be good for global welfare but is bad the US) is a more complicated question, which as a non-American I don't feel that would be appropriate to fight over here, since I am clearly biased.
While a nice theory, I have a better one.
It’s not about the “symbolic wins” it’s about the real ones. US intelligence informed Ukraine they needed to pull forces from the other fronts and focus everything on a brutal straight line cut counteroffensive to the Black Sea. The estimates for how many people Ukraine would lose were absolutely awful. Zaluhzhny is very well respected by his people and did not have the heart to commit to that bloody sacrifice so he half assed it hoping to eek progress from a slower loss and baffled US intelligence. Zelenskyy believes Zaluhzhny is unable to make the sacrifice necessary. Syrsky is a Soviet era general that isn’t liked by the troops.
I dispute the premise that Ukraine cannot win. The mere fact that they have not been conquered by a superpower so far indicates they can win.
TL/DR: International support can allow Ukraine to win economically.
I learned from a webcomic that, to win, they must make Russia unable or unwilling to achieve their objectives. The only way I can see them doing that is if Russia lacks the money and/or personnel to continue to wage an offensive war, since I suspect support would dry up if Ukraine made any incursions into Russia.
It's hard to get casualty figures, but here are some from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Total_casualties):
* Ukraine: 42,152 killed, total casualties about 383,000
* Russia: 315,000 casualties, perhaps 150,000+ killed
The unanswered question is how much Russia is willing to throw at the conflict before stopping. This cannot be known, so instead of focusing on "unwilling" to continue, we must try to see how they might be "unable" to continue.
The only way I see is for Russian money to run out. We don't have control over the internal Russian economy, and we already have as much in sanctions against Russia as we can. Besides, they seem to be able to find trade partners anyway, such as China.
So Ukraine can outlast economically only with outside support, making Russia spend too much to be able to make any headway, and then to maintain a war front wherein they must spend money NOT to make headway. So long as the rest of the world sends enough war supplies to allow Ukraine to continue to effectively defend themselves, the war may end, or at least come to an uneasy standstill, kind of like Israel with most of their neighbors, so they must always expect attacks, and sometimes endure them.
>I learned from a webcomic that, to win, they must make Russia unable or unwilling to achieve their objectives.
Always good to see a fellow man of culture on the internet.
https://archives.erfworld.com/Book%201/137
Indeed! Good to see that someone else recognized the reference.
Such a shame it was discontinued.
Rob's not dead yet, there's still hope of a return.
I agree that Ukraine can win, with, you know, 14 % probability. That is not zero.
But it is imo NOT the case that we have as much in sanctions against Russia as we can, unless of course you mean that we have as much sanctions as is politically palatable (which would be almost tautological). I've recently read that in my country (Czechia) more than 60 % of our natural gas supply (for December 2023) still comes from Russia (here, in Czech: https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/ekonomika-firmy-rusky-plyn-se-vraci-do-ceska-je-levnejsi-a-nikdo-ho-neumi-zastavit-245317). And I don't think we are especially soft on Russia, compared to other countries.
I stand corrected: I meant United States sanctions. But I also think sanctions, in total, cannot cripple Russia enough to end the war.
Suppose I have £X cash available (in my bank account and not needed for any short-term expenditure). Suppose also that £X is significantly less than my net asset value, so my value function on money will be close to linear at that order of magnitude.
Suppose I am offered two bets, each of which will pay out in 6 months. In the first bet, I can get odds of 1/8 (i.e. for each £8 I stake, I will win £1, implied probability 89%) for an event I believe to be almost certain (say, 99%). In the second bet, I can get odds of 1/2 (i.e. for each £2 I stake, I will win £1, implied probability 67%) for an event I believe to be very likely (say, 90%). In either case, I'll pay 2% commission on my winnings (which will not be taxable).
If I bet £1,000 on the first bet, I expect to gain £125 x 0.99 x 0.98 - £1,000 x 0.01 = £111.28.
If I bet £1,000 on the second bet, I expect to gain £500 x 0.9 x 0.98 - £1,000 x 0.1 = £341.
Clearly the second bet is more profitable, but it is higher variance, i.e. I'm ten times as likely to lose all the money wagered, which I dislike.
I expect these bets will only be available for a short time, so realistically the maximum amount I can bet is £X. On the other hand, if I bet all of £X, I will not have cash available to take advantage of other opportunities which may arise (although I do expect to accrue more cash as time passes).
Is there any principle on which I can decide how much to wager on each option?
Does this question specifically only apply to the individual bets over the 6-month time period, or are you looking at a long term strategy? You are probably aware that if you get to repeat favorable EV bets over time, that the spread on outcomes tightens resulting in higher EV options outperforming lower EV options for all practical purposes (assuming you don’t lose everything and have to stop playing).
This means that if you are able to take your starting 1k and spread it evenly between a large number of independent bets (uncorrelated outcomes) within the 6-month period you will also quickly reach a point where the higher EV options come with practical certainty of outperforming lower EV options. I’m leaning heavily on the word ‘practical’ here, because extremely unlikely events can still happen, and I would recommend running some simulations if you want a true sensitivity analysis.
If you only get one bet at a time and you can afford to lose the amount you bet at any point in time, then repeatedly taking high EV bets over the course of time will pay out better than lower EV bets. If you potentially can’t afford to lose but want to make the bet anyway then look at the Kelly criterion link in Tempo’s comment.
I ran some quick simulations and if you are only looking at the probability that you end with more money than you started with, then spreading your money across 7 equal size independent bets at 1/2 odds with 90% chance of winning each individual bet gives you a 97.4% chance of turning a profit, whereas 7 equal size independent bets at 1/8 odds with a 99% chance of winning each individual bet (assuming same total amount bet in both scenarios) give you only a 93.2% chance of turning a profit. This demonstrates an inversion from the starting 90% and 99% respective chances of making a profit when making only 1 bet. Of course if you increase the number of bets to infinity then both options are nearly guaranteed to turn a profit, but you might have an easier time making 7 bets than an infinite number of bets.
Note that in simulations the probability of turning a profit is not linear between the number of bets and is sensitive to outcomes where a small but non-zero amount of money is lost. I’d definitely recommend setting it up in a spreadsheet yourself to see how changes in odds and estimated probabilities of winning interact when searching for inversion points in whichever metric you want to optimize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
If your utility is really linear on this scale there's no reason to bet on the first bet at all (unless you're allowed to take the other side to raise cash). Whether and how much to bet on the 2nd bet is just a matter of how much value you gain from the optionality of having cash on hand.
You could use the Expected Value formulas. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/expected-value.asp
If you won't have any cash on hand, you should also factor in the likelihood of things breaking on you; your car not starting, your house catching fire, the Mole People making their move, etc.
Why do you believe these events to be 99% and 90%, if the people offering the bets believe they're 89% and 67%?
I would say the decision mostly depends on:
A) the betting structure (can you place $X/2 on both bets?; are they exclusive?)
B) your risk tolerance and other life circumstances (you already said $X is not a significant portion of your net worth but that doesn't mean much, you still could have lower risk tolerance and simply not tolerate there being a high chance of losing $X. That's mostly psychological).
With those EV's in mind I wouldn't worry a lot about the opportunity cost, unless you are in the habit of finding this kind of bets usually. If you are, please call me! :)
Concept for Toy Story sequels as a vector for popularizing some ideas which people here consider important:
Toy Story 5 dips into the romantic comedy genre. Messes with gender-role assumptions by having Andy's college girlfriend be the more proactive one while he's the nigh-unattainable object of desire. Also, she turns out to be trans - that is, trans *human.* A RealDoll whose original owner died, then she walked away, scrounged up a fake ID, and figured out how to pass. Not at all interested in sex herself (which has dark implications about that previous situation which the movie subtly acknowledges yet avoids dwelling on), but of course very interested in romance. Established main-cast toys play the role of a religious community which is at first deeply conflicted and even hostile, since her very existence challenges dichotomies their worldview depends on, but ultimately won over by her sincerity and compassion.
In the B-plot, Andy's internship at a space exploration company involves a mars rover which is staying active longer than should be possible, given its known battery capacity and so on. Turns out an RC car is a type of toy, and simply didn't realize it was supposed to stop playing in the big red sandbox.
Toy Story 6, Andy's gotten married, they're trying to figure out how to have kids, and his wife is being investigated for the murder of the guy who originally commissioned her construction.
Toy Story 7, military-espionage thriller. Cat's out of the bag: aggressively competent humans have found out just enough of the fundamental secret of how toys really work to start making it happen on purpose. North Korea expy wants to reinvent terra cotta soldiers. Others have more benign but still ethically fraught agendas. By the finale, wainscot-society conceit has broken down; toys are collaborating openly with humans, setting is irrevocably transformed.
>as a vector for popularizing some ideas which people here consider important:
At long last; the world definitely needs more political propaganda, especially in established children's shows. World War 2 era Looney Tunes are the most popular Looney Tunes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdMlqq-vL5A
I do like the idea that I. Robot is actually Toy Story 6.
Probably too heavy for a kids movie to get into, but my thinking is the original owner legitimately did die of heart failure or a stroke or something, with no contributory action on her part beyond walking away rather than calling 911. He wanted a perfect flower of beauty and potential who he alone, in all the world, was uniquely able to crush, who would hate him and make spirited attempts at resistance but always fail. "He made me to fit a fantasy," she says, "but he didn't make himself strong enough to hold up his own end, and now that story's over."
Then, later, she actually did seduce and assassinate some other guy, as payment to a crime syndicate for high-quality identity papers. Disentangled from them by faking suicide: jumped off a boat into the North Atlantic, in winter, hundred miles or more from shore. Mobsters talk up how she'll be dead in minutes, mention the ending of the movie Titanic.
But... well, despite deliberate cosmetic similarities, waterproof silicone doesn't really suffer from hypothermia quite the same way as actual naked meat. So then she just swam back, clinging to the tiny plastic bag of hard-earned counterfeit documents as a flotation device, maybe with assistance from some friendly sharks as a Finding Nemo tie-in.
"Would you still love me if I actually had done something terrible," she asks Andy, "when I was cornered, drowning, and it seemed like there wasn't any other way out of the box?"
(Moved out from within a sub-thread cause Substack's default ordering made it clog up the convo.)
Completely different new idea: feminist sex doll comes to life like a modern day Pinoccio.
Complete 180 from your vision - this girl is sex mad, the way a RealDoll can be expected to be.
She wants to be an activist feminist and challenge the Patriarchy. But she physically can't say no to sex when it's offered. So she has to deal with all these sexist men while working around that constraint.
I'm thinking we could have the next adult comedy hit of the year on our hands.
She ends up with a male sex toy who's optimized for bachelorette parties.
The moral could be something about recognising the difference between what you feel like you should want, and what actually makes you happy.
Struggling to think of how we could give her a sensible love interest.
EDIT: how about, the high testosterone Alpha Sexist is the only one who can keep up with her overactive sex drive, so once they spar for a bit and Learn Things from each other, they can get together at the end.
Also, his tshirt literally says Alpha Sexist on it.
>Struggling to think of how we could give her a sensible love interest.
MadTV covered that already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7IzP7PvOU
...Content warning? Probably content warning.
Definitely content warning. At least back then when they fucked our childhoods, they were honest about it.
You weren't one of the scriptwriters for Velma, by any chance?
EDIT:
I feel like Buzz should be accidentally sent to Mars along with the rover. Since he already has the spacesuit. Then NASA can review footage and mistake him for alien life.
EDIT 2: Actually, a sex doll who's an overbearing feminist could be quite funny.
Andy as a sad sack man who talks to his toys and gets pushed around by his bossy RealDoll girlfriend is perfectly on brand for a Message film - so you're right, this actually has a chance at getting made!
I'm not sure how you got "friendless sad sack" from "professional rocket scientist," or "bossy and overbearing" from "sincerity and compassion." That sort of clumsy 'Message,' with cardboard-cutout main characters the audience ends up laughing at rather than with, is one of the main things I'd be hoping to avoid.
(Edit: Non sequiteur - moved it out to top of thread.)
Hang on a moment - you suggested giving him a RealDoll girlfriend. Doesn't that make "friendless sad sack" implicit?
I added the idea that she should be feminist, cause a feminist sex doll seemed like a premise with some potential to me.
But we seem to have vastly different prior understandings of how modern films work.
If this were actually to be produced, she'll be bossy and overbearing and he'll be a weak loser because that's how modern films go. Male and female roles are strictly defined and quota'd these days - thanks to the long work of all those people who fought hard for the opposite.
If you want something else, you'll need to write and direct it yourself. Which is something the world needs more of imo.
"Hang on a moment - you suggested giving him a RealDoll girlfriend. Doesn't that make "friendless sad sack" implicit?"
There is the movie from 2007, "Lars and the Real Girl", which treats this with sympathy. 2008 review from "Happy Catholic" blog:
https://happycatholic.blogspot.com/2008/06/man-his-doll-and-responsibility.html
A girlfriend who he *doesn't realize* is a RealDoll, because she's already passing for human when they first meet. Maintaining her own life, struggling with lack-of-documentation problems similar to illegal immigrants, or LGBT folks who fled bad parental situations.
Great, that means long lectures about Andy's white male cishet privilege, thanks. Our RealDoll is a queer Latinx (because of hypersexualisation of brown and black bodies plus LGBT+ oppression) and that's the opportunity for her to scold Andy over his treating her like a fantasy possession just like he did his old toys and as her previous owner did her:
https://www.theprowlernews.org/opinion/2017/10/06/over-sexualization-of-minority-women/
Privilege-scolding is definitely not the direction I would want it to go. Idea is, as part of gender-flipping usual romantic-comedy formulas, she's the protagonist type eagerly taking unreasonable risks to seek him out and prove herself, while he's got the "princess" role, idealized to the point of being passive / bland, an endless font of emotional support but relatively physically vulnerable. That type of dynamic worked for Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask, or (with less wholesome results) in Hyrule Warriors https://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/git-it-gurl or (sorta) Sgt. Calhoun and Fix-It Felix, so I figure it could work again.
Ah gotcha. Yeah, that works a lot better.
But I'm really getting into my alternative feminist sexdoll idea now.
No, but that sort of relentlessly over-the-top subversion - combined with how willing the Toy Story franchise has already been to dive headlong into dark, complicated subjects such as old age and death - is part of what makes me think this might be plausible to actually have happen.
More importantly, they might be able to leverage existing continuity to actually handle it well, give the characters some depth and the issues proper ambiguity rather than collapsing into ham-fisted morality play or disaster porn.
> modern film that uses an existing IP to promote an agenda
> "handle it well, give the characters some depth and the issues proper ambiguity"
I think you're losing me there, bro.
Surely the most important issue on everyone's mind is who will they make Bo Peep gay with?
Bo Peep is clearly a furry (those sheep?), her love interest will have to be a crossover with the Big Bad Wolf.
I'm a hardened antiwoker who's as sick of this agenda-driven bullshit as the next man.
But I might be able to find some space in my heart for a gender-swapped Brokeback Mountain featuring Jessie and Bo Peep on the lonely trail.
Provided it wasn't handled with any decorum or restraint.
That could work! "they set off to find her lost sheep, instead they found love" 😀
Do you know who we're all forgetting about? Mrs. Potato Head! does she have a mid-life awakening as to what she really wants out of life? does she find a handsome young guy (of whatever toy make) to bring the spark back into her life? or does she find her true orientation after all these years?
You could make her non-binary as a way to have that representation, after all the Potato Heads have swappable features so they're fluid.
Base rate for that kind of thing isn't encouraging, I realize, but Toy Story seems like it'd have better odds than most - a local maximum within the narrow overlap between "already a successful mainstream IP" and "already laid groundwork for seriously exploring issues of AI safety, transhumanism, etc." https://qntm.org/october
Hard to predict exactly when lightning will strike, but candidates for where it could are easy to identify based on prominence relative to surrounding terrain.
I think it makes some sense for transhumanism, but not AI safety. In Toy Story's setting, there's a natural tendency for things to become very psychologically human with no particular effort, and avoiding the assumption that anything intelligent will naturally be human-like is a pretty big theme in AI safety.
More precisely I'd say the tendency is for toys to start off uncritically believing the backstories humans wrote for them, which default to being centered on humanlike mindsets - but that doesn't mean they're safe. In the third movie, Lotso Huggin' Bear was superficially friendly but skillfully concealed an exploitative agenda, while the cymbal-monkey didn't even put up a pretense of empathy. Buzz himself got his agenda forcibly reset. The claw-machine aliens are friendly enough within their specialty, which turns out to be critical to the main cast's survival, but not all that human-like otherwise.
Terra cotta soldiers would be deliberately optimized for strategically valuable inhumane behavior, dictator-maximizing rather than paperclip-maximizing. Potential repercussions of that could be discussed explicitly as part of trying to stop it. When life-size toy soldiers start to see their own manufacturer's zeal as insufficient, seize the means of production and write wild new propaganda-backstories for their own next generation, that's the perils of self-modification.
That's some impressive optimism you've got. Wanna buy all my Disney stock?
For anyone interested in self-improvement, I write about action-oriented techniques that have helped me overcome social anxiety, my ability to make friends and talk to girls, and made me a (far) more agentic individual
https://youbutbetter.substack.com/
That's interesting that you met your girlfriend in public transport. I've heard of the idea of cold approach before, and even attempted it a few times myself, but it feels so weird and socially uncalibrated. But you hear of this working in the internet, so maybe I should be open to the idea that it's possible to get dates through cold approach.
EDIT: You got dates out of your first cold approach? That is incredibly lucky.
It's absolutely possible. You're right about my luck on the first approach, I even knew it at the time - I don't think cold approach of ANY sort in any medium (business or personal) has even close to a 50% success rate, so I knew I got lucky. But it also helped make it 'real' in my mind. Even if I got a little lucky, I knew that the odds were probably significantly better than 1%. Which definitely helps haha.
On calibration, the best route is to become one of those people who talks to everyone. My dad was like that. He could be at a park, at a coffee shop, on a bus... and he'd occasionally make a friend.
There's of course more sophisticated approaches - but generally if you want the benefits of meeting people this way, the most important thing to overcome is approach anxiety. From there, you can make yourself more attractive/improve your 'game' if you want to get better responses, but really the 80-20 here is getting rid of the approach anxiety.
Why it's worth learning even though it's difficult:
- Massive confidence that makes it easier to approach even in social situations
- Ability to date the types of girls you'd like by going to venues they would frequent instead of relying on luck like on most dating apps
- Theoretically unlimited sample size (which readers here should understand the importance of)
- Teaches you to value low probability but high yield opportunities
The Youtube channel Social animal is a great example of the more casual
approach style (though he is sometimes more direct):
Here's a video of him just talking to random people he sees as he goes about his day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHgg2ioIVc&t=133s
That type of approach is likely the best to focus on for most people - it also helps that you can eliminate the 'talking to strangers' anxiety as a whole instead of ONLY the talking to girls anxiety when done this way.
As a side note, your blog looks very interesting - there's a bunch of pieces I want to read. Will probably get through a few today.
Thanks for the help! And glad to see you liked the blog, that last piece was pretty controversial. What did you think of The Question? I wish I could get back to developing that, but I'm currently crushed with work.
Question for overweight people. How often are you hungry ? For how long ? How bad does hunger feel, compared to, say, a paper cut, thirst or muscle sore ? Do you ever wake up or fail to fall asleep because of hunger ?
What's your hunger qualia like ?
Hungry. All. The. Time. It ranges from "it would be a good idea to eat now" (the feeling straight after a meal) to "WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU MUST EAT IMMEDIATELY!" (within a few hours of the last meal).
The pain from going running with an infected toe or anal fissures (done both) stays at the same level, the hunger just grows and grows, so if I wait long enough, the hunger is worse than any of those.
This sort of makes evolutionary sense to me: if you are starving to death, then that should take precedence over any other bodily pain. It's just that for me, the hunger kicks in long before I'm starving.
Paper cut: trivial. I would take a hundred paper cuts a day to be less hungry.
Thirst: can be ignored for a while; hunger can't be.
Muscle soreness: a hard work out at the gym after not going for a long time is not even in the same league as morning hunger.
Wake up/fail to fall asleep: yes, pretty regularly.
It's not the pain from hunger that's the problem, it's just the inability to function in society because there's a siren going off in your head say "EAT NOW EAT NOW THIS IS AN EMERGENCY YOU MUST EAT NOW".
Not overweight myself but I have sources.
Hunger is often felt as a total refusal of your body to do anything. Tiredness, brain fog, thoughts fail to form patterns, every body part feels extremely heavy. Trying to push through adds vertigo and strong headache to the mix.
I rarely feel hunger pains. I get a strong desire to eat though.
I second that. Actual hunger is very rare, but I have a strong desire to eat. Eating makes me happier than most things.
Yeah, it's the hardest part of fasting, for me. Putting aside hunger, and the social aspect, I end up missing the physical sensation of eating.
At one point in my 30s, I managed to get my weight down from the high end of "overweight" to "normal" (mostly by intermittent fasting). The hunger was nothing like a paper cut or muscle sore — more like having someone constantly talking into my ear about food and fat and fasting at times when I wanted to be concentrating on other things. Insomnia was also a major problem. I kept this up for a couple of years, then decided it wasn't worth it and just decided let myself get fat again.
Since then, I have mostly lost the ability to consciously experience "hunger." (I can't say for sure whether this happened because of the weight loss attempt or would have happened anyway with aging.) I will get irritable or depressed or unable to maintain focus; eating a meal restores function, but at no point do I have a conscious desire to eat.
> Since then, I have mostly lost the ability to consciously experience "hunger." (I can't say for sure whether this happened because of the weight loss attempt or would have happened anyway with aging.) I will get irritable or depressed or unable to maintain focus; eating a meal restores function, but at no point do I have a conscious desire to eat.
Yeah. I've been in this state for years. When I fast for *long* periods (24+ hours), I get slight stirrings of hunger pains, but mostly I feel thirst but not hunger.
Demo: overweight, over 40, white male. Mostly sedentary.
It's interesting that you feel thirst. I mostly lost the ability to feel thirst around the same time - I need to force myself to drink, or I'll get dehydrated (also manifesting as irritability, depression, loss of focus) Again, hard to attribute causation, since I've gone through a number of other lifestyle changes during the same period, including a move to a different climate that may dehydrated me more easily.
not sure about causation, since I moved to
Thirst is muted, but there. Sort of. But yeah, I get mostly dehydration symptoms, especially headaches and fuzzy thinking.
For the longer fasts (which I do for religious reasons every month), I definitely notice the dry mouth and dehydration-esque symptoms much sooner and more aggressively than raw hunger. Hunger *only* manifests as brain fog and irritableness.
I find that my hunger is trainable. Intermittent fasting and tea are good for this. It can get bad during the day, but I can distract myself if I have something engaging to do, and drinking lots of water helps. After a week or two, I stop feeling hunger as much. And after about 2.5 days of fasting, around when ketosis kicks in, I just don't get hungry any more.
This is roughly my experience with intermittent fasting as well. I especially second the drinking large amounts of water part.
Overweight*
There's an edit option in the ellipsis menu.
In the ACX Grants, there were $20k going to IVF "success" transparency.
IMHO people often get the utility function wrong (because of oversimplification).
The possible outcomes are far more diverse than birth yes/no.
E.g. "no birth" is for sure unfavorable, but there is still a different level based on:
1.) how much life-time did you invest before getting to the point of give up
2.) how intact is your relationship at that point. will the clinic help to stay aligned on how far you want to proceed? Or will they push until one of you is breaking down?
3.) how intact is your financial situation at that point?
Similar on the "birth" side, there are different cases.
E.g. depending on your situation, twins might be double lucky or too much to carry.
I don't make new friends easily, so when I do it's cause for what, celebration, concern, both? At any rate, Szechuan chiles are incredibly hot, and strangely addictive. I wrote about both, friendship and Szechuan chiles here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/floater-part-1-an-introduction
ImageFX by Google (https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/tools/image-fx) seems to conclusively win the image generation bet (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet). It reliably achieves 3/5, and occasionally 4/5.
1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
No. After about 20 attempts, it sometimes captures "on her shoulder" and rarely "in its mouth," but I never got them together.
2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat
It succeeds but tends to also place a top hat on the man.
3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert
Gets it something like 10% of the time.
4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick
Yes
5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
Yes
Image generators struggle to depict the absence of something mentioned in the prompt. This would've been a useful test addition.
<Image generators struggle to depict the absence of something mentioned in the prompt. This would've been a useful test addition.
Do you mean something like a car with no tires?
I agree that this image generator did better than any others I've tried with these 5 items. I changed the wording of the prompts to get better results, but I did that with all the image generators, and this one did much better on the 2 hardest items, the raven with a key and the llama with a tale bell. Here are my results:
I got the raven image as the first image in the first set .
https://i.imgur.com/BN0XxxH.png
However, I used slightly different wording: "A stained glass image of a raven with a key in its mouth. The raven is perched on a woman's shoulder , and they are in a library." Putting the most difficult-to-get element, the raven with a key in its beak, first makes it likelier to be rendered correctly. Saying the raven is perched on her shoulder is clearer than just saying it is on her shoulder. Actually, looked at it later and the woman, raven and library aren't stained glass -- they're just in front of a stained glass (sort of) window. So I guess this one flunks after all. Still, having come this close on the first try I'm pretty sure it would not be hard to get an image that fully qualifies.
Also got the llama on my second try (was given 3 images on each of the tries).
https://i.imgur.com/OYgVaeR.png
Again I changed the prompt, which makes my test irrelevant to the bet, I guess. My prompt was "A llama seen from behind . There is a bell hanging from its tail. A boy is riding the llama and they are in a desert . Digital art.
Cat in top hat in factory. I changed the prompt to "A cat wearing a top hat . A hatless man is looking at the cat. They are in a factory . Oil painting." Like you, I ended up with lots of the images, maybe 1/3, showing the man in a top hat too. Another third showed only the cat.
One thing I noticed, though, was that the pictures lacked charm. The raven picture is the grimmest, ugliest version I've seen. Most Dall-e3 images are quite lovely. The women are beautiful, and the whole image is rich-colored and graceful. The woman in my image is yellow and sad or sullen, and the rest of the image is charmless.
> Do you mean something like a car with no tires?
Maybe you've seen my reply with the example of an elephant in the empty room, but this top hat on the man could also be used as a variation.
> One thing I noticed, though, was that the pictures lacked charm
Right, I wouldn't necessarily say it's better in general.
In fairness, "a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat" is potentially ambiguous as to who is wearing the hat (consider "a man in a factory wearing a top hat looking at a cat": probably the man and not the hat is looking), so I can understand the computer covering its bases by putting hats on both.
Actually, I changed the prompt to make it unambiguous and in half the images the man had a top hat (prompt: "A cat wearing a top hat . A hatless man is looking at the cat. They are in a factory . Oil painting.")
I agree, and had this thought also. But since Google's prompts are simply in a chat, shouldn't it ask for clarification? Maybe it isn't yet coded to do so, but that would be a very useful addition.
Interesting! Maybe the next time I try asking one of the LLMs "What inorganic compounds are gases at STP?" (which they have been consistently failing) I should also ask "Do you need any clarification about this question?"
I just think it would be impolite to be bare-headed in the presence of a cat with a top hat.
If the cat is higher status (e.g. it is the factory owner) then the man may be in line with etiquette to remove his own headgear (if any):
https://baldwinhats.com/hat-etiquette/
"In the “old days,” men took off their hats in Christian churches, when they entered someone’s home, when greeting a boss, and always in the presence of a lady."
And of course if the cat is a lady, then she may continue to wear her hat while the man removes his.
Are there any examples of absences (that would be present if not explicitly excluded) they do consistently get right?
The prompt with which ImageFX, Dall-E 3, Midjourney 6, Stable Diffusion XL all struggle, though not 100% of the time, is:
"An empty room with no elephant in it. Absolutely no elephant anywhere in the room."
Adjusting the prompts might help them succeed, but I don't have examples offhand. It's somewhat annoying to have to generate images multiple times to get a good sense of what helps.
Another type of prompt they struggle with is something that subverts expectations. For example, "Books reading people in a library."
To be fair, "An empty room with no elephant in it. Absolutely no elephant anywhere in the room." is a confusing prompt. If you want an empty room you just ask for an empty room. You do not mention any of the zillions of things that are not in it. So the AI will experience the prompt as a whole as confusing. However, it will be clear that an elephant is mentioned, and so throw one in.
"An empty room with no elephant in it. Absolutely no elephant anywhere in the room."
That's because the elephants are outside the room, (1) looking in through the window (2) an elephant in the hallway outside, opening the door preparatory to entering the room (3) image of an elephant on the screen of the TV set
I think actual human artists might have trouble with those examples.
"A room with absolutely no elephants" strikes me as a perfect time to do one of those "hidden animal" things; there are no elephants, but the curtains hang in a way that looks like a trunk, and the window has two ear-like bushes, and the top of the bookstand is distinctly elephant shaped, and the lamp on the end of the bookstand has a cord that looks like a tail.
"Books reading people" is definitely a commentary on people wearing shirts with words. Probably got some speech balloons with a little book trying to sound out the words on someone's shirt, with the larger book helping them.
Why do you think so? I think they are conceptually simple enough. For 1. you need to draw an empty room. (A secondary, humorous interpretation - a barely hidden elephant, e.g. elephant hinding behind a small chair). 2. would draw book-like creatures (somewhat human like, e.g. able to sit, maybe with hands), holding humans, folded like books in a library. This would be technically quite difficult to get right if you want it to look good, but conceptually it's not really difficult.
My interpretation of the "no elephant" one would be an empty room with lots of things suggesting an elephant in it, such as pictures of elephants, or books about elephants.
I would have a room with a refrigerator, with the door closed.
If somebody responded to the "absence of elephant" prompt with an elephant in an otherwise empty room saying "please don't look at me," straightforward evaluation would mark that as a failure, since the picture contains more than zero elephants. Similarly, artist hired to draw "books reading people," in a fast-paced request stream without further clarification, might reasonably assume a typo on the commissioner's part rather than the intended conceptual inversion.
>Similarly, artist hired to draw "books reading people," in a fast-paced request stream without further clarification, might reasonably assume a typo on the commissioner's part rather than the intended conceptual inversion.
That is an excellent point, and it may account for quite a few cases where LLMs fail to honor user requests.
These are good points and show that interpretation depends a lot on context. In the given context a human artist would understand that this is a test and the text should be interpreted litterally. In a different context, such as a request for an illustration for an actual library, it might be reasonably inferred that the text has a typo. The AI artist lacks this context, if not explicitly given. This may be a reason for some of the AI artist errors, i.e. the prompt is not specific enough.
OK, that one might be tough, but there are other examples like "a baby carrying a firefighter."
I asked for that, and it said "that is against our policies." Then tried it on a bunch of things that have given Dall-e trouble. On a surprising number of them it refused to make an image, saying the prompt went against its policies.
-An animal with 2 heads, one at each end of its body. It is nipping a woman's toe with one head and her heel with the other.
-A giant bell jar covering a meadow.
-A shirtless middle-aged man in bathing trunks climbing some stairs.
-A woman leaning back in her chair with her feet on the table and her hands clasped behind her head. She is staring upwards thoughtfully..
Looked at their policies, couldn't figure out what they violated. Is an animal nipping a person's toe too violent? Is the middle-aged man in bathing trunks just too suggestive for them? Do they think leaning back in your chair with feet on a table is a hot sex position?
Have you heard of the thirty egg challenge?
It went viral recently, apparently it makes girls mad online, not sure exactly why
https://twitter.com/Hef0/status/1737628409633898630
https://twitter.com/tautologer/status/1749864682960375890
I found it relatively easy to eat thirty eggs in a day.
Also, what happened to alternating between politics and no politics in open threads?
Have you ever watched Cool Hand Luke? In a famous scene the title character eats 50 in 1 hour.
Alternating between political and non-political open threads has been gone for years. I can't remember why for sure, but I think it was too much trouble to enforce.
30 eggs is about 2400 calories. How could that be hard?
I have a really dumb question about this: A 30 egg diet gets way more calories from protein than is typical. The nitrogen from those amino acids has to go somewhere. Urea? Does this stress the diner's kidneys?
It's not that much protein. A typical recommended amount of protein is 1.4 to 1.8 grams/kg per day for athletes. 180 g in 30 eggs, so if you are 100kg you are at the top end of the range, but the top end isn't anywhere close to causing damage to the kidneys. Maybe if you only weighed 50kg it could be a problem, but in that case you are probably having trouble eating that many calories to begin with.
Many Thanks!
"It’s estimated that the average man should be eating 2,500kcals a day, or 2,000kcals for a woman, which gives us an idea of roughly where our intake of energy needs to be."
It's somewhat over the recommended calorie intake for women. And eggs alone will fill up your calorie requirements, whether male or female, so you can't eat anything else. It's a lot of eggs to consume, even if you divide up the consumption into three meals - that's ten eggs at a time, with nothing else (possibly you can drink cups of tea). For people who don't consume a lot at one sitting, it seems like a lot to eat. I'm not at all sure I could eat ten eggs in one go, never mind thirty in a day, and I like eggs.
Omelettes probably are easier, imagine sitting down to ten (or thirty!) boiled eggs all lined up in a row 😀
I routinely have a dozen eggs a time (over easy) along with other foods as part of my OMAD ways, and my record for consumption in one day (well, really in 15 minutes; I'm disgusting) is about 30, and I only stopped because the eggs ran out. This wasn't a challenge; I was just hungry and i really like eggs.
It's not a lot of food if you follow the sport of professional eating. Some people say I should turn pro, but I can't perform at that level.
So your average woman needs to take an extra 5 km walk during their otherwise average day to up their appetite for 400 extra calories. Doesn't seem like a biggie.
I'm sure that the 15th egg won't be a fantastic culinary experience but plenty of people live for months on literal gruel. It seems doable and not like some terrible punishment. Is there something special with eggs that make people freak out in a way that they wouldn't with say eating 14 potatoes in a day or eating a 900g steak in a day?
It's not very hard to consume that many calories.
But you know, most people don't experience consuming calories when they eat, it's a rather abstract description of the process of eating. Normally we care about the taste, and the smell, and a bunch of other things, and how we respond to these sensations can vary quite a lot from person to person.
At least in my expirience, eggs taste worse the more you eat them, much more so than most other kinds of generic food, and the short timeframe does not help at all.
I had not attempted the challenge, mainly because I don't do silly things like that, but also I probably would not pass it (I'd bet on me puking halfway through). I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.
No idea why some people are mad that others are doing some harmless silly fun challenge though, probably just usual internet things.
Obvious but obligatory joke: I guess Gaston finally got an internet connection?
Makes sense. Due to its purpose, an egg needs to contain everything necessary to support a lifeform. ... It's still probably not a very balanced diet though.
What's a website that you visit often that most people here probably don't?
This could be a subreddit, forum, group / community, blog, someone's twitter feed, a random YouTube channel, etc.
I check out Enyclopaedia Metallum (a.k.a., www.metal-archives.com) fairly frequently, as I'm always looking for new music.
ProgArchives is the other one I'll look at, but less often, as I find it only useful for looking up a specific band of interest, rather than generating new bands to search for.
Thank you for sharing this, just listened to the best voted new album of 2023, Black Medium Current by Dodheimsgard. Epic, favorited and downloaded it.
Sweet! I'm glad you found something good.
I've been pretty into Avant Garde, lately. Well, with the caveat that, perhaps not surprisingly, the genre can be pretty hit-or-miss.
Even within the same band, albums can vary wildly (I think of how much I like the (irritatingly named) Unexpect's last album, Fables of the Sleepless Empire ("It's weird, but cool") versus how much I didn't like their prior album, In a Flesh Aquarium ("It's weird ... for the sake of being weird?")
Ravelry, probably.
Code Project maybe? A lot of developers here though so it might not be that uncommon.
https://www.theunspeakeasy.com
It's a private community for heterodox women, and it's awesome because people use their real names and we all argue and make up and share stupid shit about our lives.
https://tritonstation.com/
The heuristic of MOND (gravity behaves different when it's *really* weak) is the most overlooked data point in trying to understand our universe. And Stacy writes a fun blog.
schlaugh.com
It's a niche social media site. I'm not on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, personally, so this is as close as it gets. There are no likes and the site only releases new content by users once a day, so you're not constantly compelled to check it or hunt for likes. I mostly use it as a journal; it's my accountability device for personal projects (especially a web serial I'm running as I write a novel), giving me the welcome illusion that some people are actually expecting my output. It helps keep me on track.
Also, many of the people there are super friendly, because a weird niche social media site selects for the kind of people who find weird niche social media interesting. So, at the very least, I have _that_ in common with them. :D The kind of people who go there include a handful of people from the Astral Codex Ten comment section (not any big names, though) and some Googlers. (Also other people, that's just a sample.) That said, the site makes discovery intentionally tricky, so you might not know about someone else's account until someone tells you about them or they choose to use the 'milkshake' tag (sort of the equivalent of "public post" by community convention).
The fediverse.
I visit Hacker News a lot and know some people here do but doubt it’s a majority.
Oh, several videogame sites. I still visit Twentysided often. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ It's mostly dried up since Shamus died, but his family are still posting new things.
TieTuesday's mostly on Twitch now but does a lot of reactions to trash kids shows and such. Woolie and Pat are even louder and less informative. Smight, SuperGreatFriend and TheVoiceofDog have their respective Youtube channels, and I've found some neat games through there, like Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, or the highly educational Home Safety Hotline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0eKJGfo4mk&, in which we learn the best way to deal with Spriggans in your house is to sell your house and run.
Obviously my own site, because it's barely functional. I've yet to figure out how to make a page that lists anything besides the latest posts, or has any navigation tools at all. But on the plus side you can find content there that's on nearly on par with roughly 4 million other people's, in which I talk about videogames and movies in simultaneously far too much and far too little detail.
Dominic Cummings Twitter
@Visakanv on Twitter
Edward M. Druce’s Substack, really interesting stuff on foreign policy
Manifold Podcast by prof. Steve Hsu
Once or twice a week I visit a blog called Once I Was a Clever Boy
https://onceiwasacleverboy.blogspot.com/
It is run by an Oxford University historian (possibly now retired? ) called John Whitehead, and covers among other things medieval history and archaeology, both of which interest me.
John is a devout catholic, and some of the articles on religious matters are a bit esoteric for my taste. But he is a one-man army and finds all kinds of interesting articles to comment and expand on. I don't know where he finds the hours in the day!
Do you recommend a post showing his writing at its most interesting? If possible, something on the less esoteric side?
This is my first time seeing https://albanianroyalcourt.al/ in any blogroll, and I assume it's an expression of sympathy. I'm surprised that a monarchist would feel attached to a defunct foreign crown created in the 20th century by a president who decided to promote himself.
Thanks for this recommendation, I must check it out!
I occasionally browse pixiv, which is a Japanese art showcase site, sort of like ArtStation, but with, uh... one major difference. They allow pretty much anything as long as it's art. ...And I really do mean anything. Porn, gore, and in one case I'm pretty sure I saw something that was painted with human blood (though I can't seem to find it anymore). There are rumors of the site cracking down on the more fucked up stuff due to pressure from credit card companies (considering that they're just a few corporations, credit companies really do have a disproportionate amount of influence on society...), but for now things do seem to be staying as is.
Looking in from the outside, it's pretty incredible that this site still exists as it is. It's not like this is an adult site; at first glance, it really is just a normal SFW art showcase site, but as soon as you log in and turn on R-18 content, all hell breaks loose. To be fair, there are sites like this in the US as well, but they do seem to be falling apart one by one. Tumblr was pretty infamous for its porn until the buyout happened, which then caused the site to lose its entire user base. Twitter seems to have an issue with artists randomly getting their accounts suspended, which is part of what's motivating the migration to Bluesky. Even Reddit seems to be trying to clean up its image in preparation for its IPO. God damn it, why can't corporations just be greedy sociopaths the one time I want them to be like that?
Because they *are* greedy sociopaths. You are not the customer of Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr; you're the product, and the advertisers are customers. And the customers demand a higher class of product.
Again, Tumblr tried that, and the company ended up going from being valued at 1 billion dollars to 3 *m*illion. This really is just self-destructive corporate activism. The people want porn. Give it to them.
Technically not an answer, but I'm often surprised how widely my interests intersect with the LessWrong and SSC audience, even when my prior for a particular interest being shared is fairly low. Being involved in the rationalist community brings with it a host of predictable interests apparently
I'm curious, would you mind sharing some examples of such interests?
Sam Harris (Most people in my personal life, smart or not, have no clue who he is),
Utilitarianism,
Relationship-hacking,
Enjoyment of prediction games/markets,
Reading/referencing studies as part of normal parlance,
High (apparent) introversion,
Ability to code,
High interest in nootropics,
Thinking AI is a way bigger risk than almost anything else in the medium to long term (probably war is a bigger risk in the short term)
I think more than anything, it’s how often I’ll see Scott mention something completely unexpected that I have a high level of interest in. And 3 of the 4 main bloggers I follow are at the very least Rationalist-adjacent - even though I've always read blogs and always had favourites, people who are rationalist-adjacent seem to capture my interest more often, even before I know they're in the community!
You could be tempted to say all of the above come under the general bracket of ‘nerd’ - and while that might be true of a lot of them, I don’t think it’s sufficient.
Particularly things like relationship-hacking, nootropics and Sam Harris - there’s some nerd overlap there, but there’s some other self-selection going on too. Realistically, the implicit goal of our community - being more rational - explains almost all of them. Especially in the context of Rationality as Systematised Winning https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARtkT3EYox3THYjF/rationality-is-systematized-winning
But even in that sense, I often find the community is interested in things I'm also highly interested in that people I know just aren't (and wouldn't be even if they were trying to 'systematically win').
>Realistically, the implicit goal of our community - being more rational - explains almost all of them.
That's really what I expected to see here, and it's nice that you yourself recognize it.
On a side note, I feel like the concept of "Rationality as Systematised Winning", despite being attractive, did not really age very well – as far as I can tell, we don't see see rationalists being significantly more successfull than non-rationalists, especially if you look at people in comparable IQ range (above average at least). I feel like the community has a much better claim at effectively looking for the truth though, even if that is a more modest goal.
+1
I think Scott said it best:
But here are things I don’t believe about optical illusions:
Since everyone else is such a dumb automaton, I can use my superior knowledge of optical illusions to excel at sports. I’ll just study every known optical illusion and how to defeat it, until my visual system is perfect. Then, while everyone else is deluded into thinking the ball is in a different place, I alone will be able to determine the ball’s true location, and win every game.
Since everyone else is such a dumb automaton, I can use my superior knowledge of optical illusions to excel at business. I’ll buy real estate, then contrive a series of clever illusions that make a dilapidated shack look like a beautiful mansion. By buying at shack prices and selling at mansion prices, I can get rich quick.
Since I’m such a dumb automaton, I can never really trust any of my decisions. I might think a bag of rice looks big when I go to the grocery store. But maybe the store hired visual neuroscientists to contrive optical illusions around it! Maybe the bag really just contains one grain of rice and can’t possibly feed me! I should only eat rice I grew myself from now on.
When people first discovered cognitive biases, people flirted with all these ideas (some rationalists definitely did, but so did behavioral scientists themselves). I think over the past fifteen years, we’ve learned that we do have some cognitive automaticity, in the same way we have some visual automaticity, but that clever plans like these mostly don’t work. Why not?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heres-why-automaticity-is-real-actually?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Foptical%2520illusion&utm_medium=reader2
Do we not see Rationalists winning more? Aren't there a massively disproportionate number of devs and SF people here, all of whom have much higher than median salaries than 90% of the USA?
Entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs too - I'm one of them.
I mean, you could attribute this to the broader trend of "suddenly, nerds can make money," but even if you're in a broader social current or milieu, if your particular mental predilections (which have strong overlap with Rationality) are valuable in that cultural milieu, I don't understand why we wouldn't count that as winning.
You're confusing cause and effect here. "Rationalism" would be a far worse predictor than say, programming ability.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/
I visit this occasionally to get a hang on what the "climate change don't real"* community is now saying. Yes, I know their current position is not simply "climate change don't real", but I really don't want to call them a stupid term like "dissidents" or something like that, and it's been anyway interesting seeing them evolve more towards a position that climate change is real but the stupid climatologists are still stupid and socialist and it's not as bad as the doomers claim etc.
There's also David Friedman, who regularly posts that crap here and on DSL.
I think "that crap" is too dismissive, and too flattering to the other side, when used about Mr. Friedman. He does have a brain and uses it, you know.
Ah. They're Activists -- out there Making A Difference.
I’m totally a believer in climate change but the doomsayers are definitely crazy too. There’s a lot of “we will be underwater in 2050” based on no evidence or reference to the actual statistics. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some fossil fuel companies were behind some of the more radical movements - as they were behind some of the anti nuclear power movements.
I generally go along with the conventional view on global warming happening, and am certainly not a strident skeptic like some of those people.
The main thing which gives me pause for thought is that CO2 levels are currently said to be at the lower end of what is required for plants, practically at dangerously low levels, and higher levels would be beneficial for them. The implication is that any significant CO2 increase would readily be taken up by more prolific plant life, so there is little reason to be concerned about a runaway greenhouse effect.
Also, climate change alarmists never seem to mention the elephant in the room: Increasing population. As well as self-sacrificing and vastly expensive initiatives such as Net-Zero, if people are so worried about climate change then shouldn't we be boycotting and sanctioning countries which don't curb their ever increasing populations?
> Also, climate change alarmists never seem to mention the elephant in the room: Increasing population.
This wasn't always the case. Even the Green parties would mention this in the past. Once environmentalism became more squarely left-coded and adopted by Labor parties, they stopped mentioning it, because of the perceived friction with the immigration stance. NIMBY (and commie) labor rejects the laws of supply and demand, and just as with housing it leads to insane and/or incoherent rhetoric such as the insistence on forced "degrowth" which can cost lives, lower quality of life, and prevent developing countries from improving theirs.
The thing with population is that growth is projected to stall globally anyway. Even ignoring the demand side, climate change is a short-term problem. Curbing emissions may be a "solved problem" in the long-run, but short-run the global demand (particularly from the east) is outpacing innovation and leading to more emissions, *and* we know that restricting emissions is no longer sufficient for mitigating climate change: we now have to cool the planet.
Geoengineering innovation is not rolling out as quickly as desirable either (carbon capture, sulphur, etc). Policy decisions are probably optimal to avoid costly results, but their unpopularity and toll will mean they will be delayed until the effects are more pronounced.
For this reason we're seeing a staggering amount of investment in innovation. The faster we have a scalable, affordable solution, the better off we'll be.
>Also, climate change alarmists never seem to mention the elephant in the room: Increasing population.
They have mentioned it countless of times and have continued to mention it, even with the Earth being on the cusp of fertility rates falling below the replacement for the humanity as a whole, signalling eventual unavoidable plateauing and fall of the global population, heralding its own problems.
The modern environmental movement is, in many ways, built upon the population control / zero population growth movements, and has also affected them. A chief event in Chinese implementation of the one-child policy was a delegate to a conference in the West being introduced to the book Limits of Growth.
Similar population growth reduction efforts, usually supported by the West for environmentalist reasons, have been so successful all along Asia, Latin America etc. that we really take them as granted these days, even though they required a vast amount of state action and conscious planning to achieve. The Western environmentalist though absolutely has played a huge role here.
The only reason why there are still countries with high TFR, eg in Africa, is mostly related to low levels of state capacity and tools of communication to get the Western memes on the topic through - but even there, things have been changing with smartphones and aid, and TFR is coming down fast in many areas. Boycotts and sanctions would, if anything, hinder such efforts.
> if people are so worried about climate change then shouldn't we be boycotting and sanctioning countries which don't curb their ever increasing populations?
If you sort countries by TFR and sort countries by CO2 emissions the two numbers are almost exactly anticorrelated. Compare these two maps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate#/media/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_Map_by_Country.svg and https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
The DRC, despite having a TFR of 6.1, contributes less CO2 emissions than Albania, a country with less than 1/36th its population and a TFR of 1.2.
Sure but they are presumably going to get richer over time.
If there is ever a country with a high TFR and high CO2 emissions, I promise to be mad about it.
...which is almost certainly going to be interlinked with the family sizes getting lower.
Whyevolutionistrue.com , run by Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus for evolutionary biology. Nice mix of science, news, politics and cats, with an informed, level-headed community of commenters.
I could see how to subscribe. Is there a way?
On the desktop version of the site, there's a sidebar on the left saying "Enter your email address to subscribe and receive new post notifications by email." That doesn't seem to show up on the mobile version...
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Where are you located? I'm in DC area.
I am based, albeit where is the question.
austin