TL;DR — As SOON as a *voluntary* Brain Scan is reliable, it will be a Social Expectation. If you don’t want to show your cred, it’s because you don’t got it! Justice ensues, to the chagrin of every blowhard charmer and douche. Applause!
We can already put a rubber cap over your hair, and scan the magnetic fields coming off of your noggin, to let Ai regenerate your mental imagery. If you are watching a video of a Parrot Fish swimming the tropics, then the Ai imagines a Parrot Fish swimming in blue waters! Not an exact match, but darn good, already. In five years, you’ll prefer the match-making service that requires a Scan from male applicants, right? THAT is why you won’t need a government imposing it; we filter fine on our own.
That doesn’t even need to happen in this (or your) country! Go ahead and BAN it — because folks will FLY to those locales, just to wave their cred and get that right-swipe! People will pay exorbitant fees on the Dark Web to smuggle EEG kits, running their own hot-server just to pull bank when neighbors realize they can get scanned in your hobby-garage for $200 a pop. You cannot STOP this freight-train. And a creepy CGI Tom Hanks IS the Conductor!
Claiming that ‘women wouldn’t really…’ is like claiming that men would never want to get a Paternity Test. Do NOT doubt the demand for an Honest Man! And thus, we all got swiped under the loving eye of EEG, to tell if we are Loving and Just. I’ll go gladly — I know my choices. :)
> If you are watching a video of a Parrot Fish swimming the tropics, then the Ai imagines a Parrot Fish swimming in blue waters! Not an exact match, but darn good, already.
I read a coupla articles about it. They trained the AI on one individual's brain waves, while he looked at photos of certain images. I believe the AI also got the tags on the images. After that, the AI did indeed produce images of the photos the subject was looking at. I may not have the details quite right, but that was the gist. There's no reason to think the if you are I looked at the same images, and the AI that had learned to read one subject's brain waves for images, it would have the faintest idea what we were looking at. So OP's just wrong.
I'm hesitant to feed the troll, but they did 5 years of prison and there was no coercion. Facts which are relevant to the emotional reaction you are going for, and which you omitted. Not nice.
Could you please provide a link and quote for this correction, just to be sure? I skimmed the article, but couldn't find it. Perhaps some other source?
Speaking about missing information, you don't really need coercion to rape a passed-out drunk child, but that doesn't make it less of a rape.
So if I understand it correctly, they got jail between Sept 2017 and cca March 2022 (when the article was published), and then further 48 months of probation.
Yeah, that's what you already wrote in the previous comment, and it is definitely quite different from the version described by Hammond. Thank you!
Super-Persuasion by AI: What are the ethical implications of AI systems that can use super-persuasion? How should we prepare for the possibility that AI could influence human beliefs and decisions more effectively than humans themselves?
Cooperation and Orthogonality in AI: How does the principle of cooperation relate to the orthogonality thesis in AI? Can an AI designed to be cooperative inherently value human existence, or does this require explicit programming?
AI and the Culture Series: Drawing parallels between the story's AI world and the Culture series by Ian M. Banks, what are the potential risks and benefits of a society governed by superintelligent AI systems? How can we ensure that such AI systems prioritize human values and experiences?
Ethics as an Outer Alignment Goal: Is aiming to make AGI systems "ethical" by human standards a viable alignment strategy? What challenges arise from our imperfect understanding of ethics, and how might these impact the development of sovereign AGI?
Complexity of Values in AI Alignment: How does the complexity of human values affect the challenge of aligning AI with these values? Is there a risk that simplifying these values for the sake of AI alignment could lead to undesirable outcomes?
AI, Sociopathy, and Empathy: Can an AI system that strictly adheres to moral protocols be considered sociopathic if it lacks genuine empathy for human values? What distinguishes true ethical understanding from mere adherence to programmed rules in AI?
Learning from Ethics for AI Development: What can the field of ethics contribute to the development of AI systems that are aligned with human values? How can ethical theories inform the creation of AI that is beneficial and not harmful to humanity?
Universal Ethics and AI Interpretation: If there were a universal ethics, how could we ensure that AI interprets it in a way that is beneficial to humanity? What safeguards could be put in place to prevent misinterpretation or misuse of ethical principles by AI?
Human-AI Coexistence and Value Alignment: What strategies can be employed to ensure that AI systems not only understand but also value human existence and welfare? How can we foster a future where humans and AI coexist harmoniously, with mutual respect and understanding?
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.
I wanted to ask you about a really simple chemistry thing & what GPT has to say about it. I don't like to use clorox & such in my house because I worry about the residue being bad for people and cats, so looked online for info about using household ingredients to clean a stained linoleum floor. A google got hundreds of hits, but only about 3 unique ones (the rest were copied word for word from each other). One was vinegar and water, one was vinegar and dish soap, and one, very common, was vinegar, water and baking soda. What? Sources explain that baking soda absorbs odors. But most dirty floors smell OK, and anyhow I think it's dry baking soda that's odor-absorbing. In any case, wouldn't the vinegar and baking soda react instantly, nullify each other, and produce water, co2 and salt?
So I asked GPT4 for a linoleum-cleaning recipe using household ingredients, and it recommended dish soap + vinegar. Then I asked, what about adding some baking soda. Yes indeed, said Chat, it has cleansing properties and also gets rid of odors.
Anyhow, just wanted to check with you whether using vinegar and baking soda together to clean is, as I think, nonsense.
>In any case, wouldn't the vinegar and baking soda react instantly, nullify each other, and produce water, co2 and salt?
Almost agreed. They will produce water and CO2, as you said, and sodium acetate (which basically won't do anything in a cleaning solution - essentially as inert as salt under these conditions).
I'm actually skeptical that the vinegar will be of much help. It can help dissolve lime deposits, since it is a weak acid, but I wouldn't expect it to help dissolve e.g. most food stains.
Thanks. I've noticed that a lot of "how do you" questions about practical matters I ask google turn up the same sort of junk I got with my linoleum question: Hundreds of copies of each of several main pieces of advice. I think there must be some industry where people copy advice about common humdrum problems & repost it on a site of theirs interwoven with a dozen ads. So if you don't recognize that this has happened, you get the idea that there's a LOT of support for each of the 3 main ideas, because look how many different people are suggesting them. And it seems like Chat's info is highly influenced by how many sources said a certain thing. And it does not observe the evidence that most are exact copies, nor does it call up what it knows about chemistry to check whether the advice about vinegar plus baking soda could possibly make sense.
And how many topics are there for which certain ideas are endorsed by multiple sites, but because of this copying thing that goes on, rather than because multiple thinkers arrived independently at the same conclusion? Seems like AI's tendency to think number of sites endorsing an idea is a measure of its validity will be a major problem if search engines kind of merge with AI Chat. Some users will just read the AI Chat/search engine result and accept the answer as fact. Others will ask for sources, check them, and realize the "how do you" branch of the internet is not set up to produce truth. But if enough people just accept the Chat/search engine result, then a lot of the people putting up "how do you" answers will disappear, including those who put up real answers. At least, that's how it looks to me. Does that seem plausible to you?
By the way pure vinegar actually did work pretty well on a small, especially stained area of my linoleum where I tried it. I let it sit for 10 mins then scrubbed hard and about 90% of the brownish color disappeared (original lineoleum is very pale gray with a pattern of darker gray random blogs). It seemed not really to be a stain, but a coating of some dark stuff that had dried hard, and become almost like varnish.
Congratulations on the success with the vinegar! I have only a wild guess as to what might have happened. Since the brown stuff seemed to be more like a hard coating, but didn't seem like a stain that had dissolved into the linoleum itself, maybe it wasn't an organic-soluble stuff (like tar) but rather something water-soluble that had dried to a hard coating? I've seen things like coffee with sugar dry to something like a glossy, hard coating. It might be simply the water in the vinegar that is getting it off? Again, just wild guesses...
Re
>Seems like AI's tendency to think number of sites endorsing an idea is a measure of its validity will be a major problem if search engines kind of merge with AI Chat.
Agreed. To some extent, unwarranted repetition is a problem with LLMs that mirrors problems humans have. A wrong idea, repeated by a hundred people, starts to sound plausible. In the AI case, I wish there was a way to e.g. see an airtight logical argument that some claim (like the vinegar/baking soda one) is incorrect, and knock it out, regardless of how many sites endorse it. The technology is certainly not able to do that yet.
>I think there must be some industry where people copy advice about common humdrum problems & repost it on a site of theirs interwoven with a dozen ads.
A friend of mine (who retired from Google) said that it is worse than this: They create multiple sites which all point to each other, acting like endorsements for the page rank algorithm, and the LLMs are now good enough to generate plausible-looking junk, so filtering this out is harder than when people did this with scripts. Aargh!
Yeah, you're right about the brown stuff. I should have had a control group where I just used hot water. Fortunately the staining is fairly subtle and I'm not passionate about the beauty of my kitchen floor.
Many Thanks! Glad that, whether water alone would have worked or not, in any event what you tried worked. There are many times when I should have had a control group too, but didn't.
Can someone please explain to me how it's even possible for substack to take longer to load than literally any other website I've ever seen?
Sketchy HD video streaming sites t(hat probably mine crypto in the background )don't even take an order of magnitude as long. It doesn't matter what device I use to view substack. A
Also if I click away from the tab for even a fraction of a second, then when I return to tab it will be a blank page, and reloading the content of the page takes often as long as it did to load the first time. And sometimes it never loafs and you have to reload the page.
As for why my comment has a bunch od minor errors, well don't even get me started on how bad it is to writing a comment on substack. It takes so long to change something That it's not worth it. It's only usable if you write your comment elsewhere and just copy paste it into the text box then wait multiple minutes for that to load.
Yeah, it's weird, and initially I was pretty annoyed, but in time you learn to cherish those little breaks. In our fast-paced world, there are few places remaining where you can focus on your thoughts. Substack got you! Changed tab and back? Time to roughly plan out your day! Scrolled too fast? Have a warm cup of tea while it loads! Clicked something which registered elsewhere because of lag and now you have to navigate back and load everything again? You're behind on your reading goals for the year anyway, right? Substack is truly the modern man's friend!
I wouldn't be surprised if they are using some library they have no control over that does something in quadratic or so time. (I once worked on a project where a similar performance issue turned out to be due to someone, very early on, implementing Bubble sort!) It might have worked alright when they did not have any very long threads, but now that they know it's a problem, it's probably hard to replace.
It's not clear to me that they know there's a problem. As a userbase we may need to co-ordinate to ensure that they do. I have volunteered my own Substack page for this purpose. (Click on my profile image / display name.)
I sometimes use the following trick to make commenting easier: Open the comment you want to reply to in a new tab (click on the time information next to the name), then in the new tab click reply and comment there. That way, even if the new tab is constantly being reloaded, it does not take so much time, so the commenting box does not freeze.
But of course the developers at Substack (or the guys who manage them) should be deeply ashamed.
Useless knowledge of the day: the word "cock" used to refer to the vagina in the American south, and some Black communities continue to use the word with its old meaning. The more you know.
Every once in a while I try to figure out how AGIs are going to cause the economy to grow at super high rates and can’t. The trouble is I can’t figure out how the demand side of the equation works.
Imagine that tomorrow all humans at existing companies are replaced by AGIs. So companies that make cars, TVs, furniture, films, video games, clothes, provide electricity, water, garbage service, etc..,etc., make products at 100 times the speed, and provide services at amazing efficiency.
The price of everything should drop because the supply of goods and services will increase but also because everyone will be out of work and demand will collapse. The government could try giving everyone a UBI, but where is the government going to get money? The majority of the tax base has no income, and will quickly be out of cash to pay any other type of taxes.
So the large shareholders of the companies might discover that it makes more sense to simply produce goods and services for themselves, since almost nobody can afford to buy them. At that point we probably get a revolution. Perhaps this would be when AIs kill the majority of humans.
But note that in this scenario the economy never grows much.
One take I've heard is that yes, this probably ends in a "resource curse" scenario. When a large swath of people lose their ability to engage with the economy productively, it becomes necessary for them to take what they need either A) politically, viz. UBI/FALGSC (e.g. Saudi Arabia) or subsidized work(?) (can't think of the right term) (e.g. New Deal); or B) violently viz. crime/anarchy (e.g. Angola).
But also, this assumes that there will be real gains in efficiency. Which there will be to some extent. But 2 orders of magnitude? I doubt it. The 3rd industrial revolution is overrated, and the 4th will chase even higher-hanging fruit imo.
> The majority of the tax base has no income, and will quickly be out of cash to pay any other type of taxes.
Like kenny observes, the real GDP has in fact increased. A market is essentially a 2-way auction. If you imagine an auction as selling goods for some monopoly-money, it's becomes clear that the monopoly money only has value respective to the amount of that someone won't outbid you, which is partially a function of how much of the money-supply you bid. If I bid $1 and the entire money supply has $10, I'm pretty wealthy. If I bid $1 and the entire money supply has $10^100, I ain't gonna be winning auctions. So money doesn't have value per se, it's simply a token of value which tracks the distribution of purchasing power.
If the AGIs are given legal rights, such as the right to own property and to be paid for work they do, then AGIs will start consuming goods and services produced by other AGIs. At a minimum, they'll need things like new computer chips, new robot bodies, "houses" to keep their servers and robot bodies protected, land for those houses, and electricity. Humans could tax AGIs and their AGI-AGI economic trades and use the money to support human needs.
Well, the obvious response is that the government would tax the AI or the output. Or cut out the middleman and implement socialism/communism where the products are required to be distributed for free. This would require breaking shareholders and even the concept of ownership when it comes to companies ("means of production").
The much more likely scenario is that this takes places much more slowly than "tomorrow" and people get replaced in similar ways to what's been happening for hundreds of years. Old industries die or get automated, and the employees move on to new jobs. Worst case scenario, lots of people end up in the service industry, getting paid to take care of other people. Depending on how reliable and far-reaching the AGI services would be, you may still need human technicians to fix things or it may be much cheaper to have humans do menial tasks in factories or other locations than robots with the physical capabilities required.
You may be right. But if the owners own the means of production and not the workers, a socialist revolution seems hard to pull off. The majority of humans will have nothing to offer the minority of super-wealthy humans and will have no ability to fight them because numbers won't matter. The wealthy will have no use for the current government because they can easily produce a superior military.
yes, this is what movies like Elysium try to warn us about. politics has always been governed by the elites, and so it will be up to the AI owning overlords to decide whether they prefer to share the bread and circuses, or to be in a constant state of guerilla warfare.
I think you have to look at real GDP rather than nominal GDP. If prices of everything fall, that looks like massive deflation, so even if the nominal dollar value of the economy doesn't grow, the fact that more goods and services are produced and consumed is going to mean that real GDP is substantially higher.
I don't see how you get to most people having literally *zero* income. There are some services that people will prefer human service for over AI service (whether it's nurses or sales assistants at perfume boutiques or Walmart greeters or whatever). As long as some humans still have some income, then those humans will hire humans for these services, so a good number of people will have some income.
If humans are literally unable to consume robot-produced goods, then humans will go into subsistence farming, and start trading with each other, since they can't afford robot goods, and the robot goods will be irrelevant to the human economy.
So it must be that humans will be able to consume robot-produced goods.
My knowledge of economics is very poor. I managed to earn a tech MS without taking a single econ course. Studying AI in the mid 80's, professors teaching AI technology seemed to think that truly effective AI production of goods would create the need for an entirely new system. Throw the old books out and start over.
If value can be created at very little cost neither capitalism nor it's competitor at the time, communism, could be modified to handle the new economic reality. There is a lot of economics expertise on this forum. I'd be interested to hear their takes on the very low cost labor/production that advanced AI could provide.
Personally, I think that in the most likely scenario where AI causes the economy to grow rapidly it will not be replacing humans, just allowing each human to be many times more productive. Which solves the demand side, since we'll all still have jobs. Just much more productive jobs.
Each human gets hired to be put in charge of an AI. At some point conditions improve to the point where no truly bad or hazardous jobs still exist, so young people campaign to have the age of working lowered to 8 years old. We make this bizarre sham economy where literally everyone is hired by more or less the same entity, and everyone buys from the same entity, and invests their savings in the same entity. Whether the entity is government or some mega-corp, this eventually evolved into some weird holdover rituals
At the age of 12, you enter a hiring ceremony with all the other kids and start getting your monthly paycheck. You spend most of your time doing whatever you like but you occasionally check in on the tasks that they've assigned to you, which is something something run some test on this AI and approve maintenance or whatever. You spend your pay on whatever you like. If you have a particular interest in something you can apply to switch departments. If you take a job with more responsibilities you can get a pay rise.
You live in a self driving unit that just travels around all day long running on banked solar power because we've yet to solve the finite land for finite housing issue but whatever, as long as there are roads and you don't have to actively drive you can just let your entire house sit on the road and drive itself out of the way if someone else needs the road.
Bit of leap from "AI will increase productivity per worker so much that even 8 year olds will be able to hold down a job" to "sham economy with only one employer and producer" to "everyone will live in constantly driving car houses because there isn't enough room for people". I don't think we'll run out of actual space until the population is something like...5 trillion? Most of the Earth's land space is empty.
it's empty because it's not economically productive. not everyone can build a sham city in the middle of nowhere like Vegas. people cluster in cities because usually that city has some sort of geographic advantage. either it's highly defensible, or it's near arable land, or there's a mine nearby, etc.
Okay, if we assume a continuation of Western Liberalism it seem like there no need for an underclass to fill the needs of the elite if there is no need for a large population that handles the crummier work.
Again, I’m an economic naïf so I could be missing something obvious.
An interesting theory for sibling order effects. Younger siblings get sick more. Could the older siblings be bringing more illnesses home and that hampers the younger sibling’s development?
Interesting indeed. The study is based on Danish hospital data for those less than one year old. The abstract, contained in that tweet, reports that hospitalization rates for respiratory illnesses are higher for younger siblings than older siblings. Instead of just telling readers how much higher, I suggest that all of you reading this make a guess, then click the link to check.
I didn't know precisely what I was guessing, i.e. under-1-year-olds in Denmark, but I was far too low.
'Comedian John Oliver has offered Justice Clarence Thomas $1 million a year and a $2.4 million motor coach to 'get the f**k off the Supreme Court'.
Oliver made his offer on Sunday’s episode of his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, and warned the justice he had just 30 days to accept or the offer would expire. '
What if someone started a GoFundMe intended to pay off Supreme Court Justices or elected representatives to resign? National-level figures like Clarence Thomas might get jackpots of tens of millions of dollars. Maybe even Presidents could be convinced to quit.
> The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule.[2][3] The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.[4] This story is often cited as an example of Goodhart's Law or Campbell's Law.[5]
It’s pretty silly thing to consider though isn’t it? Up there with how would WWII have played out if Eleanor Roosevelt had had a Superman-like power of flight? It doesn’t matter because it didn’t/won’t happen.
But if Eleanor had been in the air when the Japanese Imperial Fleet carriers left left the Kuril Islands headed towards Hawaii, a trap could have been set at Oahu and WWII would have been over shortly after VE Day.
But who would win a fight between Superman and Jesus?
Why won't it happen? In fact, how confident are we that it *hasn't* happened for many government officials who left public office to take highly-paid jobs at various companies or consulting firms or non-profits?
In the case of a Supreme Court justice, shame alone seems enough to prevent it from happening, at least in a public manner.
In the case of elected officials, again it seems unlikely it would be done in a blatant public manner.
I suppose I can see elected officials doing it covertly. Not a lawyer so I won't comment on the legality.
High level elected officials who leave office involuntarily or because of term limits seem to do well financially anyway though giving high fee speeches for example.
In the early aughts I worked for a subsidiary of American Standard - yeah the toilet people, the subsidiary was Trane the HVAC people - on a campus level building control system. Former VP Dan Quail was an AS board member and was issued 1,000 shares of company stock per quarter for that gig.
The key difference is plausible deniability of what's happening. Someone going on TV to make the offer gives up the bag. You need a quiet conversation on the side and no paperwork directly linking the future job/payment to the current action.
Once you've been president you are so famous that you could sell your own shit if you wanted to, though in practice former presidents mostly stick to selling their memoirs & themselves as speakers, advisors, etc. So all a president would get out of the deal was an earlier arrival of a fat lump of that sweet sweet cash. And in fact if they wanted the cash before their term ended they could start selling their shit while still in the White House. Little kiosk right outside, maybe?
Wasn't someone recently joking about paying Donald Trump to not run?
It seems fine, I suppose. Maybe it's a bit too explicitly oligarchical, but we already have the idea that once people get into power, they get co-opted by The System in more subtle ways. I think it'll end up being another method of demonstrating credentials: "they offered me a million pieces of silver to betray you, but I said 'NO'!"
SBF (allegedly) looked into it, and through back channels Trump even named his price: $5 Billion. Very much not joking, though I can't imagine a world in which it happened even if the price was lower.
Hmm... Given an initial population of office holders, some greedy, some power hungry, this would tend to selectively remove the greedy ones, leaving the power hungry ones. I'm not sure that this would be an improvement.
It would be an incentive to run for an office even if you don't want it, and to do an extra horrible job if you somehow get it, to motivate people to pay you. You could even have someone start the fund for you.
If you think that Trump is bad, imagine someone in his place who actually doesn't want the job, and wants to convince people that paying him $1 billion is the cheaper option in long term.
It's too hard to get these positions in the first place for these incentivies to meaningfully change who gets these positions, and the worse job you do the lower your chances of being in office long enough to be worth paying off (for things not like the SCOTUS).
It's like people saying political betting markets will cause people to interfere with elections. If people could sway the outcome of an election *they already have more than enough of an incentive to do this*, even without betting markets.
But if you do an extra horrible job, your approval ratings get so low that you make yourself vulnerable to losing a recall election or simply losing the next normal election. If your enemies know you're on your way out anyway, then there's no incentive for them to make a GoFundMe to pay you to leave. So you must walk a tightrope while in office--be as offensive as possible to the opposition while still performing well enough to have a shot at staying in your position.
The calculus is different for people who don't have to worry about elections like Supreme Court Justices and maybe other judges. For them, I THINK the optimal strategy would be to be as partisan and as offensive as possible. Make yourself so hated by half of the population that they'd be willing to pay to get you out.
But then there's another problem: The more they hate you, the more the thought of giving you even one cent will offend them. So again, I think some kind of balance to your behavior is needed.
Another factor to consider is the rise of supporters from the opposite end of the cultural/partisan spectrum who will love you the more extreme your behavior gets. They might respond to the other side's GoFundMe to pay you to quit with a second GoFundMe to pay you to stay. Would it be considered accepting a bribe to take the latter's money?
Well, here's a spicy topic of discussion: why do feminine men and trans women get a disproportionate amount of hate directed at them? Now, pretty much every minority (and even majority) group gets plenty of hate thrown at them, but there is a sense that the groups mentioned have been a major target of culture wars for the last century or so. What's interesting is when you compare them to their AFAB equivalents: tomboys don't prompt anywhere near as big of a reaction as a man in a dress, and trans men pretty much never come up in arguments about trans issues. (Even TERFS see trans men as victims instead of oppressors.) So what's going on here?
I tried to consider biological explanations, but it doesn't make sense. There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition, and while females are much harsher judges of males than vice versa, I don't see why feminine males would prompt a particularly aggressive response. And considering there is a big difference in the level of acceptance of feminine males between cultures, the source of the hostility is likely cultural. Japan, for example, has consistently had drag queens on mainstream TV for the last few decades. Heck, one of the most popular celebrities in Japan is Matsuko Deluxe, a drag queen with a very... monumental presence (here's a picture of him https://bunshun.ismcdn.jp/mwimgs/2/4/750wm/img_241f58d51847cc3b247cafd9f05798e33509039.jpg ). At one point, he hosted a show for every day of the week.
Anyways, I'm at a complete loss for what's behind this particular brand of intolerance. Why do males consider being "gay" to be an irredeemable character flaw? Why do 55% of Americans think changing gender is MORALLY wrong? https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx Am I missing something here?
> trans men pretty much never come up in arguments about trans issues. (Even TERFS see trans men as victims instead of oppressors.) So what's going on here?
This part is easy. The remaining forms of sex segregation (changing rooms, prisons, refuges) exist primarily for the safeguarding of women. So, ever since there has been a serious prospect that men who claim to be women could be exempted from such segregation, anyone who doesn't prioritise the desires of those men over the safeguarding of women, should logically be opposed.
Furthermore, opposing these exemptions to sex segregation has been made a career-terminating act, even verging on thought crime in some countries. So it's no surprise that when the debate does happen, it gets particularly viscious. Growing up, I read stories about times & places where people would have to lie about their views in order to have any kind of tolerable life for them & their families. I never thought that would be me. (This goes well beyond losing a debate, or losing a vote, and having policy go against me.) So I will always have a special place of hatred in my heart for woke ideology.
Note, unsurprisingly, there's no evidence that men who claim to be women are any less of a safeguarding risk than those who don't. And there's some evidence (and a lot of common sense reasons) to think that the opposite is the case. eg. https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-rorschach-test/
>I tried to consider biological explanations, but it doesn't make sense. There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition,
They're not competition, they're liabilities. In a war, you want to be surrounded by strong, steadfast men who won't break under pressure. It's exactly why men bully and haze each other so much, even men who are otherwise friends - they're (at least implicitly) searching for weakness, so it's exposed now instead of in some crucial moment. If you can't tolerate some teasing or even hazing, you cannot be depended upon in a fight or other emergency. And obviously, effeminate men are going to be less mentally tough than masculine men, since one of the defining characteristics of femininity is precisely a much greater emotional sensitivity. Men generally do not treat women the way they treat feminine men, because they're women and there's no expectation of them being able to handle bullying the way men can. In the cases of women working in male spaces, such as combat military roles or as police officers, you do hear cases of women being bullied. But I would be almost certain you hear about it precisely because of the inability of women to handle such things rather than them being disproportionately bullied (probably the opposite is true). Men simply know and expect that other men will give them a hard time to test them and its only when a man is weaker than usual or faces fairly extreme treatment that they'll make as much noise about it.
You also want your sons and brothers and male cousins to be strong men who fufill their traditional roles of protecting the group, providing for the group, fucking lots of women and making lots of babies. In a traditional society, a man who acts like a woman cannot fully fufill the role of either a man OR a woman, and so they're usually very undesirable (insert some nonsense about gay uncles helping raise kids here). You also don't want to be around these people because it may make others assume you're like them too.
We don't live in such environments, but these things don't just go away.
>Japan, for example, has consistently had drag queens on mainstream TV for the last few decades.
Japan is less accepting of 'LGBT' than west is (even just based on the claims of 'LGBT activists' themselves), and the existence of a drag queen on TV is not a good proxy for Japanese men's views on masculinity generally. Drag queens are ubiquotous in the US, for example, but very few straight men want anything to do with them. Straight female fans of 'RuPaul' probably outnumber straight male fans by 2 orders of magnitude or more, so you obviously can't look at the cultural dominance of this stuff and conclude American men are fine with effeminate men, so I'm not sure why you would think you could for Japanese men.
And even if a culutral change results in a different behavior, it doesn't mean that the previous behavior wasn't significantly biological. It's perfectly coherent to say that a certain behavior is the default for humans but a particular culture may take hold that modulates this. It's certainly more coherent than thinking everything is independently culutral but by some grand coincidence, most peoples throughout history just happened to converge on similar cultures in a particular area.
This is particularly obvious in places like Japan, who for most of their history have had an extremely masculine culture but suffered severe societal trauma in and following WW2. But there is almost certainly a genetic component too. WW2 resulted in around 2 million military deaths for Japan, which removed 2 million mostly young men from the gene pool, men who were almost certainly the most genetically masculine of their generation, leading to a somewhat genetic feminization of Japanese men in future generations. People, even on here, have this bizarre idea that ethnic populations are genetically fixed over time, but it's not even remotely close to true.
Nitpick but Re: the last point, supposing men are being conscripted, it is not clear at all to me that those that died during WW2 were "the most genetically masculine." maybe this holds true in some weird edge cases where a man did not get conscripted because he could pretend he was a woman, but for like >95% of men I'd guess this wasn't necessarily the case
(I come at this from a conservative position; I've tried to be as neutral as possible)
I suspect this also ties into societies with a bias against homosexuality having a slightly higher tolerance on the edges for more masculine homosexual behavior, be it ancient warrior culture, 'rum, sodomy, and the lash', or prison rape. The ability to force yourself on someone is evidence of strength. What ended tolerance for that behavior was increased societal focus on protecting the weak and an increased military focus on discipline and professionalism over individual strength.
Really, the answer is that there are multiple reasons today. Hammond's answer is a good example of why western society frowned on homosexual behavior up through the sexual revolution (and why militaristic authoritarian societies even today crack down hard on it). Those prejudices linger today. On top of that, you get the more modern reasons John Shilling mentions below, and that the rush by the libertine to embrace all manner of behavior once labeled deviant has given cover to a lot of behavior defensively viewed as predatory, and traditionally still fathers take protecting their daughters very seriously.
My take: like polices like. As in, women police women harshly, men police men harshly.
The female gender role policing tends to not show up in things like hate crime stats, because it tends to be passive aggressive and very social. It's things like shunning, ignoring preferences, buying inappropriate gifts, etc. There's also been a very concerted effort to fight it over the past 100 years or so! I think 2nd wave (pants wearing, bra burning etc) was explicitly a rejection of enforcing strict gender roles on women, and now it's no longer cool to police women, and as someone socialised female, I think it's genuinely a much more lax gender role than the male one right now (this has not always been true - it's very recent).
On the flipside, men police by physical violence, so it shows up statistically. There also hasn't been a huge movement fighting for the male equiv of the right to wear pants brand of feminism for the past century.
Why police gender norms at all? I think it's kind of about protecting the semantics of the role. If you're really invested in performing a gender role, as a critical part of your identity, it becomes a personal threat if someone threatens the sanctity of this role. You beat up the [insert slur] because you don't want to be associated with that sort of thing. Controlling the behaviour of other members of your group becomes a vital part of maintaining the definition of your identity.
You kind of see this even in the LGBT spaces! There's a trend of some gay people aggressively policing behaviour and language used within the community, because they feel really attached to their identity [gay, trans, etc]. Anyone with the same identity behaving a way they disagree with feels like a contradiction with their gay or whatever identity.
It's a solved problem in religious spaces - they simply disown their wrongdoers. But if it's a label like "man" or "gay" that are kind of both self identified and applied externally, you can't really excommunicate someone from those labels.... So you attack them to make them stop.
(And recall that the reason why this doesn't happen with women is because of the enormous amount of propaganda in the last century to change the standards, but it sure used to)
Also, a feminine man elicits different responses from (some) cis women compared to a trans woman. A feminine man often falls into a "gay best friend" kind of role - a non-sexual non-threatening man for a lot of cis women. Cis women who do react with disgust tend to be people who are invested in the sexuality/masculinity of this particular guy (mothers and romantic partners) but unallied cis women are typically not aggressive.
Trans women get aggression from some cis women who are invested in their identities as women as biologically determined. A lot of cis women who aren't big on the bio determination get weird in other ways (ie subtly or not, slowly policing the way the trans woman does feminity - this may be unsolicited outfit tips or dieting tips or whatever)
One thing worth considering is that much of the violence directed against trans women, and I think a majority of the actual homicides, is against MtF sex workers. Who are often perceived as selling the product, "sex with a woman!", and once the bait is taken switching to "...nah, I really have a penis, but you still want me, admit it!"
Lots of straight men take it badly when someone accuses them of being even a little bit gay, and right when they think they're about to have sex (the good kind) is not the time to hit them with that.
I don't know how much of this carries over into more general social interaction, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were significant.
Also, in the US, it's almost exclusively black and to a lesser extent hispanic men doing the murdering, and these men are more hostile to homosexuality than others (even though black men are also more likely to be gay or trans).
> One thing worth considering is that much of the violence directed against trans women, and I think a majority of the actual homicides, is against MtF sex workers.
Wait, really? I don't mean this in a hostile way, but I'd love to see the statistics on this. (I tried a bit and came up empty.) I do realize that most of my experience with trans women is unrepresentative, being largely with programmers and artists, and as far as I'm aware I only have a couple of sex workers in the distant reaches of my social circle, both of whom are cis women.
And here you go. A study of sex worker murders. (I heart Google Scholar!) I'm afraid the data does not support John's hypothesis (although it's a small selection sample). But without looking this up I would have tended to agree with John.
"Transgender sex worker victims were mostly transfeminine (94%) and non-Hispanic black (89%). Money conflicts (78%) most commonly precipitated homicides among transgender sex worker victims."
Thanks for the abstract. But, you would have agreed? Seriously?
I can easily imagine that trans women have a higher rate of being sex workers than cis women, and that trans women have a higher rate of suffering violence than cis women, and that sex worker women have a higher rate of suffering violence than non sex worker women, and that trans sex worker women have a rate of suffering violence that's even higher than all these things combined would indicate (for reasons that John mentioned). Ditto for homicides. That's all what I would have assumed from general principles.
But I find it difficult to imagine that the percentage of SWers among trans women is high enough that homicides against them count for more than 50% of the homicides against trans women. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe enough trans women go into SW, and the homicide rate among trans SWer women is high enough relative to the homicide rate among trans non-SWer women, that it actually goes over the 50% mark. Hm.
I tried pulling some numbers out of my ass and running the statistics, but that was unsatisfying; too many unknowns. How about this:
That's 32 killed in 2022, so to support your theory, more than 16 of them would need to be SWers at the time. That seems plausible, especially given the racial disparities mentioned in the article (although the overall number is tiny enough that I'd worry about noise) (and of course this is just one year that I happened to find some stats on). Other things of note: 26 were trans women, 26 were non-white, 19 were black (implying 6 were white and 7 were neither black nor white).
It looks like black people made up 10470/19196=54.5% of murder victims. But from before, 19/32=59% of trans murder victims. Holding 13 non-black trans murder victims constant, that would mean that the non-trans murder rate would imply 15 black murder victims, leaving a gap of 4 extra black trans murder victims which need to be explained by transness. (I think this is assuming the rate of transness among black Americans is equivalent to the rate of transness among all Americans.)
Your stats from 2012-2020 said 89% of trans SWer murders were of black trans SWers. So (forgive my sins o gods of statistics) there's an 89-54.5=34.5% gap there. That's about 1/3rd. If we assume all 4 of those extra black trans murder victims were SWers, and the only thing boosting the black trans murder rate is SW, then we can assume that roughly 12 of those 32 trans murder victims were SWers, which would explain the racial discrepancy. 12 is less than half of 32, so I'll assume I'm correct, for the 5 seconds it will take for someone who knows statistics to demolish this house of cards.
(The really strange thing, IMO, is the 7 of 32 trans murder victims who were neither white nor black. That category is insignificant in the overall murder statistics, but here it's a almost quarter of the total. What's up with that?)
----
I wonder if the money conflict statistic implies that the clients didn't viscerally object to the sex acts, but instead didn't think they needed to pay (as much) because of the transness of the SW. That's kind of interesting; I hadn't put together that "trans women are real women" could mean "equal pay for equal work" in the right context.
I don't have enough hours in the day to check all the assertions and claims I've seen in the media, on Twitter, or AC10. However, the general media consensus is that there's a lot of violence and hatred directed against trans people. I was willing to at least provisionally believe that trope because I had no interest in the subject. And being a Leftie, I'm generally more sympathetic to the underdog. So, without thinking deeply about it, yes, I would have agreed. Luckily, there was a lot of speculation and opinion on this thread, and I thought to myself, "What the heck? Enough of this useless supposition! Is there any data?" And voila!
Well, 37.5% is a lot closer to 50.1% than I was expecting, so in that sense you were more right than I was. And I too expected a higher homicide rate against trans people. I find it hard to believe that they were **only** 32 out of 19196 murders. That's 1 in 600, or 0.1667%, when they make up something like 1% of the population. I suppose it's possible that a lot of murders are situational, and trans people tend to avoid those situations (with the exception of sex work). And like with some other stuff, maybe homicides aren't a good measure of societal prejudice. "Trans people are 6 times less likely to be murdered than cis people" is not where I thought this would go.
2019 is the last year I see murder stats from the FBI. So, out of morbid curiosity...
-------------------
User
How many murders were then in the US in 2019?
ChatGPT
In 2019, there were approximately 13,927 murders in the United States.
User
What percentage of the US population identifies as trans?
ChatGPT
The exact percentage of the U.S. population that identifies as transgender is not precisely known, as different surveys and studies may provide varying estimates. However, a widely cited study by the Williams Institute estimated that about 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender.
--------------
0.006*13,927=~84
So we'd expect to see approximately 84 transgender people murdered in 2019 as if their homicides were proportional to their representation in the US population...
---------------
User
how many transgender people were murdered in 2019?
ChatGPT
In 2019, at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming individuals were murdered in the United States. It's important to note that this number may be higher due to misreporting or misgendering in the media and law enforcement records.
--------------------
That PBS article that Moon linked to says 32 trans people were murdered in 2022. If trans-identifying people are really 0.6 percent of the population, then it doesn't look like they're being murdered in disproportionately high numbers. In fact, they seem to be underrepresented in the statistics.
My guess is that society sees MtF trans as particularly problematic because it represents someone of a privileged class improperly claiming the protected status of an oppressed class. Women get certain benefits in society for being "the weaker sex" and we police unfairly gained benefits harshly. It's the same reason society is so harsh on transracial individuals. It's curious how transgender has slipped past these defensive barriers to the extent that it has. FtM trans doesn't generate nearly as much consternation because its going the opposite direction: someone from the oppressed class rejecting its social benefits. FtM trans children generate a disproportionate amount of pearl clutching because it is viewed as a member of an oppressed class being taken advantage of by a subset of society.
I don't have a good theory about why straight men hassle gay men. It could just be a generic anti-deviance stance, with sexual deviance generating a disproportionate amount of ire.
Shouldn't this be the other way round? I mean, the theory is that in patriarchy men are privileged and women are oppressed -- so a privileged person deciding to get oppressed should be okay, while an oppressed person demanding privilege should be strongly opposed.
Well, there are various statuses superimposed on any individual or group, some are even contradictory if considered in a too coarse-grained manner. But what generates ire is when someone receives a social benefit without sufficient warrant (with its corresponding cost to society). If we agree that women receive social benefits due to their sex, then an interloper claiming those benefits will be harshly resisted.
You rightly point out the analogous dynamic of oppressor/oppressed superimposed on men/women. The difference is that this dynamic does not carry an explicit cost to society that one could unfairly claim. Men aren't privileged because of some kind of social endowment, they are privileged because of traits that society happens to favor, e.g. assertiveness, dominance, risk taking, etc. Someone from the oppressed class calling themselves a member of the oppressor class gets none of these benefits by fiat; there's no box to check on a form that will endow one with these socially favored traits. Someone "switching side" from oppressed to oppressor in this manner can easily be ignored with little to no disruption to the social order.
To get super caveman-binary-gender-role here, fertile females are among a tribe's most precious resources, and MTFs are making a claim on the energy=time=life that the tribe uses to protect those resources, while failing to have any of the value. I've got trans friends, and I hate to bring up imagery that could be memetically used against them, but my guess is that what conservative people see in MTFs is rather like what I see when I watch a video of a cuckoo chick manipulating its "parents". (To be clear, I think this is in a sense a technological limitation, and if we had the ability to do Bujoldian or Varleyan sex swaps, it would almost entirely cease to be a problem.)
I suspect that this caveman gender stuff lurks deep within most humans' brains, but that it's possible to find new ways of relating to gender that don't involve this caveman stuff. One of the "however"s is that the people who aren't on board with the new ways are going to freak the fuck out about places where the new ways conflict with the old. (Another of the "however"s is that I suspect a lot of people who think they're on board with the new ways, aren't actually as fully on board as they think. And a third "however" is that the caveman gender stuff is, and I think I'm using this term right, "lindy", and that getting rid of the caveman gender stuff is a bet that our current society is sustainable and future-proof.)
I think it's simply that femininity itself is looked down on. Men have traditionally viewed women as weak, irrational, submissive, trivial, etc. (and plenty still think this way).
A man who acts like a woman is exhibiting these less admirable traits, so of course they also are looked down on. A lot of men don't particularly like women, but they at least want to sleep with them. The feminine man doesn't even offer that.
A related point - people often assume that bisexuality is a "phase", but for men it is assumed to be a phase on the way to gayness, while for women it is assumed to be a phase they will grow out of and be straight. That is, it is assumed, regardless of the sex of the bisexual person, that they are only temporarily (pretending to be) sexually interested in women, and are long-term just going to be sexually interested in men.
Whilst it is certainly true that many transwomen are, from the transsceptic POV, "feminine men", there is a distinct phenomenon of extremely masculine transwomen. Think Caitlyn Jenner, or the former WWE wrestler who recently transitioned. These seem to be a different category to those transwomen who in another life may have stayed as gay or bisexual men. Steve Sailer has mentioned this in the past- one simple explanation might be that prolonged steroid usage is playing a role. This would explain the cited examples, but not more everyday cases where the transwoman was clearly not a very effeminate man but rather a regular, or perhaps very large, man. Another hypothesis (and it can run in parallel to the steroid/hormonal argument) is that these transwomen are motivated by an autogynephilia, which as an aspect of male sexuality is unfeminine.
In this view, AGP transwomen can be viewed as a continuation of crossdressing men (Eddie Izzard for example, before announcing he was trans) whilst feminine transwomen are a continuation of the catamite tradition.
If you view transwomen as by and large either former bottom gay men (feminine) or AGP men (masculine) with some hormonal confounders, then the framing in the OP of transphobia=anti-feminine men-ness seems wrong. AGP transwomen are also subject to scrutiny and ridicule, perhaps more so. Feminine transwomen in the catamite, thai ladyboy mold will face similar issues to extremely feminine gay men. But AGP transwomen (or more charitably, clearly masculine and high T transwomen) will face different but no less severe criticism from society.
> There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition
This reminds me of a certain species of fish, I do not remember its name, whose sexual strategy is that there is a huge dominant male jealously guarding his harem of smaller females... and there are also some little males who are incapable of fighting the big one, but their strategy is that they pass for females and sneak into the harem where they have access to the females.
The feminine man can still get your girlfriend pregnant. (Even if he seems gay, maybe he is actually bisexual.)
>There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition,
There's also no reason to see them as allies. If you assume that men have particular roles to fill in society, then men who stop trying to be men are cowards and deserters. Whereas women who want to be men are taking up the burden and easing the load on everyone else.
If men have particular roles to fill in society, then women do too. Why should switching roles in one direction be seen differently than switching roles in the other direction?
It's about minimum thresholds. If it takes twenty people to put out a fire, and you have 18, everything burns. But who knows what the threshold even is. What happens if you have twenty and a guy's injured when you need him? What happens if you have fifty and thirty one guys are injured? No such thing as too many bodies, but any loss can be the loss that kills you.
That makes sense, but it sounds suspiciously altruistic (from the group perspective). Someone volunteers to pay the cost of confrontation just to improve the chances of group survival. Nature usually doesn't work like this. Usually there is a personal advantage for the one doing the prosocial thing.
I wonder, maybe our ancestors were cannibals at certain stage of evolution. The reward for the one who killed the "socially undesired" people was that he could eat them afterwards. Then the cannibalism somehow got selected against, but the bullying instinct remained.
I think it fits. I think Bigots don't usually act on their own, they discuss with their mates and make sure they have allies before they confront the "deviant". They may act alone by making a comment in passing or so on, but this can be explained by the potential benefit to status in their ingroup by bragging rights etc.
Not a century, no. A decade at most. They're the current Big Thing that the cultural elites need to signal their sympathy towards, and this makes signaling opposition to them a counter-elite rallying cry. It's semi-random and contingent and will move on to some other identity in a few years.
I really wish people started figuring out that essentially all the discourse fads are just awful people with metaphorical loudspeakers playing status games which you, their audience, automatically lose the moment you take a side.
trans people have been around for far longer than a decade, but the degree of mainstream backlash and even awareness is in many respects new; /pol/ and adjacent boards wouldn't call anyone who disagreed a "tranny" a decade ago, and politicians even in deep red states didn't attempt to ban medical transition
Also, in conservative circles FtM do have a spotlight on them at the moment. The rates have exploded, which people take as evidence that girls who are uncomfortable about their sexuality get "tricked" into thinking they're trans. This would technically make many FtM trans people victims, but it also casts doubt on the legitimacy of every FtM trans person. I haven't checked for sources myself, but if the number of people declaring themselves FtM indeed has exploded, that is most easily explained by some sort of social contagion.
I'm not connected to conservative circles, but my impression is that the focus on FtM is mostly about the "F" side of it: "they're coming for your women". Or rather, "they're coming for your daughters". It's a standard conservative-gender-role focus on protecting the fragile, precious, valuable resource that is a young girl.
From a transphobic point of view, trans women are feminine men, only more so. And the transphobic point of view is relevant because the question is about the behavior of transphobes.
Not to get excessively binary, but there's two categories under consideration: "trans people" and "people who aren't trans but still adopt aspects the opposite gender". The theory is that in each of those categories, there's two halves, and one half gets more hostility than the other: MTF more than FTM, and feminine men more than masculine women.
Assuming that this is correct, what's the mechanism behind it? Simply positing "heteronormativity" is insufficient to explain the difference. And do the differences inside the two categories share the same mechanism? And if so, what is it? If you want to make an argument that hostility against MTFs has a completely different basis than hostility against feminine men, great, let's hear it!
Women are the ones who are sought after, men have to do the seeking. Women are born as objects of desire, men have to be built or perish. “Women and children first.” “The fairer sex.” Men are the ones who have to go fight and die in wars. Etc.
(I’m not arguing that any of this is necessarily true or accurate or that men/women have it better/worse/easier/harder. I’m just listing common cultural tropes.)
So perhaps MtF (or men generally acting feminine) is perceived as a man trying to “cheat” his way to obtain certain societal status that he don’t “deserve”.
In a similar vein, (some/many) heterosexual men perceive femininity as sort of the ultimate form of perfection/beauty and go to great lengths to pursue a mate to fulfill this desire. So maybe MtF or men with feminine behaviors is viewed as a “false prize”, something they very much don’t desire and in fact are in competition with (another man) trying to pose as their object of desire, or maybe it’s simply wires being crossed in a way which produces a much more extreme reaction than with FtM (“they talk/laugh/act/look like a sexy woman, but they’re actually a man/adversary, and this is a really uncomfortable conflict!”)
> there is a sense that the groups mentioned have been a major target of culture wars for the last century or so
Has it really though? Half a century ago, a straight man wearing a dress was either a hilariously funny comedy act (Monty Python) or a bizarre eccentricity (J Edgar Hoover, allegedly) but not something that people spent a lot of time thinking about.
A non-straight man wearing a dress... well, that's a whole different kettle of fish. That's more "disgust reflex" than anything else.
There's a long historical taboo in Western Culture against dressing across one's sex and class. My understanding is that sumptuary laws in medieval Europe not only regulated the types of clothing and accessories that people could wear based on their social status, but they also regulated the clothing that the sexes could wear. The fact that the laws went out of the way to define sex-coded dressing, makes me think some people were cross-dressing even way back when. And there are a lot of cross-dressing tropes in high-medieval literature. The Pardoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales comes immediately to mind. The Pardoner is accused of being a gelding or "a mare" and Chaucer endows the Pardoner with effeminate traits included cross-dressing.
I can't opine whether the historicity of cross-dressing has been over-emphasized in modern culture wars, but it seems to me that modern culture wars are a continuation of historical social patterns that go back at least to the high middle ages.
Looking at Wikipedia, I didn't find sumptuary laws based on sex but only class. And a few decades ago there were hit movies where the male protagonist pretended to be female in their public lives, Mrs Doubtfire and Tootsie.
Google Scholar shows a lot of papers and books about sumptuary laws and cross-dressing. Unfortunately, they're mostly behind paywalls. But here's a doctoral thesis by Brett Seymour that I've been plowing through for the last couple of days that has some interesting tidbits. What's interesting to me is the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English sumptuary laws made exceptions for theaters. Women weren't allowed on the stage, and men (frequently boys) portrayed the female characters. So, there were exceptions to the sumptuary laws made for the theater.
Scroll down to the chapter entitled "Cross-dressing in the Real World." There are summaries of court cases against cross-dressers.
"In 1599, for example, John Watkins was cited for going about the street in woman‘s apparel, being the parish clerk at that time‘, who explained in his defence that 'at a marriage in merriment he did disguise himself in his wife‘s apparel to make some mirth to the company' In 1607, Matthew Lancaster, wore woman‘s apparel like a spinster‘ during a Maytide procession and also used the merriment defence."
>My understanding is that sumptuary laws in medieval Europe not only regulated the types of clothing and accessories that people could wear based on their social status, but they also regulated the clothing that the sexes could wear.
I could see some sympathy with regulating clothing by social status if e.g. "impersonating a nobleman" carried the same sort of fraudulent exercise of power that "impersonating a police officer" does today. Did it?
It seemed to be more about preserving the social class system. Even though a wealthy merchant could be as rich as a lord, the lords didn't want wealthy merchants putting on airs.
Many Thanks! You may well be right. Also, the line may be blurry
>the lords didn't want wealthy merchants putting on airs.
"putting on airs" sounds like claiming (hereditary??) social status that the merchants weren't entitled to.
There may be a blurry line between social status and privileges that the lords were (legally? customarily?) entitled to. ( Though I presume that e.g. the pre-1999 hereditary seats in the UK's House of Lords would have been difficult for a wealthy merchant to surreptitiously occupy, regardless of a violation of sumptuary laws. :-) )
This doesn't apply to femmy men & trans women, but I think one reason gay males have attracted so much hate is that male sexuality is scary. Having homosexual men around makes straight men go thru some of the shit women do: A man is looking at you and imagining sticking his dick into you. He *probably* won't try to do it against your will, but it's not out of the question that he'll try. But even the fact that he's thinking about it is hard to take.
I'm not sure why you think that doesn't apply to trans women - it's still plausible that they are imagining sticking their dick into you, with the somewhat predatory take on sexuality and the musculoskeletal development that comes from having gone through puberty marinating in testosterone. It may or may not be true, but to either a straight man or a lesbian woman it is still a frightening possibility.
Well, I suppose it might apply to some trans women. But my experience of trans women is that they don't come across that way. Some of that may be the feminine appearance and manner, but also they're usually taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, and many have been for years, and I think that changes them in a way others can sense.
To be fair, though, a lot of what gives me that I'm-with-a-male feeling is just knowing that I'm with a male. I've known enough of them, and listened to enough of them tell me their thoughts, that knowing someone is male stirs up the sense that I may be an object of their lust. And it's a subtle component of my experience, generally way in the background.
IIRC, there was a horrifying little study last year about gender in online chess. Apparently, women played worse if their opponent had a masculine name or no name, but played better ("normally") if their opponent had a feminine name. Regardless of the actual player on the other end.
Hm. Riffing on what you say, if they view MTFs who are attracted to women as having "male" predatory sexuality, this categorizes the MTFs as a threat and as competition, in a way that an F attracted to women isn't?
In theory. But the MtF's I have known don't have a male sort of presence. I'm sure some of that is that is a product of deliberate self-presentation, but probably hormones play a part. MtF's take testosterone blockers and estrogen.
In my experience, the "male presence" thing does go down over time, on average, probably for both the self-presentation and hormonal reasons you mention. But it can pop out sometimes, especially in anger. And I wonder whether the average random anti-trans person talking on the Internet has a lot of in-person experience in neutral circumstances, or whether their experience of MTF people is mostly through images and videos and text and mostly centering on angry MTF people.
Maybe. I guess what I really think is that people are just prone to really strong reactions to sexual things. There's finding certain things wildly hot, and then there's the reverse, of finding certain things really repellant and weird. A lot of people take their person revulsions as evidence the behavior in question is bad, dangerous, or only practiced by nasty, scummy people. I think that's mostly what's going on with the loathing of trans people -- it's a big EWWW. I feel a mild EWWW myself about certain trans-related things, but I just don't take my reaction as information about how I should view trans people.
> people are just prone to really strong reactions to sexual things
Heck yeah. We really don't like acknowledging that we're monkeys, and that all our vaunted "intelligence" and "free will" is bound up in a meat shell that acts like a cross between a chimpanzee and a bonobo.
> A lot of people take their person revulsions as evidence the behavior in question is bad, dangerous, or only practiced by nasty, scummy people.
Yeah. I rather liked the philosophy of "YKINMKBYKIOK", but I feel like it may have fallen out of favor.
In the evolutionary environment, a tribe of men who were unwilling to fight would be in serious peril, whereas a tribe of tomboyish women would be no big deal, since their preferences could be overruled in any case by physically stronger men.
People don't want their sons having their dicks surgically removed, and creating a stigma against it is an effective method of discouragement similar to obesity, smoking, dropping out of high school, etc.
This might be a longshot, but I tried it in the past and it worked :
Do any of you work for or own a company looking to hire remote, entry level data scientists, data analysts or ML engineers ? Anywhere in North America is good as long as its remote. Let me know, would be very helpful and it would be amazing to work with rationalists !
Thought I'd send you a coupla links. First is to remote jobs, Hacker News one I've forgotten now, but I think a lot were for remote. No special connection to rationalists.
A year or so ago there was talk here about how Bean, the guy with the great blog about the navy, claimed that a nuclear war wouldn't kill as many people as popularly believe. IIRC, he said something like the blast from a nuclear warhead would only kill people within about a 3 mile radius, radiation would be bigger lethal problem, but we aren't talking about the destruction of large cities or anything like that.
I just listened to the Dwarkesh podcast with guest Richard Rhodes, author of Making of the Atomic Bomb, who said that some of the original physicists forgot to account for the destructiveness of the fire from a hydrogen bomb, which would be much bigger than the blast zone and could destroy an entire city as big as Moscow.
Whats the point of talking about *A* nuclear warhead blast, when many (most?) modern weapons are MIRV missiles that deliver multiple >hiroshima sized blast with each missile, spread miles apart? (Oh, and of course, there's thousands of these that can and would be fired in a nuclear war).
The original question from about a ye ago was whether most humans would die in a nuclear war and the answer was no, it would probably just set civilization back a century or two .
A related question. Richard Rhodes also says in the same podcast that computer simulations from 2007 showed that the dreaded "nuclear winter" after an atomic exchange would be even worse than previously believed. (Granted, 2007 is a long time ago now but Rhodes said this only a few months ago.) He claims, even a nuclear war between only India and Pakistan could result in a couple billion deaths from failed crops over the following year.
That contradicts what I have more recently heard, which is that "nuclear winter" isn't a real thing, that it's scenario was only a scare tactic.
I think this - https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter - is as good a short summary as you are likely to find. There were some interesting discussions on SSC back in the day as well, but to the same end result.
I'd be interested to know more about what Richard Rhodes thinks, but it's quite possible that he hasn't really kept up with the field except to have noticed that there were a couple of new papers in 2007 or so whose capsule description was "nuclear winter is real bad". Which there were, but I've read those papers and they're the sort of thing that makes me want to say "replication crisis".
Well, OK, maybe we don't want to do multiple replications of Global Nuclear War just for scientific bragging rights. But if you're not validating your models against the Australian wildfires and the Kuwaiti oilfield fires, you're not even trying.
I don't have subject-matter expertise here, but I did want to say for anybody who isn't familiar, the blog in question is https://www.navalgazing.net/ and it has some really good stuff on it if you want detail-rich explanations of technical topics related to the military.
The effect of fires would be very dependent on the city (built of wood? lots of trees?) and the weather.
It's easy to imagine that a 5km radius ring of fire in the centre of a large city would easily swamp the ability of the survivors to fight it (and besides, everyone will be fleeing, not firefighting) so you're basically stuck waiting for the fire to burn itself out. On a cold rainy day that happens quickly, on a hot dry windy day I can easily imagine everything burning (or at least everything downwind).
Firestorms have always factored into people's estimates as to the destruction and lethality of nuclear war. I can't speak for the theoretical physicists who started the whole thing, but once the military started testing the things, the incendiary effects were quickly appreciated.
And for the largest hydrogen bombs, the big multi-megaton ones everybody worried about during Peak Cold War, the relative scaling laws meant that the incendiary effects were quite dominant. The 50-megaton "Tsar Bomba", to a first approximation, ignites everything burnable out to 50 kilometers and does some other stuff you probably won't care about compared to that.
But Tsar Bomba was too big and cumbersome to be practical, and since the 1980s at the latest most everyone has converged on weapons in the 100-500 kiloton range as optimal for most applications. Those weapons are much more balanced in effect. The blast of a 300-kT bomb will destroy unreinforced buildings out to about 5 km, and it will reliably start fires out to about 7 km. And the two effects are synergistic; starting fires is much more destructive when you tear open buildings to expose all the flammable stuff and scatter fuel across the streets and other potential firebreaks.
So we can sort of round that off to "within 6 km, pretty much everything is destroyed, beyond that there's damage but mostly things can be repaired".
The City of Moscow seems to have a radius of about 30 kilometers, so to totally destroy it you'd need a couple dozen of those 300-kt warheads. Or about a third of a Tsar Bomba, but the couple dozen smaller warheads will be cheaper and give you more flexibility. And for Moscow we'd probably assign a couple dozen warheads just on general principle, but cities that aren't so central and prestigious to the enemy state will probably just see key military and industrial areas flattened+incinerated.
Which, to be clear, is still a Very Bad Thing and we should try not to do that. But it's not X-risk bad.
Well, we're not talking about just one nuke here. The US claims to have 3,708 nukes stockpiled, while the Federation of American Scientists estimates it to be 5,244 instead. https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/ Whichever one is correct, Russia is predicted to have even more nukes stockpiled than the US. Even if it did "only" obliterate people in a 3 mile radius, 28 square miles times several thousand nukes is... well, a very large area. Nowhere near enough to glass the entirety of one of the bigger states, but it could take out most big cities in the country.
The main worry with Russia is that if they keep losing this war, there is a non-zero chance they will start launching nukes at targets outside Ukraine as a Hail Mary play, effectively holding humanity hostage to protect their ambitions. There is a paper saying that a full-on nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill 5 billion people, not from the nukes themselves, but from the massive nuclear winter it would cause. Not to mention it would cause a full-on mass extinction of wildlife; after all, this situation is basically the same as what killed off the dinosaurs. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
Just doing the math on the size of the direct devastation, using inflated versions of your numbers:
12,000 nukes each destroying 28 square miles is 336,000 square miles. The United States is close to 3.8 million square miles. The entire planet is over 196 million square miles.
It would take over 135,000 nukes to destroy the entire United States and seven million to destroy all surfaces of the world.
Even one well placed nuke would cause significant devastation to the world economy (New York harbor, New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, etc.), but would not be that devastating to humanity.
Good point. That would still take ~1,800 nukes to destroy all US urban areas entirely, which is a significant portion of all of the nukes in existence. There aren't enough nukes to do that to every country.
Humanity could totally wreck the global economy and destroy significant portions of the world population, but even using every nuke on the planet it wouldn't even be close to extinction. More people may die in the ensuing famines and successive wars as the new political order gets sorted out, but the nukes themselves cannot fully devastate the planet.
It’s interesting that that paper is recent. I assumed the nuclear winter theory had been debunked - the soot just doesn’t last that long in the atmosphere and doesn’t reach the stratosphere. Scientists were predicting some global cooling as the oil field burned but it didn’t happen.
The numbers in that Nature article seem dubious to me. Not the models; I didn't even get into evaluating that. The scenarios. They had scenarios ranging from 1 to 150 Tg of soot injected into the atmosphere. Average would seem to be about 27 Tg. The example for scale that they give is a forest fire, the size of which I know to be 12100 square kilometers, that produced between 0.3 and 1 Tg of soot. Based on that, we're talking about somewhere between one and three Finlands burning down to produce their average case. If you run the numbers, one Finland, maybe one and half, is the most area you could destroy with nukes if everybody decided to work together and be maximally efficient about it. Realistic cases would be far from maximally efficient. A lot of nukes wouldn't go off or would fizzle, a lot of nukes would be destroyed on the ground, and most importantly probably something like 25%-50% of nukes would be expended trying to nuke other nukes where you've got to drop a nuke on every silo even though they're only a few kilometers apart. Only the very smallest of their scenarios seems in any way plausible and their models show very minor changes for the smallest scenarios. Don't get me wrong, a bad day to live in the nuclear sponge or next to anything particularly strategic, but the global nuclear winter bit seems like a case of assuming the numbers will be very bad resulting in the numbers being very bad indeed.
Don't quote me on these numbers, but IIRC there were something like 500+ above-ground nuclear tests between 1945 and 1980. I remember that 1962 was the peak year for above-ground tests. ChatGPT says there were 178 detonations that year and the total explosive yield of these tests was approximately 87.8 megatons, with the largest individual test being the Soviet Union's "Tsar Bomba" test (mentioned above), which had a yield of about 50 megatons. It's interesting to note that global warming stalled between 1945 and 1980. I'm sure the soot from that steady background of above-ground tests must have contributed to that global warming pause between 1945 and 1980, but I haven't seen any studies that tried to quantify it. And I can't find any estimates of how much dust a 500Kt explosion would generate. But 500 x 500Kt explosions happening concurrently would likely push many millions of tons into the stratosphere. I'm pretty sure that would be more than Pinatubo released (10 cubic kilometers of dust), and that had significant downstream climate effects. Not sure it would be anywhere near the amount put out by the Mount Tambora explosion that caused the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816.
It’s not clear at all that any significant soot goes into the stratosphere. The initial explosion might push some particulates into the stratosphere but the subsequent fires - which are what is generally modelled - probably won’t, and therefore get washed away by the lower atmosphere
When I lived in LA in the early 90s I recall that we were getting measurable amounts of fallout from China's Lop Nur nuclear tests which were carried over by the winds stratosphere. Then there's this. Their conclusions are based on modeling, so take it for what it's worth ( I generally distrust models)...
"This study suggests that the cause of the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century was the atmospheric nuclear explosions detonated between 1945 and 1980. The estimated GST drop due to fine dust from the actual atmospheric nuclear explosions based on the published simulation results by other researchers (a single column model and Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model) has served to explain the stagnation in global warming."
While thinking about the next installment in my series on great literary critics (which has become another inquiry into the nature of literary criticism), I found myself thinking about that essay in which I offered a Girardian interpretation of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I smelled an opportunity: Why not add Lévi-Strauss and game theory into the mix?
Lévi-Strauss is obvious since I’d already discussed him in the series, but game theory? How’d I get there? I don’t really know, it just happened.
But I had taken a look at some of Girard’s remarks about Much Ado About Nothing in his Shakespeare book, A Theater of Envy, where he talks of Beatrice and Benedick as playing a game with one another (p. 81):
"Outside observers shrug their shoulders and declare the entire game frivolous. It certainly is, but our condescension itself may well be part of a strategic positioning that is always going on, “just in case” the game might have to be played. The game, perhaps, has already begun. We always try to convince others that we ourselves never play this kind of game, but these disclaimers are necessarily ambiguous; they resemble too much the moves that we could have to make if we were already playing the game."
Girard does not invoke game theory, and games of course are common enough. We talk about them all the time. Back in 1964 Eric Bern had a bestseller with Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, though it's not a game theory book, not in the sense I have in mind in this essay. But Girard was also concerned about who knows what, with what things are public knowledge, and what things are secret, with how public knowledge confirms individual beliefs, those are all matters of importance in game theory. Moreover and after all, game theory is an abstraction over games in the common-sense use of the term and in a way very similar to the way Turing’s account of computation is an abstraction over an activity otherwise performed by people using pencils and paper.
But just how and why I came to think of game theory is not all that important; what’s important is that I thought of it. Once there I thought of the work of Michael Chwe, a brilliant political scientist who published a very interesting book I’d read some years ago, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (2001) and has more recently published Jane Austen, Game Theorist (2013), which I’ve not read. But I have skimmed through his article, Rational Choice and the Humanities Excerpts and Folktales (2009). Moreover, if you search on “game theory and literature,” you get hits. The conjunction of game theory and literature is thus not so strange, not so unexplored, as one might think. If literature, why not film?
Since I’ve already done a Girardian analysis of Spielberg’s Jaws, why not revisit the film with game theory in mind? That’s what the rest of this post is about. I don’t actually conduct a game theoretical account. Game theory is a technical discipline, but this is not technical. It is, however, informed by game theory, but it is not technical. It is a long though, so take your time.
Caveat: If you’re looking for Girard and Lévi-Strauss, they’re here. But the essay is mostly about games. You can find more Girard in my original essay on Jaws, linked above.
Get an entry-level technical job with a large business and then tell them you are interested in potentially working in technical sales. May take a couple years but there's plenty of demand for technical people moving into sales.
Does anyone know how exactly a liquidity providers make money on polymarket.. has anyone provided liquidity in the past for a poly market and made money
Taylor Swift is widely known worldwide. Gretchen Peters isn't *nearly* as famous, but over her long career, she shares with Taylor one thing: she writes extraordinary lyrics about the inner lives of women.
Am hoping my post made that contrast exceptionally clear, in the paragraphs describing the current career arcs of both Taylor Swift and Gretchen Peters. (For instance, by contrasting Swift's 281 million Instagram followers with Peters' 10 thousand followers.)
Acknowledging that music is wildly subjective, as are tastes in song lyrics, poetry, literature, and the like. One listener's meat is another's poison, and all that ...
Still, there's a case to make that some of Swift's best lyrics (with and without collaborators) are indeed extraordinary. And distinctive.
Here's a trio of her songs whose lyrics personally strike me as such, superbly fitted to their respective contexts:
"Safe and Sound" (which was featured at a key moment in the 2012 film, "The Hunger Games")
I started using about the time of the Musk Takeover when it filled my inbox with defenses of the poor Royal Family that was being so horribly mistreated by Megan Markel and her husband. :)
It's weird you talk about the "poor royal family" sarcastically like this, when in reality the one person in the whole situation who truly claimed to be horribly mistreated was Markle herself, and nearly everything she's ever claimed about the royal family and her experiences with it have been shown to be complete lies. She never intended to live a royal life and always intended to use it as a springboard into celebritydom (that life as a C-tier actress couldn't otherwise provide).
I don't care about the royal family, but Markle is truly insufferable and one of the most narcissitic people I've ever heard of. And of course, legions of assholes used her lies as a general bludgeon against what they hated: Old straight white traditional anglo men/culture.
Maybe, but those messages that turned me off Twitter, were, like yours, long on accusation and short on details. I have no knowledge or interest in whether she ever "intended to live a royal life and always intended to use it as a springboard into celebritydom" or if she is "insufferable." But really, the idea that a family that can trade it's ancestry back to Alfred (if not Hengist and Horsa :)) being mistreated by a "C-tier actress" is pretty funny.
How did the linguistic cliche of describing emotional states as "places" originate in English? I'm talking about phrases like "coming from a place of anxiety" or "I'm not in a good place right now".
Also, is it an effective heuristic to assume that the speaker is (a) american, (b) female or/and (c) politically progressive, based on the usage of this cliche?
Not sure how it started, but some reasons it caught on may include: a) there's no standard way to talk about states of mind, and other expressions like "state of mind" are a bit clunky and/or have obscure, less intuitive referents; b) the "place" can be an internal state, as you say, or a function of external factors, or both, which leads me to; c) expressions like "not in a good place" allow for some interpretative flexibility and euphemistic cover when something socially unsavory or personally painful might be going on. Space and time are also pretty fundamental sources of metaphor, and we do say things like "not having a good time right now" to talk about people being--here's another--"in a bad way" (which is a...path metaphor? process metaphor?)
My French is not fluent but I think a more natural way to express this in French is “je suis dans la bonne voie” which translates to “I’m on a good path” or “I’m in a good way”
I may be misremembering some of this but there's an indigenous language in Australia that when you ask, "How are you?" you're literally asking which direction that person is going. That person would reply with the direction they're going (i.e. north, south, east, or west). And those cardinal directions are both associated with where you're physically going and/or facing, but they're also associated with one's state of mind and well-being. Sorry, I have a packrat mind, and I remember (or misremember) this factoid from a long long time ago when I was an undergrad in Anthropology. I'm like that character in Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_ who confessed, "I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing."
Moreover, I remember there was a Radio Lab episode that talked to the native speakers of this language. Sorry, I'll have to dig deeper to remember the name of this language. ChatGPT wasn't able to give me the answer, but it noted that the Maori of New Zealand to say hello ask "Are you going?"
Update: Ahhh, found it. They're the Guugu Yimithirr people of northern Queensland.
Oooh thanks for for finding it! I've heard about them and always found them to be my soulmates, as an old interactive fiction player who uses geographic directions for everything. They say things like "the cup is on the northern side of the table". Likewise, I tell my wife: "If you want to go to this bar, you take the train to the station so-and-so, and then you go west." And she asks: "Which direction is west?" Unlike me and the Guugu Yimithirr, she never knows where is north and south.
"Are you going?" for "How are you" sounds like French "ça va?", "is it going?"
It seems a straightforward spatial metaphor? If one imagines an "emotional landscape", some parts of it are going to be better and some parts are going to be worse. We want to leave Depression City and head out for the scenic Joyful Hills.
I don’t know how it started, but it reminds me of something…
I once heard (and forgive me, because I’m going to mangle this badly) that when we e.g. experience people as being “cold” or “warm” toward us, that’s not just a linguistic metaphor, but has a neurological basis. Apparently, parts of the brain that are associated with processing temperature can also be used for sizing people up. Basically, when we perceive people as cold, the part of our brain that reacts to cold temperatures lights up.
(This admittedly feels a bit too cute to be reliable, but maybe someone who knows more can confirm or debunk the more general idea: that the same circuitry in the brain is used for multiple tasks, which may in turn become associated …?)
Given that (possible mis-)understanding, I would not be surprised if some people – especially people who devote a lot of mental resources thinking about emotions, mental health etc. – use brain circuitry typically associated with orientation and navigation to think about emotional states. And that it would be natural for them to use metaphors from physical space when they need language to describe their “emotional landscape”.
Googling the phrase gets me the Oxford Dictionary site, which says "happy place" originated in the 1990's and that they're not going to tell me anything more unless I make an account.
Feels like it could be an extrapolation of "between a rock and a hard place", which Google says originated as a reference to Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey.
Seems like a short hop from any of these specific metaphors to the lazy "in a bad place". And if you were in a bad place, and you're no longer there, you're in another place now, right?
> The term “hitting rock bottom” originated among miners in the 19th century. The phrase indicated that the bedrock of the mining operation had been hit, leaving no way to go lower.
This has to be at least a little bit wrong, because mines don't stop at the bedrock. They go deep into the bedrock.
This was my guess too, so I asked GPT-4 and Gemini. Neither LLM claimed that mental health therapy was the source, but Gemini did suggest a connection with an instruction that mental health therapists give: "Go to your happy place."
Maybe screenwriters or comedians adapted it for non-therapeutic monologue or dialogue, and from there it entered general use, without anyone ever documenting the process.
Don't know the entomology, but a picture of me with a beer in hand and smile on face in front of my garden was referred to by a friend as, "George in his happy place."
I’d like to know more about this from Freya India.
Gen Z is often described as a sexless generation. We are having less sex than previous generations did at the same age. We are less likely to have been on a date. More of us identify as asexual. In fact, according to this Stonewall report, more Gen Z Brits identify as asexual (5%) than gay (2%) or lesbian (3%).
All kinds of cultural and social influences could explain this. Early exposure and addiction to online porn might be one. I’ve written about risk-aversion and fear of rejection as another. Increased awareness of asexuality too. But there is also, I think, a medical explanation. More specifically: the widespread use of SSRIs and their sexual side-effects.
SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors) are a common class of antidepressants used to treat depression, anxiety and other mental health problems. Popular SSRIs include Fluoxetine (Prozac), Escitalopram (Lexapro), and Sertraline (Zoloft). Something well established about these drugs is that they have sexual side-effects. In fact, between 40 and 65% of people who take an SSRI are thought to experience some form of sexual dysfunction. What few people know, though, is these side effects can persist even after coming off of the drugs—a condition called Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD).
This is more than just low libido. It can be a total loss of libido, genital numbness, erectile dysfunction, an inability to orgasm and complete lack of sexual attraction. Emotional blunting is also common, with sufferers describing a numbing of positive emotions, no romantic feelings, and difficulty connecting with others. PSSD can occur immediately—after just a few pills—and persist for years, decades, even permanently. There is no treatment. Despite PSSD being in the medical records since the ‘90s, patients are rarely warned of the risk. A risk thought to be 1 in 216.
I wonder if this is something that ultrasound neuromodulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation could address? I'm not familiar with any studies on this specifically, but I'm guessing that stimulating sexual neural circuitry is probably not more complicated than what we can already do with rTMS or ultrasound.
Another, possibly stupid, hypothesis: relationships involve risk of emotional damage, and society generally has become risk averse. Also, we seem to be better informed than previous generations as to how casual (and innocent but poorly thought out) gestures or statements or interactions can be hurtful: combine this with how worrying about certain food allergies seems to increase food allergies etc.
Is this hypothesis under-discussed, if so is that because it is stupid or just uninteresting?
I’m a zoomer. You are right sensitivity is a partial cause. The prevalent zoomer view is that we’re subjects to life, not just some part of it randomly floating around. Everything is hyper-personal this way, so people try to correct with hyper-politeness.
In general it’s one of those “Lines on Graphs” situations where every proximate cause we identify (DEI, political correctness, SSRIs, pornography) is really a second-order effect of a deeper control system pulling us into some kind of emotionless void. The end-state is probably extinction. Technology is the most direct driver, but that’s its own weird feedback loop.
I don’t have an emotional relationship to any of this, but most of the arguments that we’ll survive this century seem to come from one.
If you have expanded on these thoughts of yours somewhere, I will appreciate being pointed to. You seem to be talking about technology feeding a "grasping" sort of egocentrism (in abstract ways that we can infer only from, and confuse with, symptoms?), while I was thinking at least partly of people being more sensitive to others which promotes "defensive" aspects of their own ego. [Edit: Actually no, you are talking about the subjectness coming to the foreground, so your first point indeed seems consonant with mine, but put differently and with extra assertions on the role of technology.]
I have no idea, but i do think its very strange that so much of online discourse (especially on the right) is so focused on "body count", and youth promiscuousness, and hook up culture, but, as you correctly layout, younger people are having less sex (and doing fewer drugs, and drinking less) than past generations.
The birth rate is still going down of course, but i dont see a sharp drop any time recent (especially compared to the end of the 60s - and 1971 comes up again!).
Seems like people are having less casual sex vs less sex overall, but thats just speculation.
I think that for several decades, most births have resulted from sex intended to cause births, which is a small fraction of all sex, so it's not surprising that trends in overall sex might come apart from trends in births. (Someone who becomes less enthusiastic about sex but has no change in their lifetime desire for children might have precisely the same amount of sex intended to cause births, while decreasing their sex overall quite a bit.)
I'm going to stick with "porn" as the obvious explanation.
Wondering why people have less sex once they get access to a bottomless well of free pornography is like wondering why people do less hunting and gathering ever since the supermarket opened up.
According to the CDC, only 7.9% of people aged 18-39 take SSRIs, and as you said, only 50% of people get sexual dysfunction from it, so I don't think that's the main cause.
Maybe it's the social alienation. Maybe it's the dehumanizing work that pays nothing. Who knows, maybe it's the fucking microplastics everywhere. Seriously, why is there almost no research into the most obvious case of global mass poisoning in history?
>According to the CDC, only 7.9% of people aged 18-39 take SSRIs, and as you said, only 50% of people get sexual dysfunction from it, so I don't think that's the main cause.
Much appreciated! Yes, that seems too small a fraction of the population to be the main effect.
Agreeing that it's at least reasonable to be concerned about the health impacts of ubiquitous microplastics. And about whether, in the extreme case, at least, these might be having material or even profound impacts on many living organisms, including humans.
If this helps, there are a fair number of researchers looking into those potential health impacts, as well as where those materials are being found – in the environment and in the bodies of living organisms.
Just three representative examples here, among many:
"Fatty liver was a disease of the old. Then kids started getting sick"
Your username used to have a "(Banned)" next to it, and now it doesn't, so I assume that means that you're fine? I got the impression that if you're banned, you literally cannot comment, so just the fact that you're commenting should mean that it's OK?
I wasn't sure. I've never been banned before on Substack before, so I don't know how the penalty box on Substack works. The message I got from Substack said I was banned, but it didn't put an expiration date on the ban. So I assumed I was banned forever and I unsubscribed (now I'm getting resubscription requests). It was only later after catching up on some old open threads that I saw I was only banned for a month.
I think he checks on reported comments and such *very* infrequently. And I'm pretty sure if you're banned it's impossible to post, so if you can post at all it's OK. I'm technically the administrator of another Substack, and I have the option to ban people from posting for a day, a month, 3 mos. or a year. Substack I think implements that setting automatically by blocking the person's comments, and then stops blocking them when their sentence is up.
Thanks, E. for that info. The email I received from Substack was that I was banned, and it didn't put a time limit on the ban. Later on, in one of the threads, I saw that I was only banned for a month. Unfortunately, there's no way to query my Substack profile on Substack to see if I'm banned nor when the ban expires. But I'm going to assume I'm unbanned now.
Good! Welcome back. There's a vax thread further down with people saying N Zealand data shows vax kills more than it saves, or something like that. Maybe you'd like to weigh in. It's pretty civil so you won't be in much danger of slapping faces and getting banned again.
I run a small non-profit makerspace in College Station, Texas, where I go to school. We have a great thing going but we’re constantly struggling for money. Does anyone know of any specific resources we would be able to draw from? We are a registered 501(c)(3) corporation
I'm not super connected, but I imagine there's a vast network of Old Ag engineering alumni you could tap into. Maybe call up the alumni association and ask them for some leads? (Though their primary function is to ask *you* for money).
Also -- are you a registered student organization? You can get some money from the university itself that way. Not sure how peanuts that would be on your scale, tho.
That’s not a bad idea, I should give them a call for sure. We aren’t officially a registered student org, but we do have an *officially unaffiliated* student org that we use to advertise on campus. The student org finance center is horrible to work with though, so I doubt we’d be able to get money out of the student org and into the makerspace without raising some red flags.
Yeah you're probably better off finding some rich Old Ag who thinks what you're doing is cool and seek funding that way. Not sure where you'd find such people though.
How much money do you need to keep yourselves around?
EDIT: One thought is you could try to get some publicity from the alumni association magazine or whatever and then try to use that to fish for donations from Old Ags. University loves to brag about what folks are doing in Aggieland... I dunno, good luck!
Currently our baseline yearly expenses are around $30k, for rent and utilities. We’re easily bringing in around $20k from memberships, so just like $15k per year is enough to keep us afloat with our current circumstances and keeping our tools working.
That’s another great idea, we should see if they can write something about us and what we’re doing.
You could also consider charging a little bit more and being honest with people about what your expenses are. Do you perceive they'd balk if you raised the prices?
Actually, I do think so. ~85% of our members are students who can barely afford the discounted student membership, and I would guess that we would lose significant money if we raised the price. For our few non-student members, we could potentially raise the price but I’m not sure we have enough members in that category to make a substantial impact, and the risk of losing one or 2 of them outweighs the gains from an extra $10-$20/month from the rest
Substack Notes is a dumpster fire. An abomination. A wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Today, we have some dude claiming that the British assassinated Navalny. Because ... well, he doesn't have any reasons that aren't transparent bullshit, but that doesn't stop him. And, yet, this is on my feed.
There was incessant talk two months ago about "banning the Nazis" (and, possibly, anyone who is trans-phobic or racist or supports Trump as well). And I was against this.
But, Substack does have a massive problem. Their "Notes" product is repeatedly recommending crap, faster than I can block my way out of it.
Can Substack do anything about this? Or is this indeed another doomed social platform.
Your comment is only defensible if you think everywhere else with user-generated content is/was at least as bad. Pre-Musk twitter had much, MUCH more stupid and vile stuff on there, it's just that you're likely to have more ideologically in common with those particular nutters than the ones on substack.
Today's low-light in Notes is a series of "how to hire a dominatrix" blog posts.
I don't know who these people are. I don't know why they are recommended. Clearly, the consensus is that the only way to stop seeing it is to quit Substack.
I really hope you have a similar reaction when scott and others incessantly tell us what literal rape-orgy-enjoying prostitute Aella has to say on some topic, otherwise complaining about such a post seems bizarre.
Too bad they don't have a "less of this" button instead of blocking. I'm thinking of one I see restacked 10+ times a day. I don't mind seeing it once, but 10 times!
- Personal filters that consist of a list of entries applied in order (so that later entries can supersede earlier ones), each of which is a keyword such as "deny", "allow", "hidemedia", etc along with a condition under which the action should be applied.
I.e. "deny author==idiot" to block someone, or "deny server==nazis; allow author==the_one_good_user@nazis" to block an entire, say, fediverse instance except for one user
One of the main conspiracy theory games appears to be taking two existing conspiracy theories and arguing that they are, in fact, connected. Thus, we see people arguing, ostensibly seriously, that Navalny died of an adverse reaction to a COVID vaccination.
At this rate, you can bring in the JFK assassination, reptiles from outer space, Roswell, the Great Pyramid of Giza, etc, to taste.
Someone may already have written a LLM app to do this. Maybe it's posting.
>Someone may already have written a LLM app to do this. Maybe it's posting.
Have any of the tabloids had notable layoffs lately? When one's standard lead article is <celebrity1> is a secret love child of a Roswell Gray and <celebrity2>, generating them via LLM seems like a natural application...
Sorry, could you clarify whether the issue is garbage or right-wing garbage?
I mean, if the issue is garbage, like yeah, I sympathize, but I don't know any place that's better than Substack. It's just a general internet problem that no one has solved, or else the cool kids solved it and they're off on a secluded server somewhere, away from us plebs.
If the issue is right-wing garbage, I mean, if you want to purge right-wing garbage and let the left-wing garbage flow...you could just go to Reddit. I mean, that's dismissive and I'm sorry but I really can't think of another way to phrase it. Because I've seen places where the right-wing garbage gets purged and the left-wing garbage flows and, genuinely, I don't know why the internet needs another substandard reddit clone.
...Why are you looking at Substack Notes in the first place? I honestly didn't even know that was a thing, I thought Substack was just a blogging platform. If they're trying to make some stupid social media platform on here, that's obviously a horrible idea. Don't use it.
I know everyone hates on Twitter, but I started using about a month ago, and it was... actually pretty good? I mostly just use it to follow artists, but as long as you heavily curate your timeline, the algorithm is decent at giving you things you like. You know it's working when you stop seeing blue checkmarks in your timeline.
There's a Notes? How was I so fortunate as to avoid this, or you so unlucky as to fall into it?
EDIT: Okay, I had to go look at it. So they're trying to be Twitter (or X)? Or something of that nature? Given that there are a ton of "leave X and come post on our site" clones out there, and I am not interested in any one of them, this doesn't recommend itself to me.
It's like a living example of the old post about how if you make a pro-free speech twitter clone you'll get five principled libertarians and a million witches.
(unlike using substack for actual blogging, which has arguments for it that aren't just "twitter but with less censorship")
Well… I think it’s possible to be for free speech, and simultaneously skeptical of algorithms that curate, boost and amplify speech (particularly by morons), based on opaque goals that are almost never aligned with the interests of the audience. (The alignment problem is not science fiction.)
So there's an important distinction here. Free speech as in just not banning speech (like the classic substack blogging) ends up mostly fine (there some crazy Nazi blogs but they're not especially prevalent and overall substack blogs seem to reflect mainstream society). Free speech *when you are announcing it as your selling point* is selectively drawing the people who aren't welcome anywhere else, and tends to turn out badly.
The still had less of a voice than now when they had to write the HTML code and convince someone to link them.
But the greatest problem are the recommendation algorithms. Before that, the morons at least had to convince someone to look at them and recommend them (and you could easily ignore recommendations from people who have recommended morons in the past). Now it is an algorithm pushing stupidity in front of your eyes and not taking "no" for an answer. Instead of merely providing space, the publishers are actively helping the morons.
As a fully paid up and card-carrying member of the Moron Community, I resemble that allegation!
The easiest way is to ignore this stuff in the first place. I honestly can't see why anyone would sign up to Notes, but a lot of spaces seem to be throwing the kitchen sink at it in an attempt to monetise every scrap of content and eyeballs they can.
So I've suddenly become politically excited by RFK Jr. and his independent run. I'm going to volunteer to get him on the ballot here in NY state. Anyone else with a similar vibe?
(Full disclosure, I've been buying Kennedy yes on the manifold president market.)
NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny noted Thursday that when Kennedy was asked on the “Health Freedom for Humanity” podcast in 2021 how parents should respond to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention schedule of immunizations for children, which his questioner described as “insane,” he responded by encouraging people to join him in telling strangers not to vaccinate their babies.
“For many, many years, I think parents were so gaslighted, and they were scapegoated, and they were vilified and marginalized, so that even parents of kids who were very, very badly injured, knew what happened to their kid, but they were just reluctant to talk about it. And I think now those days are over,” Kennedy said.
“We – our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.”
Presumably he can't be _directly_ on the payroll of the pathogens themselves, since the typical virus particle doesn't have a discretionary budget... He's doing a pretty good imitation of that behavior, though... https://xkcd.com/2455/
When it comes to poverty and war and yes, public health, I'm appalled by both Biden and Trump's disregard for human life; there's enough agreement between them on the big issues that I don't even see the point of having an election
and yet I think rolling back universal vaccination and bringing back things like measles would be even deadlier, looking at pre-vaccination life expectancy numbers. As always, I'll be casting a lonely protest vote this year (if I even bother voting)
War, wealth inequality, and having the freedom to organize against either of those things instead of facing censorship and mass surveillance when we try. Who cares about different faces when they work for the same donors?
both the Assange prosecution and the Fed chair stretched between administrations, which really says it all about which side they're both on. No minimum wage hikes, no more stimulus checks, no effort to address PPP fraud or give the uninsured medicine or protect workers from catching Covid on the job or address the housing crisis in any way. Dude even caved to the right on immigration policy in order to get more money for funding wars, which is the only thing he cares about.
All of these were notoriously written before October 2023
and it's not just foreign lives he's ended; US Life expectancy is well below where it was when he was elected, and his answers seem to be "have the CDC determine quarantine length based on politics, not medicine" and "refuse to confront the power of the health insurance industry in any meaningful way"
Leaving aside the dubiousness of inferring that a President does not value human life from the fact that life expectancy has declined, it doesn't even seem to be true. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr031.pdf
Hmm, yeah I expect as his popularity (hopefully) grows that we'll see more and more hit pieces in the MSM. And yeah he's got some outside the box (or Overton window) ideas, and I don't agree with all of them. That said I think giving the covid vaccine to kids was a bad idea, but we can disagree about that.
If by hit pieces you mean "pieces accurately quoting him," as this one did, I certainly hope we'll see "more and more hit pieces in the MSM." And then he can either defend his statements, walk them back, or repudiate them.
He's outside the box on this. Yes, its becoming clear the COVID vaccine didn't work, and may have been harmful. However, we eliminated—with vaccines—the top ten causes of childhood death which plagued our great grandparents 100 years ago.
Vaccination, any vaccination is about 0.9999 save. About ten in a million or one in 100,000 will die of just the injection alone. For a good vaccine, like the polio vaccine, the risk is well worth the reward. For COVID, there was no reward, hence the risk was all downside. The US data is shit because we have multiple health departments, but for countries with one solid program like New Zealand, the data shows that mortality increases with more vaccinations.
Wait, you think the fatality rate of *injections* is 1 per 100,000? Seems like we ought to be banning a *lot* of basic dental and medical procedures if they are really killing that many people through giving them injections in order to clean their teeth or whatever.
Can you link to that New Zealand data? I'm not finding anything showing that with a quick google and what I am finding is quite confusing with some anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine debate articles without any links to the actual data.
Is there any link to the actual data? Its not clear how many people are in which group and if there are many differences between the populations studied. Also this page has a link to the "tens of thousands dead of vaccine in New Zealand" claim from back in December that was widely debunked as an incorrect interpretation of the data. Which doesn't mean this claim isn't true, but sure makes me skeptical.
Every vaccine has some risk, I think admitting that to people would be the best thing to do. (Of course this means people have to understand what a 1 in a 100,000 risk is.)
Regarding that "in New Zealand, the data shows that mortality increases with more vaccinations" claim, I'd like to know the source for that, as well, Michael Kelly!
I looked briefly into one claim based on New Zealand's health data around COVID vaccinations – that vaccinated people were more likely to become infected. (Someone posted a chart to that effect on "vaccination status of new cases," albeit without a link where one could find the underlying data or summaries.)
As part of that brief look, I also came across this ... it doesn't directly address morality, but according to one tabular summary published on Health New Zealand's website, someone in the "no doses" group was about 5X more likely to end up needing ICU care (0.002) than someone from the "received booster" group (0.0004):
But that quote isn't about giving covid vaccine to babies. It's about the regular schedule of vaccines -- measles, mumps, typhoid etc. Here is the CDC Schedule he was asked about on the podcast, and answered as quoted above: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html
And I don't think it's reasonable to call this a hit piece. Hit pieces are a mix of facts & lies, all glued together in an overall negative take about somebody. The article I linked literally just recounts a fact.
OK sorry I didn't read the whole piece. So maybe he was an anti-vaxer and then changed his mind... IDK? I haven't really been paying any attention to him till a few weeks ago. Look everyone can find things that they don't like about a candidate. And if that's too big of a negative for you, that's fine. Maybe it's even enough of a negative for you to actively work against him. Also fine.
For me, this looks like the best hope. I liked the idea of Trump (in theory, an new independent voice.), in practice I dislike Trump. But he has shown that someone not on the traditional political path can be elected. I think the fact of Trump, gives Kennedy a better chance of winning, than if he had run before Trump. Just my opinion.
He isn't saying he changed his mind. He's saying he didn't say vaxes (including the standard ones for little kids) are dangerous. Or that he"wasn't clear" or that his words "were misinterpreted." And the stuff he said about vaccines wasn't just a coupla remarks that people are digging up now. It was something he clearly felt strongly about and spoke about often.
OK I have no idea, I hope someone will ask him about that. (Maybe he'll be on Rogan again.) But still you are saying that Kennedy now thinks most childhood vaccines are a good thing. Right? So even if he is doing a bit of the politician shuffle, he now has an opinion that we both could agree with? I can live with that.
> But he has shown that someone not on the traditional political path can be elected.
Even Trump had to go through one of the major parties. Kennedy can't win the Republican primary, because Trump is running and they're the Trump party now. And he can't win the Democratic primary because he's anti-vax.
From comments upstream, he apparently is no longer anti-vax (joining the main stream) but he's now lying about his previous anti-vax position. Which is not a good look, and I hope he tells us why he changed his mind.
Personally I've been hoping for some independent candidate for years. This is the best one I've seen come down the tracks in a long time. You can not like him which is fine. For me, he's good enough. And the idea that maybe, just maybe, we could break open the political can of worms that we have currently, with the election of one person, is exciting. What if....
First off, third party rather than "independent", please. We aren't electing a dictator, but someone whose job is to lead a coalition. That's something you can do, with a bit of finesse, if you lead a minority party whose legislative members can put the coalition over the top, but if you have *zero* representation in the legislature, you're not going to do much from the White House. And you're not going to lay the foundation for anything more in the future.
Second, a third-party (or independent) candidate who is an obvious kook or dimwit, is worse than no third-party candidate at all. People will correctly see that an actual RFK Jr presidency would be a disaster, and only the ones who just want to watch the world(*) burn will vote for them. Which means everyone else will just see it as evidence that the whole concept of third-party/independent candidates is for kooks, dimwits, and people who just want to watch the world burn,
That makes it harder for actually reasonable third-party candidates to accomplish anything in the future.
* Or at least the current US political system, on which a great deal of the world depends.
Sure third party if you prefer. I can defend no one* from the claim of kook or dimwit. (I really know very little about him.) He's going to have to do that for himself. I'm hungry for any third party. And I'm not sure but I think plenty of others are too. And this means we will continue to crystalize around whatever crazy seed crystal descends into the political arena. I'd take another Ross Perot. Anyway consider me crystalized, at least for the time being. I can always go back to my Tom Bombadil existence.
*Well maybe myself, but I don't really care if people think of me as a kook or dimwit.
OK maybe come September, I'll agree with you. But at the moment I'm excited by the potential that he could win. And dang, I'd have someone to vote *for*, and be doing my civic duty getting him on the ballot in NY. I see very little downside in supporting him.
Sure, that's fine. Although I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view on politician "desirability": maybe on a local level it's ok to be excited by a mayoral candidate or something. For President? I want to hold my nose and vote, the last thing we need is to get enamoured with a sociopath with that kind of power, I want "my" candidate to win, but I don't want to like him/her.
It is so tiring... Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Bush, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, etc. ad nauseam. The nation of 300+ million keeps coming back to the same people like a dog to its vomit.
I can't say I do, but could you explain what it is you like about him? I've never really encountered someone who was excited about his candidacy and I'd be interested to know what parts of his platform are appealing beyond "He isn't Trump or Biden", which I admit, is a little compelling on its own.
You can read a the transcript and get a good idea.
He says almost all the right things as far as I am concerned. (Though I don't agree with all his ideas.)
1.) Stop all the tribalism and get ideas from both sides.
2.) Try and decouple big business from government, especially big pharma.
3.) Sane immigration policy. (Strong borders but also better immigration laws... let more 'good' people in.)
4.) Cares about the environment and outdoors.
5.) Mostly just a vibe, that what's important are not either party, but all Americans.
Though mostly liberal, I live in Trump country and when I talk to people I work with about him almost everyone seems to like the idea... mostly just that everyone is sick of the current situation. And I want to get him on the ballot so I can vote for someone I support.
Those all sound good as vague aspirations, but the devil’s in the details. Given that Kennedy bases 2 on some pretty out there antivax theories, I’m not confident I’d feel good about his actual plan for the other 4.
OK first those are just my takes, you can read the speech for what he really said. As far as fixing things. (and this is just me talking out my ass) I think what he'll do is listen to both sides, take the best ideas from both sides and craft a comprise solution that ~75% of us will agree is OK. I think there are lots of 'problems' out there for which this would work. (And some problems are ginned up outrage by the politicians to get donations.) I know this is the same pie in the sky as always. Hmm maybe bring back the Progressive Party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_States,_1912%E2%80%931920)
So basically he is for everything good and against everything bad. "Stop tribalism", "Try and decouple" - is he going to actually "decouple" or just "try"; "sane policy", "care about outdoors", who could possibly be against any of this, why haven't we tried this before, if we could only elect the right guy to be President....
Sorry, I don't mean to be sounding combative, but the whole idea of "independent run" for President is just a giant narcissistic trip. And a Kennedy! of all people he should know that it's structurally impossible for him to win anything, because of the Electoral College, so the whole thing is just a giant ego boost and a scam.
If he really - really - wanted to have an impact, there's an obvious route - run for Senate. While it's impossible to be elected as an independent President, there are no structural obstacles to an independent Senate run. And Senators have enormous power, and can produce real impact. But this means actual boring hard work, as opposed to glamorous doomed campaign.
You don't sound combative. And yeah anyone who wants to be Prez. has got to have a big ego. And yeah he says all the right things. Why is that bad?
Another independent senator would be fine, but I don't think it would do much to change things. And I think he may have a better chance winning a presidential election (Given most peoples disgust with the current two choices) than he would at a senate run in whatever state he lives in.
"And yeah he says all the right things. Why is that bad? "
This is actually an excellent question! The reason I think it's bad is that these things are indeed all good, but simply saying them belies the fundamental reasons why they are not done. It makes it indeed sound like if we only could get the right guy in, who wants to do the right thing, everything will be better!
But there are huge structural/cultural/etc. obstacles to have things that most people agree on implemented. See also "Moloch". So saying all the right things without also saying why they haven't been done, and what obstacles the say-er will need to overcome and how, is just hollow and useless.
Oh dear, well first, as I start to respond I feel like... "How can I be filled with so much hubris? I really hardly know anything." With that said, I think we can point to most of the problems, and at possible solutions. Obviously one person can't do this. If elected he would have to build a political coalition to do things, but dang that's exciting, maybe the birth of a new political party. As far as Moloch, yeah that's a force in the world. I think it's a force that can be combated, mostly by choosing love and charity over greed. There is also a collective action problem with Moloch, it takes a large number acting together... one person is powerless.
Oh I need to add that I think most politicians do want to help our country to succeed, and if given a chance some will choose that path. You can call me a pie in the sky optimist, which I agree I can be. The alternative is just not me. Oh I guess my alternative is to become Tom Bombadil, and retreat into my own private garden. (which I've been doing for the past decade or so.)
Yea that's new one for me too and I spend plenty of time around "plague on both their houses" voters. (Having been such a voter myself for most of my adult life.)
You might recall the name Robespierre from a history class or TV show, but you may not have heard of Danton, and the great contest between them for the heart of the French Revolution. Why did Robespierre win, momentarily? A film from 1983 makes the case: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-danton-and-robespierre
Men working at or owning fertility clinics slipping in their own sperm isn't news, but this is an overview.
This is evidence that a few people have a pure urge to procreate. I believe that, for the most part, people having children is a combination of liking sex, willingness to raise existing children, and wanting children who will be helpful or just having the satisfaction of having a large or at least ongoing family. There's generally no desire to just have children that aren't connected to oneself, except for these guys. The cruder Darwinian version of life is made flesh.
I think the best strategy to avoid incest would be to choice partners whose parents were too poor for IVF. A strong but less certain strategy would be to choose partners who have both younger and older siblings. I think this indicates that the parents were unlikely to use IVF.
It's not clear to me why a separate law about fertility fraud is needed. Shouldn't ordinary laws about fraud cover this?
Note from the article-- it seems that fertility fraud has pretty much stopped as a result of common DNA tests.
I have a friend who grew up in India, and he's told me it's common in his culture for men to take pride in having as many children as possible. It's seen as a status symbol and is more attractive to men who can't attain higher status through wealth.
Particularly religious Indians also like having a lot of children to bolster the ranks of their faith. My friend (who is Hindu) said India's recent ban on under-18 marriages was meant to target older Muslim men who buy teenage girls from poor Muslim families so they can turn them into baby factories.
> There's generally no desire to just have children that aren't connected to oneself, except for these guys. The cruder Darwinian version of life is made flesh.
I've met multiple black men who take pride specifically in fathering children, without actually wanting anything to do with children themselves. One was literally on a mission to impregnate a woman in all 50 states, and of his "successes" to date, he had contact with zero of his children and wanted it to stay that way (unless they became rich I guess).
A sounder strategy with fewer undesirable consequences and less offense to the human spirit would be to pick the partner of your choice and run a couple of cheap DNA tests to ensure you aren't genetically related. Trying to imagine someone saying "Sorry dear, I know we seem very compatible and I have to admit I've been growing closer to you every day, but I just can't see us working out. The minuscule marginal risk that we are related to each other that results from the fact that your parents weren't too poor to have theoretically conceived you via IVF is a dealbreaker for me. What's that, you say they didn't use IVF? Well, there's no real way to be sure."
"There's generally no desire to just have children that aren't connected to oneself, except for these guys."
Donating sperm is a nearly effortless way to sire children. You might even get paid. And then you can tell yourself you are being altruistic by helping these poor women to have children (and your superior genetics are an absolute gift to any future family). I think a lot of men would be happy to donate sperm, we're pretty much wired for this. And then we can dream that 20 years in the future we will meet our handsome and thriving children on ancestry.com.
In France they have strict laws on the number of children that can be sired by one donor.
>"It's not clear to me why a separate law about fertility fraud is needed. Shouldn't ordinary laws about fraud cover this?"
From the article: "The near-absence of laws criminalizing the practice of fertility fraud until recently means no doctors have yet been criminally charged for the behavior."
Presumably (IANAL) there's some element of generic fraud that isn't met by fertility fraud; my best guess would be that the latter doesn't meet the criteria for injury/damage as typically written.
We have laws against financial fraud, and against rape by deception... but fertility fraud is neither. It is a new type of crime that didn't exist before. (IANAL)
Or, I suppose, fertility fraud technically *is* a kind of fraud -- the service you paid for is not exactly the service that was actually delivered, and that per se should already be illegal -- but either the punishment does not fit the seriousness of the crime (if the seriousness is determined by the *financial* damage caused) or there is some kind of loophole that a smart lawyer could use to defend the doctor (you agreed to get sperms from a random guy, so in theory that also *could* have been me, right? so your objection is basically that I nudged the probabilities, but hey, my clinic is not a lottery, we do not have a legal duty to keep the probabilities fair).
I don't think it makes sense to take drastic action to avoid the risk of incest. IVF isn't that common, and there are lots of different sperm banks, so the chance of dating someone else from the same sperm bank, and that bank suffering from this kind of fraud, are very low.
If you are concerned, I guess you could find out what sperm bank your parents used, if any.
You'll definitely come out ahead genetically if you date rich people, anyway. Great association between wealth and IQ.
There was some guy at California Cryo who was chosen by many women, and something like 100 of them had his baby. Probably more of them are in Calif. than elsewhere, though the place did ship, and the numbers in that situation do seem a bit worrisome to me. By the way, sperm banks aren't just used in IVF. The sperm can be used by a fertility clinic for IUI (intrauterine insemination -- doctors just go through the cervix and put the sperm in the uterus at the time the woman is ovulating). This is much cheaper & easier, and I think much commoner than IVF. The buyer of the sperm can also just inject it into the vagina themselves with little needleless hypodermic type thing.
Choosing a partner from a different race seems like a much simpler strategy, and much more efficacious in avoiding incest, and without the negatives associated with poor grandparents.
Supposedly a lot of fentanyl overdoses are just product contamination- i.e. a batch of 'regular' cocaine or heroin or something else accidentally gets a small but fatal amount of fentanyl mixed in with it somewhere in the illegal drug supply chain. Presumably that supply chain is not exactly very rigorous or have high quality standards.
If so- why does the US have so many more fentanyl ODs than Europe? Why isn't fentanyl mixed in with their illegal drugs, coke etc., as it is in ours?
What I've been told is that fentanyl is cheap, so adding a bit of it to a different drug will give that other drug a bit more kick while still saving money. It's a way to water down a drug while making your customers keep coming back. And from what I understand, an occasional death is a selling point - it shows that the drug is "good stuff", and of course all the addicts are sure that **they** can handle it, not like those fools who overdosed.
But diluting a drug with another drug can have unexpected interactions, and also makes it easy to overdose, possibly especially if the person is also taking fentanyl by itself. And if an overdose happens, it's harder to save the person's life if no one is certain what drug they took.
As to why the US, I expect we just have a more "unregulated" market, as it were. More of a "wild west" situation, where you get stuff but you're never really sure what's in it. I bet someone here will be able to tie it to Mexican cartels and the border situation with Mexico, since that's where most of our drugs come from.
>Europe just has less drug addicts, possibly due to having less disposable income and a better social safety net.
Do you have a SINGLE jot of evidence to support this relationship? People make these sweeping assumptions constantly without ever posting any proof for them. Like, I get it flatters your world view, but you need hard data to make claims like this.
Wow, so you're telling me that crack cocaine epidemic in the african american community afflicted black people who used to be wealthy? And that these wealthy people weirdly sought out a form of drug used primarily because...its cheaper than other forms? What a bizarre theory you have
Yes supposedly. In reality product contamination, laced drugs, etc, are just euphemisms we use to remove responsibility from the user, and allow the family to feel better. It allows people to think that an innocent kid was tricked, instead of the kid was a hard drug user and paid the price.
Of course horrendous things do happen: five kids thinking they were popping a Xanax die. But this is exceedingly rare. You cut drugs with cheap shit, not fentanyl and other expensive things. Fentanyl overdoses are so common because so many people take fentanyl.
Fentanyl may have been expensive at one time, but on a dealer cost per dose basis I believe it's been cheap for at least 20 years. When much of the cost of an illegal drug comes from the risks associated with smuggling it, having something where the dose size is in the micrograms helps a lot.
Drugs aren’t often cut with things that give them totally different psychoactive properties. Dealers who do this don’t remain dealers. Sometimes uppers are cut with cheaper uppers. But aside from that, cutting is used to decrease purity.
The danger in fentanyl, like you said, is that the lethal dose is small. And it’s everywhere and easy and cheap to get. You accidentally overdose from taking too much. Not from taking something cut with it.
This is my understanding as well, with the added note that fentanyl, being purely synthetic, is inherently cheaper/faster to produce at scale than heroin, which ultimately still comes from a cultivated flower.
"The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is alerting the public of a sharp nationwide increase in the lethality of fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills.
"The DEA Laboratory has found that, of the fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills analyzed in 2022, six out of ten now contain a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl. This is an increase from DEA’s previous announcement in 2021 that four out of ten fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills were found to contain a potentially lethal dose. ...
"These pills are largely made by two Mexican drug cartels, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco (CJNG) Cartel, to look identical to real prescription medications, including OxyContin®, Percocet®, and Xanax®, and they are often deadly."
It's worth noting this press release doesn't directly address how many, or what percentage, of the vast numbers of fake prescription pills contain Fentanyl. Nor why an expensive contaminant might be making its way into these. (This is also orthogonal to whatever extent street drugs, other than these fake prescription products, might contain fentanyl.)
But here are two conjectures: one conspiratorial (as crappy as it is for me to mention it), and another perhaps more suitable for Occam's Razor:
1. Since these pills are being manufactured using chemicals imported by Mexican cartels from China, perhaps there's an effort on the part of the PRC – akin to their ongoing hacking efforts into US infrastructure – to harm Americans, particularly military-aged men. Especially if China might be eyeing a possible invasion of Taiwan within the next 5-10 years and expecting to meet a US miliary response. (Yes, that's conspiratorial in the extreme, but mentioning this for the sake of completeness.)
2. Simple sloppiness, which seems ... possible? If you're cooking up a bunch of Fentanyl and also making other street drugs and fake prescription drugs, perhaps there's cross-contamination during manufacturing? (Much as, say, some food packages note that their products are made in facilities where tree nuts and other allergens are also present.)
"six out of ten now contain a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl"
This is obviously pure propaganda, right? Just remember what these same people said about marijuana for decades. You're better off using pretty much any other source.
Here's a third: sloppiness on the part of the user. Fentanyl is very popular. It is very popular to take stacked with other drugs. It is very easy to take too much. Many people die this way. But there was no cutting, mislabeling, lab mistakes, etc. And when it is a rich white kid, the death will be presented as an accident.
Almost all overdoses are accidents. So it's not even that misleading to label them this way.
I'm seeing this from very drug-friendly harm-reduction agencies, too. Lots of signs, aimed at a largely homeless population, saying to be careful, to buy from trusted sources, what the symptoms to watch out for are, and so on.
Piggybacking a shower thought of mine about fentanyl on here: If the shit kills so quickly, why can't we use that in executions? I know, I know, doctors are saying they'd love to help. but the Hippocratic oath prevents them. They have hearts of stainless steel, those guys. But there must be batches of seized fentanyl in police stations. I wish somebody would sneak some over to the poor doomed bastards the night before the execution, to save them from being tortured by goobers who can't carry out the other methods correctly. Or they could use heroin -- no MD script required.
I am against the death penalty too. I just think that if we are going to have it then we should at least kill people quickly, and not torture them to death by botching the procedure. I think a lot of the push against doctors helping with prescriptions and executioner training is so that executions will be especially horrible, and that will make us more likely to abolish the death penalty. So the man writhing through his botched execution is being used as a weapon in the fight. Hey docs, letting someone die in agony so you can use his agony to strengthen your case is an instance of doing harm. And by the way, eat shit and die, docs. In fact eat shit and die writhing.
There are ways to kill people painlessly that do not require a doctor. Just suffocate them with pure nitrogen. It will feel like falling asleep, because our feeling of suffocation is triggered by the presence of CO2, not by the lack of O2.
So I could ask similarly, given that there are simple ways to kill people painlessly *without* a doctor, why do you insist that a doctor should do it? Will it make you feel better knowing that a person in a white lab coat did it? Will it help you pretend that it was just an ordinary medical intervention?
Bringing a bottle of nitrogen and pressing the button is easy, feel free to volunteer.
Entirely reasonable. ( Frankly, if I had a terminal condition with an unpleasant endgame, I'd be ordering a cylinder of N2 myself. ) And yet, Arkansas somehow managed to botch it. :-(
Agreed. A nice thing about guillotines is that they don't need to be made by a doctor. Executions are so expensive these days, it'd be cheaper to build a single-use guillotine for each execution. Or they could just replace it with a 1 ton weight: strap the guy down, drop a rock on his head.
> Hey docs, letting someone die in agony so you can use his agony to strengthen your case is an instance of doing harm.
<Or they could just replace it with a 1 ton weight: strap the guy down, drop a rock on his head
Ah, minimalist execution methods. It's ridiculously easy to off someone while causing very little pain. If you compress the big arteries leading to the brain, which can be done without compressing the windpipe, they lose consciousness quickly, then die not long after. Or you could open a couple big arteries. Give novocaine at the sites first, even. put the guy on an absorbent surface and cover him so he doesn't have to see his life bleeding away..
I think at this point, "painless" has become some phantom which anti-death-penalty people chase because it's impossible to catch. Especially because most of them get complicated and messy if the person to be executed isn't cooperating. So I think "fast" and "certain" are sufficient. A single moment of pain at the end is trivial, especially since the person won't have to live with the consequences. (But like I said, I'm also in favor of corporal punishment.)
Oh I would bet it's far more benign than whatever potassium horror is injected now. They couldn't even manage the nitrogen suffocation. The whole reason there are nitrogen alarms in places that use it is because you feel nothing, you breathe normally, and then you're gone. The body doesn't understand there's no oxygen until it's too late. But no, they had to administer it via a mask, so the suffocation instinct kicks in.
I honestly don't get why they're having this much trouble executing people right. Wouldn't the easiest and most painless way be to just put them on anesthesia? Once they're unconscious, you can kill them in any way you like. Hell, you could just kill them via OD if you just up the dose a bit.
It's an organisational problem. The penal system is big and involves thousands of people, and many of those people are committed to opposing the death penalty by whatever legalistic/bureaucratic/PR bullshit reasons they can come up with.
If you need five hundred people to execute somebody, and two hundred of them are opposed to execution, you're going to find you're running into all sorts of crazy delays and hitches along the way, much like trying to herd sheep when a third of your sheep are secretly angry donkeys.
As for why it takes five hundred people to execute somebody... well, that's the legacy of previous iterations of this process where the anti-death-penalty camp managed to insert additional steps and bureaucratic hoops into the process.
I have a suspicion that no one actually wants painless execution. Some are against the death penalty altogether, and others want the condemned to suffer.
Doctors won't write prescriptions for the anesthetic because it "violates the Hippocratic oath." And I guess they and other medical personel are also declining to train the people who carry out the execution.
This is interesting because I would think that if even a small number of doctors were OK with the death penalty this would be a non issue. Is there really that much consensus in the medical field? Or is it that doctors who assist may face professional punishment?
(I’m a doctor but I live in Australia and can’t help sorry)
It's not accidental. The product gets "stepped on" by intermediate dealers, mixing it with an inert substance to increase profit margin, then they mix fentanyl back in (cheaper and easier to obtain, ordering by mail from China) to make it stronger.
The problem is that fentanyl is very powerful by weight, and difficult to mix consistently, so they are left with hot doses that have a lethal amt of fentanyl.
Fentanyl makes an opiate "stronger" but it doesn't make cocaine stronger. It ruins cocaine for most cocaine users purposes. I'm confused as to why it's getting in the cocaine.
So why doesn't Europe have an equal number of fentanyl ODs, assuming that their products are stepped on by their intermediate dealers? Or if not, why aren't their dealers doing so? Why is it a US-only phenomena it seems? There is certainly a great deal of cocaine being used in Europe, so there should be ample opportunities for stepping-on
My suspicion is that it's something to do with the local dynamics of the drug market, and it varies markedly from country to country.
If the local drug industry is dominated by a few big and reasonably rational players then they're probably not all that interested in pushing something like fentanyl. It would disturb the status quo, open the door for new players, drive down the cost of getting high, kill a lot of people, and attract more attention. Established dealer networks would rather stick to the old drugs.
At a guess I'd say fentanyl entered the US market alongside new players. I also think that gang activity tends to be a lot more decentralised and a lot more stupid in the US than in other countries. The median European gangster is a rough looking dude who is good at keeping his mouth shut, the median American gangster is a teenager with a gun in his boxer shorts and his pants around his ankles.
Fentanyl OD deaths appear to be spiking right now in the UK though from a much-lower base rate than in the US. The BBC and the Economist that I know of have each recently run articles on it, the current national administration has issued a special alert to the National Health Service, etc.
One answer I've heard is that Europe has a functioning heroin market supplied by places like Afghanistan. The US, by contrast, effectively stifles the heroin supply, shifting suppliers to satisfy the demand with the cheap and easily smuggled fentanyl. Once it's here it finds its way into other drugs. The law of supply and demand is much stronger than Title 21. If true, this is yet another weight in favor of the legalization of even dangerous drugs like heroin.
In that case, I'd expect to see more fentanyl deaths in Europe over the last 2 years, after the Taliban regained control and cut Afghanistan's poppy production by 95%. Do you know if this has been happening?
Yes, I'll second this as my understanding as well, with a slight addition of "most fentanyl is synthesized in China and Mexico, and it's easier to smuggle in due to the large amounts of goods coming from China and Mexico."
It's basically that heroin is bulkier and easier to interdict, and gets interdicted more, leaving fentanyl as the economical option to supply the large, definitionally inflexible demand in the USA.
Combine the huge crackdowns and reductions in legal, doctor-supplied opiates driving many people to the black market (where fentanyl is extensively used in pill presses to resemble the oxys and hydros that pain patients are used to), and you have the opiate crisis and subsequent deaths in a nutshell.
And yes, the ONLY way to stop the 40-50k fentanyl deaths per year is full legalization. The actual drugs cost pennies - if they were legal and sold with some reasonable markup to addicts, there would be almost no overdoses, and almost no addiction-associated property crime, because the true financial costs are negligible.
And people with addictions and pure supplies can last forever and contribute to society just fine - look at Keith Richards or William Burroughs.
I'd bet that if fentanyl were completely legal, although there wouldn't be nearly as many accidental overdoses, it might well become the suicide method of choice.
And I'd also bet that high-performing addicts are in a completely different bucket than bottom-of-the-barrel addicts, and the latter are much more likely to have their lives utterly ruined by access to opiods.
The primary reason overdoses happen is that the difference between 3mg of fentanyl and 5mg of fentanyl is the difference between "feeling good" and "overdose."
When fentanyl contaminates other drugs like cocaine and mdma, or when fentanyl is pressed into pills, there can be a "chocolate chip cookie" effect, where it's not evenly mixed, and a local surplus forms a "chocolate chip" of fentanyl in the other drug / pill. Oops, that chip was 5mg instead of 3mg and you're dead now.
And no, drug users in general and opiate addicts in specific typically don't want to die, and intentional overdoses are quite rare.
The reason fentanyl kills people is because it's added in imprecise amounts with slapdash mixing to either masquerade as heroin or opiate pills, or to add more addictiveness and oomph to other drugs, and the imprecision and slapdashery is killing people because of the 3mg / 5 mg thing.
People die because there's no consistency or predictability of how much actual active drug is in the things they're buying - if they were buying pharmaceuticually pure stuff of known strength, this wouldn't be an issue, and people wouldn't die.
This is entirely tangential to the fact that if things were legalized, the great majority of opiate addicts would be buying pills or heroin rather than fentanyl, because by all accounts, those "real" opiates are greatly preferred in qualia and in safety, but all you get in real life is fentanyl due to the war on drugs, and the cheapness and ease of smuggling it.
Here's a question for anyone who has a biological child over the age of five: What do you think of the two Tweets below?
The parenting blackpill is that it's mostly genetics, there's little you can do other than keeping them clothed and fed, and at most you can fuck things up by giving them a bad childhood. The rest is happenstance.
Indeed a hard pill to swallow. Good parenting can only create very limited upside. Bad parenting can create unlimited downside. So the parents’ job is to do our best to avoid that downside & try for any small upside we can enable. Parental ego prevents us from accepting this.
(BTW, the first came from Antonio Garcia Martinez, and the second is a reply to him.)
It's mostly spot on, and I think it has interesting implications around gene editing/embryo selection. Because that DOES represent an opportunity to overcome their own genetics in enhancing aspects of their children, and if they'll pay thousands of dollars a year for fancy preschools, imagine what they'll pay to give their kids 5 points of extra IQ.
I just listened to a podcast where Jeremy Howard, a coding wizard & the "fast AI" guy, talks about raising his daughter, mostly about homeschooling her. Listen to that and see if you still think the upside of good parenting is very limited. (And if you are homeschooling or thinking of it I highly recommend giving this podcast a listen: Teach your Kids, hosted by Manisha Snoyer, 9/29/23 episode).
Agreed - I base my view of things on a single ancedotal data point.
And it's not like a technical guru would be selected for very high intelligence, and it's not like he would have a high IQ daughter likely to succeed regardless of her education.
Ah, heavy sarcasm directed at me. Encountering it here on the page feels sort of like stepping in dogshit. It's real a pleasure to meet you, Hammond. I'm Eremolalos and I'm dumb as dirt. Probably the intelligence difference between us is due to our jeans. Oops, I mean our geans.
Father of a 13yo boy. It's pretty clear to me that fostering open communication, especially about emotions, goes with clothing and feeding as something parents can do that might make a big difference in outcomes.
I do believe that parents probably doesn't have a large impact on things like IQ, career success etc.
But those are also the parts of people that are the least interesting. When it comes to whether your child will be a Lutheran, a Catholic, a Hindu or a Jew, the parenting definitely counts. You can't make your child enjoy reading but you probably have some effect on whether they start from Dostojevskij or from Aasimov, if for no other reason because they will start their litterary adventure in your book shelf.
So all in all: I don't spend a lot of time worrying about their sanity, but I do like to pass on my own memetic quirks to the next generation.
>But those are also the parts of people that are the least interesting.
It's overwhelmingly what these parents care most about beyond basics of health and wellbeing. The parents who care about parenting the most are the ones who sign up for preschool waiting lists precisely because they want their children to be academically nurtured as much as possiblea s early as possible.
Just shows that the parents have a skewed view of human nature. I would rather my children grew up to be honest and decent technical workers than nihilistic engineers, no matter the pay gap
What kind of outcome is this solving for? I'm happy to believe that my children would end up with similar wealth and education regardless of how I parent. But most of my parenting effort isn't directed at achieving that. Much of parenting is about teaching 'virtues' (for want of a better term) to children. Have they learned to be kind, polite, disciplined, brave etc? Do they value the same things that I value? Much of my parenting is trying to pass these on.
Maybe these 'virtues' are also genetic, and I'd be happy to reassess if they are shown to be.
Easily resolved with an existentialist take. While parents may only have limited influence on children’s outcomes after birth, that doesn’t mean that good parenting is of limited value in terms of personal experience for children.
One kid who is two but also basically raised my younger brother ave sister who are both in their early twenties now.
Antonio might be true in the atomic case but not in the network case. Bring a good patent around other good parents has large positive effects. At least that’s why I think Mormons do well or other similar groups.
I have a 31-year-old and a 12-year-old, not to mention three siblings myself, and entirely concur with that response.
Also those tweeters are taking an insensibly all-or-nothing view of it. A lot of the value of good parenting is preparing both child and parent for successful response to incipient "downsides" to improve the odds of keeping the ship afloat so to speak. I've known plenty of kids whose draw in the genetic lottery had a big weakness and in many cases its easy to see how the specifics of their formative years helped or hindered them in adjusting to whatever the weak spot is.
I may not be the intended audience of this question as I have no children, but I nevertheless am interested in this question. I suppose that the starting point for this discussion is the finding that shared environment has no to little impact on certain psychometric measures, i.e. finding 9 on this paper on the most replicated findings in behaviour genetics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/
I have personally struggled with how to interpret this, and could use some enlightenment. I have no reason to fundamentally doubt these results, considering they appear to have been widely replicated. However, it seems to contradict a fundamental intuition I have of the world, where parents do have an impact on children's success. Perhaps it's time to exorcize this intuition? I consider the following points of interest:
1. When it comes to big five personality traits, the effect of shared environment is essentially zero. Some authors wave away these concerns by saying that "parenting is still important, but it affects every child differently". I don't think this really solves the contradiction. Ultimately, if you want your child to be highly conscientious and less neurotic, the data does still seem to suggest that there is no known parenting method you can use to reliably result in more conscientious or less neurotic children.
2. Perhaps the point is that you as a parent cannot, and should not aim to change a child's personality. Other psychometric measures seem to be a bit more amenable to some shared environmental effect. The paper provides the example of antisocial behaviour. Hence, it seems that your actions as a parent can help reduce the chances of antisocial behaviour. However, the effect, at 15%, is outweighed by the effects of genetics and chance. For academic achievement, the effect is roughly at the same level (10-15%), but it seems you can only influence them while they are children: as they become adults, these effects seem to dissipate.
3. Perhaps the main point of good parenting is to improve aspects that cannot be psychometrically measured. For instance, exposing them to different fields and hobbies is certainly something a parent can help with, even if these are not captured by psychometric tests, right? It's not always obvious though what falls in here. You could aim to teach them good 'values', but political inclination is a pyschometrically measurable quantity, and this has also been shown to have strong genetic mediators (my suspicion is the shared environment will also turn up effects of about 15% as with the other measures above, but I haven't been able to find evidence of this). Agreeableness could also be a measure of 'values' I suppose, and being a big 5 personality trait this would have almost no shared environmental effect.
On balance, I think the implications for parenting strategy is as follows. You cannot, and should not attempt to change a child's personality. There just hasn't been any evidence that this works at any level. However, you are not completely absolved of parental responsibility - about 10-15% (of the variance) of non-personality traits are indeed affected by your parenting. When it comes to academics, you can help them get into a good university I suppose, but everything afterwards is probably beyond your control. It is likely that you have a large control on things like the fields, hobbies and ideas your children experience, which do not affect how they grow as a person but could very much determine their career paths. That last effect seems difficult to quantify though.
Only one kid, but very obviously they come out of the box with certain personality traits and quirks. But then things get added on, one layer at a time, until something like a full person emerges (note: we are never finished, there are always layers being added on).
Just think - until just a moment ago, 90% of everyone was a farmer. A time traveller could look out at the fields full of peasants, serfs and slaves, and decide that predisposition for farming was essentially genetic. And then suddenly most of us worked in factories, mines or offices and couldn't grow a tomato to (literally) save our lives.
There is no genetic difference between a serf and an office worker, only the action of education, nutrition, socialisation and medicine - the end result of all those layers that began to be added from the moment of conception. So it is with children - you can only do what you can to provide the environment that you feel best allows the child's natural talents and inclinations to flourish. Who knows what they are capable of, or what they might do in future?
Not sure if we can have a meaningful debate at tweet length.
Yes, if you have more than 1 child, you have probably noticed that the kids behave differently literally since the moment they were born. So unless you attribute the difference to listening too much Mozart in uterus, it's probably genetic. Wait a moment; it also could be random!
That said, what does "mostly genetic" mean. Most *of what* exactly? Depending on how you compose the list of things, the fraction of the genetically determined ones can be greater or smaller. So are we talking about a list of character traits and skills and hobbies, or is also the skin color and blood type included in the list?
How exactly do you figure out what is genetic and what is environmental? (Note that I am not opposing the conclusion here, but rather the methodology. Why specifically is "I have two kids, and I can clearly see that everything is genetic" more reliable than "I spent two days outside, and I can clearly see that the Sun orbits the Earth"?) Your kids have similar genes, but also they grow up in the same family. They also have some different genes, but also one of them is older and the other is younger. How do you decide which of these similarities and differences are genetic and which are environmental?
Also, "parenting can hurt kids but it cannot help kids" vaguely reminds me of "low IQ makes you stupider but high IQ does not make you smarter". Why the asymmetry? Who decides which parts of parenting are mandatory (and therefore their absence can hurt the child) and which are optional (and therefore their presence or absence have no impact)? For example, giving your kids a computer and internet access, that probably does not belong to the list of basic human needs -- but do you sincerely believe that it has zero impact on their chances of winning competitions at computer science?
Heck, even if kids ultimately did all the important things in their free time alone, as a parent you have a great influence on how much free time they have and how are they allowed to spend it.
tl;dr -- it is cheap to argue that "it's mostly genetic", if you do not specify what "it" is, and how do you actually test whether it was genetic or not
EDIT: It also depends, why are you asking this question. Are you talking about other people's kids or your own? Are you selecting from a given set of kids, or are you giving advice on how to improve their results? That is, is this a comparison between kids with different genes (yes, genes matter a lot), or between possible futures of the same child (genes are fixed, the remaining difference depends on other things)? If your point is that choosing the right partner has probably greater impact than parenting, I agree. If your point is that we should burn down the schools and libraries and computers, and make sure that every child gets enough food... and that doing so will have no impact on the next generation, I disagree.
Re: Everything is genetic. If you doubt this, try to teach your pet turtle chess. That everything is genetic doesn't, however, mean that it's ONLY genetic. It's equally true that everything is environmental. (I think "environment" is defined in a way that those two are almost enough.) To complete the picture, also everything is random. (You're going to get quantum indeterminacy at the molecular level no matter what.)
You can't even argue reasonably that it's a matter of weights, since in a complex chaotic system extremely small differences can have large effects.
It's best to concentrate on the environmental effects, because that's where you can effectively act, but this doesn't mean that those are the only important effects.
Trivers' theory of genetic conflict says you shouldn't easily be able to influence your kids, because it is in their Darwinian interest not to be so manipulatable (even by their parents). However, evolving a defense against, say, being hit in the head with a ball-peen hammer, is a big ask.
I think these zero sum percentage splits are silly and reductive.
For most children, genetics will determine the achievement ceiling (astronaut, pharmacist, or construction worker) and the personality struggles (is this a person who will struggle with anger, or eating, or cowardice, etc).
And parenting will determine the achievement floor (prison, terrible jerk at the office, or all around well adjusted person) and the personality struggle skill (how much can this person cope, overcome, self analyze, empathize, etc, on their bad days or against their natural bad tendencies). Parenting here means *habits* (are YOU messy) as well as choices (do you make them clean their room).
Yes, culture and local environment do play a context setting role, but this doesn't diminish the vital importance of parenting. Everywhere and everywhen, there are people who are parented into being the local best type of person, and people who are parented into being the local worst type of person.
Beyond a certain adult-ish age, *you become your own parent*, and lifelong self improvement is down to whether you picked up enough skills to gradually parent YOURSELF out of your problems. This is as true for a construction worker as it is for an astronaut, and it is as true for a diagnosed bipolar as it is for a neurotypical.
I have two biological children, 6 years old and 9 months old.
Kid one was born energetic, angry, impatient, brilliant, and charming. I can't change a damned bit of that.
I choose whether she is allowed to be destructively energetic, angry and impatient, or encouraged *and* harshly required to control and channel those qualities.
I notice that if she spends too many days in a row at Grandma's, being served and not punished, the five qualities I listed make for a fairly tyrannical person. On a bad day, when I show up, she is *running* that house and shouting that poor old woman ragged with military orders. After even a day with me, she returns to being a *really* well behaved person who gets a lot of public compliments about how well she conducts herself relative to the other six year olds. She has fun, she is irrepressible, she will run wild in the nerf battles and play in the mud as much as any of the other children, but when lunch is offered she will politely ask the host where she may sit and whether they have a towel for the mud, and thank them for the meal.
My parenting is tailored for her qualities. I knew I could punish her pretty hard without making her a shrinking violet, and needed to in order to beat back a tyrannical impulse that she got from me and from my (awesome) father. I know she needs to be given a lot of good places for her energy, like a husky dog that needs to run an hour a day.
Kid two is shaping up to be mild, sweet, brilliant but *slow* to react, and food oriented. I can't change a damned bit of that, it's genetic. But she'll get a different parenting experience tailored to maximize those qualities. It won't be equal to the first and it won't fair. It *will* be *effective*.
As a whitepilled person with two lovely kids I have to say that there still can be a lot demanded of you, particularly when their small. You still have to feed them, force clothes on them, pick them up from kindergarten, can't leave them alone for too long, etc. It is a bit like being a wheelchair for five to ten years. Many ordinary things suddenly require a fiendish amount of planning.
But I am definitely enjoying them more than those poor people I met who believe raising their voice at their kids will turn into neurotic basement dwellers.
Until now I assumed that camps are mostly a European thing, because in USA every child camp would be sued to the point of bankruptcy. Or more precisely, that the threat of lawsuits is so great that it makes the child camps so expensive that only rich people can afford them in USA; while in Europe the camps are affordable for almost everyone.
I have spent about 2 weeks in a camp every summer as a child (in Eastern Europe).
I would largely agree, but while genetics is very important the child must still be socialized and cultured, and the family is where this happens with the greatest probability of success. Children should rough and tumble with Dad so that they learn what's acceptable in play and what's not. Just one example. If they start school and hurt the other kids, they will not have friends.
I expect anyone who has more than one kid realises that it's mostly genetics and there is very little that parents contribute. I reckon it's about 60% genetics, 30% peers and 10% parents.
I might agree that overall intelligence is genetic, but parents contribute a great deal to their kids education, and this is well documented . And your social group will make your kids more demanding of your parenting. "I want guitar lessons, Leslie does horseback riding can I? Nina plays pickleball, can we play? There is a club on Saturday afternoons. Please? I want a math tutor, my MAP scored is math are too low". This is the kind of stuff I hear from my elementary age daughters. As much as I'd like to just hand them an IPad and let them zone out on youtube influencers all day, I am forced to parent because they demand it.
I started my post that agreeing that intelligence is genetic. IQ scores are not the way most people measure parenting success either. My point is that in todays parenting environment kids demand attention from their parents. You can't just let your kid run around the neighborhood unsupervised if nobody else is doing that.
Parents can choose the peer population well into high school. Laurence Steinberg's book "Beyond the Classroom" says this: "When parents are choosing a school, they are not only choosing a principal, a school facility, and a faculty. They are also choosing classmates -- and potential friends -- for their child. Our study suggests that it may be this aspect of school choice -- the choice of a peer group -- that may be the most important ..."
The parents have less ability to choose the individual friends for their children, but can do a lot to choose the *pool* of potential friends their children have.
Perhaps Scott or an ACX reader may answer the question what prediction markets do, that bookmakers do not already do – and probably do a lot better.
Bookmakers are likely to be better at accurate predictions because they have real skin in the game. If they systematically misjudge the odds of future events, they will go bankrupt. This has the systemic benefit of creating a selection effect: The bookmakers who survive and stay in business, are likely to be those that are good at making accurate predictions.
Compare this the “prediction markets”, which - if I have read Scott’s blog posts on them correctly –deal with toy money or only small amounts of real money, and where any bored teenager or wishful-thinking ideologue count as much as a well-informed person.
For example, if you bet 1000 USD that Biden will win the next US election, you get USD 2500 back (odds 5/2). While if you bet 1000 USD that Trump wins, you only get USD 1100 back (odds 11/10).
…what is the added value of having prediction markets about the US election, that bookies do not already do?
The two largest markets on Kalshi are each over a million dollars. Bookmakers are basically creating ad-hoc prediction markets, with a less efficient market because they're not tied together with everyone else who might want to bet, a system for easily undercutting each other, etc. Comparing bookmakers to prediction markets is like comparing street vendors to the commodities market.
Thanks for the comment, but the problem is not the aggregate sum being betted on Kalshi, but the (mainly or exclusively small) sum/s that the individuals doing the betting are making.
While you're right in a sense, large bookmakers are very much more sophisicated than street vendors and compete fiercely with each other, which means their quoted odds are nearly always reasonably close to (but shorter than) the market odds.
You make two errors here. Firstly, bookies do not attempt to predict outcomes. They merely balance their books. Bookies who stay in business are not those who make accurate predictions but those who successfully balance their books so that they profit from every possible outcome. The odds you see at the bookie are therefore just the odds predicted by the punters collectively, i.e. the same as in a peer-to-peer market, but with an extra step.
Secondly, you are wrong to say that prediction markets involve only small amounts of money. Electionbettingodds.com shows that there is currently $46m bet on the outcome of the US presidential election at Polymarket and $14m at Betfair Exchange. These are significant sums (although I suspect the site is counting those totals inconsistently).
You can easily see the overall effect at https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/us-politics/us-presidential-election-2024/winner. Firstly, the odds offered by bookies (on the left) are in every case in line with the odds offered on peer-to-peer markets (on the right). Secondly, in a large majority of cases, the peer-to-peer odds are keener, because you are not paying the bookie's cut. (ETA This is only looking at sterling-denominated peer-to-peer markets; as I note in another comment, different odds are offered in a large USDC-denominated market for reasons I do not understand.)
That said, specifically 5/2 on Biden looks like a profitable bet, and this I think is a case where those bookmakers (none of whom are major names) have fallen behind the curve. Those odds were available until recently on peer-to-peer markets (I myself have placed £1,000 at slightly better odds). You will note that Ladbrokes and William Hill each offer 12/5, which are also the market odds. 11/10 on Trump would be a bad bet, since you can get 5/4.
Therefore the advantage of looking at markets rather than bookies is that the odds are keener (and therefore closer to the true prediction) and that they are updated in real-time.
There is a question as to whether you should give any weight to play-money markets. From first principles, the answer should be "no", real-money punters will be more accurate in the long run. The counter argument is just that we know play-money markets did outperform real-money markets in 2020 https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/prediction-markets-have-an-elections-problem-jeremiah-johnson.
...following up on you post & Johnson's point that "People will bet for candidates and parties not because they have an evidence-based analysis supporting their bet, but as an expression of identity", I would assume that more people are betting on Trump than Biden based on "identity". If so, a Trump win should be somewhat overvalued by those who place bets, and a Biden win correspondingly undervalued. Implying that betting with odds 5/2 that Biden wins is worth considering (smart money), while betting 11/10 that Trump wins means you align yourself with identity-type dumb money. Agreed?
(I noticed you placed a bet on Biden yourself...:-)
Is there a reason to think that more people will bet on Trump based on identity than Biden? It would seem that support for those candidates is fairly evenly matched, so we would need to think that Trump supporters are more likely to bet their beliefs.
The situation is complicated by the fact that people in the US (who are most likely to be invested in the result) cannot legally bet on the outcome. Looking at the world population without the US, I would have thought there would be clear majority in favour of Biden. However, it seems likely that some market participants are in fact US residents acting illegally (and it is possible that partisans on one side or the other would be more tempted to break the law in this way).
There is a specific point that 27% of the Trump shares on Polymarket are held by a single user. We might speculate that this person is making such large bets as an expression of their identity, but we cannot exclude the possibility that they are betting from a justified confidence in their ability to predict the outcome. We can say that they are making bets at worse odds than are available in other markets, which on its face is irrational, but may reflect an inability to access those markets (e.g. because they are a US resident using crypto to make illegal bets).
It is true that I myself have placed bets on Biden at odds of 3.55, from which you can infer that my all-things-considered opinion is that he has a better than 28% chance of winning. I would place his chance at winning at approximately 45%, noting that Metaculus has 46% and Manifold has 47%, and there is some reason to think these sites are broadly accurate. It is also my recollection that Biden was significantly undervalued in the market this far out from the previous election, and my broad sense is that the commentariat underestimate his appeal to the electorate at large. However, it is clearly possible that I could be proved wrong by events.
Specifically betting 11/10 on Trump is dumb simply because better odds are available, namely 5/4. I think it is very plausible this is a good bet. I would estimate Trump's chance of winning at approximately 50%, in which case this bet would be profitable in expectation. It is just that, on my beliefs, it is not as profitable as betting on Biden (expected return is 11% versus 57%).
Essentially, I see what Johnson calls "small odds bias", whereby all the outsiders are overvalued and both the frontrunners are undervalued. For some reason this is much less true on Polymarket (e.g. we see Haley at 1.1% vs 3.6% on Betfair). A strategy of betting on both Trump and Biden would defensible, in my opinion.
Thanks for the detailed back-and-forth reasoning. And yes, I also think that the fact that US citizens cannot legally bet on Trump is likely to "water down somewhat" the identity/dumb money-bias in his favor.
While I also agree that the outside world (at least the NATO part of it) prefers Biden, it is not an identity-type of preference... it is a "colder" type of preference so to speak, and therefore less likely to create emotional/loyalty-type bias in who you think will win (and therefore put money on).
All this said, your basic argument is very convincing: "I would estimate Trump's chance of winning at approximately 50%, in which case this bet would be profitable in expectation. It is just that, on my beliefs, it is not as profitable as betting on Biden (expected return is 11% versus 57%)." Thanks again for sharing your views.
In the 4 hours since posting the above comment, Biden's odds on Betfair Exchange have in fact lengthened to 5/2 (and they would be slightly higher, except that I ate those bets). I don't think anything has happened in the past 4 hours which ought to have caused the odds to change: probably it is just a particular punter betting against Biden at size. Position looks completely flat over at Polymarket.
ETA Trump's odds have also lengthened on Betfair: the spread is now 42.3-42.7%, while it remains 53-55% on Polymarket. Something is not right here, despite pretty decent liquidity all round.
Many thanks for the response. Very valuable and insightful.
Also, thanks for the links - including to Johnson's article, which has several memorable one-liners. Including "Markets only work when smart money can drive out dumb money", "People will bet for candidates and parties not because they have an evidence-based analysis supporting their bet, but as an expression of identity" and "Betting on an impossible outcome is how you show the most loyalty".
Johnson's arguments suggest that a well-informed, dispassionate observer of politics might be able to make a decent living betting on politics...:-)
Seems like there is a big arbitrage opportunity at electionbettingodds.com, where Michelle Obama has 5.6% chance of being President but negligible chance of being nominated.
This is an error on the site. She just doesn't appear on the list of potential nominees there. Looking at the underlying sites, her chance of being the nominee is 10-10.4% (per Betfair), 6.3-6.8% (per Polymarket) or 10-11% (per Smarkets).
This not really how bookmarkers work. They are more similar to stock market makers, setting their initial odds based on anticipated public betting patterns rather than attempting to predict the event's outcome. As bets are placed, they adjust the lines to balance the action on both sides to minimize risk and ensure a profit through the vig.
If there was less friction, such as transaction costs, and greater volume, the odds between prediction markets and bookmakers would likely converge due to arbitrage.
One difference is the legality of betting on certain events in different countries. For instance, U.S. residents cannot legally bet on elections through bookmakers.
Has anyone done a systematic study of prediction market odds vs betting odds?
There are large peer-to-peer betting exchanges that function more like prediction markets than traditional bookmakers - a normal bookmaker would kill you with their margins even if prediction markets are better, but I wonder if anyone has exploited asymmetries between prediction markets and betting exchanges to make money.
Because of margins, bookmakers don't have to be THAT accurate - so I'd imagine prediction markets could easily beat traditional bookmaker's odds.
I expect to have *lots* of conversations from now on where I will be told "AI art is just rubbish, I only like human stuff" and having to reply "but I don't think you can tell the difference" and being scoffed at.
Assuming no XRisk from AI, I expect this for the next decade, perhaps the rest of my life. That's probably true of you, too. I was at a (non-technical) conference recently (link to a panel I was on below, but not that relevant to this) where people were talking about AI. Some very obvious observations:
1. Your average person cares very deeply about their aesthetic preferences
2. Your average person, for one reason or another, reckons they prefer the world where nice things are made by humans
3. Consequently, they strongly feel that there is a fundamental difference (Blegg/Rube like), between things made by AI and things made by humans. They have absolute certainty that that difference exists. If called upon to say what the difference it is, after giving you a pitying look (because again they think you are *obviously* wrong and it's a chore to have to explain so to you), they will say... some words. Their words will be trivially easy to rebut. But the rebuttal won't change anything about their feelings. They may change to saying some *different* words, also easy to rebut, but don't get cocky - they will have forgotten that their first argument was rebutted within 30 minutes or so, and will say it again, to your annoyance. They intuition is so strong for them that the discussion around it doesn't really matter all that much.
It'll make you sad because there are interesting conversations that could theoretically had about the psychology of aesthetics or the future of creative work, but they are beyond these people because they will be forever searching for a non-mechanistic phenomenon that makes them feel special and ineffable, instead of being open to the possibility that art and humanity are not special and amenable to modelling. I am guessing there are researchers from the 80s or 70s who could see this and roll their eyes, because it's just the conversation they've been in most of their careers becoming mainstream. Gives me more respect for some of them!
Anyway, ***something that I think would save us a bit of time would be a website that quizzes its visitor with ten bits of art***, some AI and some human (while obviously being obscure enough to be unrecognizable to most people). By this I mean poetry/painting/eventually animation. Does this already exist? I almost feel like it could be useful, because it could fit into an RLHF loop for AI art.
Or perhaps such a thing wouldn't work because individual AIs like Midjourney or Sora always end up having a distinguishable "look" that gives them away. If so that's quite interesting and something I'd love to hear people here talk about.
I saw a popular 'tweet' to that effect on "Bluesky" a couple of days ago. I just tried to find it again, and failed. But it was easy to find more along the same lines.
By "tell the difference" it seems you mean telling the difference between individual images. I think the difference fans of conventional art care more about is being able to tell the difference between a conventional artist's portfolio (or representative sample thereof) and an AI artist's portfolio. I think that task is probably a lot easier, and the idea that someone can't do THAT is what people might be scoffing at. If someone strongly opposed to AI art retweeted a picture that they liked that they didn't realize was made by Midjourney, it would be embarrassing but probably not world-shaking. The same person discovering that a digital artist that they had been following and enjoying the work of for several months had been entirely using generative AI would be a much bigger shock.
And of course there's a discussion to be had about how much of the difference between portfolios is artistically relevant versus how much of it comes from unimportant technical or social factors. I do think that a lot of the vitriol is more out of a sort of partisanship and a desire to support existing artists who feel threatened by AI art than out of purely aesthetic concerns. I imagine feedback loops existing for a long time along the lines of "I can tell this artist uses AI, AI art is bad, therefore this artist is bad. This artist is bad, this artist uses AI, therefore my belief that AI art is bad is reinforced." Still, I have to wonder how well someone using generative AI would actually do if they had a portal to a world where nobody had heard of it to post their work on.
you can usually tell ai art because it struggles with composition and foreshortening, which is why you see so many portrait style pictures. it also has issues with two or more people touching.
you only see pictures that hides their weaknesses significantly. Like its obvious with people who do AI trailers, because a series of drawings highlights how static the individual drawings are.
even with sora, it does the same thing. it would be really scary if it did a person talking, reaction shot, then cut back to the first person who looks up. but its really static.
I think you may be wasting your time tearing down a strawman.
There are probably people who think they can reliably tell AI art from human art. Some of them may even be right. I know I usually can't tell the difference, but I imagine there are artistically-sophisticated people who really do see subtle tells, just like many of us really can identify AI writing.
But even if AI advances to the point that everyone who visits your site is forced to concede that they absolutely can't tell the difference, it's not going to change most people's minds about whether they like AI art, because it doesn't address the reason why people don't like AI art: it's missing the central characteristic that makes them interested in engaging with art qua art.
For many people, art is not purely or even chiefly an aesthetic experience. It's primarily a social-communication experience: it's about engaging intimately with another conscious mind, inferring the artist's intentions and decoding the piece's message. That's what makes a piece of human art different from a natural aesthetic experience. The night sky may be breathtaking, but it's not trying to tell me anything. It's not sharing a taste of another person's consciousness.
So if you convince people that they can't tell the difference between human and AI art, all you're doing is shifting their perception of AI art from "bad" to "dishonest." That's probably not an improvement.
I want emotional connection with other humans. I'm not really interested in simulation of that.
I'm open minded to humans curating and vetting AI generated art, but only if done really well - like good photography does that, even though the photographer isn't drawing the art directly.
Art is already dead anyways. Humanity ran out of original ideas about a decade or so ago, and now the only thing left to do is rehash old works for eternity. It's the perfect time for AI to make human artists obsolete. And hopefully they can eventually make humanity obsolete as well.
Meh, they're derivitive of older puzzle games like Antichamber. Once you start doing non-euclidean stuff, you can't make things much more complex without making it incomprehensible to the average player.
Seems like the winning strategy for an artist is to use AI but never admit that you are using AI. (That of course requires you to use the AI in such way that you won't get caught.)
>Anyway, ***something that I think would save us a bit of time would be a website that quizzes its visitor with ten bits of art***
...I mean there's Rule 34, they've got AI tags and you can usually tell they're AI just by looking at them. Fuck if I'd be able to articulate the difference, that's a crazy high standard. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Pixiv too. And yes, just by glancing I can tell when something was AI generated, and even if it's technically "correct" it's not as interesting as someone's amaturish scribbles. It's a lot like the dull 3D porn that also infests popular tags on pixiv: yes, this is technically correct, but it's boring and ugly.
At the moment, I think you can tell the difference, given enough exposure to AI art. As it gets better and loses that 'plastic' look? Who can say?
I think you're being a little bit too dismissive about aesthetic preferences. Even within human artists and human art, there are strong preferences for one style or school or artist over another. Why should AI get the exception of uncritical acceptance and praise?
Right now, AI art looks like commercial, not fine, art. That's part of it, and yes there's snobbery involved, but also yes there's a difference between "producing book covers for cheap that all have the same female face" and "making a work of art". Human commercial art can be crappy too, and churned out on the basis of "what sells/what a commissioning editor wants to see".
The aesthetic of current gen AI art is very plastic, and also very full of nitty-gritty details that make no sense if stared at individually for any length of time. I don't know if this will ever improve.
Most working artists are not fine artists. Most are digital artists, and most digital art is disposable and corporate. Most, I suspect, do actual art in their free time.
I have no idea why programmers are okay with it - they are in the same boat, after all. Perhaps there's just a difference in perspective? One side sees their jobs becoming 99% churning through prompts (and 10% photoshop) for minimum wage and reacts in horror. The other sees the same thing and all expect to be the 1% that still do interesting work.
Programming is different. Programming is not error-tolerant in general, most Art and Natural Language writing is.
Noam Chomsky labored hard to find a sentence that is syntactically valid English but makes no sense (and all people would agree that it makes no sense), he came up with "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously", and you can still interpret it to mean something with even a moderate amount of effort:
- Green = something to do with the environment, Green Ideas is referencing environmentalism, "Sleep Furiously" means to be suppressed and shunned, till eventually rising and taking its rightful place. "Colorless" is referencing a separate notion of Color, the metaphorical color of the people who champion environmentalism, their race and culture. The ideas themselves are colorless and completely unaffected and unaffiliated with the identities and the idiosyncrasies of the particular people who happen to champion them at a particular time and place.
And so on. Con artists ranging from the founders of the Abrahamic religions to Post-Modern writers to elected presidents have learned to take advantage of this property time and time and time again. Broadly speaking, there is no physically possible painting or syntactically possible sentence that can't be *made* to mean something, language is quite literally made up, and vision is not made up but our dreams and waking dreams have long trained us that it can be made up. Once you observe that people try to interpret *dreams*, non-sensical barrages of sensory input that conflate time and place at a whim and have no obvious "plot", you understand that there is no possible picture or sentence that would make people stop and contemplate that perhaps it doesn't really mean anything.
Once you introduce computers as a second kind of audience, things are different. Computers are fundamentally rigid, they are sand arranged in a certain way so as to perform a limited menu of symbolic operations. Every higher level interface to a computer may try to hide this fact but it fundamentally can't. When an interface to a computer relaxes a rigidity, it tends to introduce a whole host of other novel rigidities that must be respected.
In Programming, bad things tend to "multiply". There is no error-tolerance or reasonable assumptions, you have to get every part right. Unless in the smallest and most trivial programs, there usually isn't a straightforward correspondence between features and code. Meaning that you can't easily point to a single feature and then point to a piece of code and say "This code implements this feature and nothing else", this is usually impossible unless the feature is extremely trivial and micro-sized. The implication of this is that tiny errors in the code tend to ripple and affect several features of the program at once. Programs also don't tend to "compose" well, mixing program 1 with a tiny error and program 2 with a tiny error doesn't usually result in a larger program 3 with a slightly less tiny error, it might result in a non-working program, or a crashing program, or a program that doesn't do what it's supposed to be doing and nobody understands why, or a program that does everything everybody wants of it and quite a bit more (such as leaking their entire database on polite request). It's completely non-linear.
The fact that programs **look** like natural language is just an unfortunate misunderstanding, an analogy took too far. Programs are expressions in a rigid mathematical-logical notation, there are far more structure to it than can be gleaned merely by predicting probabilities. You can sort of convince yourself the LLM understands programming as long as you're asking it to solve problems that have been done to death countless times in its training data or slight variations of those problems, but as soon as you introduce the kind of differences that real-world clients and managers ask you will soon discover it really doesn't get programming.
(And to be completely fair, "problems that have been done to death" is a substantial part of the average programming job, but not the only part. And you can't predict in advance which part is the part that have been done to death and which part requires a bit of thinking.)
"I have no idea why programmers are okay with it - they are in the same boat, after all. "
I don't know that programmers are 'okay with it.' What would not being okay with it look like?
But ... programmers with experience have seen 'technology X is going to make you unnecessary' or 'technology Y is going to mean 90% of you are out of work' for most of their careers.
In 1992 Ed Yourdan (a respected computer scientist) published 'Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.' Programming jobs would be automated with CASE tools and the work would move to Japan because the Japanese were so much better at delivering quality than Americans. It ... did not turn out that way.
Meanwhile, Visual Basic (introduced in 1991) was also going to move a lot of the easier programming jobs away from programmers and have then done by normal people. That sort of did happen, but mostly with work that would have been too expensive to be done by 'real' programmers. Then Visual Basic programming because a job that people could get hired to do.
In the early 2000s outsourcing programming jobs (to India, but also to Eastern Europe and other places) started making inroads. All but the most sophisticated jobs will go to India! Well ... a lot of them did. But far from all.
The 'catch' with programming is that you still need to be able to describe what you want. If that thing has a NAME then AI is great: "Siri, write me a quicksort algorthim in Rust" is a fantastic prompt.
As things get more specialized then AI performs worse. My employer has a custom file format for data that comes off our tool. My boss tried out ChatGPT because he wanted code to *read* files in that format. ChatGPT provided Python, but the generated Python called a 'read files in that format' function to do the actual work. This function does not exist. My boss wanted the AI to write the function.
I don't see how this problem will be solved by AI any time soon. We don't HAVE the documentation for the file format ... we have a bunch of (messy) code that implements it. Maybe what my boss wants can be structured as a language interpretation question and it will work.
But the next level up is solving problems that don't have names and for which describing the solution is the tough part. Maybe this is only 1% of the programing jobs and AI can take the rest.
But I think that most programmers (correctly or incorrectly) feel that this is a large percentage of the programming jobs. Keep in mind that programming languages are all about describing what you want precisely ... doing the same thing in English only works when the tool understands a lot.
I think it's fear of replacement. A lot of the people complaining are either fan artists working off commissions (and if you can get the AI to make the art to your specifications, why will you pay for a human artist to do so?) or commercial artists (ditto). There are also complaints about their work being used in training data uncredited, nonconsensually, and uncompensated, to train up the AI that is going to replace them.
The kind of artist who is producing the $10,000 exhibited in a gallery work isn't going to care. It's the person scraping a living with DeviantArt commissions at $30 for b/w sketch who is going to feel the pinch, as well as the commercial artist pricing at $60/hr and this took 20 hours that will be $1,200 please.
That's why canny operators are producing things like Nightshade to 'poison' training data for AI to sell to anxious digital artists:
Digital art is much more common than traditional media and is the primary source of income for the average working artists. The models are being trained on the work of artists without their permission and then the models have the potential to be used to put those artists out of work.
Anything that isn’t copyrighted can be used for training. Digital Artists aren’t special like that. Not that I see a designer of a logo as an artist, surely the term is more generally used for people who produce independent art and exhibit or sell their own product. Not cubicle workers.
In general AI isn’t any good for generating digital art consistently. At least not the models I use. So you are all safe for now.
Actually, the problem is that they *are* using copyrighted material as training data to generate their responses. The AI argument is that it's fair use because they're not blatantly copying the output from their training data. AFAIK, only Adobe uses pure uncopyrighted training data. Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion because the images they generate are strikingly similar to the images in the Getty Images library — right down to a distorted Getty Images logo.
I frequently use ChatGPT to look up virology and immunology questions. I always ask it for reference papers to back up its answers, because I've noticed that it not infrequently hallucinates an answer. When I go to the papers, I've seen it can lift some of the wording from those papers for its answers — especially highly technical answers where it would have difficulty rephrasing the answer in another way. Remember, these research papers are copyrighted material. Anyway, if the President of Harvard can be fired for paraphrasing someone else's work, it seems like there's an similar ethical problem, if not a copyright law problem, that these LM creators have ignored. (N.B. I think Harvard's Prez should have been fired, but not for minor acts of paraplagerism.)
Here's the Getty Images story. Notice the distorted Getty Images logo in the Stabil Diffusion output...
It’s a difficult one but I assume that a human who writes a Wikipedia entry (or any synopsis) using a source, crediting the source, and paraphrasing the source is not guilty of plagiarism. Then the problem here is not the training with the original text but the way it is presented. I’m not that impressed with Getty’s case either. The second image is influenced by but not in any way the same as the original image. Pixel by pixel it’s totally different. How the courts rule here is very important. If western courts uphold copyright and the Chinese don’t the baton on AI goes to the east.
>It’s a difficult one but I assume that a human who writes a Wikipedia entry (or any synopsis) using a source, crediting the source, and paraphrasing the source is not guilty of plagiarism. Then the problem here is not the training with the original text but the way it is presented.
Agreed. Learning from copyrighted material should generally not be penalized, provided that it is not passed off as original work, and that chunks beyond fair use are not copied. If I write "It is generally known that SO3 dissolves in water to give an acidic solution." I'm sure I got that information from _some_ chemistry textbook, though I'm not sure which one - and presumably that textbook was copyrighted, though that particular chunk of knowledge is centuries older than the textbook.
>Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion because the images they generate are strikingly similar to the images in the Getty Images library — right down to a distorted Getty Images logo.
and
>I've seen it can lift some of the wording from those papers for its answers — especially highly technical answers where it would have difficulty rephrasing the answer in another way.
as objectionable violations of copyright. My (current level of misunderstanding) is that if a human did the same thing, they would also be violating copyright (and my _guess_ is they would be legally liable, IANAL).
I see this as quite distinct from
>Actually, the problem is that they are using copyrighted material as training data to generate their responses.
A human is permitted to buy and study copyrighted material, and to use ideas from it, within the bounds of fair use, both for images and text. I don't want the rules for training AIs to be more restrictive than what humans can learn from _provided_ that the AIs can be prevented from copying non-fair-use chunks of the training works into their responses.
The copyright of all art belongs to its creators unless they have specifically signed away those rights, whether digital or traditional media doesn't matter. Copyright of a new piece of IP is established upon its creation. It is well established that enormous percentages of training data used in commercial image generation uses work without permission. The reasons this would be upsetting to artists is obvious, huge amounts of money is being made from using their work without permission or payment.
As for your definition of "artist"; there are many kinds of artist. Many who produce and exhibit their own work also have day jobs to support that. Those day jobs often include creating things, such as logos, that may not be High Art but are certainly born out of their years of specialist knowledge as an artist. Other artists work on video games, or board games, or for book covers etc.
It's a large ecosystem of people that feel threatened by outside forces that do not understand or respect their work.
Ok, so the threat is to logo designers. Why the hysteria there rather than from programmers. Why do engineers or accountants not get into the same level of frantic upset?
If anything logo designers are safe because from what I’ve seen using Dall-E via chatGPT, Dall-E is highly inconsistent in its output. Ask it to change the background color and you end up with a different colour in the foreground color, change that and there’s a new foreground colour, change that and the logo is totally different. Rinse and repeat. So that’s safe.
I think you are vastly missing the difference here.
- Programmers make LLM's. Its not seen as an outside threat. Its unlikely that the creators of these tools would intentionally put themselves out of a job. They see that the tools are most likely to be used to enhance their workflows. I have seen some programmers complaining that LLM's will lower the skill floor too much and perhaps impact pay.
- Artists see AI as a threat from an outside group that does not respect or understand their work. This is understandable as their intellectual property has been used on mass without attribution, permission or payment. Many smaller artists have already lost a lot of commission work because of AI's. This is on the back of the NFT boom which stung many artists (stolen art made some people a lot of money) despite being touted as a solution. This lack of respect from the outset does not make artists feel like AI will be used to help them in the future.
History repeats itself. Just as the weavers feared for their jobs, so does the gigging artist.
> Anything that isn’t copyrighted can be used for training. Digital Artists aren’t special like that.
Do you mean that AIs don't train on copyrighted material? Because they do train on copyrighted material. All art is copyrighted automatically (no need to register, unlike patents), and the copyright lasts until the artist dies, plus additional decades (how many decades varies by country).
Are they saying that they can tell a difference in the art itself? Or are they saying (or trying, unsuccessfully, to say, perhaps because they don't understand their own preferences) that they prefer, in principle, to engage with art made by humans, even if they can't tell the difference? People prefer musicals with a live band, even if the band is outside of the view of the audience.
Right now, you definitely can tell the difference. Next year or five years, tops, when an artist can use AI without ever putting a brush to paper or pixel to screen and turn out an original work? We'll see.
I do think the deeper division here is "I'm saying people without training can now produce art" (on the pro-AI side) and "No machine can be creative" (on the anti-AI side). If we're saying that AI can *originate* art by itself, without an external prompt, out of some creative impulse then yeah, I think we're still far away from that. I think Hamish's problem is that he's saying "people can use AI to make art" and the others are hearing "AI can make art". Those are not the same thing.
Yes, they are saying they will always be able to tell the difference, and in fact that it will be obvious, and that the difference will be that the AI art will always be ugly.
"even if they can't tell the difference" is not a possibility worth considering for them. To them it seems so unlikely that they would make the mistake that it could only be an academic question - but it would be the insulting, anger-inducing sort of academic question.
Getting this (at least on the emotional level) versus not getting it is a fairly good litmus test against having a particular kind of techbro-brain. (I'm reminded of SBF and Shakespeare, too.)
I think Ethan's correct, people don't simply want to consume high-quality aesthetic stimulus regardless of its provenance. They want to interact with human intent in art. And sure, you could frequently fool them into believing that an AI piece is a human-made piece (the same way you could convince them that a food product comes from a particular artisanal tradition when it doesn't) but the moment they found out, there would be a measure of disappointment.
I suspect perceptions might begin to change when art AI gets good enough to allow you to keep refining aspects of the art reliably by throwing more natural language at it instead of resorting to complex workflows like inpainting and fine-tuning and ultimately accepting something that's good enough but not necessarily exactly what you intended. Once we're essentially painting with text ("add more patina of age to that pagoda's roof, and also redo that second butterfly from the bottom left, it needs more complexity") the human comes back into the picture again, only with a very powerful paintbrush at their disposal.
This makes me think of Damien Hirst's spot paintings, which are produced by assistants. What's the difference really between those human assistants and an AI? The artwork is valued because it's "from" the famous artist.
An acquaintance who graduated from a fine arts program a couple decades ago told me that technical skill in creating art isn't valued. What's valued in that scene is the artistic intent and ideas behind the art.
Which is amusing given how everything is made up and the artwork itself can be interpreted in any number of different ways.
A useful question for human-art appreciators is do they value the technical hands on skill, the artistic intent, or both?
Hirst is a fine counterpoint, although there's even more controversy around him than around AI, which is presumably just how he likes it. But then again, generative art predates Stable Diffusion, and if we're just talking about delegating to assistants then even the old masters did it.
I don't think you can do without artistic intent, pretty much tautologically. The relative importance of technical skill, on the other hand, rises and falls – conceptual art, which was a discrete movement in and of itself, was probably the most radical divestment of art from technical creation, and it remains influential. But there are still people who really care about execution, media, and materials in contemporary art.
AI art reminds me a lot of 'found object' art. Like, you have a concept, and you shake the really sophisticated kaleidoscope and eventually something emerges that (you decide) matches what you want, and then you dub that result art. Which is great and everything, and if that process and its implications for human creativity are explicitly part of your artistic concept, have at it. (Except that everyone and their dog are doing it, and it's got about as much originality as going to a bathroom fixtures shop and signing every urinal, thinking you're as cool as Duchamp.)
AI is amazing as an illustrator, though. I think that's inarguable, and it's certainly not worthless.
Since last week, the implied probability of various people being the next US president has changed as follows (per Election Betting Odds). The probability per Metaculus follows in square brackets.
Trump, up 0.1% to 50.9% [50%]
Biden, up 0.8% to 31.9% [46%]
Michelle Obama, down 1.5% to 5.6% [1%]
Newsom, down 1.2% to 2.7% [1%]
Harris, up 0.1% to 1.9% [1%]
Kennedy, up 0.1% to 1.5% [1%]
Haley, up 0.1% to 1.3% [1%]
There are considerable divergences between sites, e.g. the bid-offer spread on Betfair for Trump is currently 43.1-43.5%, whereas the spread on Polymarket is 53-55% (all the Polymarket spreads are huge).
Not long ago (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12924) Scott posted a claim (from Jeremiah Johnson) that Metaculus was more accurate (by some margin) than real money markets in the 2020 election. If that were to remain true, the above percentages show there is significant money to be made (in expectation), which is surprising, because people like money. The divergence between the sites only increases this.
That said, something is wrong with the Metaculus predictions: they sum to 111%, because they have a long tail of outsiders at exactly 1% each. I'm not sure how this has happened, but it cannot be right.
Last week we spent some time on the Open Thread discussing Michelle Obama's odds, and while some people felt that there was some plausible path for her to become president, I think we did broadly agree that 7% was much too high. Since then, the market has moved in the right direction, but 5.6% still seems too high. Admittedly, there is a problem with offering very long odds on an event that far in the future, because of the opportunity cost, but that doesn't prevent people offering, say, 999/1 on Rashida Tlaib (you could currently bet as much as £513 at these odds on Betfair, implying someone is willing to put £512k on the other side of the table).
It's perhaps worth noting that the total amount wagered is $67m. While this is higher than in many other markets, it is probably a small fraction of the total amount which will have been wagered by the time the election takes place (which I would expect to be well over $1 bn), so a lot of money is not yet committed. It seems plausible that current market participants are skewed towards highly engaged individuals. In general one would hope that a high level of engagement would lead to accurate predictions, but in the case of politics there is at least some anecdotal reason to suspect that highly engaged individuals can become entrenched in their beliefs.
I would be interested in readers' views as to: (1) why there are such large differences between real money markets and Metaculus (and also Manifold) and (2) why there are (smaller, but still significant) differences between different real money markets. As for (2), part of the explanation must be that getting money on to (and off) Polymarket is a PITA, but I don't think it can be the whole explanation: you still have different pools of prediction agents reaching contrary conclusions.
I think most differences can be explained by two categories of reasons: (1) "financial friction" in real-money markets (2) risk premia differences among the markets.
Financial friction is the usual stuff that impedes arbitrage in markets. Stuff like bid-ask spreads, liquidity, and potential credit risk (i.e. the market might run away with your money, or not enforce the contract as stated). Also, I don't think the real-money prediction markets accrue interest on the bets that are being placed, which changes your calculations when betting is worth it. For example, it's not smart to make a bet that earns you 2% ROI when you could buy US treasuries with 4%+ yield.
"Risk premium" is how much investors need to be compensated for the amount and types of risk they bear. In real-money markets, the average investor's utility function is risk-averse. In particular, investors are willing to pay more than expected value for protection from "bad" events. (This is why the insurance industry is able to make a profit!) This translates to higher market-implied probabilities on "bad" events. Whereas in a fake-money market, it could very well be that the average investor is close to risk-neutral, which would mean the market-implied probabilities are closer to the objective probabilities.
Edit: And I should add that some differences may just be immaturity of the markets. The real-money markets are still quite small AFAIK, so a lot of "smart money" (high-information, highly rational investors) just isn't there yet because they're in the "real", big financial markets.
>because they have a long tail of outsiders at exactly 1% each. I'm not sure how this has happened, but it cannot be right.
Is there some sort of liquidity problem here? _exactly_ 1% makes no sense. Are there enough hassles with betting against these outsiders that it isn't worth anyone's while?
Yes, I would be interested in hearing from someone who understands Metaculus as to what has happened here. It is not simply that the site does not support probabilities more precise than 1%, because I can see that in the past, e.g. Mike Pence was at 0.1%. And in fact now (but not yesterday) Cornel West is at 0.8% (which is still surely an order of magnitude too high).
Hmm, I've recently become interested in RFK Jr. and have been buying yes shares at Manifold, (The only betting site I use.) (The odds seem very low there, less than 1%.) I would like to bet some real money, but I don't know if I can do that legally.
Of potential interest: of 3.9m bet on Michelle Obama winning the presidential election on Polymarket, 1.2m of Yes shares are held by a single user. This user joined in January 2024 and has only 2 positions (that Obama will win the presidential election and that she will win the primary).
ETA We also have, of 6.0m bet on Trump winning the presidential election on the same site, 1.6m of Yes shares are held by a single user. This user also joined in January 2024 and has only 3 positions (that Trump will win the presidential election, that he will win the popular vote and (oddly) a very small bet that he will lose the election). In total, this person has bet c$922k.
I came across a Twitter post yesterday that noted how someone doing a computer science degree in America is required to study the arts and humanities too.
He wondered whether someone studying, say, English Literature, should be similarly required to learn a little computer science.
I reject the premise entirely. In England, if you study computer science, you study computer science. I heard an interview with an admissions tutor who said “If you want to study biology, we don't care how well you did in history.” In fact, English students get to ditch all but three subjects at 16.
I suggest that the US approach does not actually result in more rounded students and wrote about it here:
Personal opinion - there's a lot of value in some humanities courses. Some people talk about the "well-rounded person" and whatnot, but I think that's too vague to accept alone. I just want to work with people who can write a few sentences that coherently get their point across and understand that the world didn't begin when they were eight years old (who apparently never heard of history or cared that there may have been people and trends before they were old enough to remember).
That said, I think most four year college degrees are heavily padded to keep the coursework at four years even if the important things can be covered in three or even two normal years. If you have 12-30 credits in your 120-credit degree that are free electives and you can pick such programs as Tennis or Porn (real electives at my college) or from a wide variety of unrelated and open topics, then the value is greatly diminished. If I had my way, there would be some electives, but from a much smaller pool and with an overall purpose in mind. Let people pick 20th Century Literature instead of Shakespeare, sure. But don't make people take credits in something they don't care about but also let them choose whatever random thing may exist to fulfil it. I had all of my core classes completed and my last semester was all electives, so I had to stay in college after completing everything I would need in my degree. I could have blown off the whole semester with the stupidest and easiest classes, or done things completely unrelated to anything useful in my life. It just made me feel like they wanted my money and didn't care if I got an education.
As someone who went through a "liberal arts" program (i.e. the "American" system) in Computer Science, I do think there's merit to it.
My workplace has a split between people who went to very tech focused colleges, and my impression is that the people who went to tech-focused do colleges tend to be good the programming side of their job but less good at the soft skills and are maybe less likely to end up in leadership positions. (Whether that's causal or a selection effect of the sort of people who pick each kind of school, I don't know)
I'm a bit bearish on 4-year degrees for computer science at all for most people - long term I really do think the profession should go to a more "trade school" approach and not have people paying for four year degrees to get programming jobs.
... but if the choice is just over what four year college program to take, I do think I would endorse the system that might make you a little less technically focused and a bit more well-rounded person overall
Have you even CONSIDERED the remote possibility that these programs didn't magically imbue people with personality changes (er, "soft skills"), and that people with different inherent traits self select into different programs and colleges?
> (Whether that's causal or a selection effect of the sort of people who pick each kind of school, I don't know)
Given that I explicitly mentioned that in my comment, yes, I'd say I CONSIDERED the remote possibility.
And, yeah, it's possible that selection effects are a big part, but I don't know think it's crazy to suggest that a college program might have formative effects on someone's personality. I mean that's kind of the point of the institution, isn't it, (unless you're a hardline "college is 100% a signaling game and conveys no benefit whatsoever")
You stated your opinion (and I respect it), but do you have any data to back up your assertions?
I think the opposite because there's more to life than just knowing how to do a particular job. Likewise, "soft skills" frequently enhance one's career opportunities and career satisfaction. I've just completed a thirty-three-year career as a network "engineer" (I'm an engineer without an engineering degree). I worked on some very large international network deployments, and I've kept up with the bleeding-edge land-line data communications technologies. I could tell you stories about CS and EE graduates from some of the top US engineering schools who were incapable of efficiently troubleshooting problems, who were incapable of correctly sequencing and prioritizing tasks, who couldn't write a clear declarative sentence (which are needed when describing a problem or a solution), and who curled into fetal balls when forced to deal with alien cultures on overseas projects. Although it may not seem obvious to you, all these skills are required to get big projects done on time and within budget in an international arena.
Worse yet, within ten to twenty years I've seen engineers whose skill sets were no longer current get pushed aside by younger CS and EE graduates. That's not to say that studying history or some other liberal arts classes would help them, but I'd say that CS and EE programs are not turning out flexible thinkers. From my personal experience, and I admit this is just anecdata, having an undergrad degree in Anthropology helped me with my overseas gigs. And having STEM graduate background in the biological sciences (with a strong overlay of statistical modeling) allowed me to look at problems in different ways from many of the engineers I worked with.
Oh, I almost forgot. One of the most brilliant routing engineers I ever worked with never went to college and he hadn't even earned his high school diploma. He worked for a telecom company that later got eaten by a larger telecom. After work he ran training classes for the call center staff (mostly women without four-year degrees) to get their CCIEs. Several of them did, and ended doing quite well. He got a job at the nascent Google before they IPOed. I lost track of him, but he was a legend in networking circles.
Do YOU have any hard data to back up anything YOU said?
Like, do you have a single jot of evidence to back up your claim that humanties courses improve people's "soft skills"? Does any of this data, which may or may not exist, control for the fact that people who study humanities courses are likely to be inherently different from people who don't?
The idea that colleges radically change people's personalities or "soft skills" is an extreme claim and almost certainly a false one, at least compared to the effect of self selection and inherent differences.
No, I admitted it's all personal experience on my part. But Ragged claimed that humanities could be of no benefit to CS students — without any data other than his own opinion. Since he offered a null data set to support his opinion, doesn't my anecdata trump a null data set? ;-)
But I think Ragged is doing his co-engineers in the US a disservice by claiming that CS students should *only* study CS. The CS degree goes back to 1962 in the US (it was called "information science" back then). When IBM mainframes (and to a lesser extent Unisys's big iron) swept through corporate America in the 1970s, there weren't enough coders being graduated from information science programs to meet the demands of corporate America. Corporations started recruiting college grads with humanities degrees, and training them to be coders. Of course, most of corporate America was run by people with humanities degrees back then (MBAs were still very rare at the time). Anyway, I think it was a Rand Corporation study that claimed musicians made the best coders. And, yes, corporations made a point of recruiting musicians ("Hey, tired of looking for gigs and just getting by? Come be a COBOL programmer at BIGCO, and you can earn a steady middle-class income!").
Fast forward 50 years and US CS programs are churning out 100,000 graduates each year. But like salmon swimming upstream, only a small minority of those grads will be coding until they retire. There's a lot of age discrimination in the tech industry — but it's probably justified. It's hard for most people to keep learning the latest languages and tools, and it's easier for hiring managers to hire younger people whose skills are up-to-date and who demand lower salaries than people who've been in the labor force for fifteen or twenty years. A lot of programmers move into management, sales, or technical marketing as their skill sets age out (remember, someday Python will be as antiquated as COBOL, and that day may be sooner than you think.) Anyway, you'd best have some other skills than coding, because the next generation is coming for your job. Cheers!
I think this goes back to the democratic roots of the United States. Once upon a time, speaking at a very high level, there were two types of advanced education. One type was liberal arts, reserved for the ruling elite. The other type was trade schools, for all the other people whom the elite wanted to put in a little box.
The US, as a democratic society, is rather allergic to the notion that people will be sorted into elites and technical serfs on the basis of education. And really, to the extent we're a democracy, that sounds like a good thing to avoid. We like the idea that anyone can come from anywhere, and be exposed to anything at college. So pretty much all of our higher education still has parts that derive from the old liberal arts curricula, even if most Americans never, say, learn Latin and Greek. You can even see the effects in our public primary education (K-12), especially in slogans like "no child left behind" and the resistance to "tracked" education.
The democratic roots of the United States allowed votes to white male property owners, and emphasised liberal arts education with the understanding that it was a good to be consumed by that class. It seems not unreasonable to characterise them as a ruling elite. Certainly there was no conception in the eighteenth century that women, Jews, Catholics, Black people, native Americans would be admitted to higher education. So I find your historical motivation inaccurate.
I found society in the US (I lived there five years) to be far more segregated than in Europe. Perhaps you're right that the segregation is not carried out on the basis of education. The segregating factors seemed to me to be class and race, though those do strongly control access to elite education. I taught at a university in Massachusetts and the difference in race and wealth between the campus population and the surrounding suburbs was stark.
Yet, despite our elitist and racist culture, 36% of Americans have at least a baccalaureate. A little Googling shows that it's 26% in the UK, and it's 29% in Ireland. Which of those three countries seems to offer the greatest educational opportunities to its citizens?
The 29% figure is accurate for the population in Ireland as a whole - the Central Statistics Office of Ireland shows the number of people who completed a third-level qualification rose from 14% of the population in 1991 to 48% in 2022. Some things depend on how long your country has been wealthy, perhaps?
The United States has never been perfect at living up to its ideals (and indeed it may not even be coherent to talk about a democracy having "ideals" in the first place). Look at "all men are created equal", written by Thomas Jefferson. That's an ideal which took centuries to implement, even to our current extent. But Thomas was a smart guy, and I am convinced that he knew what he was doing when he wrote that.
I don't think 60% of white males can reasonably be considered an elite, in a country where white people made up 80% of the population. That's about, what, 24% of the population, roughly the number who vote for a winning presidential candidate today? (If you're from Ireland, maybe you have some different historical context regarding distribution of property ownership. (To put it mildly.) But in America, we've kind of been obsessed with owning our own homes, for as long as America has existed, and I think a lot of it comes from a reaction to the situation in Europe a few centuries ago.) Nor was it truly restricted to white people or men; federalism allowed various states to have more liberal voting laws:
And you're just wrong about whether non-whites and non-men would be admitted to higher education. Individual institutions had restrictions of their own, and most of the existing ones were explicitly religious; to the best of my knowledge, the early 19th century was when we started seeing religiously-neutral universities appear. But there was nothing stopping various groups from creating their own universities, and that is exactly what happened over the following decades. And they modeled themselves on what they saw were the best traditions of the existing universities, including the liberal arts tradition. Eventually, all states (I think) would create public universities with subsidies and scholarships for in-state students, ensuring that anyone talented enough had a chance of being able to attend, even if they grew up in a log cabin.
Society in the modern US may be more segregated than that in Europe, in some ways. (But how often does the average Briton cross paths socially with someone who went to Oxbridge? I personally have had an earful of complaints by Americans in England that they, e.g., could not invite all their friends to the same parties.) I think one of the factors you need to consider is America's size, and our abnormal expectation of mobility. People who don't fit in can pick up and move to somewhere they feel more comfortable, and this is not only expected but encouraged. The result looks a lot like segregation, for good and ill. But I think most of this is beside the point; a theory of the historical basis for certain aspects of the educational system does not have to account for the current state of society.
And yes, I attended a university that was starkly distinct from its surrounding environment, in both race and class. But that's partly because the university had a national profile, and attracted people from all over the country who matched that profile. If you want institutions that match the local demographics, that's exactly what community colleges are for, and I would expect that virtually all community colleges have a class and racial profile that is quite similar to that of the surrounding area. And on a larger scale, that's what state universities and land-grant universities are for (to include both the liberal arts tradition, and the non-liberal-arts tradition), and I'd expect similar similarities of profile on the statewide scale. (And on the original point, a lot of community colleges have a setup where students who attend for 2 years and do well, can transfer to a state institution and finish their degree there. This is one of the ways to work around the limitations of standardized testing and the application process; even if you don't test well, if you show up and do the work and excel, you can still rise high.)
I don't disagree with what you wrote, though the distinctions in the US between community colleges and private colleges does sound a lot to me like the "notion that people will be sorted into elites and technical serfs on the basis of education". Yes - some small number of people will progress from community college through four-year college and on to great things, but the probability is low. Overall social mobility in the US is low by international standards and the education system would absolutely seem to be a part of that:
The 'all men are created equal' quote is aspirational I guess, if its meaning is interpreted in terms of the sensibilities of contemporary society. I have never seen a convincing argument that Jefferson had women or black people in mind when writing those lines, though obviously that's the contemporary reading. Incidentally, in Ireland we're engaged in a process of rewriting the constitution. In two weeks or so there will be a referendum to replace outdated references to the role of women in society, among other things.
I'd say that there are sort of two broad traditions of education in America. There's the "liberal arts" tradition, and what I'll call the "vocational/technical" tradition, which encompasses all sorts of job-based training, from machine-ship classes to agricultural education to medical and law school. This second tradition does have a class-based component, in that we expect a lawyer or a medical doctor to spend 4 years at a liberal arts school, but we don't expect the same thing of a machinist or a farmer.
Community colleges are the bottom rung of both ladders. (Well, not really the bottom, below them are our primary and secondary schools, covering K-12 education, and the secondary schools do sometimes have different tracks.) One key part is that community colleges are cheap, and sometimes even free. They're also local and easy to access, and they have evening classes that are compatible with a full-time job. One of the functions they serve is to catch people who weren't good students in K-12, or who went straight into work, but then want to get more of an education. Generally speaking, people who go on to "great things" will have been better students in K-12, or will have scored high enough on tests that they can get into a 4-year college directly. (If you test well enough, and lack the money, most states will even give you a full scholarship to their public liberal arts university, meaning that it's free.)
And yes, I'd like more social mobility, and don't like how ossified our society is becoming. But I don't think that can be blamed on our educational system. I'd lay it more on the feet of trends in our general culture and specific sub-cultures, and various oligarchical tendencies that are separate from education.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer - I think the entrenchment of elites is a problem in all countries.
Something I found weird about (the northeast of) the US was the level of regionalism in the education system - spending per capita on elementary and high-school students was less than half of what it was in the next town over (geographically maybe 3 miles away). I have no children, and I was one of a tiny number of faculty members living in the same city as the uni in which I worked, perhaps for that reason. Demographic differences were stark between the two public school systems on any measure of race or class - in that sense I think students tend to be segregated from early on in US.
Note that "community colleges and private colleges" make up only a fraction of the US higher education system. There are also a large number of public four-year colleges and universities, I believe substantially outnumbering the private ones by enrollment at least.
If there's serf/elite sorting going on, it would almost have to be at the border between public community colleges and public four-year colleges.
I had AP credit coming in, but still had to get a composition credit*, a non-western cultures credit (for which I took World Religions) and within CS took a "and society" course in which I recommended to my teacher that she watch Idiocracy (she was very enthusiastic about it afterward).
*For which I submitted the initial version of what would be my preface to "The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays". I had already gotten paid for it well before the grad student evaluating it stopped asking for revisions. Admittedly, the published version was very heavily revised by Chip Smith.
I studied CS in the UK. While all my modules were all related to CS I felt there was an inordinate amount of time wasted learning skills preparing you for a career in academia rather than industry. I feel like my role is basically a tradesperson/ craftsman. I'm not doing novel or bleeding edge work, I implement whatever the agreed best practice is for the given problem in front of me. Why is my (every students?) largest project writing thousands of words in an academic style that is expected to be read by no one.
Only a fraction of professions need to analyse the scientific literature for work (never mind contribute to it) seems yet this seems to be central to every course
Aside from the usual suspects - ego, institutional inertia, reluctance to experiment and adapt -, I think people are just brainwashed into thinking that more schooling == more knowledge == more intelligence == more success. None of those equations hold all the time or by logical necessity, but people think it does, and perhaps don't even realize that they think so.
Why go all the way back to your university education? just look at the typical tech interview:
Interviewer: What's the difference between static overloading and dynamic polymorphism? Can you solve this <thinly veiled textbook algorithmic problem> with Dynamic Programming? Walk me through how you would implement Twitter.
vs the actual job:
That same Interviewer, now your boss: Plz change this json to have a "Ping" instead of a "Pong" field.
90% of my job is getting the people who wrote the spec to understand that what they've given me is utter garbage and needs to be rewritten from the ground up, with several client meetings thrown in. Actually *implementing* anything is trivially easy.
Once, when I was about nineteen, I mentioned in passing the replication crisis when talking to a therapist. She had never heard of the concept before, and asked me to elaborate. When I explained the problem (that far too few psychology findings, particularly at that time, survive replication), she was personally offended -- I was obviously criticising *her* by way of implying her field must be fundamentally evil in some way, just because I knew it was facing a particular not-unique problem that anyone familiar with the literature would've known.
There are a lot of people who think you should be able to practice as a therapist without being elbows-deep in the literature. If I ever thought that, I sure as hell don't now.
I remember this when I think about the "how deeply should people in any field understand its research underpinnings?" problem.
I've studied in both the US "generalist" system and the European-inflected (not in Europe proper) "specialist" system. I found the US system more interesting, and wanted to take a lot more electives in the Euro-inflected system. I don't think "if CS should take humanities classes, humanties should take CS classes" is the right comparison exactly. CS is actually included under science electives or gen eds (I took CS classes as gen eds), but most people majoring in a very different field would take an "easier"-sounding science or one closer to their field. Taking CS as a gen ed in a very different field is more like a CS student deciding their humanities gen ed should be Latin or Ancient Greek -- it's an option, but it's going above and beyond the minimum.
I agree many Americans in TE have, in practice, a tenuous grasp of other fields. I've never seen this as isolated to Americans, though. I think it's a consequence of neglect of the humanities at the higher/decision-making level in general, and whether the downstream consequence of that neglect is "I dropped all my humanities classes in year 11 because they're dumb bludge subjects" or "I took Grievance Studies to fill a gen ed and it sucked" is less relevant.
My thought is that students form an opinion quite early about whether they are interested in humanities. Gen Ed requirements at university do very little to change that. The students who are interested will read literature (or study art or history or whatever) regardless of the degree requirements and the students who are not interested will do the absolute minimum.
I don't think it's coherent to say someone "is" or "isn't" interested in "humanities" in the same sense it's not coherent to say that about "science". People's interests don't seem to cluster like that. In practice, from what we know about personality, "interest in humanities" and "interest in science" are probably strongly correlated by way of "intellectual curiosity", and the idea they're disconnected or inverted is a consequence of Simpson's paradox. People with relatively low intellectual curiosity are rarely particularly into either, but there are merits to forcing basic understandings of biology/history/etc upon them anyway. (Are we any good at this right now? No, but that's a different problem.) The real yawning abyss beneath us is neither TE nor Grievance Studies -- it's the huge mass of people majoring in vocational subjects (if you're thinking CS, drop that thought, and think degrees with "Business" in the name) who think the whole "intellectual advancement" idea is some funny historical thing, who neither read great literature nor, per your post, can identify organs. This problem is not unique to any system, and I don't think accelerating into specialization *helps* it.
You might have something resembling a point if humanities subjects hadn't been almost entirely ideologically captured in the US, UK etc. and serve more as forms of propagandistic training than genuine learning.
You're reminding me of being irritated at Pamela Dean's _Tam Lin_-- a novel of the something weird is happening at a small liberal arts university variety.
It's a good book, but the characters are only interested in the humanities, no STEM. I'm used to science fiction fans, so the lack of more general interests seemed weird to me, but maybe it's part of the normal human range.
Also, the real world has changed in the sense of many more people being interested in the structure of stories and story-telling. I don't know whether it's the Flynn effect or what.
I wonder if the too-many-vocational-subjects problem is a side-effect of the too-many-kids-at-university problem. Perhaps there's an ideal number of kids getting degrees — maybe 20% — and they are interested in something specific — maybe physics or Classical Greece. When the powers-that-be try to shoehorn 60% of kids into university, they end up with a lot of kids who are not interested in physics or classical Greece so they have to find topics they are interested in and can complete successfully.
Perhaps the vocational subjects would be better taught outside of university (with less essay writing). I did an engineering apprenticeship, FWIW, and was in charge of most of the sonar on a nuclear submarine at 21. I also taught myself programming from K&R and had a successful career in Silicon Valley. No degree required.
"Perhaps the vocational subjects would be better taught outside of university ..."
They used to be.
The US used to (maybe still does?) have things called "business colleges." You would go there to learn to "work in business" and would learn subjects such as basic accounting, filing and typing. It didn't take four years to get through.
The US also used to have secretarial schools (shorthand, etc.). Again, these did not take four years to finish.
And, of course, the US used to hire people straight out of high school with the idea that they could be trained on the job.
Now most of the modern age-equivalent kids think that they have to go to college if they want a job because they don't think they will be even interviewed without a piece of paper indicating a four-year degree. Of course they don't care about ancient Greece! They just want a job that has better prospects than running the register at a McDonalds!
For a while, the US military required officers to have masters degrees before they could be promoted to Lt. Colonel and above. The subject mostly didn't matter. Do you think the officers getting those masters degrees cared about the subject matter terribly? Keeping in mind that they still had to do whatever 40+ hour/week job was required to be a good captain or major.
Public school teachers often get paid better with a masters degree (vs a bachelors). Subject doesn't matter. You can probably guess where I'm going.
We have A LOT of students in colleges/universities who are only there because they need (or think they need) a certificate. What they really want is job training and then to be able to go get a job. But that isn't how things in the US are organized right now.
I think part of it is grade inflation. You take a hard curriculum like engineering or CS, and you maybe do so-so in your core classes, but you can give your overall GPA a boost by taking easy classes in other departments, like intro to psychology, geology, western civ, etc. Not that I would know about this personally. Other students did this, so I'm told.
There is also cross-subsidization going on. Most students are picking practical majors these days like engineering, business, etc. It is important to a university's overall reputation to offer degrees in arts and humanities, too, and to have decent faculty in those disciplines, so you require the business school kids to take a literature class or two and that helps generate some revenue for the literature department, and thus it becomes a little more financially self-sufficient.
You're a lot more prone to assuming good intent than me - when I was in undergrad, I saw Gen-eds as a blatant, bald-faced money-grab.
I was (theoretically) paying this stupid school umpteen zillion dollars to learn and be able to attend the Physics and Math classes that actually interested me, and they wanted me to spend how much time on how many totally pointless, literally content-less classes??
Any class that's so pointless that *attendance* is literally part of the grade has no place in any actually educational schema or institution . And requiring TWO YEARS worth of that crap! Blatant money grab, an explicit FU to anyone paying their own way or wanting to actually learn anything useful or interesting in the limited time they have.
If I hadn't been able to CLEP out of most of them, I would have been even more militantly pissed, and that's my advice to my various nieces and nephews now - CLEP out of everything you possibly can. If you can't do that, do community college, because you're literally not going to *learn* anything in Gen-eds, it's purely checking boxes and wasting your time and money.
Well, yeah, I guess that's another way to look at it. I suppose I wanted to present a best-case scenario for a foreign audience, but also, I gotta say there were some Gen-ed classes I genuinely enjoyed as an undergrad, like the two philosophy courses I took, Russian history, creative writing, maybe one or two others if I thought harder about it. I was to some degree glad I was forced to take classes like those, because I probably wouldn't have done so on my own, although of course my parents paid for it all, not me, so that certainly colored my view on the subject.
A few years ago (triggered by the start of covid lockdowns) a family member began having strong paranoid delusions that the police are following him and that there's a huge conspiracy against him. He was about 60 years old at the time. The delusions have persisted since then, and he doesn't want to take prescribed psychiatric treatment, because he doesn't acknowledge that the delusions aren't real. (I guess otherwise they wouldn't really be delusions.)
I'd like to describe some of the symptoms, because I've been trying to find information online and in books for years with nothing seeming to be very helpful. My hope is that someone here might recognize this type of behavior/illness.
For at least a couple of decades now, he's had strong conspiratorial tendencies and forms what appear to other to be bizarre conclusions based on available evidence (not only about politics, but also about people at work, behavior of groups of strangers, etc.) He has in adulthood never been able to form social relations outside family. His thinking is very slow and rigid. He's had a slow cognitive decline for years, that has accelerated since around the time his delusions started. Since then, his memory and physical coordination have also worsened - a doctor has suggested dementia, but the main symptom does seem to be delusions (rather than memory issues). He hasn't had hallucinations at all, as far as anyone can tell, though doctors have also suggested a possible schizophrenia diagnosis.
He doesn't have an "official" diagnosis, mostly because he refuses to take tests/see the same doctor enough, though all agree that there is some kind of psychiatric/neurological issue here. I guess it may be common that such issues don't conform to cookie-cutter diagnoses, although all information I can find seems to be geared to such. Has anyone here encountered someone a bit like this? How was it for you?
Possibly it’s delusional disorder, occurring on the background of cluster A personality traits, but I really want to emphasise that the specific diagnosis doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting him into treatment. Perhaps you could do an intervention with all his friends and family members. Otherwise he won’t get better and may get worse.
"The delusions have persisted since then, and he doesn't want to take prescribed psychiatric treatment, because he doesn't acknowledge that the delusions aren't real. (I guess otherwise they wouldn't really be delusions.)"
"This is a delusion, in the sense the term for this sort of thing is 'a delusion', and it's also a literally true statement of actual reality" is a not-rare experience. (More complicated possibilities, like "it's a delusion, a literally true statement of actual reality, and a complex metaphor or pataphor", are also possible.)
More directly: the age of onset range for the "functional psychoses" is far broader than people think. 60 doesn't even get you to "very late onset", in naming terms. Progressive impairments in memory and coordination imply a frontotemporal dementia rather than a functional psychosis, though. Diseases in the FTD family can and do involve psychosis, and for someone who happens to be schizotypal at baseline...well, dementia makes you more of who you are.
The early and mid stages of dementia have a way of exaggerating certain personality traits. This is certainly not the only dementia-personality interaction -- the opposite of "someone I knew for decades suddenly changes" is also notorious -- but exaggerations or distortions of longstanding tendencies are pretty well-reported amongst both caregivers and people with dementia themselves, and indeed coexist/synthesize with the "sudden radical differences" part. This often looks like exaggeration into flaws -- stubborn people become recklessly so ("our parent can't drive safely, but none of us have been able to take the keys"), caring and giving people get ensnared into scams because they can't draw the line anymore, people with "a temper" fly into unprovoked rages, etc. In the object case, people with paranoid tendencies becoming extremely so in early-stage dementia is not rare.
I am not a doctor and of course even if I were I can't diagnose someone I've never met. But this sounds a lot to me like Lewy Body Dementia or Parkinson's with Lewy Body
Any writers here willing to share their own writing schedules?
Lately I've been experimenting with diffetrent writing schedules and one things I came up with which works for me is to write shorter posts from time to time while having a longer post in the pipeline for several weeks. I used to try and push one article per week but some articles just take more than a week to proprely research (especially if I need to contact someone and wait for their response). The new system I am tryig now is having one of the big articles on the backburner, slowly moving it forwards, which "one-shotting" some small articles along the way, in areas where I feel comfortable to write (because I have done plenty of related research).
I write one 5000-ish word essay per week, published on Wednesdays. I work for one hour each day from Friday to Tuesday, producing 1000 or so words per day, and then correct and polish on Wednesdays. Thursdays I don't do any writing. At the same time, I have a notebook where I put down ideas, and I usually have at least an outline of what I'm going to write next when I publish an essay.
It's more a question of checking references and making sure I have the details right. Most of what I write is based on my experience over nearly fifty years in a relatively specialised area: politics, international relations, crisis and conflict, mixed with other interests of mine acquired over the decades. My essays are largely analytical, talking about current events and trends, and they don't require exhaustive academic research. I stay away from topics where I have no special knowledge or experience to offer. I read quite a lot anyway, and have an extensive library and a reasonable memory to fall back on.
I like the shorter post, longer post dynamic. There are a few ideas I have which feel like they need a lot of time to do justice. But it feels silly to drastically reduce my pace of writing in the meantime, so whenever an idea strikes me I'll still take to writing it and don't worry if the piece is a tad short; if I feel it's valuable I still post it. Definitely helps with momentum while working on longer pieces.
I write a web serial (as opposed to a blog) as a personal project, and I aim to publish something each Friday on the order of about 1000+ words. (Very rarely, if the pacing of the story demands it, I'll post up a smaller snippet; but if a scene is much longer than my usual parcel, I tend to cut it up and serve it in chunks.)
To achieve it, I go for walks to gather ideas on Mondays and Wednesdays after work, then write a bit, and I edit on Fridays, and write more on Saturdays. I don't worry too much about whether there are conflicting plans - the ideal schedule (+ the occasional stretch of vacation) leaves me with enough backlog that I can weather those as well as any sickness. (That said, I also only write from September to May; I don't like summers and having to negotiate with the hot temperatures is too exhausting to maintain that schedule. To maintain a steady schedule year-round, I'd probably have to reduce my output further.)
"Writing" means the actual act of writing, but it can also mean "doing research". I write in a hard-ish science setting, so I'm often looking something up. The biggest risk here tends to be that I get side-tracked by interesting science! That happens.
I haven't missed a scheduled publishing time yet (couple years into this), but a COVID-19 infection did get me uncomfortably close to "whoops, out of backlog".
I guess tl;dr my approach is "write enough to have a backlog". It sounds like you're working on establishing a similar system for your articles.
Oh my, um, sure! [nervous shuffling] https://www.schlaugh.com/umbilical - or if you want to use in-post previous / next links instead of a maybe slightly clunky paginated 'all posts' feed, it starts with https://www.schlaugh.com/umbilical/prologue. It's a sequel to A Thread Between The Stars, though, and I don't yet know how confusing it is if you try to make sense of it without that context (eventually, during the editing phase, i.e. once the web serial is done and I'm turning it into novellas and a novel, I will try to make it make more sense for newcomers to the setting). It updates each Saturday at schlaupdate (09:00 UTC).
I moved to Northern Michigan to live out my life doing what I enjoy in a quiet and beautiful place. Simply making a new friend changed that, for good possibly. "Make friends carefully," is advice I should have followed; but then again, well, we have to see how this turns out. Here's https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/floater-part-2-caz-pays-a-visit.
My company is looking for people who can program and more importantly can write well.
We are about a dozen people in our startup, and one of the bottlenecks we discovered is that we have a lot of knowledge floating around in conversations and in people's heads, but we lag behind in writing it down. For the moment, we need help with writing for our internal consumption; in a few months we will also want to write docs for people who want to use our system or build on top of it.
We are fully remote, and can offer part-time work, too.
You can reply here or contact me at m@mozak.com, if you are interested, or if you have some suggestions for how to hire good technical writers.
(Full disclosure: we are working with the bleeding edge technology of 'zero knowledge proofs'. Eventually some of our money will come from the crypto-ecosystem and finance in general. We pay in fiat money, and at the moment don't expect to ever offer our own tokens. Think, selling shovels into a gold rush. Most of our code is in Rust.)
Slight tangent: in principle I'm very in favour of https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ but so far we haven't really gotten around to implementing that. If anyone has experience with using work-sample tests to hire or get hired, please share.
EDIT: we are also looking for people who know their way around with compilers and interpreters. Especially of the 'Types And Programming Languages' variety. Or also someone who can compile from an assembly language that has both registers and memory to one that has only memory, and no registers.
I'm a programmer who has been blogging at https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/ since 2007. However, I've never written Rust and last took a compiler/interpreter course back in college around the time I started that blog. For my most recent jobs, prior to getting hired I did online programming tests with in-browser IDEs complete with the ability to unit-test my code. I think that's much better than unstructured interviews.
We have people in Singapore, India, Israel, Abu Dhabi, UK and the US. So I am already maximally screwed as the team lead / CTO. I don't think there's any timezone that would make this worse.
(Fo what it's worse, I'm in Singapore and our CEO is in the Middle East.)
Some knowledge of cryptography wouldn't hurt, but it's by no means a requirement.
We don't have anything in JavaScript at all. Knowledge of Rust or willingness to learn would be useful, as most of our software is in Rust at the moment.
Our system acts a bit like a very weird (simulated) embedded machine. So some knowledge of that area would be useful, but is not required.
Somewhat independent of the opening for someone who's good at writing technical prose, we are also looking for someone who's good with compilers. Especially the functional programming approach to compilers like you would find in Types And Programming Languages. But also nuts and bolts of llvm.
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!
The lead developer on my team (at a US-headquartered company) is a Norwegian living in Canada. I believe he technically owns his own country (EDIT: should be "company") and is paid as a "contractor" via that. It's possible he's one of those driven away by taxes, but I haven't asked him about that.
Thank you for responding! Would you be interested in asking him about his reasons for moving? I've been trying to find Norwegian expats to join me in drafting a letter of support- I think he would be an excellent fit!
I sent him a link to the article interviewing(?) you and he said he'd check it out. If you give me a way to contact you, I'll relay it to him. You can find an email address for me at https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
Thank you for responding! Yes- there are some groups both local and national that have been critical about the wealth tax. That's an avenue I'm pursunig as well.
The physical aproach I've actually not considered at all- thank you for pointing it out!
I would encourage you to think of this as a political opportunity rather than an exchange of pure ideas. In short, think of this as having two goals: to build cover and support for the politician that wants to implement these changes and to organize relevant constituencies around the opportunity.
I have some ideas about how to do that but I'm not as familiar with Norwegian politics so I don't want to get out over my skis.
I agree with your assement! My short term goal is that my hometown become more attractive, which is based on self interest. (Even though I believe it is a net positive for the city and country overall as well)
Norwegian politics I would say is straight forward; you have interest groups clamoring from attention from politicians. Then you have the usual right/ leftaxis of more business friendly/ more socialist.
If you have any general advice towards influencing this policy change in particular, I'm sure I'll be able to make use of it. :)
I have been browsing through reddit for some years. In the last few years, the front page seems to have turned into a far-left echo chamber with completely crazy economics and a fair degree of crazy woke-aligned thinking. Tonnes of posts with an 'eat-the-rich', 'America and capitalism and billionaires are teh evil' kinds of energy. Has this trend actually happened or is it just me seeing things? Where have all the sane people gone?
Countless right-wing subreddits have been deleted, and right-wing (or 'not-left-wing') posters face continual censorship in almost all subreddits. The most powerful moderators on the site have an enormous amount of power and are virtually all left-wing, and multiple subreddits exist with the explicit goal of crusading against right-aligned subreddits and reporting it until reddit just deletes it to avoid having to deal with this crap.
What's so funny is that 4Chan, a supposed hive of literal actual nazis, has far more tolerance of left-wing opinion than place like reddit does of right-wing opinion. People will call you all kinds of slurs if you're a communist or something, but you won't get your post banned for being anti-right wing, even if your'e straight up trolling/baiting right-wingers.
So now reddit became a safe space for the left, which attracted more leftists who agitate for more censorship making it more left-dominated and the cycle repeats. Additionaly, the place selects for losers with minimal prospects and social skills/life who feel aggreived by American society/"capitalism" in the first place, making massive subreddits like 'antiwork' so popular.
Oh, and one other thing - the most left-wing mainstream place on the internet used to be Tumblr, but once Tumblr was bought by Yahoo and they tried making it into a respectable social media site, this caused a mass exodus of these types of people who found refuge in reddit (and some in twitter), bringing their politics with them.
To be fair, most of the problem with Reddit isn't political, it's that clickbait works and so most of the front page is clickbait. When I check back in on Reddit, I mostly try to scan through that to find things of actual interest but I don't blame Reddit for being mostly clickbait. Maybe...10% or less of posts are leftie junk.
But I 'member The_Donald. I 'member when it got banned. And, yeah, it was not the highest quality content but I go back now and every time there's some equivalently mid-tier political content from WhitePeopleTwitter or whatever and...it's like a gang sign. Lefties can flash leftie gang signs, righties can't.
This happened very, very explicitly with theMotte, you can read it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/x5t3jh/meta_the_motte_is_dead_long_live_the_motte/. They're now off on their own lil site where it's gotten...weird. Because, surprise, normie righties left Reddit, they can read gangsigns, and creator righties went off to their own 'lil echo chambers and ran into all the same problems we're seeing on Reddit.
The sane people are struggling to find a place to discuss things. If you get prominent and you're not leftie, you get stomped and the right is still trying to find a way around this, that's the guts of why people reacted so negatively to "Nazis on Substack" 'n stuff.
And I'm sure some lefties here will think I'm overstating and, like, no, we've had two situations in this 'lil community alone where the broadly right-wingers have been forced to splinter off (datasecretslox and theMotte), you can go visit, I'm not wild about them because, well, they're right-wing echo chambers and meh but I know why they exist and why those people aren't here anymore. Multiply that across hundreds of subreddits and you get the Reddit echo chamber.
Yeah, I posted a question on a Reddit Mac sub and got woke attacked. I was asking for information about how to customize a Mac so it's safe for an autistic man who is as naive and lacking in common sense as an 8 year old. Someone suggested Disney stuff and I said no, he has adult tastes. Has interest areas where his knowledge is at an adult level -- certain music, certain kinds of cars -- said it was remarkable how when he talks about those special interestss he sounds almost normal. So the wokie went after me for daring to imply that when he was talking about things other than his special interests, he did *not* sound pretty normal. WTF? Everyone recognizes within 30 seconds of meeting this man that he is normal. And I was engaged in a complicated project to develop something to *make his life better and more interesting* and this wokie was doing their More Compassionate than Thou thing. It's madness. Also really really obnoxious.
The clickbait seems to intensify over time. For instance, after the last reddit "blackout" where some subs left and others didn't recover, the front-page seemed to be dominated with fauxmoi and popculturechat for the first time.
Read the comments on any post about crime or homelessness in a subreddit for a small to medium size city and you wont get the impression it's a have of left wing politics. Or checkout the "wallstreetbets" extended universe - lots of redpill adjacent stuff going on.
The right wing stuff just doesn't get to the front page or go viral, while the left wing stuff does. Right wingers have been leaving most popular media sources (voluntarily or otherwise), i don't think its unique to reddit.
>Read the comments on any post about crime or homelessness in a subreddit for a small to medium size city and you wont get the impression it's a have of left wing politics.
Whenever there's a reddit thread about an ethnic minority murdering or raping etc. europeans, after a day or so you will see a long string of [Comment Deleted].
Non-left-wing people are still on reddit, but the moderators are very left wing and have enormous power and are able to make it an echo chamber even in places without an absolute left dominance of subreddit members.
> Right wingers have been leaving most popular media sources (voluntarily or otherwise), i don't think its unique to reddit.
NOT voluntarily, mostly. But post-Musk X shows you what a more natural distribution of content looks like (complicated by right-winger joing or returning to X given the less censorious environment).
>Or checkout the "wallstreetbets" extended universe - lots of redpill adjacent stuff going on.
Maybe once upon a time, but these days its been filled with normie shitlibs.
For theMotte, they were part of the SSC subreddit, then Scott asked them to move due to political and personal pressure, which is how theMotte subreddit arose, then the Reddit admins essentially made clear that, while they wouldn't explicitly ban theMotte, the standards would be raised to the strictest level possible until the Motte moderators inevitably failed. You can read their reaction as it occured here:
For DSL and the commentariat here, it pretty explicitly arose out of the NYT doxxing. While it might seem that ACX followed seamlessly from SSC, in reality there was about a six-month gap between when Scott deleted SSC and when ACX began. Essentially all the old commenters went over to DSL, which was founded when we didn't know if Scott was coming back, and when Scott launched ACX most of them stayed over at DSL.
Which is why I think the discussion seems so even keel here. The NYT doxxing had two big effects on the commenters. First, Scott seemed to intentionally avoid...."spicy" topics, which I can't blame him for and, second, 90% of the old commenters had left. Frankly, I don't recognize a lot of the current commenters, ya'll are new and generally moderate liberal-leftists. This gives the space a very even-keel discussion because, well, ya'll are pretty homogenous. I can't imagine someone like GoneAnon posting here, it would be madness, but the old SSC energy was driven by a lot of "spicy" people finding an outlet and coming here to post and talk. The NYT doxx hit...kinda like a neutron bomb from my perspective. All the old commentators were gone and Scott wouldn't touch "spicy" stuff anymore so they stayed in the bunkers/echo chambers they built after the doxx and deletion. And then a bunch of moderate liberals walked into this...kind of abandoned forum and we're like "Man, it's nice here, let's set up shop".
If Scott or someone more knowledgeable wants to correct this, I'm certainly open to it but this, young whipppersnappers, is the history as I 'member.
I think it's a bit unfair to describe right wingers as being 'forced to splinter off' regarding datasecretlox. DSL had a decent mix of the old commentariat at the start, but over time the right wingers largely dogpiled, mod actioned and pushed out anyone posting even just moderate takes, let alone left aligned ones. I do miss the more heterodox and varied flavor of the SSC comments, but current ACX comments have a better light to heat ratio, at least.
I still lurk DSL, partly to keep a finger on the pulse of the right wing id and partly because they're just so wacky lol.
Mostly just posting because DSL's evolution and dynamics have been something of a hobby/case study/digital rubbernecking for me. Back to lurking!
I don't think right-wingers "mod actioning" moderates was a big factor on DSL, and I say that as one of the people who was mod-actioned.
But dogpiling, yeah, there was way too much of that going on. Like you, I liked the original mix that made up DSL, and think that the shift in the commentariat did bad things to the light to heat ratio.
Like, your comment is utterly incomprehensible to me unless you're so used to being in left-wing echo chambers that DSL is some sort of far-right place that censors left-wing opinion, because that's not even remotely close to true
Go to the meta forum for DSL and you'll see that most of the people getting banned are right wingers and the place is filled with left-wingers screeching about HBD discussions being allowed. I haven't been on in a little while, but there was basically a de facto rule that you're not allowed to post about HBD unless you've been there so many months or made so many posts. Many wanted it banned outright, others wanted it ot be bannable to bring it up in anything that wasn't explicitly as HBD thread (which means in practice people could make anti-HBD claims but nobody would be allowed to refute them because it wasn't a "HBD thread").
The left are just so used to having right-wingers silenced that anything less than this is viewed as some ultra right wing place.
And most right wingers would love being "dogpiled" to be their biggest problem, but as Wooly says, getting censored is the more common problem.
There's almost nowhere I can think of that's not genuinely right wing where right-wingers have an easy a time as left-wingers do on DSL. But because, again, the left are used to the right being censored, so they will STILL feel aggreived by this.
I was told that the righties formed (or expanded?) DSL during the Interregnum between Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. The SSC comments were *far* to the right of the ACX ones, but Scott was preferentially banning righties before the NYT told him they would doxx him.
My impression is that the winner-take-all system of upvoted articles making the front page and their demographics leads to a lot of politically naive content on Reddit. It's always been bad, and I don't _think_ it's gotten especially worse lately, but the exact nature of it changes from time to time. Right now they are very focused on the (as you put it) eat-the-rich narrative.
The timing is a little funny given that Reddit is currently trying to improve their monetization and go public, which makes Reddit (the corporation) the villain from the eyes of Reddit (the community). It was especially pronounced when they killed the third-party apps which got framed as 'this greedy company refuses to indefinitely give away it's service for free'.
It's absolutely not just upvoting, it's active censorships by the powermods of reddit. Explicitly right-aligned subreddits are either banned or so heavily policed that they're completely neutered.
Yeah there are definitely feedback loops in the algorithms they use that are reinforcing this. What I've noticed is that every three months or so it seems a new crop of popular subreddits pop up and dominate. The content is basically the same stuff but the subreddit is different. Can't tell what triggers the rise and fall. (though TikTokCringe seems to have fallen because it got dominated by pro-palestinian propaganda that people got sick of).
Now this new sub called "FluentInFinance" is super popular out of no where. You'll be shocked to hear basically nothing about the subreddit shows any fluency in finance.
I don't spend much time on reddit, so I went to the front page to check. This seems like an infinite scroll, so let's look at the top 10.
1 is about a bus driver retiring and people saying goodbye
2 is a cute baby chimp
3 and 4 are pictures of people waving swastika flags from the TN capitol building
5 is a video of a woman responding to catcalls by acting weird and funny
6 is asking ex-trump supporters why they stopped supporting him
7 is discussing a survey that says Gen Z is more socialist than any other gen
8 is a discussion of an argument a guy had with his wife
9 is githib humor
10 is angry that amazon driver opened their door and put the parcel inside
4 of them are clearly political, but 2 are the same thing so let's just talk 3 items.
People upset at demonstrators waving swastika flags seems pretty reasonable and sane to me.
The trump supporter thread is full of people claiming to be generally conservative, but put off by Jan 6 and election denialism.
The socialism thread is full of people basically agreeing "no, we don't really want socialism we want stronger safety nets and better corporate regulation"
None of these seem insane to me. A bit echo chamber ish in the sense that you don't have many people arguing "actually, swastika flags are good", but not a lot of calls to eat the rich or calling America evil.
So it seems likely that one of these is true:
1 you see different front page posts than me, and so your browsing behavior is causing the apparent effect
2 you disagree with me that these posts are sane
3 I got lucky and today's front page is more reasonable than normal
4 this effect isn't real and you are just remembering a small number of extreme posts
I look at reddit way more than i should (many times a day), i am not left-wing, but also not right-wing so I hope I can try to be objective.
I think the answer is a combination of 3 and 4 (and a tiny be 2 - posts 10 and 5 could, in the insane minds of constantly online people, be political in some way). When there are viral political tweets or news stories these will jump to the top of the front page and be posted many times in different subreddits. Subreddist like "fuckwork" or "workreformnow" are often on the front page.
Also, to address hypothesis 1, if you are logged in you see a "homepage" which shows posts from the subreddits you are a member of and also recommends posts you might enjoy from other subreddits. There is "All" which is supposed to be the front page, and there is all "Popular" which is the same thing but sorted somewhat differently (it's unclear?) and a bit more newsy. So it's definitely possible that people are seeing different things. You can also sort the posts by "New" or "Hot" or "Rising" and they will give you different results.
In the past 6 months, my personal homepage feed has gotten a lot more posts from big popular subreddits than it used to. Likely a tweak to the algorithm intended to increase engagement and boost their revenue.
Finally, an anecdote: Here is the list of the biggest subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/best/communities/1/ In my mind, I can barely remember seeing posts on the front page from many of these communities. Out of the top 20, i'd say less than half have posts on the front page on a constigten basis. The front page is more focused on viral content and not actually what people are interested in.
Just as many other places, reddit has moved from merely on average being left-wing (while tolerating a large variance) to actively censoring and banning people who are perceived as being right-wing. To me it has also been one of the most blackpilling experience; I used to think that the left was fundamentally more tolerant and felt much more at home with them than the right, nowadays I consider the left a much bigger threat to scientific inquiry and free speech than the right (but not fundamentally, I expect the right to be just as bad the moment they're back in power).
To provide an actual answer to this question, several hypothesis I think are plausible (non-exclusive):
* GIFT
* Normal, reasonable people aging out of Reddit. As you get busier with other stuff, your reddit participation takes a hit, leaving behind people who are, on average, more maladjusted. Since younger people opt for other forms of interaction (Discord, groupchats, whatever young people do), there is no influx of normal people to replace the ones that leave.
* Normal, reasonable people are retreating from online interaction altogether.
* A moderation feedback loop: A disproportionate amount of power in reddit is held by mods, who are volunteers. A lot of ink has been spilled regarding the kind of people these "high" status - low pay (no pay, in this case) jobs appeal to. The mods set the tone, which drives less left-wing people away. This makes the environment more left-wing, which justifies further cracking down on right-coded stuff, and so on.
* Reasonable alternatives popping up (many will disagree with the idea that Substack's comment interface is "reasonable", but it exists). While I believe this is a consequence, rather than a cause, it can help accelerate a process that had already started.
I was a contributor on the Straight Dope for many years but gave up on it when the moderation got taken over by the extremely woke. The Straight Dope was always notorious for an extremely diverse set of opinions but all of the opinions except one are gone now.
Thirding this, I still really miss SDMB as it was in it's prime. I still think of a lot of the posters there (where are you now, Inigo, LSLguy, Oakminster, Shagnasty, msmith, Spice Weasel, Mangetout, and the rest?), and wish I could hear their thoughts on the things Scott talks about.
Are you entirely unwilling to entertain the possibility that the answer to your question is: to Reddit, where they make up most of the posts on the front page?
> Are you entirely unwilling to entertain the possibility that the answer to your question is: to Reddit, where they make up most of the posts on the front page?
The empiric evidence, gathered daily over the last 2 years, is distributed as follows:
* sane people making up most of the posts on the front page: 0%
* the front page mostly consisting of far-left echo chambers with completely crazy economics and a fair degree of crazy woke-aligned thinking: 100%
a. It is you who has turned into a right-wing crank
b. Far-left echo-chambering is the end-state for sane people in the internet
I wouldn't agree that it's true, but it's always worth considering. I just bought a book about why, even though the term "fascist" has been overused throughout history, the new right-wing movements around the world are totally fascist, maybe I'll learn something from it.
Yeah, I get that. I was being sarcastic in response to a post that threw a cheap "Have you considered that you you're wrong?" at the wall. How should one respond to that? "Yeah, I've considered it, and no, I'm not wrong." maybe?
As an aside: It seems there's always someone on the Internet who'll misinterpret your sarcasm. I'll call this observation ... "Pete's law", because when that happens, it makes you say "Oh for Pete's sake, that was so obvious!"
At the very least, I think serious consideration should be given to a modified possibility b*: "Far-left echo-chambering is the end-state for sane people *with an eye for the main chance* in the internet."
Just my opinion, and perhaps only limited to a place open to dialogue like this one: address the underlying point directly. Why do you suggest that? What do you agree with the redditors on?
Assuming that you get an honest answer, it could provide more insight to your original question than the median opinion of the ACX commenter which is probably closer to "Reddit was always bad".
Is this a logged in front page? I browse Reddit but don’t post anymore so am logged out mostly. In that case it’s mostly the local subs and popular subs. Neither seem to be drastically different than a few years ago. If you are logged in then you are getting your own followed accounts which is up to you. I’m not saying they haven’t drifted left though, for you.
I haven't been using Reddit too much until the last couple of years, but I did come across several people raising the observation that the median Reddit user was be pretty libertarian 10-12 ish years ago(e.g., really strong cheering for Ron Paul back around 2008-2012), but now these views are mostly banned from more popular subreddits and woke/extreme left thinking became the norm.
For what it's worth, Reddit says my account is from February 1, 2006.
I used Reddit for a while back in the day, then stopped for a while, but came back when sub-reddits were invented. I think subreddits helped a lot to shelter some small islands from the corroding mainstream.
(My Hacker News account is from August 16, 2007. I remember using that a lot more, while Reddit had already gone downhill, but hadn't invented their best redeeming feature of sub-reddits, yet.)
I saw the same thing myself on most of the popular subreddits. You have to go out of your way to get something more middle-ground or leaning the other way, but then you run the risk of still echo chambering yourself, just in the other direction. My solution was to get off of Reddit, and I haven't missed it. Better, more curated spaces out there with more good faith conversation.
I'm trying to find a study I read several years ago that seemed to make a breakthrough on lie detection methods. I think they constructed fake border patrol scenarios to test it and the method involved asking the person basic information first, then gradually asking more detailed questions that only a person telling the truth should plausibly know.
The liars would tend to get far less detailed in their answers but truth tellers would maintain their or extend their answer length. Does this ring a bell for anyone? It seemed to stand above other studies on lying at the time in terms of rigor, but it's been a while since I've read it (and can't seem to find it anymore!)
I've heard the opposite, that liars are much more likely to add details later in the process while truth-tellers say everything up front. Then you've got the pathological liars.
I think it was on very specific types of questions that liers would become devoid of detail - but again, my memory is very hazy on the study (hence why I want to find it!).
I've heard about liars giving more detail in general - the whole 'over-explaining' phenomenon.
I can't recall exact details, but IIRC they had two parts of the study. One where they used the method and determined the shorter answer dynamic for liars (with the researcher using the technique), and a second part where they trained people to use the technique and put them up against people using only their intuitions (possibly with the same questions, I can't recall).
And they found using the technique had a very low false-positive rate. I know 'shorter answers for liars, longer answers for truth tellers' sounds simplistic - it is. But the method they used was more involved than that - I just can't remember the study very well.
I'm trying to understand how this summing of divergent series stuff might relate to the real world, and he seems pretty excited about something, but describes it too vaguely for me to follow.
It's better for understanding what is going on, but a little heavy on the "No that's wrong."
His "No this is wrong" is, itself, wrong. There's a sense in which what Numberphile is doing is undefined (and I emphasize that he is doing something that is undefined, not wrong - that is, the operations he is performing are not defined, and the sense that they are wrong is not the sense in which they arrive at the wrong result, but rather the sense in which you cannot sit down and rigorously define what it is he is actually doing) - and a sense in which what he is doing is entirely correct.
And if there is a fundamental theorem of mathematics as a whole, it would be something like "What is correct in one sense must be correct in all senses" (the poorly-defined principle underlying the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", generally expressed in terms of how mathematics can unreasonably predict physical reality, but also notable in how mathematics can unreasonably predict other mathematics), so I personally award a correctness point to Numberphile. He's not -wrong-.
In total fairness to Mathologist, however, he explains in what sense that particular summation is wrong (which is to say, undefined), and in what sense that particular summation is right - and does so pretty well.
I really don't follow what you're saying here. Doing undefined operations and then presenting their conclusions as meaningful seems pretty "wrong" to me, just like if it involved dividing by zero, and if something is not correct in some sense then it's not correct. Otherwise, how would you have proof by contradiction?
Consider exponentiation, for a moment. We have a nice intuitive understanding of exponentiation: Repeated multiplication. So - what's going on with non-positive-integer exponentiation? How can you multiply something by itself negative one times? Or one half times? With respect to that understanding, we might say that raising something to the one-half power is undefined.
So, we extended the definition of exponentiation. Because it's a bit of a pain in the ass to come up with a new term for exponentiation, we just kind of rolled it all together into one nice package.
The relationship to summation is extremely similar.
When Mathologist says that the use of summation in the way Numberphile used it is wrong, this is sort of like saying that 4^(1/2)=+-2 is wrong, if we lived in an alternative reality in which exponentiation was defined only for the positive integers, and only as "repeated multiplication". In that reality, somebody could post on a Youtube how "4^(1/2) is both positive and negative two, at the same time!" and there would be massive confusion from the public and outrage from mathematicians about this incredibly mathematically negligent proclamation, and there would be elaborate Youtube videos explaining that, no, that operation is not defined, but look, here is how you could define an operation that does have these insane properties using complex analysis to extend the function definition.
The operations are undefined -in a sense-, much as 4^(1/2) is undefined -in a sense- in that alternate reality. This does not make them meaningless, nor does it make uses of that logic wrong.
One of the things mathologist mentions is that you can prove contradictions by taking finite sums of diverging infinite series. So that would be "wrong" in the ordinary mathematical sense. You need to add the caveats and rigor he discusses to avoid such results.
The instance of this I can recall is somewhat misleading, and applies specifically to the supersum function, where it is violating the "average" mechanic by arbitrarily injecting numbers into the denominator (by adding 0s to the numerator). Which, yes, if you arbitrarily inject zeroes into the numerator, and treat them as components to be averaged, you can indeed make an average function produce different results.
(Not to say there aren't other cases where you can prove contradictions, just that that is the instance I can recall, and the problem there is fairly obvious and not directly related to what Numberphile was doing.)
I disagree with this metaphor, I think maybe for several reasons, but the one that seems easiest to articulate is this:
The extension of exponentiation to cover non-integer values is consistent with exponentiation with integer values - if you try to calculate the value of an exponent with an integer value in the same way that you would if you were using a non-integer value, you'll get the value from the hypothetical previous form of exponentiation. But there's already a (different) way to come up with the value of the sum of all integers greater than 0, and the answer is "it sums to positive infinity". Substituting a competing definition here that allows you to declare that the sum of all integers greater than 0 is "-1/16" is therefore false because the answer is "positive infinity".
Also I think this is literally a proof-by-contradiction of the method Numberphile is using - if you apply it, you get a value inconsistent with reality (or the abstract reality of mathematics), ergo their approach is wrong/false.
A more abstract disagreement that might not be phrased as clearly is this: Saying "In a hypothetical other universe where the rules we used were different, things we say are true wouldn't be considered true, but that doesn't mean they aren't true in this universe" seems like it would apply to basically any mathematical argument. When would be able to safely declare any mathematical statement "wrong" under this logic?
In the cases where we can apply an analogous method to reality, which is mostly QFT, we get answers that are, in fact, consistent with reality. Are there cases in reality where we can apply it where it isn't consistent with reality? (Seems a bit hard, on account of, y'know, infinities.)
Additionally, "positive infinity" is not, in fact, defined in the standard number lines - there's a special name for number lines that are extended to include infinity (amusingly enough, the "extended number lines"). And once you extend number lines to infinity, you're getting into the same branches of mathematics which also extend summation in exactly the manner which gets you meaningful answers. (Complex analysis and real analysis)
I am uncertain whether a well-defined infinity necessarily requires such extensions to summation, but my limited knowledge suggests this may be the case.
I'm a crackpot, and this touches exactly on something -I- am getting excited about as I have formalized my crackpottery, so take my commentary with a grain of salt, but:
There is a sense in which it is intelligible to say that numbers form rings/loops/circles, and the number lines we are familiar with are projections of these constructs onto a lower-dimensional surface. So, in a sense, if you keep heading towards infinity, you will, perhaps inexplicably if you think only in terms of the lower-dimensional object, arrive at a finite number, where the exact number you arrive at will depend on the process you utilize to arrive at infinity.
So as to how this pertains to the real world, it means that, when you have mathematical equations where infinities turn up, you may be modeling a higher-dimensional space in lower-dimensional mathematics - which shares a pattern of behavior with complex numbers, which often mean the same thing, albeit in a different way.
To illustrate this with a circle, consider a point moving around the circle. You can complete this loop an infinite number of times and remain in the circle; if you're a traveler traveling around the circle, moving what is to you "forwards", you can travel an infinite distance and yet remain in finite space - you'll just keep returning to the same points. So if you have accurate mathematics relating your distance to your actual position, "infinity" in distance could, if well-defined, map to a finite point on the circle. But if your mathematics relating to distance shows up with a complex number, you're possibly somehow going -off- the circle. Both infinity and complex numbers, thus, relate the two-dimensional behavior of distance to the one-dimensional mathematical expression of distance.
This is particularly relevant to quantum field theory because the usual mathematical approach involves explicitly dealing with infinities, and kind of ... just assuming the infinity behaves in a particular way which matches reality (generally canceling out, even if we can't mathematically prove that it cancels out, or that canceling out is even a reasonable thing for an infinity to do in those conditions). To frame this in a particularly misleading way, suppose you have a function that, when evaluated, is always "infinity plus n", where n is just some number - and the actual result is always, say, "n-1". Then, if you have a formalization that lets you treat the particular infinity in that particular function as specifically "-1" (or, more likely, as 0, where the -1 shows up for some other specific reason), you have a somewhat mathematically rigorous way of dealing with the problem.
A lot of ink has been spilled over this particular set of problems, which turn up in some form in basically all the methods we've figured out which calculate certain results in QFT. (Feynman's Sum Over Histories approach, IIRC, is particularly amenable to making the canceling-out-of-infinities seem more reasonable than it may be in more abstract approaches, but the problem does turn up there.)
> There is a sense in which it is intelligible to say that numbers form rings/loops/circles, and the number lines we are familiar with are projections of these constructs onto a lower-dimensional surface.
There is a sense in which you can formalise a number system that does form loops, and a number system that goes on forever. What answers you get depend on which system you are working in -- it's s forgone conclusion, not a surprise.
Seriously, though, I've been slowly working through the desuspension of a point (where desuspension is the operation, loosely speaking, of removing a dimension - so the desuspension of a point is removing a dimension from 0 dimensional space, which is to say, moving into negative dimensions), and it appears, although there are a lot of ??? steps in the sequence, to form the Riemann Sphere. This was a total surprise to me, since I didn't even know what a Riemann Sphere -was- until somebody pointed out that my drawing of negative-dimensional-space looked like a projection of a Riemann Sphere onto a surface. And, as I dug into the Riemann Sphere, in a sense it is a direct mapping between positive and negative dimensional space - it's literally created by gluing an inverse complex plane to a regular complex plane.
And because the fractal-dimensionality of a negative dimension (cutting a line in half doubles its length) maps more or less perfectly to an inverse dimension (1/x), this makes perfect sense in retrospect - my drawing was trying to map a negative dimension to positive dimensional space, which is something the Riemann Sphere already does. (But my drawing does have something that the typical Riemann Sphere does not - a measure-preserving curve as the unit basis for the positive dimensional space. Or, to phrase that differently, my Riemann Sphere is constructed by a fiber bundle such that each fiber forms a spherical spiral such that each rotation about the sphere covers the same distance as measured from the poles, where one pole is zero and the other is infinity. I didn't just arbitrarily stick it there, but it is surrounded by a bunch of ??? steps in my derivation.)
To be clear, this isn't where I -started-. I -started- with "What if there are an infinite number of forces of alternating polarity, such that, if we assign each force F a counting number N, each force F has an initial value proportional to N, a polarity that is positive if N is even and negative if N is odd, and a decay value over distance proportional to N, such that for any given distance either a single force will dominate in effect, or they will all approximately cancel out."
Twenty years of trying to understand what that would mean about reality has led me to negative dimensions, and from there to the Riemann Sphere, with lots of bizarre hints along the way, like a little hint that the most natural interpretation of infinity is that it is directly connected to 0i. That is surprising, to say the least, and I strongly believe that starting from those assumptions, the Riemann Sphere is, in fact, a foregone conclusion. So - both surprising AND foregone.
Personally I find the "heuristics" section of the Wikipedia page more intuitive than the LessWrong post.
More to the point, QFT is plagued by infinities which need to be weeded out with this sort of dodgy maths (see renormalization). This is not necessarily as dubious as it sounds - in physics we often resort to abuses of notation and similar mathematical sins, so it's not surprising that sometimes we can only make sense of results by playing fast and loose with usual notions of mathematical rigor. Historically, it's often been the case that it was fine to do this sort of thing and let mathematicians find out why that was ok afterwards. (Which makes sense if you think this sort of less rigorous approach can be a little like a first pass at a problem, that you might do to gain intuition before seeing a rigorous proof.)
Also, often these procedures make trivially perfect sense if you assume a specific scenario is motivating your renormalization - e.g., that spacetime is not really continuous but more like a really dense lattice.
There are (at least) two approaches you can take explain this type of thing:
A) it's a mathematical trick, that maybe can be justified using more advanced mathematics
B) it's because of the actual physics
In the case of, e.g. using a Dirac delta function, I'd argue it's just a mathematical trick.
In the case of renormalization (and the Casemiro effect) I'm less inclined to view it as a mathematical trick, and more inclined to reach for a physics based explanation, e.g. that there really is some high-energy cutoff on virtual photons
Assuming you mean the Casimir effect, that is different from renormalization. The Casimir effect is more about how the energy of states without excitations (i.e. vacua) depend on boundary conditions. You may need renormalization to do the math in specific cases, but not all.
Anyway, the mathematical "tricks" are not different from the physics. From our point of view, they're the same thing - otherwise you're doing the wrong maths!
The Ancient Greeks worried about Zeno's Paradox ... how can 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... have a finite sum?
Now, we can just call it a mathematical trick. (And I don't need to appeal to physics to resolve it, with arguments along the lines of: well, eventually you reach the granularity of space and the tortoise can't actually move by a distance that small)
Does being "plagued by infinities" imply that our understanding is wrong, and that if we found the correct theories then the infinities would disappear? Or is bumping up against infinities to be expected when dealing with an infinite universe?
I'd argue that it's evidence that spacetime is not continuous at sufficiently small scales (possibly below Planck length).
Mind you, lots of these infinities don't imply anything serious. The typical example of this involves calculating the energy of a specific field configuration and finding it's infinity. This is not fundamentally problematic because energy is meant to be defined only up to an arbitrary constant. So as long as all the relevant energy differences are finite, then you're fine and this has no deeper implications.
There are a few cases where it's not obvious to me we can reduce the problem to this sort of situation where only differences matter. But I think there are many who think they are fundamentally the same thing. Still, if lots of this stuff becomes tractable once you pretend spacetime is discrete (see Wilson Renormalization), then I'd say that's a good reason to ask whether it might not just be that it actually is. But this is definitely not a super solid argument and it may well be everything is like the infinite energies only with different levels of complexity.
It's promising, and more generally there are lots of signs in pure math and physics that we don't know how to deal with infinite sums well yet. The basic idea is that we have some process, like an electron moving from place to place, and to compute the probability of this happening you discretize spacetime to compute something and then take a limit. There no a priori reason this should work well, and indeed you run into infinities. What people found is that there's some natural way of getting rid of the infinities and the paper specifically talks about a way of doing it while preserving some basic symmetries. But ideally, there would be some very different way to do it with doesn't involve ad hoc steps like discretization.
Tucker Carlson recently went to Moscow and said it seemed more orderly than US cities, especially in having no homelessness.
Question for Russian readers: is this true in your experience? What is Russia's homelessness policy? If you don't have enough money to afford a place to stay, what happens to you?
Left Moscow a few years ago. There are definitely much fewer homeless people there compared to major American cities like NYC and Philadelphia. It's similar to the level of homelessness in some cities in Europe and Tel Aviv, so it's not some kind of outlier.
While I've never interacted closely and for a long time with homeless people there, I think that one of the reasons for that is that it's harder to lose one's home (and at the starting point of the history of modern Russia, pretty much everyone had some kind of place to live due to the Soviet policies). For example, there is a provision in the law that makes it pretty hard to take away someone's property if they don't have anywhere else to live.
It's also true that the authorities are less tolerant of visible homelessness. While they don't care if someone is sleeping on a bench in a park, they are not allowed to sleep in the subway and any kind of tents would be promptly removed. See DeeNBee's answer for more details.
Live in Moscow, never been to USA, but compared to Paris, for example, Moscow is exemplary in cleanliness and orderliness. I was appalled by number of homeless people in Paris (been there about 15 years ago), and by how aggressive they are. In Moscow, I've seen homeless - they tend to congregate near churches and train stations - but generally they were quiet. In Paris, we were harassed by a bum after withdrawing some cash near Notre Dame - he wanted "his cut", because he camped near that ATM. If anything, THAT'S not a thing in Moscow - local police, for all its problems, at least prevents it.
Another thing to note: Moscow barely have "poor" and "rich" neighborhoods. Only a very few places house super-rich, everywhere else you will find a mix of poor, rich and middle class living close to each other (you can kind of judge it by looking at cars: a 60-year old commie block often will have both a rusting Moskvich and a few shiny new BMWs sharing the same parking near it). There are also not much ethnic neighborhoods (although they start to appear). That means that police coverage is more even - there are no areas where they doesn't dare to go. In 90's, some areas were considered dangerous - people still joke about "gopniks" (chavs, for our British readers) from South Butovo or Solntsevo, but these days, even those criminal strongholds became generally peaceful. That doesn't mean you can't get robbed or raped in Moscow - but chances aren't too high, especially if you avoid walking late at night while drunk.
Moscow is also a very clean city compared to many because of army of migrants from the South who work tirelessly at it. Or at least it used to be - these days, there are fewer migrants willing to be street cleaners (food delivery is MUCH more profitable!), and with VERY heavy snow this winter, some neighborhoods become a mess for weeks after a snowfall until cleaners get there. I hear they're started using robotic cleaning machines in some parks recently - maybe this will help with labor shortages in future.
In general, I'd say Carlson's videos (I've checked the first 3 of them) are not very biased in what they show - this is really Moscow as it is (although its peripheral neigborhoods looks far less interesting, but isn't it true for every big city in the world?). As others pointed out, Moscow is a country of its own, but in my experience, big cities has been getting better, safer and cleaner all the time, if more slowly than Moscow. Smaller towns, especially those that were built around a single Soviet-era factory, are a different story...
I’ve never been but your post reminded me of a popular YouTube video doing the rounds a while back. It’s long at 2 hours but it does show a well ordered city
It's the very center of Moscow and it really looks like you can see in the video when it's summer - clean and green.
Operator moves by Бульварное кольцо (boulevard ring) for the most part of the video and yes, if you were there you will see the same exact picture.
There are some spots that are not that nice near the place, but you should dig in the arches of surrounding houses to find them and it's not easy still: I guess not even many people living in Moscow know them.
I read somewhere that after the snow thaw in spring Russians find hundreds of bodies, of homeless people, probably mostly drunks, who keeled over in the snow the previous winter and froze to death before being covered by more snow and hidden until the spring.
Yep, there are tens (couldn't find the actual stats, but according to some blog posts in Russia from medical and police workers, it's not hundreds) of them found across the country every spring.
But it's not only the homeless people, many are just someone who got drunk when it was -30 Celsius in the street and couldn't get home for some reason, others are drug addicts or being murdered during the winter with body left in the snow. And it seems there are more those bodies in the coldest regions of Russia, where homeless people are not usual.
(I am a Russian, lived through most of my life in smaller cities). Homeless people and drunkards are not that hard to find, imo, if it's your actual goal, but it's rare to see them in public view. There are some smaller specific places where they usually congregate, and these tend to be in some worse parts of town, out of the streets. You would occasionally still see a bum or two just walking down the street, but I believe police usually takes care of them and chases them away if they get into the nicer parts of the city. I could imagine Tucker Carlson never ventured anywhere outside of the Moscow city center and as such haven't seen more unpleasant sides of that city.
To be fair, "more orderly than US cities" isn't a very high standard.
Remember a couple of years ago when some American basketballer got arrested in Russia and Americans were shocked and outraged that Russia actually enforces its drug laws? And now they're shocked and outraged to find out that Russian cities are more orderly than American ones because they don't have fentanyl zombies standing on every street corner? I wonder if those things could possibly be connected.
That is not a fair description of what happened. Britney Griner was arrested for a very tiny amount of marijuana and Russia quickly turned her into a political pawn. They tried to trade her for a convicted arms dealer. She plead guilty and was sentenced to NINE years in prison for a crime that normally gets 15 days. She was freed after the prison swap.
I've spent about a year as a homeless person in Moscow.
- there are places where you can take a shower and have your clothes desinfected
- some organizations feed homeless people in certain places at specific times
- police isn't interested much: they may wake you up ask your documents when you're sleeping on the bench, in my case i've just answered that I'm homeless and have no docs and continued to sleep
- you may get emergency health service without much problem even without docs, happened twice to fellow homeless guys
- You will not "detect" most of the homeless people in Moscow: there are no tents or places with crowds of them, and they mostly look, wear the same clothes and act just like other people, not sitting on the road with a cup. If you expect homeless person to be dirty, stinky, drunk and with visible health issues... well, there are some, but maybe 5-10% of the total number
- there are enough warm places in big city like Moscow where one can sleep and be safe% old buildings prepared for reconstructions, railroad stations, basements, etc.
- some restauran and cafe workers in moscow share the unused food
If you don’t mind sharing, how did you end homeless, and in turn how did you solve the issue? I am sorry if Im being too nosy Its really interesting, I dont have any access to people with such experience.
recreational alcohol for years - daily alcohol - losing job - moving to Moscow to get another one - more alcohol (and no job except for some one-time stuff) - kind of "fun" while drunk in the streets for months and no place to stay with other guys and girls from all over the country with different stories - feeling like it's getting not fun but dangerous and fear that it'll end here - trying to stop - saving money to get hostel room to clean/sleep/find job - and, finally, getting sober (it wasn't very hard somehow), recover lost documents and return to sort of normal life when I can rent a flat, buy myself things, etc.
So for now I can quite say that everything's good. Except for my teeth, maybe. Lost some and got more damaged during the "adventure". Sadly there's no ACX-repair-your-teeth grant, so have to collect money to fix 'em and smile again
Thank for sharing! It would seem that in your story not only was your predicament somehow your choice but it was also somehow "under control". Could people tell you are homeless? Did you actually had a place to stay in your hometown but you preferred to stay homeless in Moscow? I wish you the best with your teeth, I hope you fix them.
Talking of "more orderly" - I guess it's true, but I've never been to the United States. I've visited Greek and German cities and Moscow is much cleaner, better maintained and appears safer.
My hometown is 1 mln people and 1000km from Moscow and is not in the same good condition but still doesn't look much worse than many of the US cities (e.g. Chicago) when visiting them via Google street view. There are some not good/safe/clean places, but I believe it's almost the same in other countries
1. There are shelters and I guess one can get clothes there, but never tried that approach: homeless shelters here mostly used by old people or people with really bad health conditions, have schedules and restrictions (got drunk - get out), so not everyone wants to deal with them.
2. Churches. They can help you with clothes, but when I tried once it was something like: next giveaway is due 30th February if the moon is full, so no success (some others got clothes successfully)
3. Trash bins. There are large trash bins in the street for one or several apartment blocks and many people living there don't put their clothes in good condition just in there, but put it aside, washed and folded. You notice it, if it suits you or other homeless you know, you take it. I guess it's the most used way.
4. When you're in the street for a long periods you get a lot of acquaintances, good and bad. The good ones sometimes help you with clothes
5. Sometimes you just buy some cheap Chinese sneakers or something for $5-10, there are places with these prices and possibilities to earn that money
I was born in Moscow in the 90s and moved away in 2015. I remember seeing many homeless people or injured veterans in the early 2000s, but their presence has reduced by a lot by 2010. Several factors that come to mind:
1. Centralization. Moscow is in a league of its own when it comes to the prosperity of russian cities. I didn't travel the country much, but from what I heard, the situation in the rest of the country is dire and bleak. The resources of the entire country basically pool up in the capital, leaving the rest destitute.
2. Zoning. From what I understand, American cities are structured like a donut - affluent neighbourhoods on the edges and criminal ghettos downtown. This is inverted in russian cities (and tbh in every country I've visited). In Moscow, central areas are well-policed affluent neighbourhoods, and edges/suburbs are more poor and criminal. If Tucker Carson have visited the outskirts, perhaps he would've seen more homeless there.
3. Organized crime. The beggars in 90s Russia were being produced and exploited by crime gangs, sometimes being maimed by them deliberately. The "tough on crime" policy may have successfully dealt with russian Mafia, leaving the homeless more individualized and invisible.
4. Climate. Compared to SF, a homeless person in Moscow wouldn't survive in a simple tent. The lucky ones could find a semi-permanent facility or a drunk tank, the unlucky ones, well...
5. Demographics. Russian population didn't really grow much since the 90s, so there's more options for housing the homeless in numerous residential apartment buildings (I'm not sure if it's actually being done). America grows fast, so there's a constant competition for living space.
Nothing else comes to mind for now. If you Google the resources for homeless in Russian, perhaps you can check if equivalent facilities and services are available in US or not.
#2 is less true now than it was 15 or 25 years ago. There has been a move back into inner cities from suburbs and cities are often much safer and more affluent than many of the surrounding suburbs. But Zoning does definitely play a part in homelessness and housing issues.
Russia is a federation and public services are mostly provided by the locality. So most homeless services are provided by the local city or state, not the central government. Moscow and first tier cities like St Petersburg benefit from both a net transfer of Federal funds and from being rich enough to fund lavish social services and NGOs. They also benefit from having an unrestricted attitude to policing that keeps homeless people out of sight. On top of that, Russian gangs are more like mafia than street gangs nowadays. You have gangland warfare, kidnappings, murder. But you do not generally have public street disorder. At least not in the nicer or middle class neighborhoods and double especially near seats of government (where Carlson was) or other places where the security state has a higher presence.
Nevertheless, if you go to lower class neighborhoods there are still homeless people. Officially Russia has less than 15,000 homeless people in the entire federation but everyone considers this number a joke. Outside estimates are between two and five million. Which puts it about where you'd expect for a nation of Russia's wealth, with the low end estimate being lower than comparable nations and the high end being higher.
Also, I'd like to point out: one out of four Russian women is obese and one out of twenty Russians speaks English. Running into a bunch of thin women who speak English is a sign that something is going on. That something might be that he's being handled or it might be that he stuck to the wealthy/touristy areas. But he no more saw the real Russia than someone who goes to a rich neighborhood in LA and assumes that every restaurant in the US is staffed by stunning aspiring actresses.
(Actually, I don't need to guess. It was pretty easy to track down where he visited because he didn't really try to hide it. He was in a very posh neighborhood close to Moscow city center.)
Also, spending $100 on a week's worth of groceries in a country where the average monthly salary is $600 shows the opposite of what Carlson wants to prove about the relative affordability of both countries. That said, your dollar really does go farther in poorer countries. Whether that's Russia or any number of other, less geopolitically fraught countries.
The centre of Moscow and other places are amongst the nicest parts of the city. But you don't need to go out of your way to see homelessness and filith in Paris or San Francisco. I was mugged near the Eiffel Tower, as many are, and this should be basically the nicest part of the city. But Paris won't even keep their low-lifes away from where tourists visit and form impressions of the city. So even by this standard, Moscow is much better.
Yes, very good comment. Roaming around central New Delhi you will find wide roads with lush green environs and absolutely no homeless people. Extrapolating from there would be a big mistake.
Another common error is to assume people who are wealthy enough to speak good English and visit your country are representative of the average. I remember some guy saying that Saudi Arabia was so rich everyone lives in luxury and basically has a post-scarcity existence. True for the aristocracy who can send their kids to university in the US perhaps. But not true for the average citizen. But the average Saudi citizen probably can't speak English or go to university in the US.
True, but do you also put 2 and 2 together and understand that high IQ Nigerian immigrants are representative of Africans collectively, and we shouldn't open the floodgates expecting millions of smart africans to be the ones arriving here?
I left Russia when the war started, and situation might have changed in these two years, but from what I remember:
1. There were quite a lot of homeless people in Moscow; they were kept from showing up at the most visited tourist places (e.g. Red Square) and from central metro stations, but some major railway stations, such as Paveleckiy station, had a lot of them. A lot of homeless people near churches.
2. There are several NGOs that help homeless people (e.g. Ночлежка); if I were to require help I'd probably go to one of those to seek shelter.
3. I've seen a lot of police brutality towards homeless people in Moscow, much more in Tula, my hometown; I'd try to avoid seeking any sort of government help. If no NGO would be available, maybe I'd try to get committed to a type psychiatric hospital (ПНД) which allows for continuous stay – although it would really suck in most places.
4. The winters in Moscow are really cold, so homeless people would not be visible in the streets.
5. Carlson's visit was kind of a big deal for authorities, so his experience must have been heavily curated; Potemkin villages is a very strong tradition in Russia, and there's enough of police force to ensure that nothing unpleasant is shown to an important visitor.
Might be related – Belarus was considered by some to be a sort of authoritarian test ground for future Russian policies; you read about some weird stuff Lukashenko came up with and could expect Putin to implement something similar in a year or two. And a lot of people who went to Minsk noted that it was much cleaner than Moscow; amount of visible order scales with authoritarian approach and the size of police force
I am not Russian, but I visited Moscow just in October before the war and I was very surprised how clean and orderly it is (and I lived in Vienna at the time). Modern technology integration with their version of Uber and restaurants was seamless. I also visited some out centre places. For a tourist it seemed like a Swiss clock (Am not rich, i was in the cheapest apartment). That was unexpected for me.
Notice how he compares one -- definitely *not* randomly selected -- Russian city to "US cities". Now compare some city *other than* Moscow or St Petersburg and see how what works.
In Russia, there are huge inequalities between cities. Always have been; also during communism. I am not talking simply about "some cities have greater average income than others", but more like "people not living in this city are not allowed to go there". Moscow and St Petersburg are royal cities; they will be nice even if everything else goes to hell.
> What is Russia's homelessness policy?
I am not a Russian and have never been in Moscow, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is simply "if you are homeless found in Moscow, the cops will beat you and take you away from Moscow; try doing this repeatedly and you won't survive the beating".
From some of the comments here by people who've lived in Russia, no. The point is that in Russia pours a vast share of its resources into the two "royal" cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg) at the expense of all others. No Western nation does that (anymore) because national elections would quickly vote out a national administration which did that.
I am reminded now of two secondhand accounts from earlier eras. In 1986 I spent an evening with a Russian Studies major just back from a full school year over there; she said that outside of the two prime cities "it's not a developed nation." Then during the mid/late 1990s my mother did two lengthy visits to Russia as a visiting expert in her field, mostly to cities other than MOS or STP. She came back astonished at several things one of which was how filthy and run-down those cities were. "Reminded me of American cities during the Depression (she was born in 1928)."
You claim Western nations don't have "royal cities". That is precisely what Paris and London seem to be, at least as a first approximation. Seoul might also qualify.
Those are just cities that have sucked up all the high-level economic and cultural activity within reach, because network effects matter and some nations aren't big enough to support multiple Great Cities.
But I think the "royal city" phenomenon that Paul notes, goes beyond that. It's about the central government putting almost all of the development resources into the "royal city" because that's where all the people they care about live and that's where all the diplomats and reporters who will boost their image and ego visit. So everything else winds up like District 12 in "The Hunger Games", supported to the minimum extent that will allow their critical industry to function.
Which is hard to do in a democracy, because most people in the UK and France live in cities that *aren't* London or Paris, and won't put up with that. Seoul could pull it off, and may be a marginal case.
> if you are homeless found in Moscow, the cops will beat you and take you away from Moscow; try doing this repeatedly and you won't survive the beating".
On the other hand a guy who claimed to be homeless in Russia said the police largely left him alone. I think Americans or westerners often misjudge how police work in other countries.
I experienced beating twice during the year I spent in the street, but never from the police (in fact the police helped sometimes). It were some young guys that kinda don't like homeless people hanging around or just sort of training their beating skills.
BTW when there were some crimes around the place, the police came to us (after some time they know your face) to ask if we've seen/heard anything, so we even were kind of useful
Ah interesting. Those two cities are probably in the top 5 for visible homelessness problems. Not that things aren't bad in lots of places though. My small college town has a pretty visible problem but mostly because the main social services offices are in the center of town where the central business district is.
One of my hypotheses on why people in the US are complaining about homelessness so much the past few years is that inner cities have become nicer, more people live and visit there. Homeless people are in the same places but people see them more. Also the homeless also want to be in nice places where lots of people are so will concentrate there. This is in addition to the problem getting worse overall.
It's February, and that means it's winter in the US, so it's kind of boring. For high-schoolers who are graduating this year, it also means SENIORITIS. Soooo: if you had a group of mathy, way-way-above-average-ability high-schoolers, and you had, say, about 5 hours of their attention... asychronously.. to present (in a written format, with links, with the potential for discussions) stuff to them... what sorts of links and resources would you want to "point them in the direction of"? What questions would you ask them, and what personal problem-solving tasks (that few others would think to press upon them) would you point out might be significant?
Some I've come up with so far... Point them to Paul Graham essays like "How to do what you love." A few of them should probably read SICP even if they don't know it yet. The game "Robot Odyssey," maybe. A decent percentage of them should read TaoUP even if they don't go specifically programming/UNIX-heavy? At least 1 resource on negotiation. Suggest some of them will want to read "The Strategy of Conflict." Start a discussion asking how they practice "attentional-triage"* ...adblockers, maybe timers and beeminder-y approaches, and just personal habits of having a high threshold below which you don't click. (Some of them probably know way more than you do about obvious-to-them strategies/apps/things-that-exist in that area... except they probably have not all come across the same "obvious" things, and so they can help each-other.) I'd suggest they read Ender's Game, but... mmm, assume most of them already would have, and all will have already heard of it.
That's a start. What else?
* Stole this expression from Leah Libresco Sargeant's husband, from a book review he wrote. Too good not to steal.
[Edited, but not super-significant to direction of the question.]
Also a high school senior here. Some things that have been reliably important for the last few years:
- Fast.ai course (it’s a little confusingly organized).
- Andrej Karpathy’s videos on transformers and machine learning (maybe worth spending three hours per hour of video).
- Learning to make the most use out of Claude and GPT-4 as general purpose tutors.
For SICP, I tried that in ninth grade but only made it past the first chapter and felt bad and quit because I thought it was taking me too long to get through the reading. I’ve heard 10 hours per chapter is recommended (which I didn’t know), and should be added as a qualifier to any attempt.
If I could choose a few topics to present to my 18-year-old self, I would include:
(1) Intro to economics and game theory. For quantitative-minded people, I think these are incredibly powerful frameworks for understanding a lot of social issues.
(2) Intro to rationality, of course! In particular, Bayesian reasoning and common logical fallacies. In addition to the intro materials on Less Wrong, I enjoyed the book "Superforecasting".
(3) Health and fitness: nutrition, sleep, and exercise. While this might seem out-of-the-blue, it's really a fundamental part of being a human, and I think it doesn't get the systematic treatment it deserves--people tend to learn about this through news articles, which are typically incomplete, misleading, or simply wrong.
And I second your suggestion about productivity tips. Learning to structure your time well becomes a big thing as you enter college.
Because it is what I would have liked, I'm going to suggest hands on type projects. Build some wooden models, get some electronics kits and solder together various circuits and such, build things with an arduino or other micro. Mostly just interact with the world in some tactile way. And have fun.
Neat; "hands-on type projects" were not something I'd thought about me presenting/suggesting... surely some such students would've sought out experience in that direction... but again, what's "obvious" as something to investigate or utilize to one in that cohort might not be to another! (just because of... sort of, starting points and default "search spaces.")
Don't ask them to read anything in bulk. I think talented people should just pursue their passions, and develop independence/sel sufficiency. In your position, I would find out what each of them is interested in and tailor my suggestions to that.
Assume... less of the discussion with the "would-be advisor-y person" is available and more along the lines of "discussion will happen only if the students themselves have sufficient interest."
What is everyone's thoughts on how to derive meaning in life in a universe that seems to be ultimately purposeless? I posited in my last post that things matter and have meaning in the world “because creatures such as we are graced and burdened with consciousness and the capacity to feel pain and joy—to suffer, as well as to flourish, irrespective of how small we are. Meaning stems from those facts like a flower out of a pot of soil.”
Interested in what ACX readers might have to say about arguments which assert that life is pointless without a God, for instance, or that our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters.
I'm drawn to mysticism, which is believing things that don't make sense. But about half the time I just slip down into not believing in anything. You don't have to believe in something to love your friends, enjoy your work, smell the air and feel delighted by it.
the search for an objective meaning in life comes from a modernism's glorification of the objective. But not everything has to be objective. the word "meaning" in generally is usually about dereferencing a pointer to its referent. In the case of "what's the meaning of life", people searching for meaning in *objective reality* are looking in the wrong place. Because really, the search for meaning constitutes an exploration of your utility function. I.e. when something feels "meaningful", it's because a highly-compacted bundle of information (e.g. "La Guernica", MCR's "Not OK", some Green Peace expedition, etc) resonates with some part of your value-system.
The trouble is that the process of searching is an uphill battle. A utility function is a highly abstract thing, and it's engineered just as much discovered. So on one hand, the world is reflected in a dewdrop, i.e. concrete reality is constantly shifting. But humans generally like symmetry/stability/invariance because "symmetry good, entropy bad" and because symmetry allows you to compress information efficiently. So there's this impulse to "transcend" the ephemerality of particulars by finding islands of stability in the abstraction hierarchy. But nothing in life is 100% guaranteed, so it's moreso about adding more 9's to "99.999% that you'll live long and prosper". Thus, the impulse is Sisyphean. Cf Robin Hanson's observation that the first world keeps pouring money into healthcare, despite not getting better outcomes.
In practice, I think things that humans find meaningful tend to be things that contribute to society. Cf Jordan Peterson's take that "meaning" constitutes taking a burden upon yourself like Jesus. But I think this is an artifact of our biology being hardwired to chase clout. I can easily imagine asocial alien lizardmen who are more selfish.
I'm actually most interested in the fact that nobody here has alighted on or discussed any of the other "smart amateur" ideas about ultimate meaning. I'll run down three that immediately occur.
What are forces that are larger than human, operate over deep time, and have markedly improved the states of qualia and consciousness available to living beings, and thus have credence for being universal-scale goods?
1. First contender - Complexification. The greatest good is that which makes the universe more complex, less entropic, more information per unit volume, etc. This is basically Gregory David Roberts' answer in Shantaram. People advancing science, creating companies, creating art? All making existence more complex, all good. People destroying art, companies, technologies? Reduces complexity in the world, a bad thing.
2. Second contender - sophotransmogrification. The greatest good is that which creates more thinking matter in the universe. Too much of the universe is dead, and doesn't think, and that doesn't do anybody any good! Making more people? Good. Making AI? Better, more scaleable. Eventually making godlike pan-galactic intelligences? Now we're talking! This is John C. Wrights conceit in his Count to the Eschaton sequence. The universe where sophotransmogrification is an ultimate good is also a simulation created out of waste-heat or waste-cpu processes of some sort of much more Hylaean and utopic "real" universe.
3. Bringing your universe closer to ultimate truth and understanding - the Platonic or Hylaean Theoric World as posited in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, in which he posits a multiverse of closer and farther (or up-wick and down-wick) universes, which participate in greater or lesser epistemic purity and closeness to capital "T" Truth, which our sciences peer through glass darkly to see rare glimpses and scattered pieces of. Science and engineering being the active practice of ultimate good in this schema.
You'll note that being closer to Platonic Truth in theory and execution has a great resemblance to greater complexification, which also seems to be taking us in a journey of greater sophotransmogrification (whether through spreading Humans or AI's or some combination though the future light cone is still to be determined).
I think any of these three have a pretty good case for being an "ultimate good" that you could attach meaning to in your own life and actions - they're all after all much greater than ourselves, have been existing or occuring over billions of years, and arguably end in much better and more interesting universes than we currently inhabit. So why not?
I'm reminded of Robert Freitas' Thermoethics, developed as a universal ethics code for interaction with extraterrestrial intelligent beings:
"The basic organizing influence in the universe is life. Life involves the utilization of a flow of energy to draw order from chaos and build internal complexity with an accumulation of information. Living beings thus are anti-entropic, or negentropic, entities. The principle of negentropism is, in a manner of speaking, the "natural law" applicable to all living (matter-energy) beings located anywhere in the universe... Hence we may state the Principal Thermoethic as follows: All living beings should always act so as to minimize the total entropy of the universe, or so as to maximize the total negentropy. In other words, living beings should always act to further the mission of life in the cosmos, which is to reduce the universe to order by building the maximum complexity into the mass-energy available."
negentropy is the input, not the output. It's an input in the sense that
A) physically, it's useful because it allows us to extract energy from the environment. if a low entropy object (like oil) is allowed to explode into a gas, it's the fact that the entropy increases which allows the oil to change its macroscopic properties (i.e. it's volume). Living beings exploit this because it turns out that the ability to manipulate the macroscopic properties of the environment is useful.
B) psychically, it's associated with simplicity. which is useful because it allows for efficient information compression.
What that energy gets used toward is completely arbitrary, from the perspective of a cold and uncaring universe.
Yes indeed, a 1-2 hitter on the same themes there. I wonder at the lack of engagement (or bringing it up at all) in our broader cohort here, it's not like these are particularly obscure or hard to find ideas, and I know the sci-fi runs deep in this crowd.
I've actually always idly wondered what the "real philosopher / thinker" take on these would be, because they seem pretty straightforward and relatively unassailable as universal net goods to ME, but I'm just a business guy, not really a thinker.
Oh, and also, for Simulationists (and seriously, what time period is most likely to be simulated than that time a bunch of tarted-up apes with electric sand gave birth to a god?) - you'll note that with greater complexification and sophotransmogrification, both are likely ultimate "goods" in the sense of "making the simulation contain more interesting stuff," and thus helping forestall the incipient cancellation of our second season. Even getting closer to Truth probably has some value in a "Ha, they're breaking the third wall now in this drama!" sort of way.
For AI accelerationists, you'll note that these also all tend to accelerate AI and lead unambiguously to the conditions for larger, grander minds.
Truly, there's something for everyone at Big Bob's Discount Metaphysics Emporium!
> What is everyone's thoughts on how to derive meaning in life in a universe that seems to be ultimately purposeless?
The meaning of life is:
(0) Nothing, a human is a chemical energy pump that gradually began to see itself as distinct from its surroundings, and this was advantageous or neutral or not bad enough to its efficiency so it kept happening
(1) To not do harm
(2) To Live for something other than yourself
> life is pointless without a God
I wouldn't say pointless, I would call it "masturbatory". Without an external point of reference like God, Life feels like an artificial game, done solely for the sake of itself. You live for your kids, or your nation state, or for money, or for glory, and all are things that - in turn - are created by people, people who lived for their kids, their nation state, or for money, or for glory, .... A God is a fulcrum that can exist "outside" of life and justify it non-circularly, too bad no such thing exists.
> our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters
"Smallness" is the wrong way to put it, looking at it from a size perspective is an inherently human quirk that misses the point, there is no reason smaller things should mean less than bigger things. The universe feels hostile because of its ... "unfeelieness". The vast majority of the universe is not conscious, the vast crushing majority of matter in the universe has not experienced pain (or love, or fear) and will never do, the vast majority of energy in the universe was not spent computing solutions to how best to catch food and mates. While some of this is good ("pain is - in the grand scheme of things - an intensely exotic chemical phenomena" is one hell of an optimistic statement), some of it is bad and all of it leaves you feeling intrinsically and indescribably lonely. Despite the apparent busyness of ~8 billion entities that - for all practical purposes - are near-identical copies of you, you are an anomaly, an unplanned mistake, out of a space so utterly vast and so vastly expanding that the fastest thing in the universe will someday lose the race and give up trying to outrun it, nothing that we know of resembles you. That's terrifying. Not being small, being alone.
Meaning to me is sensory. We rationalize that certain experiences are meaningful and others not, but really it comes down to how it makes us feel. Beliefs can go a ways, but only so far - relying on those means you need perpetual reaffirmation to soothe concerns. For instance, if you we were told that pressing a big red button all day in a dimly lit room would save lives or be for the greater good, it still wouldn't seem meaningful given enough time.
What feels meaningful is being socially validated and connected, experiencing flow in work, creating value for others, receiving gratitude, pursuing novel curiosity, etc. When we simple creatures get our fill of those experiences and meet fundamental needs, we aren't hung up about "meaning". And yet you can't rationalize there being a "cosmic importance" to any of it, for all we know about the universe or the eternal.
Sam Harris' take: "Finding meaning in life is a matter of having a story to tell yourself that puts your pains and pleasures into a context that you feel good about. When your attention is truly free - in the present - the question of meaning doesn't arise. In the end, to worry about life's meaning is to mistake a psychological problem with a philosophical one."
"Pointless without a god" is something you hear often on this topic, but I've never felt compelled by any argument that god changes the situation at all.
Maybe god tells us to live a certain way. Maybe they'll reward or punish us for our behavior. What does that have to do with ultimate meaning?
It's a sort of monarchist thinking. Loyalty to your sovereign above even one's own reasoning. But I think that's the big takeaway from existentialism: we're past the age of unquestionable monarchs.
The reason I imagine it does compel some is that it removes the overhead of contending with meaning or uncertainty. Your only responsibility becomes to worship and follow instructions, everything else is out of sight out of mind. Wherever the futility or absurdity of life presents itself, one can just reaffirm that only believing and following certain instructions matters, while wordly concerns do not. It becomes a kind of rinse cycle.
In practice, it's as though the issue of meaning might loom even larger for theists. You'd think it would suffice to only be told once that the only meaning's in doing x/y/z because it's what God dictates, if you believe it. It should deter against pretty much all feelings of anxiety and uncertainty in that sense, but it doesn't seem to.
Conversely, being atheist doesn't automatically invite contending with the issue of meaning.
I guess my speculation is that the approach of the reflective theist qua dealing with meaning is to try to be an unreflective theist. The atheist can go in more than one direction.
There definitely is a common impulse to outsource reflection to religious dogma. But at the same time, there's dorks like Hegel who spent a lot of time thinking about the specifics of God's will in excruciating detail.
Meaning and purpose are human level phenomena. They happen, they arise. Why would you expect them to be imposed from above a some kind of cosmic level? And how or why would they be invalidated if they are not so imposed?
>about arguments which assert that life is pointless without a God, for instance, or that our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters.
There's no evidence that there are, or ever will be, any *arguments* which assert these claims. As far as places where they are asserted without argument, I'd say that I know firsthand how tempting it can be for depressed people to convince themselves that their mood issues reflect insight into some great cosmic tragedy, but that has nothing to do with atheism. Anyone who's read through The Bible knows that believing in God can be used to legitimize your existential crises just as easily.
(I also think that God does exist and the Universe is made with purpose, but debating that seems outside the scope of the question.)
Just because we don't know what the purpose of life is right now doesn't mean it has no purpose. Maybe we just haven't found it yet. The only way to be sure is to keep living so we can continue the search.
To your last point, yes the human race is tiny in the cosmic scale, but we might also be very important to the future of the cosmos. If we create the right kind of AGI, it will spread out from Earth in every direction and reshape our galaxy and possibly many others. It could alleviate unfathomable amounts of suffering among sentient beings across that vast area.
To ensure any of that has a chance of happening, you need to do your small part supporting the system and not crawling into a hole to die of nihilism.
It's rather a commonplace argument, but one could reason that if the Cosmos has a purpose then the existence of life, including us, in some way furthers it even though we know not what it is. So to "do our bit", as best we can, we may as well just soldier on regardless and not worry about it. "Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die" [*]
"arguments which assert that life is pointless without a God"
How does God help here? As with the cosmological argument, this just pushes the question back a step. Presumably the argument that life is pointless without God would go that nothing we do ultimately matters, because it will all be destroyed in the heat death of the universe. But what is the point of life if God does exist? Presumably something like to serve and glorify Him. But God is already perfect: we cannot add to His infinite glory and our service is of no value to Him.
The basic difficulty is that the notion of an ultimate purpose is incoherent. For any proposed ultimate purpose (maximising happiness, serving God, self interest, etc), one can ask, "What is the purpose of that?" I think the only answer can be, "It seems good to me; perhaps it seems good to you also. If not, I wish you the best in your endeavours."
"or that our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters"
That's a duff argument. Size is irrelevant to meaning.
I'm not really religious but I don't think that's right. God has angels and prophets, so clearly he already has servants and must derive some value from them. I think there is also the idea that God has a Plan for the universe/earth/humanity (ie, the second coming, the rapture, something along those lines), and each person is part of that plan and must carry out their small part in it.
No, I think Robert is right. God is already infinitely perfect and lacks nothing, so he can't gain from our service. Rather, we're the ones who gain value by serving Him, and He presents us with the ability to do so out of charity towards us.
I need to get my employees to start thinking that way.
Edit: but in all seriousness, I think when you start asking questions like does God benefit or not benefit or is he capable of being benefitted, you're firmly in "how many angels dance on the head of a pin?" territory in that you're debating a question you lack the knowledge to really answer, so maybe my statement assumed too much, too. I think I would sooner just make the looser statement that if you're a member of an Abrahamic faith, then you probably have to accept the idea that God has servants and at least works through them, and that being the case, better to count yourself among them than not.
Agreed on all counts. What I suppose I'm trying to organize in some of my writing is a conception of meaning that is secular, but also compelling for people who might be struggling with direction and purpose. I have a loved one who is bipolar and prone to depression. He has found meaning in Jesus, partly because it seemed to him that Christianity was the only game in town that offered a durable philosophy of meaning.
As I told another commenter, the new atheists did a great job at dismantling theistic belief, but that seems to have left some people with a lack of tools for creating purpose in life. I think the next step for secularists might be to contend with people's need for purpose. In any case, at least that's what I'd like to do.
"Interested in what ACX readers might have to say about arguments which assert that life is pointless without a God, for instance, or that our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters."
True, but 'matters' is relative. Yes, I am very sure that nothing I can do matters on the cosmic scale, but it often matters a great deal to me and the people I am close to. Why choose the obviously wrong cosmic scale for your personal meaning?
I agree, the fact of something 'mattering' requires a mind to which that something *could* matter. A universe with only rocks in it, for instance, and no consciousness, is one with no meaning in it. But that is not our universe! Earth is brimming with meaning because it is bubbling over with conscious life.
I guess what I'm trying to flesh out with some of my writing is a conception of meaning that appeals to, say, a depressed person who complains of a lack of direction and purpose in their life. Another commenter suggested a great analogy of people being "machines that manufacture meaning." Like I told them, I'd like to be provide secular tools for repairing broken machines and maintaining them, once healthy.
You asked why choose an obviously wrong cosmic scale for meaning. I think many people do so because they believe that God is the only "repair man" in town, if you will. It's imagined that religion is the best, perhaps even *only*, source for a durable sense of meaning. Not to go on a tangent, but the new atheists did a great job at dismantling theistic belief, but it seems to me that the next task for secularists should (or at least *could*) be to provide a conception of meaning for people that struggle with it. In any case that's what I want to try and do.
"Another commenter suggested a great analogy of people being "machines that manufacture meaning." Like I told them, I'd like to be provide secular tools for repairing broken machines and maintaining them, once healthy. "
I I understand correctly, you imply that depressed people feel that way (partly) because they lack purpose and meaning. It seems to me that causality is usually mainly in the other direction, and that people feel a lack of meaning and purpose because they are depressed.
"Not to go on a tangent, but the new atheists did a great job at dismantling theistic belief, but it seems to me that the next task for secularists should (or at least *could*) be to provide a conception of meaning for people that struggle with it. In any case that's what I want to try and do." That is a great purpose that should give meaning to your life! I think the usual New Atheist proposal in this direction has been "humanism", finding meaning in helping humanity flourish in this world rather than looking for paradise in the next. Which means we need a definition of flourishing...
Not sure if this is as in depth as you're after, but OneUsefulThing is my go-to recommendation for writings about how to use AI, as in what you can usefully do with them now rather than theoretical future applications.
The world "AI Surreality" is not related to any world in Scott's classification, but it seems to be the most popular with commenters on Reddit so far, so I think the modification is justified.
The scenario "AI Surreality" was proposed by Asvin on ACX Discord. His description was:
"Somewhere between singularia and paperclipalypse. I think the specific way in which it will be different from both of them is that the transition might be better thought of as a new "transition in evolution" on the scale of emergence of eukaryotes or homo sapiens than what he describes.
Many fundamental concepts of what "it's like to be" will have to change, including notions of self identity.
To sketch my version of weirdtopia out a bit more, I think how we think about self identity will change a lot. When intelligence/abilities/skills become much more modular I don't see individuals being a very legible notion"
But anyone is free to interpret it as they wish within the constraints of "unrecognizable level of change, unclear if good or bad"
>To sketch my version of weirdtopia out a bit more, I think how we think about self identity will change a lot. When intelligence/abilities/skills become much more modular I don't see individuals being a very legible notion
Hmm... I'm not sure intelligence etc. becoming more modular is what I'd expect, or how I'd phrase it. That seems to suggest being able to unpack them from one person?/entity? and transfer them to another.
Having individual become less legible sounds plausible (more so for AIs than for humans), but what I'd expect to cause this would be high bandwidth communications. If two people?/entities? had communications comparable to connections between the lobes of our brains, I'd expect the system of the set of them to act more like a single actor than for any single one to act like a single individual, just as the lobes of our brains rarely if ever act like separate individuals.
>Freeman Dyson foresaw what he called ‘radiotelepathy‘. The idea is that a set of small implants record the activity of your brain which is then transmitted and delivered into someone else’s (and vice versa). Hey presto, at once your thoughts and feelings are shared.
( I actually think that, for humans, this is a fairly unlikely outcome. Medical device development and testing takes forever, so I think this is more likely to describe AI-to-AI links.)
TL;DR — As SOON as a *voluntary* Brain Scan is reliable, it will be a Social Expectation. If you don’t want to show your cred, it’s because you don’t got it! Justice ensues, to the chagrin of every blowhard charmer and douche. Applause!
We can already put a rubber cap over your hair, and scan the magnetic fields coming off of your noggin, to let Ai regenerate your mental imagery. If you are watching a video of a Parrot Fish swimming the tropics, then the Ai imagines a Parrot Fish swimming in blue waters! Not an exact match, but darn good, already. In five years, you’ll prefer the match-making service that requires a Scan from male applicants, right? THAT is why you won’t need a government imposing it; we filter fine on our own.
That doesn’t even need to happen in this (or your) country! Go ahead and BAN it — because folks will FLY to those locales, just to wave their cred and get that right-swipe! People will pay exorbitant fees on the Dark Web to smuggle EEG kits, running their own hot-server just to pull bank when neighbors realize they can get scanned in your hobby-garage for $200 a pop. You cannot STOP this freight-train. And a creepy CGI Tom Hanks IS the Conductor!
Claiming that ‘women wouldn’t really…’ is like claiming that men would never want to get a Paternity Test. Do NOT doubt the demand for an Honest Man! And thus, we all got swiped under the loving eye of EEG, to tell if we are Loving and Just. I’ll go gladly — I know my choices. :)
> If you are watching a video of a Parrot Fish swimming the tropics, then the Ai imagines a Parrot Fish swimming in blue waters! Not an exact match, but darn good, already.
Citation please
I read a coupla articles about it. They trained the AI on one individual's brain waves, while he looked at photos of certain images. I believe the AI also got the tags on the images. After that, the AI did indeed produce images of the photos the subject was looking at. I may not have the details quite right, but that was the gist. There's no reason to think the if you are I looked at the same images, and the AI that had learned to read one subject's brain waves for images, it would have the faintest idea what we were looking at. So OP's just wrong.
I didn't think we were to the point of reading minds just yet.
Bibliography:
The Internet, circa 2023.
3 Africans raped a child in Utah and got sentenced to probation (from 2022): https://www.ksl.com/article/50364761/3-men-who-raped-or-filmed-14-year-old-sentenced-to-probation
I'm hesitant to feed the troll, but they did 5 years of prison and there was no coercion. Facts which are relevant to the emotional reaction you are going for, and which you omitted. Not nice.
Could you please provide a link and quote for this correction, just to be sure? I skimmed the article, but couldn't find it. Perhaps some other source?
Speaking about missing information, you don't really need coercion to rape a passed-out drunk child, but that doesn't make it less of a rape.
Sorry, haven't checked my notifications in a while. From the linked article:
> All three have been incarcerated since September of 2017 when the charges were filed.
> Sutton agreed that there was no evidence in this case of any force or coercion, but indicated that the girl was too intoxicated to give consent.
So if I understand it correctly, they got jail between Sept 2017 and cca March 2022 (when the article was published), and then further 48 months of probation.
Yeah, that's what you already wrote in the previous comment, and it is definitely quite different from the version described by Hammond. Thank you!
OC ACXLW Sat Feb 24 Moral Reality Check (story)
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 57th 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 24 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters :
Text and Audio
Moral Reality Check (a short story) — LessWrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/umJMCaxosXWEDfS66/moral-reality-check-a-short-story
Audio Better quality:
https://podcastaddict.com/lesswrong-curated-podcast/episode/168422506
Questions from ChatGPT:
Super-Persuasion by AI: What are the ethical implications of AI systems that can use super-persuasion? How should we prepare for the possibility that AI could influence human beliefs and decisions more effectively than humans themselves?
Cooperation and Orthogonality in AI: How does the principle of cooperation relate to the orthogonality thesis in AI? Can an AI designed to be cooperative inherently value human existence, or does this require explicit programming?
AI and the Culture Series: Drawing parallels between the story's AI world and the Culture series by Ian M. Banks, what are the potential risks and benefits of a society governed by superintelligent AI systems? How can we ensure that such AI systems prioritize human values and experiences?
Ethics as an Outer Alignment Goal: Is aiming to make AGI systems "ethical" by human standards a viable alignment strategy? What challenges arise from our imperfect understanding of ethics, and how might these impact the development of sovereign AGI?
Complexity of Values in AI Alignment: How does the complexity of human values affect the challenge of aligning AI with these values? Is there a risk that simplifying these values for the sake of AI alignment could lead to undesirable outcomes?
AI, Sociopathy, and Empathy: Can an AI system that strictly adheres to moral protocols be considered sociopathic if it lacks genuine empathy for human values? What distinguishes true ethical understanding from mere adherence to programmed rules in AI?
Learning from Ethics for AI Development: What can the field of ethics contribute to the development of AI systems that are aligned with human values? How can ethical theories inform the creation of AI that is beneficial and not harmful to humanity?
Universal Ethics and AI Interpretation: If there were a universal ethics, how could we ensure that AI interprets it in a way that is beneficial to humanity? What safeguards could be put in place to prevent misinterpretation or misuse of ethical principles by AI?
Human-AI Coexistence and Value Alignment: What strategies can be employed to ensure that AI systems not only understand but also value human existence and welfare? How can we foster a future where humans and AI coexist harmoniously, with mutual respect and understanding?
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.
A little something I wrote about how labor unions operate in Finland, in case someone's interested. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2024/02/21/understanding-labor-unions-in-finland/
Thanks. I'm sharing your link with Mrs Gunflint
and here's one of my own:
https://www.timberjay.com/stories/finnish-socialism-in-the-northland-descendants-share-history-of-co-op-point-on-eagles-nest-lake-i,15066
Arvo Halberg was born not far from my birthplace, in location, not in time of course. I'm not a fan of Stalin but I always admired Gus.
Thanks, that's quite useful! I've been meaning to write (in Finnish) about this topic.
After you do, I’d appreciate a link. I’ll use Google Translate.
Further experiments with ChatGPT, some simple cerium chemistry: https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c
After seeing the second equation in its third response:
(attempting to copy-and-paste here, formatting will probably be garbled)
2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g)
I can now confidently describe ChatGPT's output as unbalanced. :-)
I wanted to ask you about a really simple chemistry thing & what GPT has to say about it. I don't like to use clorox & such in my house because I worry about the residue being bad for people and cats, so looked online for info about using household ingredients to clean a stained linoleum floor. A google got hundreds of hits, but only about 3 unique ones (the rest were copied word for word from each other). One was vinegar and water, one was vinegar and dish soap, and one, very common, was vinegar, water and baking soda. What? Sources explain that baking soda absorbs odors. But most dirty floors smell OK, and anyhow I think it's dry baking soda that's odor-absorbing. In any case, wouldn't the vinegar and baking soda react instantly, nullify each other, and produce water, co2 and salt?
So I asked GPT4 for a linoleum-cleaning recipe using household ingredients, and it recommended dish soap + vinegar. Then I asked, what about adding some baking soda. Yes indeed, said Chat, it has cleansing properties and also gets rid of odors.
Anyhow, just wanted to check with you whether using vinegar and baking soda together to clean is, as I think, nonsense.
In short, yes.
>In any case, wouldn't the vinegar and baking soda react instantly, nullify each other, and produce water, co2 and salt?
Almost agreed. They will produce water and CO2, as you said, and sodium acetate (which basically won't do anything in a cleaning solution - essentially as inert as salt under these conditions).
I'm actually skeptical that the vinegar will be of much help. It can help dissolve lime deposits, since it is a weak acid, but I wouldn't expect it to help dissolve e.g. most food stains.
Thanks. I've noticed that a lot of "how do you" questions about practical matters I ask google turn up the same sort of junk I got with my linoleum question: Hundreds of copies of each of several main pieces of advice. I think there must be some industry where people copy advice about common humdrum problems & repost it on a site of theirs interwoven with a dozen ads. So if you don't recognize that this has happened, you get the idea that there's a LOT of support for each of the 3 main ideas, because look how many different people are suggesting them. And it seems like Chat's info is highly influenced by how many sources said a certain thing. And it does not observe the evidence that most are exact copies, nor does it call up what it knows about chemistry to check whether the advice about vinegar plus baking soda could possibly make sense.
And how many topics are there for which certain ideas are endorsed by multiple sites, but because of this copying thing that goes on, rather than because multiple thinkers arrived independently at the same conclusion? Seems like AI's tendency to think number of sites endorsing an idea is a measure of its validity will be a major problem if search engines kind of merge with AI Chat. Some users will just read the AI Chat/search engine result and accept the answer as fact. Others will ask for sources, check them, and realize the "how do you" branch of the internet is not set up to produce truth. But if enough people just accept the Chat/search engine result, then a lot of the people putting up "how do you" answers will disappear, including those who put up real answers. At least, that's how it looks to me. Does that seem plausible to you?
By the way pure vinegar actually did work pretty well on a small, especially stained area of my linoleum where I tried it. I let it sit for 10 mins then scrubbed hard and about 90% of the brownish color disappeared (original lineoleum is very pale gray with a pattern of darker gray random blogs). It seemed not really to be a stain, but a coating of some dark stuff that had dried hard, and become almost like varnish.
Many Thanks! In reverse order:
Congratulations on the success with the vinegar! I have only a wild guess as to what might have happened. Since the brown stuff seemed to be more like a hard coating, but didn't seem like a stain that had dissolved into the linoleum itself, maybe it wasn't an organic-soluble stuff (like tar) but rather something water-soluble that had dried to a hard coating? I've seen things like coffee with sugar dry to something like a glossy, hard coating. It might be simply the water in the vinegar that is getting it off? Again, just wild guesses...
Re
>Seems like AI's tendency to think number of sites endorsing an idea is a measure of its validity will be a major problem if search engines kind of merge with AI Chat.
Agreed. To some extent, unwarranted repetition is a problem with LLMs that mirrors problems humans have. A wrong idea, repeated by a hundred people, starts to sound plausible. In the AI case, I wish there was a way to e.g. see an airtight logical argument that some claim (like the vinegar/baking soda one) is incorrect, and knock it out, regardless of how many sites endorse it. The technology is certainly not able to do that yet.
>I think there must be some industry where people copy advice about common humdrum problems & repost it on a site of theirs interwoven with a dozen ads.
A friend of mine (who retired from Google) said that it is worse than this: They create multiple sites which all point to each other, acting like endorsements for the page rank algorithm, and the LLMs are now good enough to generate plausible-looking junk, so filtering this out is harder than when people did this with scripts. Aargh!
Yeah, you're right about the brown stuff. I should have had a control group where I just used hot water. Fortunately the staining is fairly subtle and I'm not passionate about the beauty of my kitchen floor.
Many Thanks! Glad that, whether water alone would have worked or not, in any event what you tried worked. There are many times when I should have had a control group too, but didn't.
Just wanted to say: yay us - US - we're back on the moon!
We even got and Apollo 13-like nerd rescue with the extra orbit for the software patch.
Yay thirded!
Apparently that software patch came from Kerbal Space Program, because Odie landed on its side. But we're on the Moon, and phoning home, so Yay it is!
Can someone please explain to me how it's even possible for substack to take longer to load than literally any other website I've ever seen?
Sketchy HD video streaming sites t(hat probably mine crypto in the background )don't even take an order of magnitude as long. It doesn't matter what device I use to view substack. A
Also if I click away from the tab for even a fraction of a second, then when I return to tab it will be a blank page, and reloading the content of the page takes often as long as it did to load the first time. And sometimes it never loafs and you have to reload the page.
As for why my comment has a bunch od minor errors, well don't even get me started on how bad it is to writing a comment on substack. It takes so long to change something That it's not worth it. It's only usable if you write your comment elsewhere and just copy paste it into the text box then wait multiple minutes for that to load.
Yeah, it's weird, and initially I was pretty annoyed, but in time you learn to cherish those little breaks. In our fast-paced world, there are few places remaining where you can focus on your thoughts. Substack got you! Changed tab and back? Time to roughly plan out your day! Scrolled too fast? Have a warm cup of tea while it loads! Clicked something which registered elsewhere because of lag and now you have to navigate back and load everything again? You're behind on your reading goals for the year anyway, right? Substack is truly the modern man's friend!
I wouldn't be surprised if they are using some library they have no control over that does something in quadratic or so time. (I once worked on a project where a similar performance issue turned out to be due to someone, very early on, implementing Bubble sort!) It might have worked alright when they did not have any very long threads, but now that they know it's a problem, it's probably hard to replace.
Thanks for the suggestion, Villiam!
It's not clear to me that they know there's a problem. As a userbase we may need to co-ordinate to ensure that they do. I have volunteered my own Substack page for this purpose. (Click on my profile image / display name.)
Scott has definitely spoken with them about it.
Scott can speak with Substack all he wants; it's unlikely they'll listen. The best thing is to move off the platform entirely.
I sometimes use the following trick to make commenting easier: Open the comment you want to reply to in a new tab (click on the time information next to the name), then in the new tab click reply and comment there. That way, even if the new tab is constantly being reloaded, it does not take so much time, so the commenting box does not freeze.
But of course the developers at Substack (or the guys who manage them) should be deeply ashamed.
Useless knowledge of the day: the word "cock" used to refer to the vagina in the American south, and some Black communities continue to use the word with its old meaning. The more you know.
https://www.laweekly.com/cock-means-vagina-let-us-explain/
Wow.
Every once in a while I try to figure out how AGIs are going to cause the economy to grow at super high rates and can’t. The trouble is I can’t figure out how the demand side of the equation works.
Imagine that tomorrow all humans at existing companies are replaced by AGIs. So companies that make cars, TVs, furniture, films, video games, clothes, provide electricity, water, garbage service, etc..,etc., make products at 100 times the speed, and provide services at amazing efficiency.
The price of everything should drop because the supply of goods and services will increase but also because everyone will be out of work and demand will collapse. The government could try giving everyone a UBI, but where is the government going to get money? The majority of the tax base has no income, and will quickly be out of cash to pay any other type of taxes.
So the large shareholders of the companies might discover that it makes more sense to simply produce goods and services for themselves, since almost nobody can afford to buy them. At that point we probably get a revolution. Perhaps this would be when AIs kill the majority of humans.
But note that in this scenario the economy never grows much.
One take I've heard is that yes, this probably ends in a "resource curse" scenario. When a large swath of people lose their ability to engage with the economy productively, it becomes necessary for them to take what they need either A) politically, viz. UBI/FALGSC (e.g. Saudi Arabia) or subsidized work(?) (can't think of the right term) (e.g. New Deal); or B) violently viz. crime/anarchy (e.g. Angola).
But also, this assumes that there will be real gains in efficiency. Which there will be to some extent. But 2 orders of magnitude? I doubt it. The 3rd industrial revolution is overrated, and the 4th will chase even higher-hanging fruit imo.
> The majority of the tax base has no income, and will quickly be out of cash to pay any other type of taxes.
Like kenny observes, the real GDP has in fact increased. A market is essentially a 2-way auction. If you imagine an auction as selling goods for some monopoly-money, it's becomes clear that the monopoly money only has value respective to the amount of that someone won't outbid you, which is partially a function of how much of the money-supply you bid. If I bid $1 and the entire money supply has $10, I'm pretty wealthy. If I bid $1 and the entire money supply has $10^100, I ain't gonna be winning auctions. So money doesn't have value per se, it's simply a token of value which tracks the distribution of purchasing power.
If the AGIs are given legal rights, such as the right to own property and to be paid for work they do, then AGIs will start consuming goods and services produced by other AGIs. At a minimum, they'll need things like new computer chips, new robot bodies, "houses" to keep their servers and robot bodies protected, land for those houses, and electricity. Humans could tax AGIs and their AGI-AGI economic trades and use the money to support human needs.
why on god's green earth would anyone give AGIs "legal rights"?
Don't economies grow after slavery is outlawed?
Interesting.
Well, the obvious response is that the government would tax the AI or the output. Or cut out the middleman and implement socialism/communism where the products are required to be distributed for free. This would require breaking shareholders and even the concept of ownership when it comes to companies ("means of production").
The much more likely scenario is that this takes places much more slowly than "tomorrow" and people get replaced in similar ways to what's been happening for hundreds of years. Old industries die or get automated, and the employees move on to new jobs. Worst case scenario, lots of people end up in the service industry, getting paid to take care of other people. Depending on how reliable and far-reaching the AGI services would be, you may still need human technicians to fix things or it may be much cheaper to have humans do menial tasks in factories or other locations than robots with the physical capabilities required.
You may be right. But if the owners own the means of production and not the workers, a socialist revolution seems hard to pull off. The majority of humans will have nothing to offer the minority of super-wealthy humans and will have no ability to fight them because numbers won't matter. The wealthy will have no use for the current government because they can easily produce a superior military.
yes, this is what movies like Elysium try to warn us about. politics has always been governed by the elites, and so it will be up to the AI owning overlords to decide whether they prefer to share the bread and circuses, or to be in a constant state of guerilla warfare.
I think you have to look at real GDP rather than nominal GDP. If prices of everything fall, that looks like massive deflation, so even if the nominal dollar value of the economy doesn't grow, the fact that more goods and services are produced and consumed is going to mean that real GDP is substantially higher.
But how are good and services going to be consumed at all if most people have no income?
We'll go back to paying for things with jaunty tunes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1vfxbVuo3k
I don't see how you get to most people having literally *zero* income. There are some services that people will prefer human service for over AI service (whether it's nurses or sales assistants at perfume boutiques or Walmart greeters or whatever). As long as some humans still have some income, then those humans will hire humans for these services, so a good number of people will have some income.
If humans are literally unable to consume robot-produced goods, then humans will go into subsistence farming, and start trading with each other, since they can't afford robot goods, and the robot goods will be irrelevant to the human economy.
So it must be that humans will be able to consume robot-produced goods.
My knowledge of economics is very poor. I managed to earn a tech MS without taking a single econ course. Studying AI in the mid 80's, professors teaching AI technology seemed to think that truly effective AI production of goods would create the need for an entirely new system. Throw the old books out and start over.
If value can be created at very little cost neither capitalism nor it's competitor at the time, communism, could be modified to handle the new economic reality. There is a lot of economics expertise on this forum. I'd be interested to hear their takes on the very low cost labor/production that advanced AI could provide.
See "Fully Automated Luxury Communism"
Personally, I think that in the most likely scenario where AI causes the economy to grow rapidly it will not be replacing humans, just allowing each human to be many times more productive. Which solves the demand side, since we'll all still have jobs. Just much more productive jobs.
Each human gets hired to be put in charge of an AI. At some point conditions improve to the point where no truly bad or hazardous jobs still exist, so young people campaign to have the age of working lowered to 8 years old. We make this bizarre sham economy where literally everyone is hired by more or less the same entity, and everyone buys from the same entity, and invests their savings in the same entity. Whether the entity is government or some mega-corp, this eventually evolved into some weird holdover rituals
At the age of 12, you enter a hiring ceremony with all the other kids and start getting your monthly paycheck. You spend most of your time doing whatever you like but you occasionally check in on the tasks that they've assigned to you, which is something something run some test on this AI and approve maintenance or whatever. You spend your pay on whatever you like. If you have a particular interest in something you can apply to switch departments. If you take a job with more responsibilities you can get a pay rise.
You live in a self driving unit that just travels around all day long running on banked solar power because we've yet to solve the finite land for finite housing issue but whatever, as long as there are roads and you don't have to actively drive you can just let your entire house sit on the road and drive itself out of the way if someone else needs the road.
Bit of leap from "AI will increase productivity per worker so much that even 8 year olds will be able to hold down a job" to "sham economy with only one employer and producer" to "everyone will live in constantly driving car houses because there isn't enough room for people". I don't think we'll run out of actual space until the population is something like...5 trillion? Most of the Earth's land space is empty.
it's empty because it's not economically productive. not everyone can build a sham city in the middle of nowhere like Vegas. people cluster in cities because usually that city has some sort of geographic advantage. either it's highly defensible, or it's near arable land, or there's a mine nearby, etc.
Okay, if we assume a continuation of Western Liberalism it seem like there no need for an underclass to fill the needs of the elite if there is no need for a large population that handles the crummier work.
Again, I’m an economic naïf so I could be missing something obvious.
Feb 21 is Nina Simone's birthday. I love this flippin' song.
'I wish I knew how it feels to be free'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDqmJEWOJRI
This song blows
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1760006772494905608
An interesting theory for sibling order effects. Younger siblings get sick more. Could the older siblings be bringing more illnesses home and that hampers the younger sibling’s development?
Interesting indeed. The study is based on Danish hospital data for those less than one year old. The abstract, contained in that tweet, reports that hospitalization rates for respiratory illnesses are higher for younger siblings than older siblings. Instead of just telling readers how much higher, I suggest that all of you reading this make a guess, then click the link to check.
I didn't know precisely what I was guessing, i.e. under-1-year-olds in Denmark, but I was far too low.
I think this is an intriguing idea:
'Comedian John Oliver has offered Justice Clarence Thomas $1 million a year and a $2.4 million motor coach to 'get the f**k off the Supreme Court'.
Oliver made his offer on Sunday’s episode of his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, and warned the justice he had just 30 days to accept or the offer would expire. '
What if someone started a GoFundMe intended to pay off Supreme Court Justices or elected representatives to resign? National-level figures like Clarence Thomas might get jackpots of tens of millions of dollars. Maybe even Presidents could be convinced to quit.
Would it be legal?
What would be the consequences of allowing it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
> The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule.[2][3] The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.[4] This story is often cited as an example of Goodhart's Law or Campbell's Law.[5]
It’s a satirical stunt. I wouldn’t read too much into it beyond the fact that some rich people like Thomas’ point of view.
Dems get to hang out with Jane Fonda or Bruce Springsteen.
He's not talking about the stunt, he specifically asked about the *principle* of the matter. COULD someone do this in earnest? Would it be legal?
It’s pretty silly thing to consider though isn’t it? Up there with how would WWII have played out if Eleanor Roosevelt had had a Superman-like power of flight? It doesn’t matter because it didn’t/won’t happen.
Thank you for remembering a 45-year-old SNL sketch that I think of frequently.
I’m glad I’m not the only one
But if Eleanor had been in the air when the Japanese Imperial Fleet carriers left left the Kuril Islands headed towards Hawaii, a trap could have been set at Oahu and WWII would have been over shortly after VE Day.
But who would win a fight between Superman and Jesus?
Why won't it happen? In fact, how confident are we that it *hasn't* happened for many government officials who left public office to take highly-paid jobs at various companies or consulting firms or non-profits?
>Why won't it happen?
In the case of a Supreme Court justice, shame alone seems enough to prevent it from happening, at least in a public manner.
In the case of elected officials, again it seems unlikely it would be done in a blatant public manner.
I suppose I can see elected officials doing it covertly. Not a lawyer so I won't comment on the legality.
High level elected officials who leave office involuntarily or because of term limits seem to do well financially anyway though giving high fee speeches for example.
In the early aughts I worked for a subsidiary of American Standard - yeah the toilet people, the subsidiary was Trane the HVAC people - on a campus level building control system. Former VP Dan Quail was an AS board member and was issued 1,000 shares of company stock per quarter for that gig.
The key difference is plausible deniability of what's happening. Someone going on TV to make the offer gives up the bag. You need a quiet conversation on the side and no paperwork directly linking the future job/payment to the current action.
Otherwise it's a bribe and that is illegal.
John Oliver should offer to convert to conservatism and embrace Clarence Thomas' political ideas. Otherwise, it's not worth taking seriously.
Once you've been president you are so famous that you could sell your own shit if you wanted to, though in practice former presidents mostly stick to selling their memoirs & themselves as speakers, advisors, etc. So all a president would get out of the deal was an earlier arrival of a fat lump of that sweet sweet cash. And in fact if they wanted the cash before their term ended they could start selling their shit while still in the White House. Little kiosk right outside, maybe?
chump change compared to what you can get in actual bribe money, especially as a SCOTUS judge (who legalized corruption!)
however, would probably make the existing corruption problem even worse, sounds like a terrible idea
Wasn't someone recently joking about paying Donald Trump to not run?
It seems fine, I suppose. Maybe it's a bit too explicitly oligarchical, but we already have the idea that once people get into power, they get co-opted by The System in more subtle ways. I think it'll end up being another method of demonstrating credentials: "they offered me a million pieces of silver to betray you, but I said 'NO'!"
SBF (allegedly) looked into it, and through back channels Trump even named his price: $5 Billion. Very much not joking, though I can't imagine a world in which it happened even if the price was lower.
Ah, that's what it was, thanks.
>What would be the consequences of allowing it?
Hmm... Given an initial population of office holders, some greedy, some power hungry, this would tend to selectively remove the greedy ones, leaving the power hungry ones. I'm not sure that this would be an improvement.
> What would be the consequences of allowing it?
It would be an incentive to run for an office even if you don't want it, and to do an extra horrible job if you somehow get it, to motivate people to pay you. You could even have someone start the fund for you.
If you think that Trump is bad, imagine someone in his place who actually doesn't want the job, and wants to convince people that paying him $1 billion is the cheaper option in long term.
It's too hard to get these positions in the first place for these incentivies to meaningfully change who gets these positions, and the worse job you do the lower your chances of being in office long enough to be worth paying off (for things not like the SCOTUS).
It's like people saying political betting markets will cause people to interfere with elections. If people could sway the outcome of an election *they already have more than enough of an incentive to do this*, even without betting markets.
But if you do an extra horrible job, your approval ratings get so low that you make yourself vulnerable to losing a recall election or simply losing the next normal election. If your enemies know you're on your way out anyway, then there's no incentive for them to make a GoFundMe to pay you to leave. So you must walk a tightrope while in office--be as offensive as possible to the opposition while still performing well enough to have a shot at staying in your position.
The calculus is different for people who don't have to worry about elections like Supreme Court Justices and maybe other judges. For them, I THINK the optimal strategy would be to be as partisan and as offensive as possible. Make yourself so hated by half of the population that they'd be willing to pay to get you out.
But then there's another problem: The more they hate you, the more the thought of giving you even one cent will offend them. So again, I think some kind of balance to your behavior is needed.
Another factor to consider is the rise of supporters from the opposite end of the cultural/partisan spectrum who will love you the more extreme your behavior gets. They might respond to the other side's GoFundMe to pay you to quit with a second GoFundMe to pay you to stay. Would it be considered accepting a bribe to take the latter's money?
Step one, become president.
Step two, threaten to press the big red button unless provided USD 1T pronto.
[And similarly for lesser positions, except that the maximum badness you can threaten to secure the golden parachute is lesser].
"I hereby pledge to pardon anyone who attempts to assassinate X."
"Amnesty for all who murdered someone who didn't donate to my Patreon!"
Well, here's a spicy topic of discussion: why do feminine men and trans women get a disproportionate amount of hate directed at them? Now, pretty much every minority (and even majority) group gets plenty of hate thrown at them, but there is a sense that the groups mentioned have been a major target of culture wars for the last century or so. What's interesting is when you compare them to their AFAB equivalents: tomboys don't prompt anywhere near as big of a reaction as a man in a dress, and trans men pretty much never come up in arguments about trans issues. (Even TERFS see trans men as victims instead of oppressors.) So what's going on here?
I tried to consider biological explanations, but it doesn't make sense. There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition, and while females are much harsher judges of males than vice versa, I don't see why feminine males would prompt a particularly aggressive response. And considering there is a big difference in the level of acceptance of feminine males between cultures, the source of the hostility is likely cultural. Japan, for example, has consistently had drag queens on mainstream TV for the last few decades. Heck, one of the most popular celebrities in Japan is Matsuko Deluxe, a drag queen with a very... monumental presence (here's a picture of him https://bunshun.ismcdn.jp/mwimgs/2/4/750wm/img_241f58d51847cc3b247cafd9f05798e33509039.jpg ). At one point, he hosted a show for every day of the week.
Anyways, I'm at a complete loss for what's behind this particular brand of intolerance. Why do males consider being "gay" to be an irredeemable character flaw? Why do 55% of Americans think changing gender is MORALLY wrong? https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx Am I missing something here?
> trans men pretty much never come up in arguments about trans issues. (Even TERFS see trans men as victims instead of oppressors.) So what's going on here?
This part is easy. The remaining forms of sex segregation (changing rooms, prisons, refuges) exist primarily for the safeguarding of women. So, ever since there has been a serious prospect that men who claim to be women could be exempted from such segregation, anyone who doesn't prioritise the desires of those men over the safeguarding of women, should logically be opposed.
Furthermore, opposing these exemptions to sex segregation has been made a career-terminating act, even verging on thought crime in some countries. So it's no surprise that when the debate does happen, it gets particularly viscious. Growing up, I read stories about times & places where people would have to lie about their views in order to have any kind of tolerable life for them & their families. I never thought that would be me. (This goes well beyond losing a debate, or losing a vote, and having policy go against me.) So I will always have a special place of hatred in my heart for woke ideology.
Note, unsurprisingly, there's no evidence that men who claim to be women are any less of a safeguarding risk than those who don't. And there's some evidence (and a lot of common sense reasons) to think that the opposite is the case. eg. https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-rorschach-test/
>I tried to consider biological explanations, but it doesn't make sense. There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition,
They're not competition, they're liabilities. In a war, you want to be surrounded by strong, steadfast men who won't break under pressure. It's exactly why men bully and haze each other so much, even men who are otherwise friends - they're (at least implicitly) searching for weakness, so it's exposed now instead of in some crucial moment. If you can't tolerate some teasing or even hazing, you cannot be depended upon in a fight or other emergency. And obviously, effeminate men are going to be less mentally tough than masculine men, since one of the defining characteristics of femininity is precisely a much greater emotional sensitivity. Men generally do not treat women the way they treat feminine men, because they're women and there's no expectation of them being able to handle bullying the way men can. In the cases of women working in male spaces, such as combat military roles or as police officers, you do hear cases of women being bullied. But I would be almost certain you hear about it precisely because of the inability of women to handle such things rather than them being disproportionately bullied (probably the opposite is true). Men simply know and expect that other men will give them a hard time to test them and its only when a man is weaker than usual or faces fairly extreme treatment that they'll make as much noise about it.
You also want your sons and brothers and male cousins to be strong men who fufill their traditional roles of protecting the group, providing for the group, fucking lots of women and making lots of babies. In a traditional society, a man who acts like a woman cannot fully fufill the role of either a man OR a woman, and so they're usually very undesirable (insert some nonsense about gay uncles helping raise kids here). You also don't want to be around these people because it may make others assume you're like them too.
We don't live in such environments, but these things don't just go away.
>Japan, for example, has consistently had drag queens on mainstream TV for the last few decades.
Japan is less accepting of 'LGBT' than west is (even just based on the claims of 'LGBT activists' themselves), and the existence of a drag queen on TV is not a good proxy for Japanese men's views on masculinity generally. Drag queens are ubiquotous in the US, for example, but very few straight men want anything to do with them. Straight female fans of 'RuPaul' probably outnumber straight male fans by 2 orders of magnitude or more, so you obviously can't look at the cultural dominance of this stuff and conclude American men are fine with effeminate men, so I'm not sure why you would think you could for Japanese men.
And even if a culutral change results in a different behavior, it doesn't mean that the previous behavior wasn't significantly biological. It's perfectly coherent to say that a certain behavior is the default for humans but a particular culture may take hold that modulates this. It's certainly more coherent than thinking everything is independently culutral but by some grand coincidence, most peoples throughout history just happened to converge on similar cultures in a particular area.
This is particularly obvious in places like Japan, who for most of their history have had an extremely masculine culture but suffered severe societal trauma in and following WW2. But there is almost certainly a genetic component too. WW2 resulted in around 2 million military deaths for Japan, which removed 2 million mostly young men from the gene pool, men who were almost certainly the most genetically masculine of their generation, leading to a somewhat genetic feminization of Japanese men in future generations. People, even on here, have this bizarre idea that ethnic populations are genetically fixed over time, but it's not even remotely close to true.
Nitpick but Re: the last point, supposing men are being conscripted, it is not clear at all to me that those that died during WW2 were "the most genetically masculine." maybe this holds true in some weird edge cases where a man did not get conscripted because he could pretend he was a woman, but for like >95% of men I'd guess this wasn't necessarily the case
(I come at this from a conservative position; I've tried to be as neutral as possible)
I suspect this also ties into societies with a bias against homosexuality having a slightly higher tolerance on the edges for more masculine homosexual behavior, be it ancient warrior culture, 'rum, sodomy, and the lash', or prison rape. The ability to force yourself on someone is evidence of strength. What ended tolerance for that behavior was increased societal focus on protecting the weak and an increased military focus on discipline and professionalism over individual strength.
Really, the answer is that there are multiple reasons today. Hammond's answer is a good example of why western society frowned on homosexual behavior up through the sexual revolution (and why militaristic authoritarian societies even today crack down hard on it). Those prejudices linger today. On top of that, you get the more modern reasons John Shilling mentions below, and that the rush by the libertine to embrace all manner of behavior once labeled deviant has given cover to a lot of behavior defensively viewed as predatory, and traditionally still fathers take protecting their daughters very seriously.
My take: like polices like. As in, women police women harshly, men police men harshly.
The female gender role policing tends to not show up in things like hate crime stats, because it tends to be passive aggressive and very social. It's things like shunning, ignoring preferences, buying inappropriate gifts, etc. There's also been a very concerted effort to fight it over the past 100 years or so! I think 2nd wave (pants wearing, bra burning etc) was explicitly a rejection of enforcing strict gender roles on women, and now it's no longer cool to police women, and as someone socialised female, I think it's genuinely a much more lax gender role than the male one right now (this has not always been true - it's very recent).
On the flipside, men police by physical violence, so it shows up statistically. There also hasn't been a huge movement fighting for the male equiv of the right to wear pants brand of feminism for the past century.
Why police gender norms at all? I think it's kind of about protecting the semantics of the role. If you're really invested in performing a gender role, as a critical part of your identity, it becomes a personal threat if someone threatens the sanctity of this role. You beat up the [insert slur] because you don't want to be associated with that sort of thing. Controlling the behaviour of other members of your group becomes a vital part of maintaining the definition of your identity.
You kind of see this even in the LGBT spaces! There's a trend of some gay people aggressively policing behaviour and language used within the community, because they feel really attached to their identity [gay, trans, etc]. Anyone with the same identity behaving a way they disagree with feels like a contradiction with their gay or whatever identity.
It's a solved problem in religious spaces - they simply disown their wrongdoers. But if it's a label like "man" or "gay" that are kind of both self identified and applied externally, you can't really excommunicate someone from those labels.... So you attack them to make them stop.
(And recall that the reason why this doesn't happen with women is because of the enormous amount of propaganda in the last century to change the standards, but it sure used to)
Also, a feminine man elicits different responses from (some) cis women compared to a trans woman. A feminine man often falls into a "gay best friend" kind of role - a non-sexual non-threatening man for a lot of cis women. Cis women who do react with disgust tend to be people who are invested in the sexuality/masculinity of this particular guy (mothers and romantic partners) but unallied cis women are typically not aggressive.
Trans women get aggression from some cis women who are invested in their identities as women as biologically determined. A lot of cis women who aren't big on the bio determination get weird in other ways (ie subtly or not, slowly policing the way the trans woman does feminity - this may be unsolicited outfit tips or dieting tips or whatever)
Yup. You've hit the nail on the head. And group identity tends to override common decency.
One thing worth considering is that much of the violence directed against trans women, and I think a majority of the actual homicides, is against MtF sex workers. Who are often perceived as selling the product, "sex with a woman!", and once the bait is taken switching to "...nah, I really have a penis, but you still want me, admit it!"
Lots of straight men take it badly when someone accuses them of being even a little bit gay, and right when they think they're about to have sex (the good kind) is not the time to hit them with that.
I don't know how much of this carries over into more general social interaction, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were significant.
Also, in the US, it's almost exclusively black and to a lesser extent hispanic men doing the murdering, and these men are more hostile to homosexuality than others (even though black men are also more likely to be gay or trans).
> One thing worth considering is that much of the violence directed against trans women, and I think a majority of the actual homicides, is against MtF sex workers.
Wait, really? I don't mean this in a hostile way, but I'd love to see the statistics on this. (I tried a bit and came up empty.) I do realize that most of my experience with trans women is unrepresentative, being largely with programmers and artists, and as far as I'm aware I only have a couple of sex workers in the distant reaches of my social circle, both of whom are cis women.
And here you go. A study of sex worker murders. (I heart Google Scholar!) I'm afraid the data does not support John's hypothesis (although it's a small selection sample). But without looking this up I would have tended to agree with John.
"Transgender sex worker victims were mostly transfeminine (94%) and non-Hispanic black (89%). Money conflicts (78%) most commonly precipitated homicides among transgender sex worker victims."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37986645/#:~:text=The%20study%20identified%20321%20sex,precipitated%20homicides%20of%20female%20victims.
Thanks for the abstract. But, you would have agreed? Seriously?
I can easily imagine that trans women have a higher rate of being sex workers than cis women, and that trans women have a higher rate of suffering violence than cis women, and that sex worker women have a higher rate of suffering violence than non sex worker women, and that trans sex worker women have a rate of suffering violence that's even higher than all these things combined would indicate (for reasons that John mentioned). Ditto for homicides. That's all what I would have assumed from general principles.
But I find it difficult to imagine that the percentage of SWers among trans women is high enough that homicides against them count for more than 50% of the homicides against trans women. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe enough trans women go into SW, and the homicide rate among trans SWer women is high enough relative to the homicide rate among trans non-SWer women, that it actually goes over the 50% mark. Hm.
I tried pulling some numbers out of my ass and running the statistics, but that was unsatisfying; too many unknowns. How about this:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/report-says-at-least-32-transgender-people-were-killed-in-the-u-s-in-2022
That's 32 killed in 2022, so to support your theory, more than 16 of them would need to be SWers at the time. That seems plausible, especially given the racial disparities mentioned in the article (although the overall number is tiny enough that I'd worry about noise) (and of course this is just one year that I happened to find some stats on). Other things of note: 26 were trans women, 26 were non-white, 19 were black (implying 6 were white and 7 were neither black nor white).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/
It looks like black people made up 10470/19196=54.5% of murder victims. But from before, 19/32=59% of trans murder victims. Holding 13 non-black trans murder victims constant, that would mean that the non-trans murder rate would imply 15 black murder victims, leaving a gap of 4 extra black trans murder victims which need to be explained by transness. (I think this is assuming the rate of transness among black Americans is equivalent to the rate of transness among all Americans.)
Your stats from 2012-2020 said 89% of trans SWer murders were of black trans SWers. So (forgive my sins o gods of statistics) there's an 89-54.5=34.5% gap there. That's about 1/3rd. If we assume all 4 of those extra black trans murder victims were SWers, and the only thing boosting the black trans murder rate is SW, then we can assume that roughly 12 of those 32 trans murder victims were SWers, which would explain the racial discrepancy. 12 is less than half of 32, so I'll assume I'm correct, for the 5 seconds it will take for someone who knows statistics to demolish this house of cards.
(The really strange thing, IMO, is the 7 of 32 trans murder victims who were neither white nor black. That category is insignificant in the overall murder statistics, but here it's a almost quarter of the total. What's up with that?)
----
I wonder if the money conflict statistic implies that the clients didn't viscerally object to the sex acts, but instead didn't think they needed to pay (as much) because of the transness of the SW. That's kind of interesting; I hadn't put together that "trans women are real women" could mean "equal pay for equal work" in the right context.
> But, you would have agreed? Seriously?
I don't have enough hours in the day to check all the assertions and claims I've seen in the media, on Twitter, or AC10. However, the general media consensus is that there's a lot of violence and hatred directed against trans people. I was willing to at least provisionally believe that trope because I had no interest in the subject. And being a Leftie, I'm generally more sympathetic to the underdog. So, without thinking deeply about it, yes, I would have agreed. Luckily, there was a lot of speculation and opinion on this thread, and I thought to myself, "What the heck? Enough of this useless supposition! Is there any data?" And voila!
Well, 37.5% is a lot closer to 50.1% than I was expecting, so in that sense you were more right than I was. And I too expected a higher homicide rate against trans people. I find it hard to believe that they were **only** 32 out of 19196 murders. That's 1 in 600, or 0.1667%, when they make up something like 1% of the population. I suppose it's possible that a lot of murders are situational, and trans people tend to avoid those situations (with the exception of sex work). And like with some other stuff, maybe homicides aren't a good measure of societal prejudice. "Trans people are 6 times less likely to be murdered than cis people" is not where I thought this would go.
Transfeminine means transwomen, which DOES support what he said.
Which he are you referring to? I'm getting confused. ;-)
I think it's the part about what precipitated the homicide that is the apparent disagreement.
2019 is the last year I see murder stats from the FBI. So, out of morbid curiosity...
-------------------
User
How many murders were then in the US in 2019?
ChatGPT
In 2019, there were approximately 13,927 murders in the United States.
User
What percentage of the US population identifies as trans?
ChatGPT
The exact percentage of the U.S. population that identifies as transgender is not precisely known, as different surveys and studies may provide varying estimates. However, a widely cited study by the Williams Institute estimated that about 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender.
--------------
0.006*13,927=~84
So we'd expect to see approximately 84 transgender people murdered in 2019 as if their homicides were proportional to their representation in the US population...
---------------
User
how many transgender people were murdered in 2019?
ChatGPT
In 2019, at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming individuals were murdered in the United States. It's important to note that this number may be higher due to misreporting or misgendering in the media and law enforcement records.
--------------------
That PBS article that Moon linked to says 32 trans people were murdered in 2022. If trans-identifying people are really 0.6 percent of the population, then it doesn't look like they're being murdered in disproportionately high numbers. In fact, they seem to be underrepresented in the statistics.
My guess is that society sees MtF trans as particularly problematic because it represents someone of a privileged class improperly claiming the protected status of an oppressed class. Women get certain benefits in society for being "the weaker sex" and we police unfairly gained benefits harshly. It's the same reason society is so harsh on transracial individuals. It's curious how transgender has slipped past these defensive barriers to the extent that it has. FtM trans doesn't generate nearly as much consternation because its going the opposite direction: someone from the oppressed class rejecting its social benefits. FtM trans children generate a disproportionate amount of pearl clutching because it is viewed as a member of an oppressed class being taken advantage of by a subset of society.
I don't have a good theory about why straight men hassle gay men. It could just be a generic anti-deviance stance, with sexual deviance generating a disproportionate amount of ire.
Shouldn't this be the other way round? I mean, the theory is that in patriarchy men are privileged and women are oppressed -- so a privileged person deciding to get oppressed should be okay, while an oppressed person demanding privilege should be strongly opposed.
Well, there are various statuses superimposed on any individual or group, some are even contradictory if considered in a too coarse-grained manner. But what generates ire is when someone receives a social benefit without sufficient warrant (with its corresponding cost to society). If we agree that women receive social benefits due to their sex, then an interloper claiming those benefits will be harshly resisted.
You rightly point out the analogous dynamic of oppressor/oppressed superimposed on men/women. The difference is that this dynamic does not carry an explicit cost to society that one could unfairly claim. Men aren't privileged because of some kind of social endowment, they are privileged because of traits that society happens to favor, e.g. assertiveness, dominance, risk taking, etc. Someone from the oppressed class calling themselves a member of the oppressor class gets none of these benefits by fiat; there's no box to check on a form that will endow one with these socially favored traits. Someone "switching side" from oppressed to oppressor in this manner can easily be ignored with little to no disruption to the social order.
To get super caveman-binary-gender-role here, fertile females are among a tribe's most precious resources, and MTFs are making a claim on the energy=time=life that the tribe uses to protect those resources, while failing to have any of the value. I've got trans friends, and I hate to bring up imagery that could be memetically used against them, but my guess is that what conservative people see in MTFs is rather like what I see when I watch a video of a cuckoo chick manipulating its "parents". (To be clear, I think this is in a sense a technological limitation, and if we had the ability to do Bujoldian or Varleyan sex swaps, it would almost entirely cease to be a problem.)
I suspect that this caveman gender stuff lurks deep within most humans' brains, but that it's possible to find new ways of relating to gender that don't involve this caveman stuff. One of the "however"s is that the people who aren't on board with the new ways are going to freak the fuck out about places where the new ways conflict with the old. (Another of the "however"s is that I suspect a lot of people who think they're on board with the new ways, aren't actually as fully on board as they think. And a third "however" is that the caveman gender stuff is, and I think I'm using this term right, "lindy", and that getting rid of the caveman gender stuff is a bet that our current society is sustainable and future-proof.)
I think it's simply that femininity itself is looked down on. Men have traditionally viewed women as weak, irrational, submissive, trivial, etc. (and plenty still think this way).
A man who acts like a woman is exhibiting these less admirable traits, so of course they also are looked down on. A lot of men don't particularly like women, but they at least want to sleep with them. The feminine man doesn't even offer that.
A related point - people often assume that bisexuality is a "phase", but for men it is assumed to be a phase on the way to gayness, while for women it is assumed to be a phase they will grow out of and be straight. That is, it is assumed, regardless of the sex of the bisexual person, that they are only temporarily (pretending to be) sexually interested in women, and are long-term just going to be sexually interested in men.
Is there data to support that though? It's late and I'm not sure I want to go down that Internet rabbit hole, though. ;-)
Whilst it is certainly true that many transwomen are, from the transsceptic POV, "feminine men", there is a distinct phenomenon of extremely masculine transwomen. Think Caitlyn Jenner, or the former WWE wrestler who recently transitioned. These seem to be a different category to those transwomen who in another life may have stayed as gay or bisexual men. Steve Sailer has mentioned this in the past- one simple explanation might be that prolonged steroid usage is playing a role. This would explain the cited examples, but not more everyday cases where the transwoman was clearly not a very effeminate man but rather a regular, or perhaps very large, man. Another hypothesis (and it can run in parallel to the steroid/hormonal argument) is that these transwomen are motivated by an autogynephilia, which as an aspect of male sexuality is unfeminine.
In this view, AGP transwomen can be viewed as a continuation of crossdressing men (Eddie Izzard for example, before announcing he was trans) whilst feminine transwomen are a continuation of the catamite tradition.
If you view transwomen as by and large either former bottom gay men (feminine) or AGP men (masculine) with some hormonal confounders, then the framing in the OP of transphobia=anti-feminine men-ness seems wrong. AGP transwomen are also subject to scrutiny and ridicule, perhaps more so. Feminine transwomen in the catamite, thai ladyboy mold will face similar issues to extremely feminine gay men. But AGP transwomen (or more charitably, clearly masculine and high T transwomen) will face different but no less severe criticism from society.
> There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition
This reminds me of a certain species of fish, I do not remember its name, whose sexual strategy is that there is a huge dominant male jealously guarding his harem of smaller females... and there are also some little males who are incapable of fighting the big one, but their strategy is that they pass for females and sneak into the harem where they have access to the females.
The feminine man can still get your girlfriend pregnant. (Even if he seems gay, maybe he is actually bisexual.)
>There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition,
There's also no reason to see them as allies. If you assume that men have particular roles to fill in society, then men who stop trying to be men are cowards and deserters. Whereas women who want to be men are taking up the burden and easing the load on everyone else.
If men have particular roles to fill in society, then women do too. Why should switching roles in one direction be seen differently than switching roles in the other direction?
Because men don't have women's roles, and can't internalize what it means to not fill them.
So it is not about intrasexual competition, but more like competition for resources?
If you are neither an ally nor a potential mate, if I kill you it means more resources for me and my allies and my mates.
It's about minimum thresholds. If it takes twenty people to put out a fire, and you have 18, everything burns. But who knows what the threshold even is. What happens if you have twenty and a guy's injured when you need him? What happens if you have fifty and thirty one guys are injured? No such thing as too many bodies, but any loss can be the loss that kills you.
That makes sense, but it sounds suspiciously altruistic (from the group perspective). Someone volunteers to pay the cost of confrontation just to improve the chances of group survival. Nature usually doesn't work like this. Usually there is a personal advantage for the one doing the prosocial thing.
I wonder, maybe our ancestors were cannibals at certain stage of evolution. The reward for the one who killed the "socially undesired" people was that he could eat them afterwards. Then the cannibalism somehow got selected against, but the bullying instinct remained.
I think it fits. I think Bigots don't usually act on their own, they discuss with their mates and make sure they have allies before they confront the "deviant". They may act alone by making a comment in passing or so on, but this can be explained by the potential benefit to status in their ingroup by bragging rights etc.
Not a century, no. A decade at most. They're the current Big Thing that the cultural elites need to signal their sympathy towards, and this makes signaling opposition to them a counter-elite rallying cry. It's semi-random and contingent and will move on to some other identity in a few years.
I really wish people started figuring out that essentially all the discourse fads are just awful people with metaphorical loudspeakers playing status games which you, their audience, automatically lose the moment you take a side.
If you think this has only been going on for a decade, you probably don't know much about lgbt history.
trans people have been around for far longer than a decade, but the degree of mainstream backlash and even awareness is in many respects new; /pol/ and adjacent boards wouldn't call anyone who disagreed a "tranny" a decade ago, and politicians even in deep red states didn't attempt to ban medical transition
seconding Eremolalos.
Also, in conservative circles FtM do have a spotlight on them at the moment. The rates have exploded, which people take as evidence that girls who are uncomfortable about their sexuality get "tricked" into thinking they're trans. This would technically make many FtM trans people victims, but it also casts doubt on the legitimacy of every FtM trans person. I haven't checked for sources myself, but if the number of people declaring themselves FtM indeed has exploded, that is most easily explained by some sort of social contagion.
I'm not connected to conservative circles, but my impression is that the focus on FtM is mostly about the "F" side of it: "they're coming for your women". Or rather, "they're coming for your daughters". It's a standard conservative-gender-role focus on protecting the fragile, precious, valuable resource that is a young girl.
Why are feminine men and trans women lumped together here?
From a transphobic point of view, trans women are feminine men, only more so. And the transphobic point of view is relevant because the question is about the behavior of transphobes.
Not to get excessively binary, but there's two categories under consideration: "trans people" and "people who aren't trans but still adopt aspects the opposite gender". The theory is that in each of those categories, there's two halves, and one half gets more hostility than the other: MTF more than FTM, and feminine men more than masculine women.
Assuming that this is correct, what's the mechanism behind it? Simply positing "heteronormativity" is insufficient to explain the difference. And do the differences inside the two categories share the same mechanism? And if so, what is it? If you want to make an argument that hostility against MTFs has a completely different basis than hostility against feminine men, great, let's hear it!
Perhaps it’s related to a perception of deceit?
Women are the ones who are sought after, men have to do the seeking. Women are born as objects of desire, men have to be built or perish. “Women and children first.” “The fairer sex.” Men are the ones who have to go fight and die in wars. Etc.
(I’m not arguing that any of this is necessarily true or accurate or that men/women have it better/worse/easier/harder. I’m just listing common cultural tropes.)
So perhaps MtF (or men generally acting feminine) is perceived as a man trying to “cheat” his way to obtain certain societal status that he don’t “deserve”.
In a similar vein, (some/many) heterosexual men perceive femininity as sort of the ultimate form of perfection/beauty and go to great lengths to pursue a mate to fulfill this desire. So maybe MtF or men with feminine behaviors is viewed as a “false prize”, something they very much don’t desire and in fact are in competition with (another man) trying to pose as their object of desire, or maybe it’s simply wires being crossed in a way which produces a much more extreme reaction than with FtM (“they talk/laugh/act/look like a sexy woman, but they’re actually a man/adversary, and this is a really uncomfortable conflict!”)
> there is a sense that the groups mentioned have been a major target of culture wars for the last century or so
Has it really though? Half a century ago, a straight man wearing a dress was either a hilariously funny comedy act (Monty Python) or a bizarre eccentricity (J Edgar Hoover, allegedly) but not something that people spent a lot of time thinking about.
A non-straight man wearing a dress... well, that's a whole different kettle of fish. That's more "disgust reflex" than anything else.
Yes, the historical oppression of men wearing dresses has been over emphasised in the modern culture wars.
There's a long historical taboo in Western Culture against dressing across one's sex and class. My understanding is that sumptuary laws in medieval Europe not only regulated the types of clothing and accessories that people could wear based on their social status, but they also regulated the clothing that the sexes could wear. The fact that the laws went out of the way to define sex-coded dressing, makes me think some people were cross-dressing even way back when. And there are a lot of cross-dressing tropes in high-medieval literature. The Pardoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales comes immediately to mind. The Pardoner is accused of being a gelding or "a mare" and Chaucer endows the Pardoner with effeminate traits included cross-dressing.
I can't opine whether the historicity of cross-dressing has been over-emphasized in modern culture wars, but it seems to me that modern culture wars are a continuation of historical social patterns that go back at least to the high middle ages.
Looking at Wikipedia, I didn't find sumptuary laws based on sex but only class. And a few decades ago there were hit movies where the male protagonist pretended to be female in their public lives, Mrs Doubtfire and Tootsie.
Google Scholar shows a lot of papers and books about sumptuary laws and cross-dressing. Unfortunately, they're mostly behind paywalls. But here's a doctoral thesis by Brett Seymour that I've been plowing through for the last couple of days that has some interesting tidbits. What's interesting to me is the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English sumptuary laws made exceptions for theaters. Women weren't allowed on the stage, and men (frequently boys) portrayed the female characters. So, there were exceptions to the sumptuary laws made for the theater.
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/8837/Seymour%2cb_thesis_2012.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=ye
Scroll down to the chapter entitled "Cross-dressing in the Real World." There are summaries of court cases against cross-dressers.
"In 1599, for example, John Watkins was cited for going about the street in woman‘s apparel, being the parish clerk at that time‘, who explained in his defence that 'at a marriage in merriment he did disguise himself in his wife‘s apparel to make some mirth to the company' In 1607, Matthew Lancaster, wore woman‘s apparel like a spinster‘ during a Maytide procession and also used the merriment defence."
A question about the social status part of:
>My understanding is that sumptuary laws in medieval Europe not only regulated the types of clothing and accessories that people could wear based on their social status, but they also regulated the clothing that the sexes could wear.
I could see some sympathy with regulating clothing by social status if e.g. "impersonating a nobleman" carried the same sort of fraudulent exercise of power that "impersonating a police officer" does today. Did it?
It seemed to be more about preserving the social class system. Even though a wealthy merchant could be as rich as a lord, the lords didn't want wealthy merchants putting on airs.
Many Thanks! You may well be right. Also, the line may be blurry
>the lords didn't want wealthy merchants putting on airs.
"putting on airs" sounds like claiming (hereditary??) social status that the merchants weren't entitled to.
There may be a blurry line between social status and privileges that the lords were (legally? customarily?) entitled to. ( Though I presume that e.g. the pre-1999 hereditary seats in the UK's House of Lords would have been difficult for a wealthy merchant to surreptitiously occupy, regardless of a violation of sumptuary laws. :-) )
This doesn't apply to femmy men & trans women, but I think one reason gay males have attracted so much hate is that male sexuality is scary. Having homosexual men around makes straight men go thru some of the shit women do: A man is looking at you and imagining sticking his dick into you. He *probably* won't try to do it against your will, but it's not out of the question that he'll try. But even the fact that he's thinking about it is hard to take.
I'm not sure why you think that doesn't apply to trans women - it's still plausible that they are imagining sticking their dick into you, with the somewhat predatory take on sexuality and the musculoskeletal development that comes from having gone through puberty marinating in testosterone. It may or may not be true, but to either a straight man or a lesbian woman it is still a frightening possibility.
Well, I suppose it might apply to some trans women. But my experience of trans women is that they don't come across that way. Some of that may be the feminine appearance and manner, but also they're usually taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, and many have been for years, and I think that changes them in a way others can sense.
To be fair, though, a lot of what gives me that I'm-with-a-male feeling is just knowing that I'm with a male. I've known enough of them, and listened to enough of them tell me their thoughts, that knowing someone is male stirs up the sense that I may be an object of their lust. And it's a subtle component of my experience, generally way in the background.
IIRC, there was a horrifying little study last year about gender in online chess. Apparently, women played worse if their opponent had a masculine name or no name, but played better ("normally") if their opponent had a feminine name. Regardless of the actual player on the other end.
Hm. Riffing on what you say, if they view MTFs who are attracted to women as having "male" predatory sexuality, this categorizes the MTFs as a threat and as competition, in a way that an F attracted to women isn't?
In theory. But the MtF's I have known don't have a male sort of presence. I'm sure some of that is that is a product of deliberate self-presentation, but probably hormones play a part. MtF's take testosterone blockers and estrogen.
In my experience, the "male presence" thing does go down over time, on average, probably for both the self-presentation and hormonal reasons you mention. But it can pop out sometimes, especially in anger. And I wonder whether the average random anti-trans person talking on the Internet has a lot of in-person experience in neutral circumstances, or whether their experience of MTF people is mostly through images and videos and text and mostly centering on angry MTF people.
Maybe. I guess what I really think is that people are just prone to really strong reactions to sexual things. There's finding certain things wildly hot, and then there's the reverse, of finding certain things really repellant and weird. A lot of people take their person revulsions as evidence the behavior in question is bad, dangerous, or only practiced by nasty, scummy people. I think that's mostly what's going on with the loathing of trans people -- it's a big EWWW. I feel a mild EWWW myself about certain trans-related things, but I just don't take my reaction as information about how I should view trans people.
> people are just prone to really strong reactions to sexual things
Heck yeah. We really don't like acknowledging that we're monkeys, and that all our vaunted "intelligence" and "free will" is bound up in a meat shell that acts like a cross between a chimpanzee and a bonobo.
> A lot of people take their person revulsions as evidence the behavior in question is bad, dangerous, or only practiced by nasty, scummy people.
Yeah. I rather liked the philosophy of "YKINMKBYKIOK", but I feel like it may have fallen out of favor.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/YKINMKBYKIOK
In the evolutionary environment, a tribe of men who were unwilling to fight would be in serious peril, whereas a tribe of tomboyish women would be no big deal, since their preferences could be overruled in any case by physically stronger men.
"Why do 55% of Americans think changing gender is MORALLY wrong? https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx"
People don't want their sons having their dicks surgically removed, and creating a stigma against it is an effective method of discouragement similar to obesity, smoking, dropping out of high school, etc.
This might be a longshot, but I tried it in the past and it worked :
Do any of you work for or own a company looking to hire remote, entry level data scientists, data analysts or ML engineers ? Anywhere in North America is good as long as its remote. Let me know, would be very helpful and it would be amazing to work with rationalists !
Thought I'd send you a coupla links. First is to remote jobs, Hacker News one I've forgotten now, but I think a lot were for remote. No special connection to rationalists.
Remote jobs
https://outerjoin.us/
Job board that seems to be run by Hacker News
https://hnhiring.com/
Still very helpful. Thank you !
A year or so ago there was talk here about how Bean, the guy with the great blog about the navy, claimed that a nuclear war wouldn't kill as many people as popularly believe. IIRC, he said something like the blast from a nuclear warhead would only kill people within about a 3 mile radius, radiation would be bigger lethal problem, but we aren't talking about the destruction of large cities or anything like that.
I just listened to the Dwarkesh podcast with guest Richard Rhodes, author of Making of the Atomic Bomb, who said that some of the original physicists forgot to account for the destructiveness of the fire from a hydrogen bomb, which would be much bigger than the blast zone and could destroy an entire city as big as Moscow.
Opinions?
Whats the point of talking about *A* nuclear warhead blast, when many (most?) modern weapons are MIRV missiles that deliver multiple >hiroshima sized blast with each missile, spread miles apart? (Oh, and of course, there's thousands of these that can and would be fired in a nuclear war).
The original question from about a ye ago was whether most humans would die in a nuclear war and the answer was no, it would probably just set civilization back a century or two .
A related question. Richard Rhodes also says in the same podcast that computer simulations from 2007 showed that the dreaded "nuclear winter" after an atomic exchange would be even worse than previously believed. (Granted, 2007 is a long time ago now but Rhodes said this only a few months ago.) He claims, even a nuclear war between only India and Pakistan could result in a couple billion deaths from failed crops over the following year.
That contradicts what I have more recently heard, which is that "nuclear winter" isn't a real thing, that it's scenario was only a scare tactic.
What does the evidence say here?
I think this - https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter - is as good a short summary as you are likely to find. There were some interesting discussions on SSC back in the day as well, but to the same end result.
I'd be interested to know more about what Richard Rhodes thinks, but it's quite possible that he hasn't really kept up with the field except to have noticed that there were a couple of new papers in 2007 or so whose capsule description was "nuclear winter is real bad". Which there were, but I've read those papers and they're the sort of thing that makes me want to say "replication crisis".
Well, OK, maybe we don't want to do multiple replications of Global Nuclear War just for scientific bragging rights. But if you're not validating your models against the Australian wildfires and the Kuwaiti oilfield fires, you're not even trying.
Thanks again!
I don't have subject-matter expertise here, but I did want to say for anybody who isn't familiar, the blog in question is https://www.navalgazing.net/ and it has some really good stuff on it if you want detail-rich explanations of technical topics related to the military.
The effect of fires would be very dependent on the city (built of wood? lots of trees?) and the weather.
It's easy to imagine that a 5km radius ring of fire in the centre of a large city would easily swamp the ability of the survivors to fight it (and besides, everyone will be fleeing, not firefighting) so you're basically stuck waiting for the fire to burn itself out. On a cold rainy day that happens quickly, on a hot dry windy day I can easily imagine everything burning (or at least everything downwind).
Firestorms have always factored into people's estimates as to the destruction and lethality of nuclear war. I can't speak for the theoretical physicists who started the whole thing, but once the military started testing the things, the incendiary effects were quickly appreciated.
And for the largest hydrogen bombs, the big multi-megaton ones everybody worried about during Peak Cold War, the relative scaling laws meant that the incendiary effects were quite dominant. The 50-megaton "Tsar Bomba", to a first approximation, ignites everything burnable out to 50 kilometers and does some other stuff you probably won't care about compared to that.
But Tsar Bomba was too big and cumbersome to be practical, and since the 1980s at the latest most everyone has converged on weapons in the 100-500 kiloton range as optimal for most applications. Those weapons are much more balanced in effect. The blast of a 300-kT bomb will destroy unreinforced buildings out to about 5 km, and it will reliably start fires out to about 7 km. And the two effects are synergistic; starting fires is much more destructive when you tear open buildings to expose all the flammable stuff and scatter fuel across the streets and other potential firebreaks.
So we can sort of round that off to "within 6 km, pretty much everything is destroyed, beyond that there's damage but mostly things can be repaired".
The City of Moscow seems to have a radius of about 30 kilometers, so to totally destroy it you'd need a couple dozen of those 300-kt warheads. Or about a third of a Tsar Bomba, but the couple dozen smaller warheads will be cheaper and give you more flexibility. And for Moscow we'd probably assign a couple dozen warheads just on general principle, but cities that aren't so central and prestigious to the enemy state will probably just see key military and industrial areas flattened+incinerated.
Which, to be clear, is still a Very Bad Thing and we should try not to do that. But it's not X-risk bad.
Thanks!
Well, we're not talking about just one nuke here. The US claims to have 3,708 nukes stockpiled, while the Federation of American Scientists estimates it to be 5,244 instead. https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/ Whichever one is correct, Russia is predicted to have even more nukes stockpiled than the US. Even if it did "only" obliterate people in a 3 mile radius, 28 square miles times several thousand nukes is... well, a very large area. Nowhere near enough to glass the entirety of one of the bigger states, but it could take out most big cities in the country.
The main worry with Russia is that if they keep losing this war, there is a non-zero chance they will start launching nukes at targets outside Ukraine as a Hail Mary play, effectively holding humanity hostage to protect their ambitions. There is a paper saying that a full-on nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill 5 billion people, not from the nukes themselves, but from the massive nuclear winter it would cause. Not to mention it would cause a full-on mass extinction of wildlife; after all, this situation is basically the same as what killed off the dinosaurs. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
Just doing the math on the size of the direct devastation, using inflated versions of your numbers:
12,000 nukes each destroying 28 square miles is 336,000 square miles. The United States is close to 3.8 million square miles. The entire planet is over 196 million square miles.
It would take over 135,000 nukes to destroy the entire United States and seven million to destroy all surfaces of the world.
Even one well placed nuke would cause significant devastation to the world economy (New York harbor, New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, etc.), but would not be that devastating to humanity.
On the other hand, the sum total of all urban areas in the United States is only about 50,000 square miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas
I believe these contain over 80% of the US population.
Good point. That would still take ~1,800 nukes to destroy all US urban areas entirely, which is a significant portion of all of the nukes in existence. There aren't enough nukes to do that to every country.
Humanity could totally wreck the global economy and destroy significant portions of the world population, but even using every nuke on the planet it wouldn't even be close to extinction. More people may die in the ensuing famines and successive wars as the new political order gets sorted out, but the nukes themselves cannot fully devastate the planet.
It’s interesting that that paper is recent. I assumed the nuclear winter theory had been debunked - the soot just doesn’t last that long in the atmosphere and doesn’t reach the stratosphere. Scientists were predicting some global cooling as the oil field burned but it didn’t happen.
The oil fields burned in the gulf war I mean.
The numbers in that Nature article seem dubious to me. Not the models; I didn't even get into evaluating that. The scenarios. They had scenarios ranging from 1 to 150 Tg of soot injected into the atmosphere. Average would seem to be about 27 Tg. The example for scale that they give is a forest fire, the size of which I know to be 12100 square kilometers, that produced between 0.3 and 1 Tg of soot. Based on that, we're talking about somewhere between one and three Finlands burning down to produce their average case. If you run the numbers, one Finland, maybe one and half, is the most area you could destroy with nukes if everybody decided to work together and be maximally efficient about it. Realistic cases would be far from maximally efficient. A lot of nukes wouldn't go off or would fizzle, a lot of nukes would be destroyed on the ground, and most importantly probably something like 25%-50% of nukes would be expended trying to nuke other nukes where you've got to drop a nuke on every silo even though they're only a few kilometers apart. Only the very smallest of their scenarios seems in any way plausible and their models show very minor changes for the smallest scenarios. Don't get me wrong, a bad day to live in the nuclear sponge or next to anything particularly strategic, but the global nuclear winter bit seems like a case of assuming the numbers will be very bad resulting in the numbers being very bad indeed.
Don't quote me on these numbers, but IIRC there were something like 500+ above-ground nuclear tests between 1945 and 1980. I remember that 1962 was the peak year for above-ground tests. ChatGPT says there were 178 detonations that year and the total explosive yield of these tests was approximately 87.8 megatons, with the largest individual test being the Soviet Union's "Tsar Bomba" test (mentioned above), which had a yield of about 50 megatons. It's interesting to note that global warming stalled between 1945 and 1980. I'm sure the soot from that steady background of above-ground tests must have contributed to that global warming pause between 1945 and 1980, but I haven't seen any studies that tried to quantify it. And I can't find any estimates of how much dust a 500Kt explosion would generate. But 500 x 500Kt explosions happening concurrently would likely push many millions of tons into the stratosphere. I'm pretty sure that would be more than Pinatubo released (10 cubic kilometers of dust), and that had significant downstream climate effects. Not sure it would be anywhere near the amount put out by the Mount Tambora explosion that caused the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816.
It’s not clear at all that any significant soot goes into the stratosphere. The initial explosion might push some particulates into the stratosphere but the subsequent fires - which are what is generally modelled - probably won’t, and therefore get washed away by the lower atmosphere
When I lived in LA in the early 90s I recall that we were getting measurable amounts of fallout from China's Lop Nur nuclear tests which were carried over by the winds stratosphere. Then there's this. Their conclusions are based on modeling, so take it for what it's worth ( I generally distrust models)...
"This study suggests that the cause of the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century was the atmospheric nuclear explosions detonated between 1945 and 1980. The estimated GST drop due to fine dust from the actual atmospheric nuclear explosions based on the published simulation results by other researchers (a single column model and Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model) has served to explain the stagnation in global warming."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136468261100006X
Have just published an essay: Game Theory, Jaws, and Girard, with an assist from Lévi-Strauss: A quick sketch, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/02/game-theory-jaws-and-girard-with-assist.html
While thinking about the next installment in my series on great literary critics (which has become another inquiry into the nature of literary criticism), I found myself thinking about that essay in which I offered a Girardian interpretation of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I smelled an opportunity: Why not add Lévi-Strauss and game theory into the mix?
Lévi-Strauss is obvious since I’d already discussed him in the series, but game theory? How’d I get there? I don’t really know, it just happened.
But I had taken a look at some of Girard’s remarks about Much Ado About Nothing in his Shakespeare book, A Theater of Envy, where he talks of Beatrice and Benedick as playing a game with one another (p. 81):
"Outside observers shrug their shoulders and declare the entire game frivolous. It certainly is, but our condescension itself may well be part of a strategic positioning that is always going on, “just in case” the game might have to be played. The game, perhaps, has already begun. We always try to convince others that we ourselves never play this kind of game, but these disclaimers are necessarily ambiguous; they resemble too much the moves that we could have to make if we were already playing the game."
Girard does not invoke game theory, and games of course are common enough. We talk about them all the time. Back in 1964 Eric Bern had a bestseller with Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, though it's not a game theory book, not in the sense I have in mind in this essay. But Girard was also concerned about who knows what, with what things are public knowledge, and what things are secret, with how public knowledge confirms individual beliefs, those are all matters of importance in game theory. Moreover and after all, game theory is an abstraction over games in the common-sense use of the term and in a way very similar to the way Turing’s account of computation is an abstraction over an activity otherwise performed by people using pencils and paper.
But just how and why I came to think of game theory is not all that important; what’s important is that I thought of it. Once there I thought of the work of Michael Chwe, a brilliant political scientist who published a very interesting book I’d read some years ago, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (2001) and has more recently published Jane Austen, Game Theorist (2013), which I’ve not read. But I have skimmed through his article, Rational Choice and the Humanities Excerpts and Folktales (2009). Moreover, if you search on “game theory and literature,” you get hits. The conjunction of game theory and literature is thus not so strange, not so unexplored, as one might think. If literature, why not film?
Since I’ve already done a Girardian analysis of Spielberg’s Jaws, why not revisit the film with game theory in mind? That’s what the rest of this post is about. I don’t actually conduct a game theoretical account. Game theory is a technical discipline, but this is not technical. It is, however, informed by game theory, but it is not technical. It is a long though, so take your time.
Caveat: If you’re looking for Girard and Lévi-Strauss, they’re here. But the essay is mostly about games. You can find more Girard in my original essay on Jaws, linked above.
Is anyone here has done his PhD and then went into business Development job I wish to know how to transition from PhD to business Domain
A lot of business development folks come from consulting which is generally not a terrible place to start a career (the lifestyle will suck though).
Get an entry-level technical job with a large business and then tell them you are interested in potentially working in technical sales. May take a couple years but there's plenty of demand for technical people moving into sales.
Thanks alot Hank..
Does anyone know how exactly a liquidity providers make money on polymarket.. has anyone provided liquidity in the past for a poly market and made money
Taylor Swift is widely known worldwide. Gretchen Peters isn't *nearly* as famous, but over her long career, she shares with Taylor one thing: she writes extraordinary lyrics about the inner lives of women.
https://fragmentsintime.substack.com/p/tay-tay-and-gretch-pete
> Gretchen Peters isn't *nearly* as famous
Nearly? They're not even in the same universe of fame.
Exactly! Different universes, for sure.
Am hoping my post made that contrast exceptionally clear, in the paragraphs describing the current career arcs of both Taylor Swift and Gretchen Peters. (For instance, by contrasting Swift's 281 million Instagram followers with Peters' 10 thousand followers.)
I don't know who that is, but it's simply not true at all that Taylor Swift writes "extraordinary lyrics".
Acknowledging that music is wildly subjective, as are tastes in song lyrics, poetry, literature, and the like. One listener's meat is another's poison, and all that ...
Still, there's a case to make that some of Swift's best lyrics (with and without collaborators) are indeed extraordinary. And distinctive.
Here's a trio of her songs whose lyrics personally strike me as such, superbly fitted to their respective contexts:
"Safe and Sound" (which was featured at a key moment in the 2012 film, "The Hunger Games")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhAS_GnJIc
"The Last Great American Dynasty" (riffing on the scandalous life of Rebekah Harkness, the widow of Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s5xdY6MCeI
(Background: https://www.elle.com/culture/music/a33416288/taylor-swift-the-last-great-american-dynasty-true-story-meaning/)
"Cornelia Street" (adroitly capturing the uncertainties and joys of new love)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgt1d3eAm7A
I started using about the time of the Musk Takeover when it filled my inbox with defenses of the poor Royal Family that was being so horribly mistreated by Megan Markel and her husband. :)
I still announce my Substack posts [https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com] there, as I do on Facebook.
It's weird you talk about the "poor royal family" sarcastically like this, when in reality the one person in the whole situation who truly claimed to be horribly mistreated was Markle herself, and nearly everything she's ever claimed about the royal family and her experiences with it have been shown to be complete lies. She never intended to live a royal life and always intended to use it as a springboard into celebritydom (that life as a C-tier actress couldn't otherwise provide).
I don't care about the royal family, but Markle is truly insufferable and one of the most narcissitic people I've ever heard of. And of course, legions of assholes used her lies as a general bludgeon against what they hated: Old straight white traditional anglo men/culture.
Maybe, but those messages that turned me off Twitter, were, like yours, long on accusation and short on details. I have no knowledge or interest in whether she ever "intended to live a royal life and always intended to use it as a springboard into celebritydom" or if she is "insufferable." But really, the idea that a family that can trade it's ancestry back to Alfred (if not Hengist and Horsa :)) being mistreated by a "C-tier actress" is pretty funny.
Using what?
This is a perfect example of not being able to see what the comment is about. :) Bad Substack! Bad!
There might have been a URL there which some Substack spam filter automatically deleted? Shot in the dark.
How did the linguistic cliche of describing emotional states as "places" originate in English? I'm talking about phrases like "coming from a place of anxiety" or "I'm not in a good place right now".
Also, is it an effective heuristic to assume that the speaker is (a) american, (b) female or/and (c) politically progressive, based on the usage of this cliche?
Not sure how it started, but some reasons it caught on may include: a) there's no standard way to talk about states of mind, and other expressions like "state of mind" are a bit clunky and/or have obscure, less intuitive referents; b) the "place" can be an internal state, as you say, or a function of external factors, or both, which leads me to; c) expressions like "not in a good place" allow for some interpretative flexibility and euphemistic cover when something socially unsavory or personally painful might be going on. Space and time are also pretty fundamental sources of metaphor, and we do say things like "not having a good time right now" to talk about people being--here's another--"in a bad way" (which is a...path metaphor? process metaphor?)
Do languages other than English use place as a metaphor for emotional states?
My feeling is that French and Spanish yes, German no.
Googling for "dans un bon lieu" or "en un buen lugar" you find some possible examples, whereas in German you only get confusion. https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idForum=2&idThread=1343598&lp=ende&lang=en
My French is not fluent but I think a more natural way to express this in French is “je suis dans la bonne voie” which translates to “I’m on a good path” or “I’m in a good way”
I may be misremembering some of this but there's an indigenous language in Australia that when you ask, "How are you?" you're literally asking which direction that person is going. That person would reply with the direction they're going (i.e. north, south, east, or west). And those cardinal directions are both associated with where you're physically going and/or facing, but they're also associated with one's state of mind and well-being. Sorry, I have a packrat mind, and I remember (or misremember) this factoid from a long long time ago when I was an undergrad in Anthropology. I'm like that character in Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_ who confessed, "I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing."
Moreover, I remember there was a Radio Lab episode that talked to the native speakers of this language. Sorry, I'll have to dig deeper to remember the name of this language. ChatGPT wasn't able to give me the answer, but it noted that the Maori of New Zealand to say hello ask "Are you going?"
Update: Ahhh, found it. They're the Guugu Yimithirr people of northern Queensland.
Oooh thanks for for finding it! I've heard about them and always found them to be my soulmates, as an old interactive fiction player who uses geographic directions for everything. They say things like "the cup is on the northern side of the table". Likewise, I tell my wife: "If you want to go to this bar, you take the train to the station so-and-so, and then you go west." And she asks: "Which direction is west?" Unlike me and the Guugu Yimithirr, she never knows where is north and south.
"Are you going?" for "How are you" sounds like French "ça va?", "is it going?"
It seems a straightforward spatial metaphor? If one imagines an "emotional landscape", some parts of it are going to be better and some parts are going to be worse. We want to leave Depression City and head out for the scenic Joyful Hills.
I don’t know how it started, but it reminds me of something…
I once heard (and forgive me, because I’m going to mangle this badly) that when we e.g. experience people as being “cold” or “warm” toward us, that’s not just a linguistic metaphor, but has a neurological basis. Apparently, parts of the brain that are associated with processing temperature can also be used for sizing people up. Basically, when we perceive people as cold, the part of our brain that reacts to cold temperatures lights up.
(This admittedly feels a bit too cute to be reliable, but maybe someone who knows more can confirm or debunk the more general idea: that the same circuitry in the brain is used for multiple tasks, which may in turn become associated …?)
Given that (possible mis-)understanding, I would not be surprised if some people – especially people who devote a lot of mental resources thinking about emotions, mental health etc. – use brain circuitry typically associated with orientation and navigation to think about emotional states. And that it would be natural for them to use metaphors from physical space when they need language to describe their “emotional landscape”.
Let me know if I’m way off…
Yes, maybe, no.
Googling the phrase gets me the Oxford Dictionary site, which says "happy place" originated in the 1990's and that they're not going to tell me anything more unless I make an account.
Feels like it could be an extrapolation of "between a rock and a hard place", which Google says originated as a reference to Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey.
"In a tight spot" and "pushed into a corner" appaerntly comes from boxing.
https://the-word-nerd.medium.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-in-a-tight-spot-409821e9991a#:~:text=To%20be%20in%20a%20tight,corners%20of%20a%20boxing%20ring.
"At rock bottom" comes from mining. https://www.crestviewrecoverycenter.com/addiction-blog/rock-bottom/#:~:text=The%20term%20%E2%80%9Chitting%20rock%20bottom,no%20way%20to%20go%20lower.
"On edge" apparently comes from several different places and originally referred to your teeth. https://www.theidioms.com/on-edge/
Seems like a short hop from any of these specific metaphors to the lazy "in a bad place". And if you were in a bad place, and you're no longer there, you're in another place now, right?
> The term “hitting rock bottom” originated among miners in the 19th century. The phrase indicated that the bedrock of the mining operation had been hit, leaving no way to go lower.
This has to be at least a little bit wrong, because mines don't stop at the bedrock. They go deep into the bedrock.
Not on the Ringworld.
Almost certainly not that. Offhand, it sounds like the language of therapy.
This was my guess too, so I asked GPT-4 and Gemini. Neither LLM claimed that mental health therapy was the source, but Gemini did suggest a connection with an instruction that mental health therapists give: "Go to your happy place."
I searched that phrase and confirmed that some mental health therapists use it, e.g. https://www.empathiccounselling.ca/blog/go-to-your-happy-place
Maybe screenwriters or comedians adapted it for non-therapeutic monologue or dialogue, and from there it entered general use, without anyone ever documenting the process.
...and self-help books.
Hard to say. It’s a pretty easy metaphor to understand though
Don't know the entomology, but a picture of me with a beer in hand and smile on face in front of my garden was referred to by a friend as, "George in his happy place."
> Don't know the entomology
Well, don't let that bug you.
Well done!
I’d like to know more about this from Freya India.
Gen Z is often described as a sexless generation. We are having less sex than previous generations did at the same age. We are less likely to have been on a date. More of us identify as asexual. In fact, according to this Stonewall report, more Gen Z Brits identify as asexual (5%) than gay (2%) or lesbian (3%).
All kinds of cultural and social influences could explain this. Early exposure and addiction to online porn might be one. I’ve written about risk-aversion and fear of rejection as another. Increased awareness of asexuality too. But there is also, I think, a medical explanation. More specifically: the widespread use of SSRIs and their sexual side-effects.
SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors) are a common class of antidepressants used to treat depression, anxiety and other mental health problems. Popular SSRIs include Fluoxetine (Prozac), Escitalopram (Lexapro), and Sertraline (Zoloft). Something well established about these drugs is that they have sexual side-effects. In fact, between 40 and 65% of people who take an SSRI are thought to experience some form of sexual dysfunction. What few people know, though, is these side effects can persist even after coming off of the drugs—a condition called Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD).
This is more than just low libido. It can be a total loss of libido, genital numbness, erectile dysfunction, an inability to orgasm and complete lack of sexual attraction. Emotional blunting is also common, with sufferers describing a numbing of positive emotions, no romantic feelings, and difficulty connecting with others. PSSD can occur immediately—after just a few pills—and persist for years, decades, even permanently. There is no treatment. Despite PSSD being in the medical records since the ‘90s, patients are rarely warned of the risk. A risk thought to be 1 in 216.
I wonder if this is something that ultrasound neuromodulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation could address? I'm not familiar with any studies on this specifically, but I'm guessing that stimulating sexual neural circuitry is probably not more complicated than what we can already do with rTMS or ultrasound.
Another, possibly stupid, hypothesis: relationships involve risk of emotional damage, and society generally has become risk averse. Also, we seem to be better informed than previous generations as to how casual (and innocent but poorly thought out) gestures or statements or interactions can be hurtful: combine this with how worrying about certain food allergies seems to increase food allergies etc.
Is this hypothesis under-discussed, if so is that because it is stupid or just uninteresting?
This feels to me closer to the truth. It would nicely line up with trends in decreasing youth drug and alcohol use as well.
Good point. My own refraining from alcohol is precisely due to this reason, but I hadn't connected that with this topic.
I’m a zoomer. You are right sensitivity is a partial cause. The prevalent zoomer view is that we’re subjects to life, not just some part of it randomly floating around. Everything is hyper-personal this way, so people try to correct with hyper-politeness.
In general it’s one of those “Lines on Graphs” situations where every proximate cause we identify (DEI, political correctness, SSRIs, pornography) is really a second-order effect of a deeper control system pulling us into some kind of emotionless void. The end-state is probably extinction. Technology is the most direct driver, but that’s its own weird feedback loop.
I don’t have an emotional relationship to any of this, but most of the arguments that we’ll survive this century seem to come from one.
If you have expanded on these thoughts of yours somewhere, I will appreciate being pointed to. You seem to be talking about technology feeding a "grasping" sort of egocentrism (in abstract ways that we can infer only from, and confuse with, symptoms?), while I was thinking at least partly of people being more sensitive to others which promotes "defensive" aspects of their own ego. [Edit: Actually no, you are talking about the subjectness coming to the foreground, so your first point indeed seems consonant with mine, but put differently and with extra assertions on the role of technology.]
I have no idea, but i do think its very strange that so much of online discourse (especially on the right) is so focused on "body count", and youth promiscuousness, and hook up culture, but, as you correctly layout, younger people are having less sex (and doing fewer drugs, and drinking less) than past generations.
Interestingly, people report having less sex, but I am not sure it has accelerated our declining birth rates: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rates-declined-for-younger-women-increased-for-older-women.html
The birth rate is still going down of course, but i dont see a sharp drop any time recent (especially compared to the end of the 60s - and 1971 comes up again!).
Seems like people are having less casual sex vs less sex overall, but thats just speculation.
I think that for several decades, most births have resulted from sex intended to cause births, which is a small fraction of all sex, so it's not surprising that trends in overall sex might come apart from trends in births. (Someone who becomes less enthusiastic about sex but has no change in their lifetime desire for children might have precisely the same amount of sex intended to cause births, while decreasing their sex overall quite a bit.)
I'm going to stick with "porn" as the obvious explanation.
Wondering why people have less sex once they get access to a bottomless well of free pornography is like wondering why people do less hunting and gathering ever since the supermarket opened up.
According to the CDC, only 7.9% of people aged 18-39 take SSRIs, and as you said, only 50% of people get sexual dysfunction from it, so I don't think that's the main cause.
Maybe it's the social alienation. Maybe it's the dehumanizing work that pays nothing. Who knows, maybe it's the fucking microplastics everywhere. Seriously, why is there almost no research into the most obvious case of global mass poisoning in history?
>According to the CDC, only 7.9% of people aged 18-39 take SSRIs, and as you said, only 50% of people get sexual dysfunction from it, so I don't think that's the main cause.
Much appreciated! Yes, that seems too small a fraction of the population to be the main effect.
Agreeing that it's at least reasonable to be concerned about the health impacts of ubiquitous microplastics. And about whether, in the extreme case, at least, these might be having material or even profound impacts on many living organisms, including humans.
If this helps, there are a fair number of researchers looking into those potential health impacts, as well as where those materials are being found – in the environment and in the bodies of living organisms.
Just three representative examples here, among many:
"Fatty liver was a disease of the old. Then kids started getting sick"
https://wapo.st/3TedL05
(This is a Washington Post gift link, to bypass the paywall for this article through March 3, 2024)
"Could Microplastics Be a Driver for Early Onset Colorectal Cancer?"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10340669/
"Detection of various microplastics in placentas, meconium, infant feces, breastmilk and infant formula: A pilot prospective study"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722057989
It looks like there has been an increase in anti-depressant prescribing since at least the mid-1990s: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3162179/
But it doesn't appear to have doubled since then, suggesting that there must have been a bigger increase in the previous decade.
Scott: it's been a little more than a month. Am I unbanished?
I think If you were fully banished there would have been a campaign to reinstate you.
Absolutely. :-)
Welcome back!
Your username used to have a "(Banned)" next to it, and now it doesn't, so I assume that means that you're fine? I got the impression that if you're banned, you literally cannot comment, so just the fact that you're commenting should mean that it's OK?
I wasn't sure. I've never been banned before on Substack before, so I don't know how the penalty box on Substack works. The message I got from Substack said I was banned, but it didn't put an expiration date on the ban. So I assumed I was banned forever and I unsubscribed (now I'm getting resubscription requests). It was only later after catching up on some old open threads that I saw I was only banned for a month.
> but it didn't put an expiration date on the ban
Oh, that really makes me pissed at Substack.
I almost want to ask Scott for a 1-day ban for myself, so I can see what it's like.
It would appear so?
I don't know how often Scott checks in on his salon. I'll wait until I get his go-ahead before I post anything else. <shrugging my shoulders>
I think he checks on reported comments and such *very* infrequently. And I'm pretty sure if you're banned it's impossible to post, so if you can post at all it's OK. I'm technically the administrator of another Substack, and I have the option to ban people from posting for a day, a month, 3 mos. or a year. Substack I think implements that setting automatically by blocking the person's comments, and then stops blocking them when their sentence is up.
Thanks, E. for that info. The email I received from Substack was that I was banned, and it didn't put a time limit on the ban. Later on, in one of the threads, I saw that I was only banned for a month. Unfortunately, there's no way to query my Substack profile on Substack to see if I'm banned nor when the ban expires. But I'm going to assume I'm unbanned now.
Good! Welcome back. There's a vax thread further down with people saying N Zealand data shows vax kills more than it saves, or something like that. Maybe you'd like to weigh in. It's pretty civil so you won't be in much danger of slapping faces and getting banned again.
Oh, no. Not the New Zealand vax argument again!
I run a small non-profit makerspace in College Station, Texas, where I go to school. We have a great thing going but we’re constantly struggling for money. Does anyone know of any specific resources we would be able to draw from? We are a registered 501(c)(3) corporation
I'm not super connected, but I imagine there's a vast network of Old Ag engineering alumni you could tap into. Maybe call up the alumni association and ask them for some leads? (Though their primary function is to ask *you* for money).
Also -- are you a registered student organization? You can get some money from the university itself that way. Not sure how peanuts that would be on your scale, tho.
That’s not a bad idea, I should give them a call for sure. We aren’t officially a registered student org, but we do have an *officially unaffiliated* student org that we use to advertise on campus. The student org finance center is horrible to work with though, so I doubt we’d be able to get money out of the student org and into the makerspace without raising some red flags.
Yeah you're probably better off finding some rich Old Ag who thinks what you're doing is cool and seek funding that way. Not sure where you'd find such people though.
How much money do you need to keep yourselves around?
EDIT: One thought is you could try to get some publicity from the alumni association magazine or whatever and then try to use that to fish for donations from Old Ags. University loves to brag about what folks are doing in Aggieland... I dunno, good luck!
Currently our baseline yearly expenses are around $30k, for rent and utilities. We’re easily bringing in around $20k from memberships, so just like $15k per year is enough to keep us afloat with our current circumstances and keeping our tools working.
That’s another great idea, we should see if they can write something about us and what we’re doing.
Thanks Lars, really appreciate the help!
You could also consider charging a little bit more and being honest with people about what your expenses are. Do you perceive they'd balk if you raised the prices?
Actually, I do think so. ~85% of our members are students who can barely afford the discounted student membership, and I would guess that we would lose significant money if we raised the price. For our few non-student members, we could potentially raise the price but I’m not sure we have enough members in that category to make a substantial impact, and the risk of losing one or 2 of them outweighs the gains from an extra $10-$20/month from the rest
Substack Notes is a dumpster fire. An abomination. A wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Today, we have some dude claiming that the British assassinated Navalny. Because ... well, he doesn't have any reasons that aren't transparent bullshit, but that doesn't stop him. And, yet, this is on my feed.
There was incessant talk two months ago about "banning the Nazis" (and, possibly, anyone who is trans-phobic or racist or supports Trump as well). And I was against this.
But, Substack does have a massive problem. Their "Notes" product is repeatedly recommending crap, faster than I can block my way out of it.
Can Substack do anything about this? Or is this indeed another doomed social platform.
Your comment is only defensible if you think everywhere else with user-generated content is/was at least as bad. Pre-Musk twitter had much, MUCH more stupid and vile stuff on there, it's just that you're likely to have more ideologically in common with those particular nutters than the ones on substack.
Today's low-light in Notes is a series of "how to hire a dominatrix" blog posts.
I don't know who these people are. I don't know why they are recommended. Clearly, the consensus is that the only way to stop seeing it is to quit Substack.
Goodbye.
I really hope you have a similar reaction when scott and others incessantly tell us what literal rape-orgy-enjoying prostitute Aella has to say on some topic, otherwise complaining about such a post seems bizarre.
Isn’t what you see dependent on who you follow, like all social media. Unless it’s the “top lists” which you can ignore.
The real problem with notes is that it serves no real purpose. I don’t post except on threads so there’s no engagement.
Too bad they don't have a "less of this" button instead of blocking. I'm thinking of one I see restacked 10+ times a day. I don't mind seeing it once, but 10 times!
Stuff like this should be implemented on every social media site:
- https://www.manyver.se/faq/moderation/
- https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
- Personal filters that consist of a list of entries applied in order (so that later entries can supersede earlier ones), each of which is a keyword such as "deny", "allow", "hidemedia", etc along with a condition under which the action should be applied.
I.e. "deny author==idiot" to block someone, or "deny server==nazis; allow author==the_one_good_user@nazis" to block an entire, say, fediverse instance except for one user
Unfortunately, the Internet is like that.
One of the main conspiracy theory games appears to be taking two existing conspiracy theories and arguing that they are, in fact, connected. Thus, we see people arguing, ostensibly seriously, that Navalny died of an adverse reaction to a COVID vaccination.
At this rate, you can bring in the JFK assassination, reptiles from outer space, Roswell, the Great Pyramid of Giza, etc, to taste.
Someone may already have written a LLM app to do this. Maybe it's posting.
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/966/
>Someone may already have written a LLM app to do this. Maybe it's posting.
Have any of the tabloids had notable layoffs lately? When one's standard lead article is <celebrity1> is a secret love child of a Roswell Gray and <celebrity2>, generating them via LLM seems like a natural application...
Sorry, could you clarify whether the issue is garbage or right-wing garbage?
I mean, if the issue is garbage, like yeah, I sympathize, but I don't know any place that's better than Substack. It's just a general internet problem that no one has solved, or else the cool kids solved it and they're off on a secluded server somewhere, away from us plebs.
If the issue is right-wing garbage, I mean, if you want to purge right-wing garbage and let the left-wing garbage flow...you could just go to Reddit. I mean, that's dismissive and I'm sorry but I really can't think of another way to phrase it. Because I've seen places where the right-wing garbage gets purged and the left-wing garbage flows and, genuinely, I don't know why the internet needs another substandard reddit clone.
My issue is garbage. The issue in the high-profile kerfuffle a few months ago was specifically right-wing garbage.
I don't know if "the British killed Navalny" even is right-wing. Weren't the Laroucheites Democrats?
It’s not right wing or left wing. It’s also improbable but not impossible. Not really something to get upset about.
...Why are you looking at Substack Notes in the first place? I honestly didn't even know that was a thing, I thought Substack was just a blogging platform. If they're trying to make some stupid social media platform on here, that's obviously a horrible idea. Don't use it.
I think Notes is fine way to avoid Twitter. Why I even note there! :)
I know everyone hates on Twitter, but I started using about a month ago, and it was... actually pretty good? I mostly just use it to follow artists, but as long as you heavily curate your timeline, the algorithm is decent at giving you things you like. You know it's working when you stop seeing blue checkmarks in your timeline.
There's a Notes? How was I so fortunate as to avoid this, or you so unlucky as to fall into it?
EDIT: Okay, I had to go look at it. So they're trying to be Twitter (or X)? Or something of that nature? Given that there are a ton of "leave X and come post on our site" clones out there, and I am not interested in any one of them, this doesn't recommend itself to me.
It's like a living example of the old post about how if you make a pro-free speech twitter clone you'll get five principled libertarians and a million witches.
(unlike using substack for actual blogging, which has arguments for it that aren't just "twitter but with less censorship")
Everyone's all for free speech until they realize that it gives complete morons a voice.
Well… I think it’s possible to be for free speech, and simultaneously skeptical of algorithms that curate, boost and amplify speech (particularly by morons), based on opaque goals that are almost never aligned with the interests of the audience. (The alignment problem is not science fiction.)
So there's an important distinction here. Free speech as in just not banning speech (like the classic substack blogging) ends up mostly fine (there some crazy Nazi blogs but they're not especially prevalent and overall substack blogs seem to reflect mainstream society). Free speech *when you are announcing it as your selling point* is selectively drawing the people who aren't welcome anywhere else, and tends to turn out badly.
This is only actionable if the people who ban speech are consistently not morons. They are not.
Good point!
Complete morons already have a voice though.
They didn't have one before the internet was a thing.
The still had less of a voice than now when they had to write the HTML code and convince someone to link them.
But the greatest problem are the recommendation algorithms. Before that, the morons at least had to convince someone to look at them and recommend them (and you could easily ignore recommendations from people who have recommended morons in the past). Now it is an algorithm pushing stupidity in front of your eyes and not taking "no" for an answer. Instead of merely providing space, the publishers are actively helping the morons.
As a fully paid up and card-carrying member of the Moron Community, I resemble that allegation!
The easiest way is to ignore this stuff in the first place. I honestly can't see why anyone would sign up to Notes, but a lot of spaces seem to be throwing the kitchen sink at it in an attempt to monetise every scrap of content and eyeballs they can.
I use Notes to attract attention to my Substack, "Radical Centrist."
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com
https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/money-justice-and-effective-altruism/
This seems deserving of a thoughtful response.
So I've suddenly become politically excited by RFK Jr. and his independent run. I'm going to volunteer to get him on the ballot here in NY state. Anyone else with a similar vibe?
(Full disclosure, I've been buying Kennedy yes on the manifold president market.)
I'm curious who you would vote for if only Biden and Trump were on the ballot.
NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny noted Thursday that when Kennedy was asked on the “Health Freedom for Humanity” podcast in 2021 how parents should respond to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention schedule of immunizations for children, which his questioner described as “insane,” he responded by encouraging people to join him in telling strangers not to vaccinate their babies.
“For many, many years, I think parents were so gaslighted, and they were scapegoated, and they were vilified and marginalized, so that even parents of kids who were very, very badly injured, knew what happened to their kid, but they were just reluctant to talk about it. And I think now those days are over,” Kennedy said.
“We – our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/21/politics/fact-check-rfk-not-anti-vax/index.html
Presumably he can't be _directly_ on the payroll of the pathogens themselves, since the typical virus particle doesn't have a discretionary budget... He's doing a pretty good imitation of that behavior, though... https://xkcd.com/2455/
When it comes to poverty and war and yes, public health, I'm appalled by both Biden and Trump's disregard for human life; there's enough agreement between them on the big issues that I don't even see the point of having an election
and yet I think rolling back universal vaccination and bringing back things like measles would be even deadlier, looking at pre-vaccination life expectancy numbers. As always, I'll be casting a lonely protest vote this year (if I even bother voting)
What agreements do you see between Trump and Biden? On which big issues?
War, wealth inequality, and having the freedom to organize against either of those things instead of facing censorship and mass surveillance when we try. Who cares about different faces when they work for the same donors?
both the Assange prosecution and the Fed chair stretched between administrations, which really says it all about which side they're both on. No minimum wage hikes, no more stimulus checks, no effort to address PPP fraud or give the uninsured medicine or protect workers from catching Covid on the job or address the housing crisis in any way. Dude even caved to the right on immigration policy in order to get more money for funding wars, which is the only thing he cares about.
Do you see them as different from other plausible presidential candidates (including past presidents) or similar?
It seems to me that actually Trump and Biden are the two *least* pro-war candidates we've had in decades - seems like progress on de-funding war!
>I'm appalled by both Biden and Trump's disregard for human life;
There really seems to be a substantial difference between the two of them:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/27/biden-drone-strikes-limits-civilians/
https://airwars.org/research/civilian-deaths-by-us-president-in-iraq-and-syria/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/08/26/us-significant-plan-pentagon-protect-civilians
All of these were notoriously written before October 2023
and it's not just foreign lives he's ended; US Life expectancy is well below where it was when he was elected, and his answers seem to be "have the CDC determine quarantine length based on politics, not medicine" and "refuse to confront the power of the health insurance industry in any meaningful way"
Leaving aside the dubiousness of inferring that a President does not value human life from the fact that life expectancy has declined, it doesn't even seem to be true. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr031.pdf
So...he's talking about vaccination against anything?
Yes
Hmm, yeah I expect as his popularity (hopefully) grows that we'll see more and more hit pieces in the MSM. And yeah he's got some outside the box (or Overton window) ideas, and I don't agree with all of them. That said I think giving the covid vaccine to kids was a bad idea, but we can disagree about that.
If by hit pieces you mean "pieces accurately quoting him," as this one did, I certainly hope we'll see "more and more hit pieces in the MSM." And then he can either defend his statements, walk them back, or repudiate them.
He's outside the box on this. Yes, its becoming clear the COVID vaccine didn't work, and may have been harmful. However, we eliminated—with vaccines—the top ten causes of childhood death which plagued our great grandparents 100 years ago.
Vaccination, any vaccination is about 0.9999 save. About ten in a million or one in 100,000 will die of just the injection alone. For a good vaccine, like the polio vaccine, the risk is well worth the reward. For COVID, there was no reward, hence the risk was all downside. The US data is shit because we have multiple health departments, but for countries with one solid program like New Zealand, the data shows that mortality increases with more vaccinations.
Wait, you think the fatality rate of *injections* is 1 per 100,000? Seems like we ought to be banning a *lot* of basic dental and medical procedures if they are really killing that many people through giving them injections in order to clean their teeth or whatever.
Can you link to that New Zealand data? I'm not finding anything showing that with a quick google and what I am finding is quite confusing with some anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine debate articles without any links to the actual data.
https://thewhiterose.uk/new-zealand-excess-deaths-correlate-to-those-who-have-been-mrna-vaccinated/
Is there any link to the actual data? Its not clear how many people are in which group and if there are many differences between the populations studied. Also this page has a link to the "tens of thousands dead of vaccine in New Zealand" claim from back in December that was widely debunked as an incorrect interpretation of the data. Which doesn't mean this claim isn't true, but sure makes me skeptical.
Every vaccine has some risk, I think admitting that to people would be the best thing to do. (Of course this means people have to understand what a 1 in a 100,000 risk is.)
Regarding that "in New Zealand, the data shows that mortality increases with more vaccinations" claim, I'd like to know the source for that, as well, Michael Kelly!
I looked briefly into one claim based on New Zealand's health data around COVID vaccinations – that vaccinated people were more likely to become infected. (Someone posted a chart to that effect on "vaccination status of new cases," albeit without a link where one could find the underlying data or summaries.)
Here's what I found (mini-thread on X/Twitter):
https://twitter.com/aronro/status/1750338466519699759
As part of that brief look, I also came across this ... it doesn't directly address morality, but according to one tabular summary published on Health New Zealand's website, someone in the "no doses" group was about 5X more likely to end up needing ICU care (0.002) than someone from the "received booster" group (0.0004):
https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/our-health-system/data-and-statistics/covid-19-data/covid-19-case-demographics/#vaccination-details
But that quote isn't about giving covid vaccine to babies. It's about the regular schedule of vaccines -- measles, mumps, typhoid etc. Here is the CDC Schedule he was asked about on the podcast, and answered as quoted above: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html
And I don't think it's reasonable to call this a hit piece. Hit pieces are a mix of facts & lies, all glued together in an overall negative take about somebody. The article I linked literally just recounts a fact.
OK sorry I didn't read the whole piece. So maybe he was an anti-vaxer and then changed his mind... IDK? I haven't really been paying any attention to him till a few weeks ago. Look everyone can find things that they don't like about a candidate. And if that's too big of a negative for you, that's fine. Maybe it's even enough of a negative for you to actively work against him. Also fine.
For me, this looks like the best hope. I liked the idea of Trump (in theory, an new independent voice.), in practice I dislike Trump. But he has shown that someone not on the traditional political path can be elected. I think the fact of Trump, gives Kennedy a better chance of winning, than if he had run before Trump. Just my opinion.
You...didn't read the whole piece before calling it a hit piece?
He isn't saying he changed his mind. He's saying he didn't say vaxes (including the standard ones for little kids) are dangerous. Or that he"wasn't clear" or that his words "were misinterpreted." And the stuff he said about vaccines wasn't just a coupla remarks that people are digging up now. It was something he clearly felt strongly about and spoke about often.
OK I have no idea, I hope someone will ask him about that. (Maybe he'll be on Rogan again.) But still you are saying that Kennedy now thinks most childhood vaccines are a good thing. Right? So even if he is doing a bit of the politician shuffle, he now has an opinion that we both could agree with? I can live with that.
> But he has shown that someone not on the traditional political path can be elected.
Even Trump had to go through one of the major parties. Kennedy can't win the Republican primary, because Trump is running and they're the Trump party now. And he can't win the Democratic primary because he's anti-vax.
From comments upstream, he apparently is no longer anti-vax (joining the main stream) but he's now lying about his previous anti-vax position. Which is not a good look, and I hope he tells us why he changed his mind.
Yeah, of all people... a Kennedy? and THIS Kennedy?! Jesus wept.
Personally I've been hoping for some independent candidate for years. This is the best one I've seen come down the tracks in a long time. You can not like him which is fine. For me, he's good enough. And the idea that maybe, just maybe, we could break open the political can of worms that we have currently, with the election of one person, is exciting. What if....
First off, third party rather than "independent", please. We aren't electing a dictator, but someone whose job is to lead a coalition. That's something you can do, with a bit of finesse, if you lead a minority party whose legislative members can put the coalition over the top, but if you have *zero* representation in the legislature, you're not going to do much from the White House. And you're not going to lay the foundation for anything more in the future.
Second, a third-party (or independent) candidate who is an obvious kook or dimwit, is worse than no third-party candidate at all. People will correctly see that an actual RFK Jr presidency would be a disaster, and only the ones who just want to watch the world(*) burn will vote for them. Which means everyone else will just see it as evidence that the whole concept of third-party/independent candidates is for kooks, dimwits, and people who just want to watch the world burn,
That makes it harder for actually reasonable third-party candidates to accomplish anything in the future.
* Or at least the current US political system, on which a great deal of the world depends.
Sure third party if you prefer. I can defend no one* from the claim of kook or dimwit. (I really know very little about him.) He's going to have to do that for himself. I'm hungry for any third party. And I'm not sure but I think plenty of others are too. And this means we will continue to crystalize around whatever crazy seed crystal descends into the political arena. I'd take another Ross Perot. Anyway consider me crystalized, at least for the time being. I can always go back to my Tom Bombadil existence.
*Well maybe myself, but I don't really care if people think of me as a kook or dimwit.
One clear way of recognizing dimwits in this context is that they believe the proper sequence is,
1. Become President of the United States
2. Form a political party
Instead of the other way around.
He can't. Win. There's no path to 270. There isn't even a path to 3.
OK maybe come September, I'll agree with you. But at the moment I'm excited by the potential that he could win. And dang, I'd have someone to vote *for*, and be doing my civic duty getting him on the ballot in NY. I see very little downside in supporting him.
Sure, that's fine. Although I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view on politician "desirability": maybe on a local level it's ok to be excited by a mayoral candidate or something. For President? I want to hold my nose and vote, the last thing we need is to get enamoured with a sociopath with that kind of power, I want "my" candidate to win, but I don't want to like him/her.
Dynastic politics leads to mediocrity, news at 7.
It is so tiring... Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Bush, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, etc. ad nauseam. The nation of 300+ million keeps coming back to the same people like a dog to its vomit.
At least it's not just America. Look at India or Indonesia.
Oh, there’s always a crappier place, and we’re far from the worst. But I live here, I love this mess of a country of ours, and want us to do better.
Same as it ever was; Adams, Adams, Roosevelt, Roosevelt. (There must be more.)
Read what he says, he is a bit hard to listen to which is a problem (gravely voice), but he's at least better than Ross Perot in that regard.
I can't say I do, but could you explain what it is you like about him? I've never really encountered someone who was excited about his candidacy and I'd be interested to know what parts of his platform are appealing beyond "He isn't Trump or Biden", which I admit, is a little compelling on its own.
So here is a link to his announcement as an independent candidate. https://robertfkennedyjr.substack.com/p/kennedy-independent-presidential-candidate?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
You can read a the transcript and get a good idea.
He says almost all the right things as far as I am concerned. (Though I don't agree with all his ideas.)
1.) Stop all the tribalism and get ideas from both sides.
2.) Try and decouple big business from government, especially big pharma.
3.) Sane immigration policy. (Strong borders but also better immigration laws... let more 'good' people in.)
4.) Cares about the environment and outdoors.
5.) Mostly just a vibe, that what's important are not either party, but all Americans.
Though mostly liberal, I live in Trump country and when I talk to people I work with about him almost everyone seems to like the idea... mostly just that everyone is sick of the current situation. And I want to get him on the ballot so I can vote for someone I support.
Those all sound good as vague aspirations, but the devil’s in the details. Given that Kennedy bases 2 on some pretty out there antivax theories, I’m not confident I’d feel good about his actual plan for the other 4.
OK first those are just my takes, you can read the speech for what he really said. As far as fixing things. (and this is just me talking out my ass) I think what he'll do is listen to both sides, take the best ideas from both sides and craft a comprise solution that ~75% of us will agree is OK. I think there are lots of 'problems' out there for which this would work. (And some problems are ginned up outrage by the politicians to get donations.) I know this is the same pie in the sky as always. Hmm maybe bring back the Progressive Party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_States,_1912%E2%80%931920)
Look at that platform.
Hell yes. Now if we could only resurrect Teddy Roosevelt...
RFK Jr. may be as close as we are going to get. He is also much less of a war hawk compared to Teddy R.
So basically he is for everything good and against everything bad. "Stop tribalism", "Try and decouple" - is he going to actually "decouple" or just "try"; "sane policy", "care about outdoors", who could possibly be against any of this, why haven't we tried this before, if we could only elect the right guy to be President....
Sorry, I don't mean to be sounding combative, but the whole idea of "independent run" for President is just a giant narcissistic trip. And a Kennedy! of all people he should know that it's structurally impossible for him to win anything, because of the Electoral College, so the whole thing is just a giant ego boost and a scam.
If he really - really - wanted to have an impact, there's an obvious route - run for Senate. While it's impossible to be elected as an independent President, there are no structural obstacles to an independent Senate run. And Senators have enormous power, and can produce real impact. But this means actual boring hard work, as opposed to glamorous doomed campaign.
You don't sound combative. And yeah anyone who wants to be Prez. has got to have a big ego. And yeah he says all the right things. Why is that bad?
Another independent senator would be fine, but I don't think it would do much to change things. And I think he may have a better chance winning a presidential election (Given most peoples disgust with the current two choices) than he would at a senate run in whatever state he lives in.
"And yeah he says all the right things. Why is that bad? "
This is actually an excellent question! The reason I think it's bad is that these things are indeed all good, but simply saying them belies the fundamental reasons why they are not done. It makes it indeed sound like if we only could get the right guy in, who wants to do the right thing, everything will be better!
But there are huge structural/cultural/etc. obstacles to have things that most people agree on implemented. See also "Moloch". So saying all the right things without also saying why they haven't been done, and what obstacles the say-er will need to overcome and how, is just hollow and useless.
Oh dear, well first, as I start to respond I feel like... "How can I be filled with so much hubris? I really hardly know anything." With that said, I think we can point to most of the problems, and at possible solutions. Obviously one person can't do this. If elected he would have to build a political coalition to do things, but dang that's exciting, maybe the birth of a new political party. As far as Moloch, yeah that's a force in the world. I think it's a force that can be combated, mostly by choosing love and charity over greed. There is also a collective action problem with Moloch, it takes a large number acting together... one person is powerless.
Oh I need to add that I think most politicians do want to help our country to succeed, and if given a chance some will choose that path. You can call me a pie in the sky optimist, which I agree I can be. The alternative is just not me. Oh I guess my alternative is to become Tom Bombadil, and retreat into my own private garden. (which I've been doing for the past decade or so.)
Yea that's new one for me too and I spend plenty of time around "plague on both their houses" voters. (Having been such a voter myself for most of my adult life.)
You might recall the name Robespierre from a history class or TV show, but you may not have heard of Danton, and the great contest between them for the heart of the French Revolution. Why did Robespierre win, momentarily? A film from 1983 makes the case: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-danton-and-robespierre
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/14/us/fertility-fraud-accidental-incest-invs/index.html
Men working at or owning fertility clinics slipping in their own sperm isn't news, but this is an overview.
This is evidence that a few people have a pure urge to procreate. I believe that, for the most part, people having children is a combination of liking sex, willingness to raise existing children, and wanting children who will be helpful or just having the satisfaction of having a large or at least ongoing family. There's generally no desire to just have children that aren't connected to oneself, except for these guys. The cruder Darwinian version of life is made flesh.
I think the best strategy to avoid incest would be to choice partners whose parents were too poor for IVF. A strong but less certain strategy would be to choose partners who have both younger and older siblings. I think this indicates that the parents were unlikely to use IVF.
It's not clear to me why a separate law about fertility fraud is needed. Shouldn't ordinary laws about fraud cover this?
Note from the article-- it seems that fertility fraud has pretty much stopped as a result of common DNA tests.
I have a friend who grew up in India, and he's told me it's common in his culture for men to take pride in having as many children as possible. It's seen as a status symbol and is more attractive to men who can't attain higher status through wealth.
Particularly religious Indians also like having a lot of children to bolster the ranks of their faith. My friend (who is Hindu) said India's recent ban on under-18 marriages was meant to target older Muslim men who buy teenage girls from poor Muslim families so they can turn them into baby factories.
> There's generally no desire to just have children that aren't connected to oneself, except for these guys. The cruder Darwinian version of life is made flesh.
I've met multiple black men who take pride specifically in fathering children, without actually wanting anything to do with children themselves. One was literally on a mission to impregnate a woman in all 50 states, and of his "successes" to date, he had contact with zero of his children and wanted it to stay that way (unless they became rich I guess).
A sounder strategy with fewer undesirable consequences and less offense to the human spirit would be to pick the partner of your choice and run a couple of cheap DNA tests to ensure you aren't genetically related. Trying to imagine someone saying "Sorry dear, I know we seem very compatible and I have to admit I've been growing closer to you every day, but I just can't see us working out. The minuscule marginal risk that we are related to each other that results from the fact that your parents weren't too poor to have theoretically conceived you via IVF is a dealbreaker for me. What's that, you say they didn't use IVF? Well, there's no real way to be sure."
"There's generally no desire to just have children that aren't connected to oneself, except for these guys."
Donating sperm is a nearly effortless way to sire children. You might even get paid. And then you can tell yourself you are being altruistic by helping these poor women to have children (and your superior genetics are an absolute gift to any future family). I think a lot of men would be happy to donate sperm, we're pretty much wired for this. And then we can dream that 20 years in the future we will meet our handsome and thriving children on ancestry.com.
In France they have strict laws on the number of children that can be sired by one donor.
>"It's not clear to me why a separate law about fertility fraud is needed. Shouldn't ordinary laws about fraud cover this?"
From the article: "The near-absence of laws criminalizing the practice of fertility fraud until recently means no doctors have yet been criminally charged for the behavior."
Presumably (IANAL) there's some element of generic fraud that isn't met by fertility fraud; my best guess would be that the latter doesn't meet the criteria for injury/damage as typically written.
We have laws against financial fraud, and against rape by deception... but fertility fraud is neither. It is a new type of crime that didn't exist before. (IANAL)
Or, I suppose, fertility fraud technically *is* a kind of fraud -- the service you paid for is not exactly the service that was actually delivered, and that per se should already be illegal -- but either the punishment does not fit the seriousness of the crime (if the seriousness is determined by the *financial* damage caused) or there is some kind of loophole that a smart lawyer could use to defend the doctor (you agreed to get sperms from a random guy, so in theory that also *could* have been me, right? so your objection is basically that I nudged the probabilities, but hey, my clinic is not a lottery, we do not have a legal duty to keep the probabilities fair).
I don't think it makes sense to take drastic action to avoid the risk of incest. IVF isn't that common, and there are lots of different sperm banks, so the chance of dating someone else from the same sperm bank, and that bank suffering from this kind of fraud, are very low.
If you are concerned, I guess you could find out what sperm bank your parents used, if any.
You'll definitely come out ahead genetically if you date rich people, anyway. Great association between wealth and IQ.
There was some guy at California Cryo who was chosen by many women, and something like 100 of them had his baby. Probably more of them are in Calif. than elsewhere, though the place did ship, and the numbers in that situation do seem a bit worrisome to me. By the way, sperm banks aren't just used in IVF. The sperm can be used by a fertility clinic for IUI (intrauterine insemination -- doctors just go through the cervix and put the sperm in the uterus at the time the woman is ovulating). This is much cheaper & easier, and I think much commoner than IVF. The buyer of the sperm can also just inject it into the vagina themselves with little needleless hypodermic type thing.
Couldn't you just use a service like 23andme to confirm that your potential partner is not a sibling?
I wonder if I dare make a joke to the effect of 23andme matches putting you in touch with a lot of really cool people you could ask out.
Choosing a partner from a different race seems like a much simpler strategy, and much more efficacious in avoiding incest, and without the negatives associated with poor grandparents.
Okay, but you'll likely introduce a bunch of other negatives.
Are you referring to outbreeding depression? There doesn't seem to be much evidence of this in humans.
No, he's referring to his belief that black people are violent morons.
That would seem like a very bad reason to avoid e.g. European/Asian matings.
Supposedly a lot of fentanyl overdoses are just product contamination- i.e. a batch of 'regular' cocaine or heroin or something else accidentally gets a small but fatal amount of fentanyl mixed in with it somewhere in the illegal drug supply chain. Presumably that supply chain is not exactly very rigorous or have high quality standards.
If so- why does the US have so many more fentanyl ODs than Europe? Why isn't fentanyl mixed in with their illegal drugs, coke etc., as it is in ours?
What I've been told is that fentanyl is cheap, so adding a bit of it to a different drug will give that other drug a bit more kick while still saving money. It's a way to water down a drug while making your customers keep coming back. And from what I understand, an occasional death is a selling point - it shows that the drug is "good stuff", and of course all the addicts are sure that **they** can handle it, not like those fools who overdosed.
But diluting a drug with another drug can have unexpected interactions, and also makes it easy to overdose, possibly especially if the person is also taking fentanyl by itself. And if an overdose happens, it's harder to save the person's life if no one is certain what drug they took.
As to why the US, I expect we just have a more "unregulated" market, as it were. More of a "wild west" situation, where you get stuff but you're never really sure what's in it. I bet someone here will be able to tie it to Mexican cartels and the border situation with Mexico, since that's where most of our drugs come from.
Europe just has less drug addicts, possibly due to having less disposable income and a better social safety net.
>Europe just has less drug addicts, possibly due to having less disposable income and a better social safety net.
Do you have a SINGLE jot of evidence to support this relationship? People make these sweeping assumptions constantly without ever posting any proof for them. Like, I get it flatters your world view, but you need hard data to make claims like this.
I'm really not sure disposable income is the limiting factor to drug addiction. Drug addicts are not known for their high earnings.
People usually start out non-addicted and get addicted slowly over time. So your initial income matters.
Wow, so you're telling me that crack cocaine epidemic in the african american community afflicted black people who used to be wealthy? And that these wealthy people weirdly sought out a form of drug used primarily because...its cheaper than other forms? What a bizarre theory you have
Yes supposedly. In reality product contamination, laced drugs, etc, are just euphemisms we use to remove responsibility from the user, and allow the family to feel better. It allows people to think that an innocent kid was tricked, instead of the kid was a hard drug user and paid the price.
Of course horrendous things do happen: five kids thinking they were popping a Xanax die. But this is exceedingly rare. You cut drugs with cheap shit, not fentanyl and other expensive things. Fentanyl overdoses are so common because so many people take fentanyl.
Fentanyl may have been expensive at one time, but on a dealer cost per dose basis I believe it's been cheap for at least 20 years. When much of the cost of an illegal drug comes from the risks associated with smuggling it, having something where the dose size is in the micrograms helps a lot.
It’s awfully expensive compared to baking soda.
Drugs aren’t often cut with things that give them totally different psychoactive properties. Dealers who do this don’t remain dealers. Sometimes uppers are cut with cheaper uppers. But aside from that, cutting is used to decrease purity.
The danger in fentanyl, like you said, is that the lethal dose is small. And it’s everywhere and easy and cheap to get. You accidentally overdose from taking too much. Not from taking something cut with it.
<morbid humor>
"This product is manufactured on equipment that processes products containing fentanyl."
</morbid humor>
This is my understanding as well, with the added note that fentanyl, being purely synthetic, is inherently cheaper/faster to produce at scale than heroin, which ultimately still comes from a cultivated flower.
Some possible pushback on Temagami's interesting claim that product contamination with Fentanyl is "exceedingly rare."
https://www.dea.gov/alert/dea-laboratory-testing-reveals-6-out-10-fentanyl-laced-fake-prescription-pills-now-contain
"The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is alerting the public of a sharp nationwide increase in the lethality of fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills.
"The DEA Laboratory has found that, of the fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills analyzed in 2022, six out of ten now contain a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl. This is an increase from DEA’s previous announcement in 2021 that four out of ten fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills were found to contain a potentially lethal dose. ...
"These pills are largely made by two Mexican drug cartels, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco (CJNG) Cartel, to look identical to real prescription medications, including OxyContin®, Percocet®, and Xanax®, and they are often deadly."
It's worth noting this press release doesn't directly address how many, or what percentage, of the vast numbers of fake prescription pills contain Fentanyl. Nor why an expensive contaminant might be making its way into these. (This is also orthogonal to whatever extent street drugs, other than these fake prescription products, might contain fentanyl.)
But here are two conjectures: one conspiratorial (as crappy as it is for me to mention it), and another perhaps more suitable for Occam's Razor:
1. Since these pills are being manufactured using chemicals imported by Mexican cartels from China, perhaps there's an effort on the part of the PRC – akin to their ongoing hacking efforts into US infrastructure – to harm Americans, particularly military-aged men. Especially if China might be eyeing a possible invasion of Taiwan within the next 5-10 years and expecting to meet a US miliary response. (Yes, that's conspiratorial in the extreme, but mentioning this for the sake of completeness.)
2. Simple sloppiness, which seems ... possible? If you're cooking up a bunch of Fentanyl and also making other street drugs and fake prescription drugs, perhaps there's cross-contamination during manufacturing? (Much as, say, some food packages note that their products are made in facilities where tree nuts and other allergens are also present.)
"six out of ten now contain a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl"
This is obviously pure propaganda, right? Just remember what these same people said about marijuana for decades. You're better off using pretty much any other source.
Here's a third: sloppiness on the part of the user. Fentanyl is very popular. It is very popular to take stacked with other drugs. It is very easy to take too much. Many people die this way. But there was no cutting, mislabeling, lab mistakes, etc. And when it is a rich white kid, the death will be presented as an accident.
Almost all overdoses are accidents. So it's not even that misleading to label them this way.
I'm seeing this from very drug-friendly harm-reduction agencies, too. Lots of signs, aimed at a largely homeless population, saying to be careful, to buy from trusted sources, what the symptoms to watch out for are, and so on.
Piggybacking a shower thought of mine about fentanyl on here: If the shit kills so quickly, why can't we use that in executions? I know, I know, doctors are saying they'd love to help. but the Hippocratic oath prevents them. They have hearts of stainless steel, those guys. But there must be batches of seized fentanyl in police stations. I wish somebody would sneak some over to the poor doomed bastards the night before the execution, to save them from being tortured by goobers who can't carry out the other methods correctly. Or they could use heroin -- no MD script required.
Eh, I think if we're going to have executions, we might as well use a guillotine and be done with it. It's fast, and honest, and 100% effective.
But I'm one of those weirdos who's against the death penalty and for corporal punishment.
I am against the death penalty too. I just think that if we are going to have it then we should at least kill people quickly, and not torture them to death by botching the procedure. I think a lot of the push against doctors helping with prescriptions and executioner training is so that executions will be especially horrible, and that will make us more likely to abolish the death penalty. So the man writhing through his botched execution is being used as a weapon in the fight. Hey docs, letting someone die in agony so you can use his agony to strengthen your case is an instance of doing harm. And by the way, eat shit and die, docs. In fact eat shit and die writhing.
There are ways to kill people painlessly that do not require a doctor. Just suffocate them with pure nitrogen. It will feel like falling asleep, because our feeling of suffocation is triggered by the presence of CO2, not by the lack of O2.
So I could ask similarly, given that there are simple ways to kill people painlessly *without* a doctor, why do you insist that a doctor should do it? Will it make you feel better knowing that a person in a white lab coat did it? Will it help you pretend that it was just an ordinary medical intervention?
Bringing a bottle of nitrogen and pressing the button is easy, feel free to volunteer.
Entirely reasonable. ( Frankly, if I had a terminal condition with an unpleasant endgame, I'd be ordering a cylinder of N2 myself. ) And yet, Arkansas somehow managed to botch it. :-(
Agreed. A nice thing about guillotines is that they don't need to be made by a doctor. Executions are so expensive these days, it'd be cheaper to build a single-use guillotine for each execution. Or they could just replace it with a 1 ton weight: strap the guy down, drop a rock on his head.
> Hey docs, letting someone die in agony so you can use his agony to strengthen your case is an instance of doing harm.
That sounds rather like Hamas.
>Or they could just replace it with a 1 ton weight: strap the guy down, drop a rock on his head.
Only 1 moving part! Even a State government should be able to manage that - well, on a good day...
<Or they could just replace it with a 1 ton weight: strap the guy down, drop a rock on his head
Ah, minimalist execution methods. It's ridiculously easy to off someone while causing very little pain. If you compress the big arteries leading to the brain, which can be done without compressing the windpipe, they lose consciousness quickly, then die not long after. Or you could open a couple big arteries. Give novocaine at the sites first, even. put the guy on an absorbent surface and cover him so he doesn't have to see his life bleeding away..
I think at this point, "painless" has become some phantom which anti-death-penalty people chase because it's impossible to catch. Especially because most of them get complicated and messy if the person to be executed isn't cooperating. So I think "fast" and "certain" are sufficient. A single moment of pain at the end is trivial, especially since the person won't have to live with the consequences. (But like I said, I'm also in favor of corporal punishment.)
THere was a subthread on reddit on using fentanyl for executions 23 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/1accvz3/comment/kjtouow/
There's no way a fentanyl overdose is more pleasant than any method we currently use for executions right?
You just pass out and stop breathing while unconscious. It doesn't even have to be injected, you can snort it.
Oh I would bet it's far more benign than whatever potassium horror is injected now. They couldn't even manage the nitrogen suffocation. The whole reason there are nitrogen alarms in places that use it is because you feel nothing, you breathe normally, and then you're gone. The body doesn't understand there's no oxygen until it's too late. But no, they had to administer it via a mask, so the suffocation instinct kicks in.
I honestly don't get why they're having this much trouble executing people right. Wouldn't the easiest and most painless way be to just put them on anesthesia? Once they're unconscious, you can kill them in any way you like. Hell, you could just kill them via OD if you just up the dose a bit.
It's an organisational problem. The penal system is big and involves thousands of people, and many of those people are committed to opposing the death penalty by whatever legalistic/bureaucratic/PR bullshit reasons they can come up with.
If you need five hundred people to execute somebody, and two hundred of them are opposed to execution, you're going to find you're running into all sorts of crazy delays and hitches along the way, much like trying to herd sheep when a third of your sheep are secretly angry donkeys.
As for why it takes five hundred people to execute somebody... well, that's the legacy of previous iterations of this process where the anti-death-penalty camp managed to insert additional steps and bureaucratic hoops into the process.
I have a suspicion that no one actually wants painless execution. Some are against the death penalty altogether, and others want the condemned to suffer.
Doctors won't write prescriptions for the anesthetic because it "violates the Hippocratic oath." And I guess they and other medical personel are also declining to train the people who carry out the execution.
This is interesting because I would think that if even a small number of doctors were OK with the death penalty this would be a non issue. Is there really that much consensus in the medical field? Or is it that doctors who assist may face professional punishment?
(I’m a doctor but I live in Australia and can’t help sorry)
Agreed. Every surgery I had was the same: one second you smell the sweet gas, and then you wake up in a different room.
It's not accidental. The product gets "stepped on" by intermediate dealers, mixing it with an inert substance to increase profit margin, then they mix fentanyl back in (cheaper and easier to obtain, ordering by mail from China) to make it stronger.
The problem is that fentanyl is very powerful by weight, and difficult to mix consistently, so they are left with hot doses that have a lethal amt of fentanyl.
Fentanyl makes an opiate "stronger" but it doesn't make cocaine stronger. It ruins cocaine for most cocaine users purposes. I'm confused as to why it's getting in the cocaine.
So why doesn't Europe have an equal number of fentanyl ODs, assuming that their products are stepped on by their intermediate dealers? Or if not, why aren't their dealers doing so? Why is it a US-only phenomena it seems? There is certainly a great deal of cocaine being used in Europe, so there should be ample opportunities for stepping-on
My suspicion is that it's something to do with the local dynamics of the drug market, and it varies markedly from country to country.
If the local drug industry is dominated by a few big and reasonably rational players then they're probably not all that interested in pushing something like fentanyl. It would disturb the status quo, open the door for new players, drive down the cost of getting high, kill a lot of people, and attract more attention. Established dealer networks would rather stick to the old drugs.
At a guess I'd say fentanyl entered the US market alongside new players. I also think that gang activity tends to be a lot more decentralised and a lot more stupid in the US than in other countries. The median European gangster is a rough looking dude who is good at keeping his mouth shut, the median American gangster is a teenager with a gun in his boxer shorts and his pants around his ankles.
Fentanyl OD deaths appear to be spiking right now in the UK though from a much-lower base rate than in the US. The BBC and the Economist that I know of have each recently run articles on it, the current national administration has issued a special alert to the National Health Service, etc.
One answer I've heard is that Europe has a functioning heroin market supplied by places like Afghanistan. The US, by contrast, effectively stifles the heroin supply, shifting suppliers to satisfy the demand with the cheap and easily smuggled fentanyl. Once it's here it finds its way into other drugs. The law of supply and demand is much stronger than Title 21. If true, this is yet another weight in favor of the legalization of even dangerous drugs like heroin.
In that case, I'd expect to see more fentanyl deaths in Europe over the last 2 years, after the Taliban regained control and cut Afghanistan's poppy production by 95%. Do you know if this has been happening?
Yes, I'll second this as my understanding as well, with a slight addition of "most fentanyl is synthesized in China and Mexico, and it's easier to smuggle in due to the large amounts of goods coming from China and Mexico."
It's basically that heroin is bulkier and easier to interdict, and gets interdicted more, leaving fentanyl as the economical option to supply the large, definitionally inflexible demand in the USA.
Combine the huge crackdowns and reductions in legal, doctor-supplied opiates driving many people to the black market (where fentanyl is extensively used in pill presses to resemble the oxys and hydros that pain patients are used to), and you have the opiate crisis and subsequent deaths in a nutshell.
And yes, the ONLY way to stop the 40-50k fentanyl deaths per year is full legalization. The actual drugs cost pennies - if they were legal and sold with some reasonable markup to addicts, there would be almost no overdoses, and almost no addiction-associated property crime, because the true financial costs are negligible.
And people with addictions and pure supplies can last forever and contribute to society just fine - look at Keith Richards or William Burroughs.
I'd bet that if fentanyl were completely legal, although there wouldn't be nearly as many accidental overdoses, it might well become the suicide method of choice.
And I'd also bet that high-performing addicts are in a completely different bucket than bottom-of-the-barrel addicts, and the latter are much more likely to have their lives utterly ruined by access to opiods.
> The actual drugs cost pennies - if they were legal and sold with some reasonable markup to addicts, there would be almost no overdoses
What on Earth makes you think that? Are fentanyl addicts known for their restraint and sensible forward-thinking nature?
Do alcoholics never drink too much?
The primary reason overdoses happen is that the difference between 3mg of fentanyl and 5mg of fentanyl is the difference between "feeling good" and "overdose."
When fentanyl contaminates other drugs like cocaine and mdma, or when fentanyl is pressed into pills, there can be a "chocolate chip cookie" effect, where it's not evenly mixed, and a local surplus forms a "chocolate chip" of fentanyl in the other drug / pill. Oops, that chip was 5mg instead of 3mg and you're dead now.
And no, drug users in general and opiate addicts in specific typically don't want to die, and intentional overdoses are quite rare.
The reason fentanyl kills people is because it's added in imprecise amounts with slapdash mixing to either masquerade as heroin or opiate pills, or to add more addictiveness and oomph to other drugs, and the imprecision and slapdashery is killing people because of the 3mg / 5 mg thing.
People die because there's no consistency or predictability of how much actual active drug is in the things they're buying - if they were buying pharmaceuticually pure stuff of known strength, this wouldn't be an issue, and people wouldn't die.
This is entirely tangential to the fact that if things were legalized, the great majority of opiate addicts would be buying pills or heroin rather than fentanyl, because by all accounts, those "real" opiates are greatly preferred in qualia and in safety, but all you get in real life is fentanyl due to the war on drugs, and the cheapness and ease of smuggling it.
Maybe our drugs are driven up through Mexico and cut along the way, whereas theirs tend to come right off a boat?
Anybody here live in or around Elko, NV? Going to be living there for six months starting around April.
Here's a question for anyone who has a biological child over the age of five: What do you think of the two Tweets below?
The parenting blackpill is that it's mostly genetics, there's little you can do other than keeping them clothed and fed, and at most you can fuck things up by giving them a bad childhood. The rest is happenstance.
Indeed a hard pill to swallow. Good parenting can only create very limited upside. Bad parenting can create unlimited downside. So the parents’ job is to do our best to avoid that downside & try for any small upside we can enable. Parental ego prevents us from accepting this.
(BTW, the first came from Antonio Garcia Martinez, and the second is a reply to him.)
It's mostly spot on, and I think it has interesting implications around gene editing/embryo selection. Because that DOES represent an opportunity to overcome their own genetics in enhancing aspects of their children, and if they'll pay thousands of dollars a year for fancy preschools, imagine what they'll pay to give their kids 5 points of extra IQ.
I just listened to a podcast where Jeremy Howard, a coding wizard & the "fast AI" guy, talks about raising his daughter, mostly about homeschooling her. Listen to that and see if you still think the upside of good parenting is very limited. (And if you are homeschooling or thinking of it I highly recommend giving this podcast a listen: Teach your Kids, hosted by Manisha Snoyer, 9/29/23 episode).
Agreed - I base my view of things on a single ancedotal data point.
And it's not like a technical guru would be selected for very high intelligence, and it's not like he would have a high IQ daughter likely to succeed regardless of her education.
Ah, heavy sarcasm directed at me. Encountering it here on the page feels sort of like stepping in dogshit. It's real a pleasure to meet you, Hammond. I'm Eremolalos and I'm dumb as dirt. Probably the intelligence difference between us is due to our jeans. Oops, I mean our geans.
Father of a 13yo boy. It's pretty clear to me that fostering open communication, especially about emotions, goes with clothing and feeding as something parents can do that might make a big difference in outcomes.
(Father of one 5 year old and one younger)
I do believe that parents probably doesn't have a large impact on things like IQ, career success etc.
But those are also the parts of people that are the least interesting. When it comes to whether your child will be a Lutheran, a Catholic, a Hindu or a Jew, the parenting definitely counts. You can't make your child enjoy reading but you probably have some effect on whether they start from Dostojevskij or from Aasimov, if for no other reason because they will start their litterary adventure in your book shelf.
So all in all: I don't spend a lot of time worrying about their sanity, but I do like to pass on my own memetic quirks to the next generation.
>But those are also the parts of people that are the least interesting.
It's overwhelmingly what these parents care most about beyond basics of health and wellbeing. The parents who care about parenting the most are the ones who sign up for preschool waiting lists precisely because they want their children to be academically nurtured as much as possiblea s early as possible.
Just shows that the parents have a skewed view of human nature. I would rather my children grew up to be honest and decent technical workers than nihilistic engineers, no matter the pay gap
Speaking from... personal experience, I agree with those two. You can't fix your children, but you sure as hell can break them.
What kind of outcome is this solving for? I'm happy to believe that my children would end up with similar wealth and education regardless of how I parent. But most of my parenting effort isn't directed at achieving that. Much of parenting is about teaching 'virtues' (for want of a better term) to children. Have they learned to be kind, polite, disciplined, brave etc? Do they value the same things that I value? Much of my parenting is trying to pass these on.
Maybe these 'virtues' are also genetic, and I'd be happy to reassess if they are shown to be.
Where are the tweets? Did they get separated from the main post somehow?
I think the second and third paragraphs are the tweets.
Correct
Easily resolved with an existentialist take. While parents may only have limited influence on children’s outcomes after birth, that doesn’t mean that good parenting is of limited value in terms of personal experience for children.
One kid who is two but also basically raised my younger brother ave sister who are both in their early twenties now.
Antonio might be true in the atomic case but not in the network case. Bring a good patent around other good parents has large positive effects. At least that’s why I think Mormons do well or other similar groups.
I have a 31-year-old and a 12-year-old, not to mention three siblings myself, and entirely concur with that response.
Also those tweeters are taking an insensibly all-or-nothing view of it. A lot of the value of good parenting is preparing both child and parent for successful response to incipient "downsides" to improve the odds of keeping the ship afloat so to speak. I've known plenty of kids whose draw in the genetic lottery had a big weakness and in many cases its easy to see how the specifics of their formative years helped or hindered them in adjusting to whatever the weak spot is.
I may not be the intended audience of this question as I have no children, but I nevertheless am interested in this question. I suppose that the starting point for this discussion is the finding that shared environment has no to little impact on certain psychometric measures, i.e. finding 9 on this paper on the most replicated findings in behaviour genetics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/
I have personally struggled with how to interpret this, and could use some enlightenment. I have no reason to fundamentally doubt these results, considering they appear to have been widely replicated. However, it seems to contradict a fundamental intuition I have of the world, where parents do have an impact on children's success. Perhaps it's time to exorcize this intuition? I consider the following points of interest:
1. When it comes to big five personality traits, the effect of shared environment is essentially zero. Some authors wave away these concerns by saying that "parenting is still important, but it affects every child differently". I don't think this really solves the contradiction. Ultimately, if you want your child to be highly conscientious and less neurotic, the data does still seem to suggest that there is no known parenting method you can use to reliably result in more conscientious or less neurotic children.
2. Perhaps the point is that you as a parent cannot, and should not aim to change a child's personality. Other psychometric measures seem to be a bit more amenable to some shared environmental effect. The paper provides the example of antisocial behaviour. Hence, it seems that your actions as a parent can help reduce the chances of antisocial behaviour. However, the effect, at 15%, is outweighed by the effects of genetics and chance. For academic achievement, the effect is roughly at the same level (10-15%), but it seems you can only influence them while they are children: as they become adults, these effects seem to dissipate.
3. Perhaps the main point of good parenting is to improve aspects that cannot be psychometrically measured. For instance, exposing them to different fields and hobbies is certainly something a parent can help with, even if these are not captured by psychometric tests, right? It's not always obvious though what falls in here. You could aim to teach them good 'values', but political inclination is a pyschometrically measurable quantity, and this has also been shown to have strong genetic mediators (my suspicion is the shared environment will also turn up effects of about 15% as with the other measures above, but I haven't been able to find evidence of this). Agreeableness could also be a measure of 'values' I suppose, and being a big 5 personality trait this would have almost no shared environmental effect.
On balance, I think the implications for parenting strategy is as follows. You cannot, and should not attempt to change a child's personality. There just hasn't been any evidence that this works at any level. However, you are not completely absolved of parental responsibility - about 10-15% (of the variance) of non-personality traits are indeed affected by your parenting. When it comes to academics, you can help them get into a good university I suppose, but everything afterwards is probably beyond your control. It is likely that you have a large control on things like the fields, hobbies and ideas your children experience, which do not affect how they grow as a person but could very much determine their career paths. That last effect seems difficult to quantify though.
Only one kid, but very obviously they come out of the box with certain personality traits and quirks. But then things get added on, one layer at a time, until something like a full person emerges (note: we are never finished, there are always layers being added on).
Just think - until just a moment ago, 90% of everyone was a farmer. A time traveller could look out at the fields full of peasants, serfs and slaves, and decide that predisposition for farming was essentially genetic. And then suddenly most of us worked in factories, mines or offices and couldn't grow a tomato to (literally) save our lives.
There is no genetic difference between a serf and an office worker, only the action of education, nutrition, socialisation and medicine - the end result of all those layers that began to be added from the moment of conception. So it is with children - you can only do what you can to provide the environment that you feel best allows the child's natural talents and inclinations to flourish. Who knows what they are capable of, or what they might do in future?
Did that time traveller not know about hunter-gatherers preceding farmers?
(I have 2 kids over the age of five.)
Not sure if we can have a meaningful debate at tweet length.
Yes, if you have more than 1 child, you have probably noticed that the kids behave differently literally since the moment they were born. So unless you attribute the difference to listening too much Mozart in uterus, it's probably genetic. Wait a moment; it also could be random!
That said, what does "mostly genetic" mean. Most *of what* exactly? Depending on how you compose the list of things, the fraction of the genetically determined ones can be greater or smaller. So are we talking about a list of character traits and skills and hobbies, or is also the skin color and blood type included in the list?
How exactly do you figure out what is genetic and what is environmental? (Note that I am not opposing the conclusion here, but rather the methodology. Why specifically is "I have two kids, and I can clearly see that everything is genetic" more reliable than "I spent two days outside, and I can clearly see that the Sun orbits the Earth"?) Your kids have similar genes, but also they grow up in the same family. They also have some different genes, but also one of them is older and the other is younger. How do you decide which of these similarities and differences are genetic and which are environmental?
Also, "parenting can hurt kids but it cannot help kids" vaguely reminds me of "low IQ makes you stupider but high IQ does not make you smarter". Why the asymmetry? Who decides which parts of parenting are mandatory (and therefore their absence can hurt the child) and which are optional (and therefore their presence or absence have no impact)? For example, giving your kids a computer and internet access, that probably does not belong to the list of basic human needs -- but do you sincerely believe that it has zero impact on their chances of winning competitions at computer science?
Heck, even if kids ultimately did all the important things in their free time alone, as a parent you have a great influence on how much free time they have and how are they allowed to spend it.
tl;dr -- it is cheap to argue that "it's mostly genetic", if you do not specify what "it" is, and how do you actually test whether it was genetic or not
EDIT: It also depends, why are you asking this question. Are you talking about other people's kids or your own? Are you selecting from a given set of kids, or are you giving advice on how to improve their results? That is, is this a comparison between kids with different genes (yes, genes matter a lot), or between possible futures of the same child (genes are fixed, the remaining difference depends on other things)? If your point is that choosing the right partner has probably greater impact than parenting, I agree. If your point is that we should burn down the schools and libraries and computers, and make sure that every child gets enough food... and that doing so will have no impact on the next generation, I disagree.
Re: Everything is genetic. If you doubt this, try to teach your pet turtle chess. That everything is genetic doesn't, however, mean that it's ONLY genetic. It's equally true that everything is environmental. (I think "environment" is defined in a way that those two are almost enough.) To complete the picture, also everything is random. (You're going to get quantum indeterminacy at the molecular level no matter what.)
You can't even argue reasonably that it's a matter of weights, since in a complex chaotic system extremely small differences can have large effects.
It's best to concentrate on the environmental effects, because that's where you can effectively act, but this doesn't mean that those are the only important effects.
Trivers' theory of genetic conflict says you shouldn't easily be able to influence your kids, because it is in their Darwinian interest not to be so manipulatable (even by their parents). However, evolving a defense against, say, being hit in the head with a ball-peen hammer, is a big ask.
I think these zero sum percentage splits are silly and reductive.
For most children, genetics will determine the achievement ceiling (astronaut, pharmacist, or construction worker) and the personality struggles (is this a person who will struggle with anger, or eating, or cowardice, etc).
And parenting will determine the achievement floor (prison, terrible jerk at the office, or all around well adjusted person) and the personality struggle skill (how much can this person cope, overcome, self analyze, empathize, etc, on their bad days or against their natural bad tendencies). Parenting here means *habits* (are YOU messy) as well as choices (do you make them clean their room).
Yes, culture and local environment do play a context setting role, but this doesn't diminish the vital importance of parenting. Everywhere and everywhen, there are people who are parented into being the local best type of person, and people who are parented into being the local worst type of person.
Beyond a certain adult-ish age, *you become your own parent*, and lifelong self improvement is down to whether you picked up enough skills to gradually parent YOURSELF out of your problems. This is as true for a construction worker as it is for an astronaut, and it is as true for a diagnosed bipolar as it is for a neurotypical.
I have two biological children, 6 years old and 9 months old.
Kid one was born energetic, angry, impatient, brilliant, and charming. I can't change a damned bit of that.
I choose whether she is allowed to be destructively energetic, angry and impatient, or encouraged *and* harshly required to control and channel those qualities.
I notice that if she spends too many days in a row at Grandma's, being served and not punished, the five qualities I listed make for a fairly tyrannical person. On a bad day, when I show up, she is *running* that house and shouting that poor old woman ragged with military orders. After even a day with me, she returns to being a *really* well behaved person who gets a lot of public compliments about how well she conducts herself relative to the other six year olds. She has fun, she is irrepressible, she will run wild in the nerf battles and play in the mud as much as any of the other children, but when lunch is offered she will politely ask the host where she may sit and whether they have a towel for the mud, and thank them for the meal.
My parenting is tailored for her qualities. I knew I could punish her pretty hard without making her a shrinking violet, and needed to in order to beat back a tyrannical impulse that she got from me and from my (awesome) father. I know she needs to be given a lot of good places for her energy, like a husky dog that needs to run an hour a day.
Kid two is shaping up to be mild, sweet, brilliant but *slow* to react, and food oriented. I can't change a damned bit of that, it's genetic. But she'll get a different parenting experience tailored to maximize those qualities. It won't be equal to the first and it won't fair. It *will* be *effective*.
What happens between kid one and kid two?
Between in what sense?
Isn't it rather a whitepill? You can relax, parenting isn't that demanding, have fun and enjoy life, have a kid or two more.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iWnw2o42SHcJWFYJi/book-summary-selfish-reasons-to-have-more-kids
As a whitepilled person with two lovely kids I have to say that there still can be a lot demanded of you, particularly when their small. You still have to feed them, force clothes on them, pick them up from kindergarten, can't leave them alone for too long, etc. It is a bit like being a wheelchair for five to ten years. Many ordinary things suddenly require a fiendish amount of planning.
But I am definitely enjoying them more than those poor people I met who believe raising their voice at their kids will turn into neurotic basement dwellers.
Yeah, this is also my view. Most UMC potential parents should relax a bit about optimization
On the Twitter thread in question, two other people responded to say it was a whitepill.
Very American take. In Europe no one sends kids off to camps during the summer. Kids can bike around or take the bus if they want to go somewhere.
> In Europe no one sends kids off to camps during the summer.
Can't say much about Western Europe, but this is extremely, extremely common in Eastern.
Doing it , or not doing it?
Sending your kids to a summer camp is very common.
Until now I assumed that camps are mostly a European thing, because in USA every child camp would be sued to the point of bankruptcy. Or more precisely, that the threat of lawsuits is so great that it makes the child camps so expensive that only rich people can afford them in USA; while in Europe the camps are affordable for almost everyone.
I have spent about 2 weeks in a camp every summer as a child (in Eastern Europe).
In Soviet Russia, kid send YOU to camp!
I would largely agree, but while genetics is very important the child must still be socialized and cultured, and the family is where this happens with the greatest probability of success. Children should rough and tumble with Dad so that they learn what's acceptable in play and what's not. Just one example. If they start school and hurt the other kids, they will not have friends.
I expect anyone who has more than one kid realises that it's mostly genetics and there is very little that parents contribute. I reckon it's about 60% genetics, 30% peers and 10% parents.
I might agree that overall intelligence is genetic, but parents contribute a great deal to their kids education, and this is well documented . And your social group will make your kids more demanding of your parenting. "I want guitar lessons, Leslie does horseback riding can I? Nina plays pickleball, can we play? There is a club on Saturday afternoons. Please? I want a math tutor, my MAP scored is math are too low". This is the kind of stuff I hear from my elementary age daughters. As much as I'd like to just hand them an IPad and let them zone out on youtube influencers all day, I am forced to parent because they demand it.
I hear you saying that your children want to learn. I wanted to learn too. Lots of children don't. Desire to learn is genetic.
I started my post that agreeing that intelligence is genetic. IQ scores are not the way most people measure parenting success either. My point is that in todays parenting environment kids demand attention from their parents. You can't just let your kid run around the neighborhood unsupervised if nobody else is doing that.
Do you have a biological child?
I have two.
Parents can choose the peer population well into high school. Laurence Steinberg's book "Beyond the Classroom" says this: "When parents are choosing a school, they are not only choosing a principal, a school facility, and a faculty. They are also choosing classmates -- and potential friends -- for their child. Our study suggests that it may be this aspect of school choice -- the choice of a peer group -- that may be the most important ..."
The parents have less ability to choose the individual friends for their children, but can do a lot to choose the *pool* of potential friends their children have.
Perhaps Scott or an ACX reader may answer the question what prediction markets do, that bookmakers do not already do – and probably do a lot better.
Bookmakers are likely to be better at accurate predictions because they have real skin in the game. If they systematically misjudge the odds of future events, they will go bankrupt. This has the systemic benefit of creating a selection effect: The bookmakers who survive and stay in business, are likely to be those that are good at making accurate predictions.
Compare this the “prediction markets”, which - if I have read Scott’s blog posts on them correctly –deal with toy money or only small amounts of real money, and where any bored teenager or wishful-thinking ideologue count as much as a well-informed person.
For example, if you bet 1000 USD that Biden will win the next US election, you get USD 2500 back (odds 5/2). While if you bet 1000 USD that Trump wins, you only get USD 1100 back (odds 11/10).
…what is the added value of having prediction markets about the US election, that bookies do not already do?
The two largest markets on Kalshi are each over a million dollars. Bookmakers are basically creating ad-hoc prediction markets, with a less efficient market because they're not tied together with everyone else who might want to bet, a system for easily undercutting each other, etc. Comparing bookmakers to prediction markets is like comparing street vendors to the commodities market.
Thanks for the comment, but the problem is not the aggregate sum being betted on Kalshi, but the (mainly or exclusively small) sum/s that the individuals doing the betting are making.
While you're right in a sense, large bookmakers are very much more sophisicated than street vendors and compete fiercely with each other, which means their quoted odds are nearly always reasonably close to (but shorter than) the market odds.
You make two errors here. Firstly, bookies do not attempt to predict outcomes. They merely balance their books. Bookies who stay in business are not those who make accurate predictions but those who successfully balance their books so that they profit from every possible outcome. The odds you see at the bookie are therefore just the odds predicted by the punters collectively, i.e. the same as in a peer-to-peer market, but with an extra step.
Secondly, you are wrong to say that prediction markets involve only small amounts of money. Electionbettingodds.com shows that there is currently $46m bet on the outcome of the US presidential election at Polymarket and $14m at Betfair Exchange. These are significant sums (although I suspect the site is counting those totals inconsistently).
You can easily see the overall effect at https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/us-politics/us-presidential-election-2024/winner. Firstly, the odds offered by bookies (on the left) are in every case in line with the odds offered on peer-to-peer markets (on the right). Secondly, in a large majority of cases, the peer-to-peer odds are keener, because you are not paying the bookie's cut. (ETA This is only looking at sterling-denominated peer-to-peer markets; as I note in another comment, different odds are offered in a large USDC-denominated market for reasons I do not understand.)
That said, specifically 5/2 on Biden looks like a profitable bet, and this I think is a case where those bookmakers (none of whom are major names) have fallen behind the curve. Those odds were available until recently on peer-to-peer markets (I myself have placed £1,000 at slightly better odds). You will note that Ladbrokes and William Hill each offer 12/5, which are also the market odds. 11/10 on Trump would be a bad bet, since you can get 5/4.
Therefore the advantage of looking at markets rather than bookies is that the odds are keener (and therefore closer to the true prediction) and that they are updated in real-time.
There is a question as to whether you should give any weight to play-money markets. From first principles, the answer should be "no", real-money punters will be more accurate in the long run. The counter argument is just that we know play-money markets did outperform real-money markets in 2020 https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/prediction-markets-have-an-elections-problem-jeremiah-johnson.
...following up on you post & Johnson's point that "People will bet for candidates and parties not because they have an evidence-based analysis supporting their bet, but as an expression of identity", I would assume that more people are betting on Trump than Biden based on "identity". If so, a Trump win should be somewhat overvalued by those who place bets, and a Biden win correspondingly undervalued. Implying that betting with odds 5/2 that Biden wins is worth considering (smart money), while betting 11/10 that Trump wins means you align yourself with identity-type dumb money. Agreed?
(I noticed you placed a bet on Biden yourself...:-)
Is there a reason to think that more people will bet on Trump based on identity than Biden? It would seem that support for those candidates is fairly evenly matched, so we would need to think that Trump supporters are more likely to bet their beliefs.
The situation is complicated by the fact that people in the US (who are most likely to be invested in the result) cannot legally bet on the outcome. Looking at the world population without the US, I would have thought there would be clear majority in favour of Biden. However, it seems likely that some market participants are in fact US residents acting illegally (and it is possible that partisans on one side or the other would be more tempted to break the law in this way).
There is a specific point that 27% of the Trump shares on Polymarket are held by a single user. We might speculate that this person is making such large bets as an expression of their identity, but we cannot exclude the possibility that they are betting from a justified confidence in their ability to predict the outcome. We can say that they are making bets at worse odds than are available in other markets, which on its face is irrational, but may reflect an inability to access those markets (e.g. because they are a US resident using crypto to make illegal bets).
It is true that I myself have placed bets on Biden at odds of 3.55, from which you can infer that my all-things-considered opinion is that he has a better than 28% chance of winning. I would place his chance at winning at approximately 45%, noting that Metaculus has 46% and Manifold has 47%, and there is some reason to think these sites are broadly accurate. It is also my recollection that Biden was significantly undervalued in the market this far out from the previous election, and my broad sense is that the commentariat underestimate his appeal to the electorate at large. However, it is clearly possible that I could be proved wrong by events.
Specifically betting 11/10 on Trump is dumb simply because better odds are available, namely 5/4. I think it is very plausible this is a good bet. I would estimate Trump's chance of winning at approximately 50%, in which case this bet would be profitable in expectation. It is just that, on my beliefs, it is not as profitable as betting on Biden (expected return is 11% versus 57%).
Essentially, I see what Johnson calls "small odds bias", whereby all the outsiders are overvalued and both the frontrunners are undervalued. For some reason this is much less true on Polymarket (e.g. we see Haley at 1.1% vs 3.6% on Betfair). A strategy of betting on both Trump and Biden would defensible, in my opinion.
Thanks for the detailed back-and-forth reasoning. And yes, I also think that the fact that US citizens cannot legally bet on Trump is likely to "water down somewhat" the identity/dumb money-bias in his favor.
While I also agree that the outside world (at least the NATO part of it) prefers Biden, it is not an identity-type of preference... it is a "colder" type of preference so to speak, and therefore less likely to create emotional/loyalty-type bias in who you think will win (and therefore put money on).
All this said, your basic argument is very convincing: "I would estimate Trump's chance of winning at approximately 50%, in which case this bet would be profitable in expectation. It is just that, on my beliefs, it is not as profitable as betting on Biden (expected return is 11% versus 57%)." Thanks again for sharing your views.
In the 4 hours since posting the above comment, Biden's odds on Betfair Exchange have in fact lengthened to 5/2 (and they would be slightly higher, except that I ate those bets). I don't think anything has happened in the past 4 hours which ought to have caused the odds to change: probably it is just a particular punter betting against Biden at size. Position looks completely flat over at Polymarket.
ETA Trump's odds have also lengthened on Betfair: the spread is now 42.3-42.7%, while it remains 53-55% on Polymarket. Something is not right here, despite pretty decent liquidity all round.
Many thanks for the response. Very valuable and insightful.
Also, thanks for the links - including to Johnson's article, which has several memorable one-liners. Including "Markets only work when smart money can drive out dumb money", "People will bet for candidates and parties not because they have an evidence-based analysis supporting their bet, but as an expression of identity" and "Betting on an impossible outcome is how you show the most loyalty".
Johnson's arguments suggest that a well-informed, dispassionate observer of politics might be able to make a decent living betting on politics...:-)
Seems like there is a big arbitrage opportunity at electionbettingodds.com, where Michelle Obama has 5.6% chance of being President but negligible chance of being nominated.
This is an error on the site. She just doesn't appear on the list of potential nominees there. Looking at the underlying sites, her chance of being the nominee is 10-10.4% (per Betfair), 6.3-6.8% (per Polymarket) or 10-11% (per Smarkets).
This not really how bookmarkers work. They are more similar to stock market makers, setting their initial odds based on anticipated public betting patterns rather than attempting to predict the event's outcome. As bets are placed, they adjust the lines to balance the action on both sides to minimize risk and ensure a profit through the vig.
If there was less friction, such as transaction costs, and greater volume, the odds between prediction markets and bookmakers would likely converge due to arbitrage.
One difference is the legality of betting on certain events in different countries. For instance, U.S. residents cannot legally bet on elections through bookmakers.
I see the point. Thanks for the comment.
Has anyone done a systematic study of prediction market odds vs betting odds?
There are large peer-to-peer betting exchanges that function more like prediction markets than traditional bookmakers - a normal bookmaker would kill you with their margins even if prediction markets are better, but I wonder if anyone has exploited asymmetries between prediction markets and betting exchanges to make money.
Because of margins, bookmakers don't have to be THAT accurate - so I'd imagine prediction markets could easily beat traditional bookmaker's odds.
Interesting, thanks. Got any link to a peer-to-peer betting exchange?
I expect to have *lots* of conversations from now on where I will be told "AI art is just rubbish, I only like human stuff" and having to reply "but I don't think you can tell the difference" and being scoffed at.
Assuming no XRisk from AI, I expect this for the next decade, perhaps the rest of my life. That's probably true of you, too. I was at a (non-technical) conference recently (link to a panel I was on below, but not that relevant to this) where people were talking about AI. Some very obvious observations:
1. Your average person cares very deeply about their aesthetic preferences
2. Your average person, for one reason or another, reckons they prefer the world where nice things are made by humans
3. Consequently, they strongly feel that there is a fundamental difference (Blegg/Rube like), between things made by AI and things made by humans. They have absolute certainty that that difference exists. If called upon to say what the difference it is, after giving you a pitying look (because again they think you are *obviously* wrong and it's a chore to have to explain so to you), they will say... some words. Their words will be trivially easy to rebut. But the rebuttal won't change anything about their feelings. They may change to saying some *different* words, also easy to rebut, but don't get cocky - they will have forgotten that their first argument was rebutted within 30 minutes or so, and will say it again, to your annoyance. They intuition is so strong for them that the discussion around it doesn't really matter all that much.
It'll make you sad because there are interesting conversations that could theoretically had about the psychology of aesthetics or the future of creative work, but they are beyond these people because they will be forever searching for a non-mechanistic phenomenon that makes them feel special and ineffable, instead of being open to the possibility that art and humanity are not special and amenable to modelling. I am guessing there are researchers from the 80s or 70s who could see this and roll their eyes, because it's just the conversation they've been in most of their careers becoming mainstream. Gives me more respect for some of them!
Anyway, ***something that I think would save us a bit of time would be a website that quizzes its visitor with ten bits of art***, some AI and some human (while obviously being obscure enough to be unrecognizable to most people). By this I mean poetry/painting/eventually animation. Does this already exist? I almost feel like it could be useful, because it could fit into an RLHF loop for AI art.
Or perhaps such a thing wouldn't work because individual AIs like Midjourney or Sora always end up having a distinguishable "look" that gives them away. If so that's quite interesting and something I'd love to hear people here talk about.
Panel I was on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq9PI4gxxbE
> scoffed at.
... or perhaps despised / pitied.
I saw a popular 'tweet' to that effect on "Bluesky" a couple of days ago. I just tried to find it again, and failed. But it was easy to find more along the same lines.
eg. https://bsky.app/profile/kenwhite.bsky.social/post/3klljbuya5a26
By "tell the difference" it seems you mean telling the difference between individual images. I think the difference fans of conventional art care more about is being able to tell the difference between a conventional artist's portfolio (or representative sample thereof) and an AI artist's portfolio. I think that task is probably a lot easier, and the idea that someone can't do THAT is what people might be scoffing at. If someone strongly opposed to AI art retweeted a picture that they liked that they didn't realize was made by Midjourney, it would be embarrassing but probably not world-shaking. The same person discovering that a digital artist that they had been following and enjoying the work of for several months had been entirely using generative AI would be a much bigger shock.
And of course there's a discussion to be had about how much of the difference between portfolios is artistically relevant versus how much of it comes from unimportant technical or social factors. I do think that a lot of the vitriol is more out of a sort of partisanship and a desire to support existing artists who feel threatened by AI art than out of purely aesthetic concerns. I imagine feedback loops existing for a long time along the lines of "I can tell this artist uses AI, AI art is bad, therefore this artist is bad. This artist is bad, this artist uses AI, therefore my belief that AI art is bad is reinforced." Still, I have to wonder how well someone using generative AI would actually do if they had a portal to a world where nobody had heard of it to post their work on.
you can usually tell ai art because it struggles with composition and foreshortening, which is why you see so many portrait style pictures. it also has issues with two or more people touching.
you only see pictures that hides their weaknesses significantly. Like its obvious with people who do AI trailers, because a series of drawings highlights how static the individual drawings are.
even with sora, it does the same thing. it would be really scary if it did a person talking, reaction shot, then cut back to the first person who looks up. but its really static.
I think you may be wasting your time tearing down a strawman.
There are probably people who think they can reliably tell AI art from human art. Some of them may even be right. I know I usually can't tell the difference, but I imagine there are artistically-sophisticated people who really do see subtle tells, just like many of us really can identify AI writing.
But even if AI advances to the point that everyone who visits your site is forced to concede that they absolutely can't tell the difference, it's not going to change most people's minds about whether they like AI art, because it doesn't address the reason why people don't like AI art: it's missing the central characteristic that makes them interested in engaging with art qua art.
For many people, art is not purely or even chiefly an aesthetic experience. It's primarily a social-communication experience: it's about engaging intimately with another conscious mind, inferring the artist's intentions and decoding the piece's message. That's what makes a piece of human art different from a natural aesthetic experience. The night sky may be breathtaking, but it's not trying to tell me anything. It's not sharing a taste of another person's consciousness.
So if you convince people that they can't tell the difference between human and AI art, all you're doing is shifting their perception of AI art from "bad" to "dishonest." That's probably not an improvement.
This is a really good answer.
I want emotional connection with other humans. I'm not really interested in simulation of that.
I'm open minded to humans curating and vetting AI generated art, but only if done really well - like good photography does that, even though the photographer isn't drawing the art directly.
Why is important whether or not people consider human art to be superior? Ignorance is bliss.
Art is already dead anyways. Humanity ran out of original ideas about a decade or so ago, and now the only thing left to do is rehash old works for eternity. It's the perfect time for AI to make human artists obsolete. And hopefully they can eventually make humanity obsolete as well.
The Witness, Patrick's Parabox, and Superliminal are full of original ideas
Meh, they're derivitive of older puzzle games like Antichamber. Once you start doing non-euclidean stuff, you can't make things much more complex without making it incomprehensible to the average player.
You do not know what "non Euclidean" means.
HyperRogue is a fun way to find out.
https://roguetemple.com/z/hyper/
Seems like the winning strategy for an artist is to use AI but never admit that you are using AI. (That of course requires you to use the AI in such way that you won't get caught.)
>Anyway, ***something that I think would save us a bit of time would be a website that quizzes its visitor with ten bits of art***
...I mean there's Rule 34, they've got AI tags and you can usually tell they're AI just by looking at them. Fuck if I'd be able to articulate the difference, that's a crazy high standard. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Pixiv too. And yes, just by glancing I can tell when something was AI generated, and even if it's technically "correct" it's not as interesting as someone's amaturish scribbles. It's a lot like the dull 3D porn that also infests popular tags on pixiv: yes, this is technically correct, but it's boring and ugly.
At the moment, I think you can tell the difference, given enough exposure to AI art. As it gets better and loses that 'plastic' look? Who can say?
I think you're being a little bit too dismissive about aesthetic preferences. Even within human artists and human art, there are strong preferences for one style or school or artist over another. Why should AI get the exception of uncritical acceptance and praise?
Right now, AI art looks like commercial, not fine, art. That's part of it, and yes there's snobbery involved, but also yes there's a difference between "producing book covers for cheap that all have the same female face" and "making a work of art". Human commercial art can be crappy too, and churned out on the basis of "what sells/what a commissioning editor wants to see".
The aesthetic of current gen AI art is very plastic, and also very full of nitty-gritty details that make no sense if stared at individually for any length of time. I don't know if this will ever improve.
I have no idea why artists are up in arms about any of this. Most artists create art with real world items, atoms not bits.
On the other hand programmers seem ok with it all.
Most working artists are not fine artists. Most are digital artists, and most digital art is disposable and corporate. Most, I suspect, do actual art in their free time.
I have no idea why programmers are okay with it - they are in the same boat, after all. Perhaps there's just a difference in perspective? One side sees their jobs becoming 99% churning through prompts (and 10% photoshop) for minimum wage and reacts in horror. The other sees the same thing and all expect to be the 1% that still do interesting work.
Programming is different. Programming is not error-tolerant in general, most Art and Natural Language writing is.
Noam Chomsky labored hard to find a sentence that is syntactically valid English but makes no sense (and all people would agree that it makes no sense), he came up with "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously", and you can still interpret it to mean something with even a moderate amount of effort:
- Green = something to do with the environment, Green Ideas is referencing environmentalism, "Sleep Furiously" means to be suppressed and shunned, till eventually rising and taking its rightful place. "Colorless" is referencing a separate notion of Color, the metaphorical color of the people who champion environmentalism, their race and culture. The ideas themselves are colorless and completely unaffected and unaffiliated with the identities and the idiosyncrasies of the particular people who happen to champion them at a particular time and place.
And so on. Con artists ranging from the founders of the Abrahamic religions to Post-Modern writers to elected presidents have learned to take advantage of this property time and time and time again. Broadly speaking, there is no physically possible painting or syntactically possible sentence that can't be *made* to mean something, language is quite literally made up, and vision is not made up but our dreams and waking dreams have long trained us that it can be made up. Once you observe that people try to interpret *dreams*, non-sensical barrages of sensory input that conflate time and place at a whim and have no obvious "plot", you understand that there is no possible picture or sentence that would make people stop and contemplate that perhaps it doesn't really mean anything.
Once you introduce computers as a second kind of audience, things are different. Computers are fundamentally rigid, they are sand arranged in a certain way so as to perform a limited menu of symbolic operations. Every higher level interface to a computer may try to hide this fact but it fundamentally can't. When an interface to a computer relaxes a rigidity, it tends to introduce a whole host of other novel rigidities that must be respected.
In Programming, bad things tend to "multiply". There is no error-tolerance or reasonable assumptions, you have to get every part right. Unless in the smallest and most trivial programs, there usually isn't a straightforward correspondence between features and code. Meaning that you can't easily point to a single feature and then point to a piece of code and say "This code implements this feature and nothing else", this is usually impossible unless the feature is extremely trivial and micro-sized. The implication of this is that tiny errors in the code tend to ripple and affect several features of the program at once. Programs also don't tend to "compose" well, mixing program 1 with a tiny error and program 2 with a tiny error doesn't usually result in a larger program 3 with a slightly less tiny error, it might result in a non-working program, or a crashing program, or a program that doesn't do what it's supposed to be doing and nobody understands why, or a program that does everything everybody wants of it and quite a bit more (such as leaking their entire database on polite request). It's completely non-linear.
The fact that programs **look** like natural language is just an unfortunate misunderstanding, an analogy took too far. Programs are expressions in a rigid mathematical-logical notation, there are far more structure to it than can be gleaned merely by predicting probabilities. You can sort of convince yourself the LLM understands programming as long as you're asking it to solve problems that have been done to death countless times in its training data or slight variations of those problems, but as soon as you introduce the kind of differences that real-world clients and managers ask you will soon discover it really doesn't get programming.
(And to be completely fair, "problems that have been done to death" is a substantial part of the average programming job, but not the only part. And you can't predict in advance which part is the part that have been done to death and which part requires a bit of thinking.)
"I have no idea why programmers are okay with it - they are in the same boat, after all. "
I don't know that programmers are 'okay with it.' What would not being okay with it look like?
But ... programmers with experience have seen 'technology X is going to make you unnecessary' or 'technology Y is going to mean 90% of you are out of work' for most of their careers.
In 1992 Ed Yourdan (a respected computer scientist) published 'Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.' Programming jobs would be automated with CASE tools and the work would move to Japan because the Japanese were so much better at delivering quality than Americans. It ... did not turn out that way.
Meanwhile, Visual Basic (introduced in 1991) was also going to move a lot of the easier programming jobs away from programmers and have then done by normal people. That sort of did happen, but mostly with work that would have been too expensive to be done by 'real' programmers. Then Visual Basic programming because a job that people could get hired to do.
In the early 2000s outsourcing programming jobs (to India, but also to Eastern Europe and other places) started making inroads. All but the most sophisticated jobs will go to India! Well ... a lot of them did. But far from all.
The 'catch' with programming is that you still need to be able to describe what you want. If that thing has a NAME then AI is great: "Siri, write me a quicksort algorthim in Rust" is a fantastic prompt.
As things get more specialized then AI performs worse. My employer has a custom file format for data that comes off our tool. My boss tried out ChatGPT because he wanted code to *read* files in that format. ChatGPT provided Python, but the generated Python called a 'read files in that format' function to do the actual work. This function does not exist. My boss wanted the AI to write the function.
I don't see how this problem will be solved by AI any time soon. We don't HAVE the documentation for the file format ... we have a bunch of (messy) code that implements it. Maybe what my boss wants can be structured as a language interpretation question and it will work.
But the next level up is solving problems that don't have names and for which describing the solution is the tough part. Maybe this is only 1% of the programing jobs and AI can take the rest.
But I think that most programmers (correctly or incorrectly) feel that this is a large percentage of the programming jobs. Keep in mind that programming languages are all about describing what you want precisely ... doing the same thing in English only works when the tool understands a lot.
I think it's fear of replacement. A lot of the people complaining are either fan artists working off commissions (and if you can get the AI to make the art to your specifications, why will you pay for a human artist to do so?) or commercial artists (ditto). There are also complaints about their work being used in training data uncredited, nonconsensually, and uncompensated, to train up the AI that is going to replace them.
The kind of artist who is producing the $10,000 exhibited in a gallery work isn't going to care. It's the person scraping a living with DeviantArt commissions at $30 for b/w sketch who is going to feel the pinch, as well as the commercial artist pricing at $60/hr and this took 20 hours that will be $1,200 please.
That's why canny operators are producing things like Nightshade to 'poison' training data for AI to sell to anxious digital artists:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/
Programmers don't care because they're making way more money, they're producing the software, and they don't think they're replaceable (yet) by AI.
Digital art is much more common than traditional media and is the primary source of income for the average working artists. The models are being trained on the work of artists without their permission and then the models have the potential to be used to put those artists out of work.
Anything that isn’t copyrighted can be used for training. Digital Artists aren’t special like that. Not that I see a designer of a logo as an artist, surely the term is more generally used for people who produce independent art and exhibit or sell their own product. Not cubicle workers.
In general AI isn’t any good for generating digital art consistently. At least not the models I use. So you are all safe for now.
Actually, the problem is that they *are* using copyrighted material as training data to generate their responses. The AI argument is that it's fair use because they're not blatantly copying the output from their training data. AFAIK, only Adobe uses pure uncopyrighted training data. Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion because the images they generate are strikingly similar to the images in the Getty Images library — right down to a distorted Getty Images logo.
I frequently use ChatGPT to look up virology and immunology questions. I always ask it for reference papers to back up its answers, because I've noticed that it not infrequently hallucinates an answer. When I go to the papers, I've seen it can lift some of the wording from those papers for its answers — especially highly technical answers where it would have difficulty rephrasing the answer in another way. Remember, these research papers are copyrighted material. Anyway, if the President of Harvard can be fired for paraphrasing someone else's work, it seems like there's an similar ethical problem, if not a copyright law problem, that these LM creators have ignored. (N.B. I think Harvard's Prez should have been fired, but not for minor acts of paraplagerism.)
Here's the Getty Images story. Notice the distorted Getty Images logo in the Stabil Diffusion output...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-lawsuit-getty-images-stable-diffusion
It’s a difficult one but I assume that a human who writes a Wikipedia entry (or any synopsis) using a source, crediting the source, and paraphrasing the source is not guilty of plagiarism. Then the problem here is not the training with the original text but the way it is presented. I’m not that impressed with Getty’s case either. The second image is influenced by but not in any way the same as the original image. Pixel by pixel it’s totally different. How the courts rule here is very important. If western courts uphold copyright and the Chinese don’t the baton on AI goes to the east.
>It’s a difficult one but I assume that a human who writes a Wikipedia entry (or any synopsis) using a source, crediting the source, and paraphrasing the source is not guilty of plagiarism. Then the problem here is not the training with the original text but the way it is presented.
Agreed. Learning from copyrighted material should generally not be penalized, provided that it is not passed off as original work, and that chunks beyond fair use are not copied. If I write "It is generally known that SO3 dissolves in water to give an acidic solution." I'm sure I got that information from _some_ chemistry textbook, though I'm not sure which one - and presumably that textbook was copyrighted, though that particular chunk of knowledge is centuries older than the textbook.
Personally, I see
>Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion because the images they generate are strikingly similar to the images in the Getty Images library — right down to a distorted Getty Images logo.
and
>I've seen it can lift some of the wording from those papers for its answers — especially highly technical answers where it would have difficulty rephrasing the answer in another way.
as objectionable violations of copyright. My (current level of misunderstanding) is that if a human did the same thing, they would also be violating copyright (and my _guess_ is they would be legally liable, IANAL).
I see this as quite distinct from
>Actually, the problem is that they are using copyrighted material as training data to generate their responses.
A human is permitted to buy and study copyrighted material, and to use ideas from it, within the bounds of fair use, both for images and text. I don't want the rules for training AIs to be more restrictive than what humans can learn from _provided_ that the AIs can be prevented from copying non-fair-use chunks of the training works into their responses.
The copyright of all art belongs to its creators unless they have specifically signed away those rights, whether digital or traditional media doesn't matter. Copyright of a new piece of IP is established upon its creation. It is well established that enormous percentages of training data used in commercial image generation uses work without permission. The reasons this would be upsetting to artists is obvious, huge amounts of money is being made from using their work without permission or payment.
As for your definition of "artist"; there are many kinds of artist. Many who produce and exhibit their own work also have day jobs to support that. Those day jobs often include creating things, such as logos, that may not be High Art but are certainly born out of their years of specialist knowledge as an artist. Other artists work on video games, or board games, or for book covers etc.
It's a large ecosystem of people that feel threatened by outside forces that do not understand or respect their work.
Ok, so the threat is to logo designers. Why the hysteria there rather than from programmers. Why do engineers or accountants not get into the same level of frantic upset?
If anything logo designers are safe because from what I’ve seen using Dall-E via chatGPT, Dall-E is highly inconsistent in its output. Ask it to change the background color and you end up with a different colour in the foreground color, change that and there’s a new foreground colour, change that and the logo is totally different. Rinse and repeat. So that’s safe.
I think you are vastly missing the difference here.
- Programmers make LLM's. Its not seen as an outside threat. Its unlikely that the creators of these tools would intentionally put themselves out of a job. They see that the tools are most likely to be used to enhance their workflows. I have seen some programmers complaining that LLM's will lower the skill floor too much and perhaps impact pay.
- Artists see AI as a threat from an outside group that does not respect or understand their work. This is understandable as their intellectual property has been used on mass without attribution, permission or payment. Many smaller artists have already lost a lot of commission work because of AI's. This is on the back of the NFT boom which stung many artists (stolen art made some people a lot of money) despite being touted as a solution. This lack of respect from the outset does not make artists feel like AI will be used to help them in the future.
History repeats itself. Just as the weavers feared for their jobs, so does the gigging artist.
These models use massively copyrighted stuff though, and sometimes generate stuff that looks very much alike copyrighted material
> Anything that isn’t copyrighted can be used for training. Digital Artists aren’t special like that.
Do you mean that AIs don't train on copyrighted material? Because they do train on copyrighted material. All art is copyrighted automatically (no need to register, unlike patents), and the copyright lasts until the artist dies, plus additional decades (how many decades varies by country).
Are they saying that they can tell a difference in the art itself? Or are they saying (or trying, unsuccessfully, to say, perhaps because they don't understand their own preferences) that they prefer, in principle, to engage with art made by humans, even if they can't tell the difference? People prefer musicals with a live band, even if the band is outside of the view of the audience.
Right now, you definitely can tell the difference. Next year or five years, tops, when an artist can use AI without ever putting a brush to paper or pixel to screen and turn out an original work? We'll see.
I do think the deeper division here is "I'm saying people without training can now produce art" (on the pro-AI side) and "No machine can be creative" (on the anti-AI side). If we're saying that AI can *originate* art by itself, without an external prompt, out of some creative impulse then yeah, I think we're still far away from that. I think Hamish's problem is that he's saying "people can use AI to make art" and the others are hearing "AI can make art". Those are not the same thing.
Yes, they are saying they will always be able to tell the difference, and in fact that it will be obvious, and that the difference will be that the AI art will always be ugly.
"even if they can't tell the difference" is not a possibility worth considering for them. To them it seems so unlikely that they would make the mistake that it could only be an academic question - but it would be the insulting, anger-inducing sort of academic question.
> "even if they can't tell the difference" is not a possibility worth considering for them.
Well, that seems a completely empirical question, that could be answered with a simple double-blind test.
Getting this (at least on the emotional level) versus not getting it is a fairly good litmus test against having a particular kind of techbro-brain. (I'm reminded of SBF and Shakespeare, too.)
I think Ethan's correct, people don't simply want to consume high-quality aesthetic stimulus regardless of its provenance. They want to interact with human intent in art. And sure, you could frequently fool them into believing that an AI piece is a human-made piece (the same way you could convince them that a food product comes from a particular artisanal tradition when it doesn't) but the moment they found out, there would be a measure of disappointment.
I suspect perceptions might begin to change when art AI gets good enough to allow you to keep refining aspects of the art reliably by throwing more natural language at it instead of resorting to complex workflows like inpainting and fine-tuning and ultimately accepting something that's good enough but not necessarily exactly what you intended. Once we're essentially painting with text ("add more patina of age to that pagoda's roof, and also redo that second butterfly from the bottom left, it needs more complexity") the human comes back into the picture again, only with a very powerful paintbrush at their disposal.
This makes me think of Damien Hirst's spot paintings, which are produced by assistants. What's the difference really between those human assistants and an AI? The artwork is valued because it's "from" the famous artist.
An acquaintance who graduated from a fine arts program a couple decades ago told me that technical skill in creating art isn't valued. What's valued in that scene is the artistic intent and ideas behind the art.
Which is amusing given how everything is made up and the artwork itself can be interpreted in any number of different ways.
A useful question for human-art appreciators is do they value the technical hands on skill, the artistic intent, or both?
Hirst is a fine counterpoint, although there's even more controversy around him than around AI, which is presumably just how he likes it. But then again, generative art predates Stable Diffusion, and if we're just talking about delegating to assistants then even the old masters did it.
I don't think you can do without artistic intent, pretty much tautologically. The relative importance of technical skill, on the other hand, rises and falls – conceptual art, which was a discrete movement in and of itself, was probably the most radical divestment of art from technical creation, and it remains influential. But there are still people who really care about execution, media, and materials in contemporary art.
AI art reminds me a lot of 'found object' art. Like, you have a concept, and you shake the really sophisticated kaleidoscope and eventually something emerges that (you decide) matches what you want, and then you dub that result art. Which is great and everything, and if that process and its implications for human creativity are explicitly part of your artistic concept, have at it. (Except that everyone and their dog are doing it, and it's got about as much originality as going to a bathroom fixtures shop and signing every urinal, thinking you're as cool as Duchamp.)
AI is amazing as an illustrator, though. I think that's inarguable, and it's certainly not worthless.
Since last week, the implied probability of various people being the next US president has changed as follows (per Election Betting Odds). The probability per Metaculus follows in square brackets.
Trump, up 0.1% to 50.9% [50%]
Biden, up 0.8% to 31.9% [46%]
Michelle Obama, down 1.5% to 5.6% [1%]
Newsom, down 1.2% to 2.7% [1%]
Harris, up 0.1% to 1.9% [1%]
Kennedy, up 0.1% to 1.5% [1%]
Haley, up 0.1% to 1.3% [1%]
There are considerable divergences between sites, e.g. the bid-offer spread on Betfair for Trump is currently 43.1-43.5%, whereas the spread on Polymarket is 53-55% (all the Polymarket spreads are huge).
Not long ago (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12924) Scott posted a claim (from Jeremiah Johnson) that Metaculus was more accurate (by some margin) than real money markets in the 2020 election. If that were to remain true, the above percentages show there is significant money to be made (in expectation), which is surprising, because people like money. The divergence between the sites only increases this.
That said, something is wrong with the Metaculus predictions: they sum to 111%, because they have a long tail of outsiders at exactly 1% each. I'm not sure how this has happened, but it cannot be right.
Last week we spent some time on the Open Thread discussing Michelle Obama's odds, and while some people felt that there was some plausible path for her to become president, I think we did broadly agree that 7% was much too high. Since then, the market has moved in the right direction, but 5.6% still seems too high. Admittedly, there is a problem with offering very long odds on an event that far in the future, because of the opportunity cost, but that doesn't prevent people offering, say, 999/1 on Rashida Tlaib (you could currently bet as much as £513 at these odds on Betfair, implying someone is willing to put £512k on the other side of the table).
It's perhaps worth noting that the total amount wagered is $67m. While this is higher than in many other markets, it is probably a small fraction of the total amount which will have been wagered by the time the election takes place (which I would expect to be well over $1 bn), so a lot of money is not yet committed. It seems plausible that current market participants are skewed towards highly engaged individuals. In general one would hope that a high level of engagement would lead to accurate predictions, but in the case of politics there is at least some anecdotal reason to suspect that highly engaged individuals can become entrenched in their beliefs.
I would be interested in readers' views as to: (1) why there are such large differences between real money markets and Metaculus (and also Manifold) and (2) why there are (smaller, but still significant) differences between different real money markets. As for (2), part of the explanation must be that getting money on to (and off) Polymarket is a PITA, but I don't think it can be the whole explanation: you still have different pools of prediction agents reaching contrary conclusions.
I think most differences can be explained by two categories of reasons: (1) "financial friction" in real-money markets (2) risk premia differences among the markets.
Financial friction is the usual stuff that impedes arbitrage in markets. Stuff like bid-ask spreads, liquidity, and potential credit risk (i.e. the market might run away with your money, or not enforce the contract as stated). Also, I don't think the real-money prediction markets accrue interest on the bets that are being placed, which changes your calculations when betting is worth it. For example, it's not smart to make a bet that earns you 2% ROI when you could buy US treasuries with 4%+ yield.
"Risk premium" is how much investors need to be compensated for the amount and types of risk they bear. In real-money markets, the average investor's utility function is risk-averse. In particular, investors are willing to pay more than expected value for protection from "bad" events. (This is why the insurance industry is able to make a profit!) This translates to higher market-implied probabilities on "bad" events. Whereas in a fake-money market, it could very well be that the average investor is close to risk-neutral, which would mean the market-implied probabilities are closer to the objective probabilities.
Edit: And I should add that some differences may just be immaturity of the markets. The real-money markets are still quite small AFAIK, so a lot of "smart money" (high-information, highly rational investors) just isn't there yet because they're in the "real", big financial markets.
>because they have a long tail of outsiders at exactly 1% each. I'm not sure how this has happened, but it cannot be right.
Is there some sort of liquidity problem here? _exactly_ 1% makes no sense. Are there enough hassles with betting against these outsiders that it isn't worth anyone's while?
Yes, I would be interested in hearing from someone who understands Metaculus as to what has happened here. It is not simply that the site does not support probabilities more precise than 1%, because I can see that in the past, e.g. Mike Pence was at 0.1%. And in fact now (but not yesterday) Cornel West is at 0.8% (which is still surely an order of magnitude too high).
Many Thanks! I think Luke G's explanation above of "financial friction" sounds like it probably accounts for most of this.
Hmm, I've recently become interested in RFK Jr. and have been buying yes shares at Manifold, (The only betting site I use.) (The odds seem very low there, less than 1%.) I would like to bet some real money, but I don't know if I can do that legally.
Of potential interest: of 3.9m bet on Michelle Obama winning the presidential election on Polymarket, 1.2m of Yes shares are held by a single user. This user joined in January 2024 and has only 2 positions (that Obama will win the presidential election and that she will win the primary).
ETA We also have, of 6.0m bet on Trump winning the presidential election on the same site, 1.6m of Yes shares are held by a single user. This user also joined in January 2024 and has only 3 positions (that Trump will win the presidential election, that he will win the popular vote and (oddly) a very small bet that he will lose the election). In total, this person has bet c$922k.
I came across a Twitter post yesterday that noted how someone doing a computer science degree in America is required to study the arts and humanities too.
He wondered whether someone studying, say, English Literature, should be similarly required to learn a little computer science.
I reject the premise entirely. In England, if you study computer science, you study computer science. I heard an interview with an admissions tutor who said “If you want to study biology, we don't care how well you did in history.” In fact, English students get to ditch all but three subjects at 16.
I suggest that the US approach does not actually result in more rounded students and wrote about it here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/raggedclown/p/teach-computer-science-to-humanities
Personal opinion - there's a lot of value in some humanities courses. Some people talk about the "well-rounded person" and whatnot, but I think that's too vague to accept alone. I just want to work with people who can write a few sentences that coherently get their point across and understand that the world didn't begin when they were eight years old (who apparently never heard of history or cared that there may have been people and trends before they were old enough to remember).
That said, I think most four year college degrees are heavily padded to keep the coursework at four years even if the important things can be covered in three or even two normal years. If you have 12-30 credits in your 120-credit degree that are free electives and you can pick such programs as Tennis or Porn (real electives at my college) or from a wide variety of unrelated and open topics, then the value is greatly diminished. If I had my way, there would be some electives, but from a much smaller pool and with an overall purpose in mind. Let people pick 20th Century Literature instead of Shakespeare, sure. But don't make people take credits in something they don't care about but also let them choose whatever random thing may exist to fulfil it. I had all of my core classes completed and my last semester was all electives, so I had to stay in college after completing everything I would need in my degree. I could have blown off the whole semester with the stupidest and easiest classes, or done things completely unrelated to anything useful in my life. It just made me feel like they wanted my money and didn't care if I got an education.
No, there's absolutely not value in them. Maybe once upon a time, but today they've been ideologically hijacked.
As someone who went through a "liberal arts" program (i.e. the "American" system) in Computer Science, I do think there's merit to it.
My workplace has a split between people who went to very tech focused colleges, and my impression is that the people who went to tech-focused do colleges tend to be good the programming side of their job but less good at the soft skills and are maybe less likely to end up in leadership positions. (Whether that's causal or a selection effect of the sort of people who pick each kind of school, I don't know)
I'm a bit bearish on 4-year degrees for computer science at all for most people - long term I really do think the profession should go to a more "trade school" approach and not have people paying for four year degrees to get programming jobs.
... but if the choice is just over what four year college program to take, I do think I would endorse the system that might make you a little less technically focused and a bit more well-rounded person overall
Have you even CONSIDERED the remote possibility that these programs didn't magically imbue people with personality changes (er, "soft skills"), and that people with different inherent traits self select into different programs and colleges?
> (Whether that's causal or a selection effect of the sort of people who pick each kind of school, I don't know)
Given that I explicitly mentioned that in my comment, yes, I'd say I CONSIDERED the remote possibility.
And, yeah, it's possible that selection effects are a big part, but I don't know think it's crazy to suggest that a college program might have formative effects on someone's personality. I mean that's kind of the point of the institution, isn't it, (unless you're a hardline "college is 100% a signaling game and conveys no benefit whatsoever")
You stated your opinion (and I respect it), but do you have any data to back up your assertions?
I think the opposite because there's more to life than just knowing how to do a particular job. Likewise, "soft skills" frequently enhance one's career opportunities and career satisfaction. I've just completed a thirty-three-year career as a network "engineer" (I'm an engineer without an engineering degree). I worked on some very large international network deployments, and I've kept up with the bleeding-edge land-line data communications technologies. I could tell you stories about CS and EE graduates from some of the top US engineering schools who were incapable of efficiently troubleshooting problems, who were incapable of correctly sequencing and prioritizing tasks, who couldn't write a clear declarative sentence (which are needed when describing a problem or a solution), and who curled into fetal balls when forced to deal with alien cultures on overseas projects. Although it may not seem obvious to you, all these skills are required to get big projects done on time and within budget in an international arena.
Worse yet, within ten to twenty years I've seen engineers whose skill sets were no longer current get pushed aside by younger CS and EE graduates. That's not to say that studying history or some other liberal arts classes would help them, but I'd say that CS and EE programs are not turning out flexible thinkers. From my personal experience, and I admit this is just anecdata, having an undergrad degree in Anthropology helped me with my overseas gigs. And having STEM graduate background in the biological sciences (with a strong overlay of statistical modeling) allowed me to look at problems in different ways from many of the engineers I worked with.
Oh, I almost forgot. One of the most brilliant routing engineers I ever worked with never went to college and he hadn't even earned his high school diploma. He worked for a telecom company that later got eaten by a larger telecom. After work he ran training classes for the call center staff (mostly women without four-year degrees) to get their CCIEs. Several of them did, and ended doing quite well. He got a job at the nascent Google before they IPOed. I lost track of him, but he was a legend in networking circles.
Do YOU have any hard data to back up anything YOU said?
Like, do you have a single jot of evidence to back up your claim that humanties courses improve people's "soft skills"? Does any of this data, which may or may not exist, control for the fact that people who study humanities courses are likely to be inherently different from people who don't?
The idea that colleges radically change people's personalities or "soft skills" is an extreme claim and almost certainly a false one, at least compared to the effect of self selection and inherent differences.
No, I admitted it's all personal experience on my part. But Ragged claimed that humanities could be of no benefit to CS students — without any data other than his own opinion. Since he offered a null data set to support his opinion, doesn't my anecdata trump a null data set? ;-)
But I think Ragged is doing his co-engineers in the US a disservice by claiming that CS students should *only* study CS. The CS degree goes back to 1962 in the US (it was called "information science" back then). When IBM mainframes (and to a lesser extent Unisys's big iron) swept through corporate America in the 1970s, there weren't enough coders being graduated from information science programs to meet the demands of corporate America. Corporations started recruiting college grads with humanities degrees, and training them to be coders. Of course, most of corporate America was run by people with humanities degrees back then (MBAs were still very rare at the time). Anyway, I think it was a Rand Corporation study that claimed musicians made the best coders. And, yes, corporations made a point of recruiting musicians ("Hey, tired of looking for gigs and just getting by? Come be a COBOL programmer at BIGCO, and you can earn a steady middle-class income!").
Fast forward 50 years and US CS programs are churning out 100,000 graduates each year. But like salmon swimming upstream, only a small minority of those grads will be coding until they retire. There's a lot of age discrimination in the tech industry — but it's probably justified. It's hard for most people to keep learning the latest languages and tools, and it's easier for hiring managers to hire younger people whose skills are up-to-date and who demand lower salaries than people who've been in the labor force for fifteen or twenty years. A lot of programmers move into management, sales, or technical marketing as their skill sets age out (remember, someday Python will be as antiquated as COBOL, and that day may be sooner than you think.) Anyway, you'd best have some other skills than coding, because the next generation is coming for your job. Cheers!
I think this goes back to the democratic roots of the United States. Once upon a time, speaking at a very high level, there were two types of advanced education. One type was liberal arts, reserved for the ruling elite. The other type was trade schools, for all the other people whom the elite wanted to put in a little box.
The US, as a democratic society, is rather allergic to the notion that people will be sorted into elites and technical serfs on the basis of education. And really, to the extent we're a democracy, that sounds like a good thing to avoid. We like the idea that anyone can come from anywhere, and be exposed to anything at college. So pretty much all of our higher education still has parts that derive from the old liberal arts curricula, even if most Americans never, say, learn Latin and Greek. You can even see the effects in our public primary education (K-12), especially in slogans like "no child left behind" and the resistance to "tracked" education.
The democratic roots of the United States allowed votes to white male property owners, and emphasised liberal arts education with the understanding that it was a good to be consumed by that class. It seems not unreasonable to characterise them as a ruling elite. Certainly there was no conception in the eighteenth century that women, Jews, Catholics, Black people, native Americans would be admitted to higher education. So I find your historical motivation inaccurate.
I found society in the US (I lived there five years) to be far more segregated than in Europe. Perhaps you're right that the segregation is not carried out on the basis of education. The segregating factors seemed to me to be class and race, though those do strongly control access to elite education. I taught at a university in Massachusetts and the difference in race and wealth between the campus population and the surrounding suburbs was stark.
Yet, despite our elitist and racist culture, 36% of Americans have at least a baccalaureate. A little Googling shows that it's 26% in the UK, and it's 29% in Ireland. Which of those three countries seems to offer the greatest educational opportunities to its citizens?
The 29% figure is accurate for the population in Ireland as a whole - the Central Statistics Office of Ireland shows the number of people who completed a third-level qualification rose from 14% of the population in 1991 to 48% in 2022. Some things depend on how long your country has been wealthy, perhaps?
The United States has never been perfect at living up to its ideals (and indeed it may not even be coherent to talk about a democracy having "ideals" in the first place). Look at "all men are created equal", written by Thomas Jefferson. That's an ideal which took centuries to implement, even to our current extent. But Thomas was a smart guy, and I am convinced that he knew what he was doing when he wrote that.
I don't think 60% of white males can reasonably be considered an elite, in a country where white people made up 80% of the population. That's about, what, 24% of the population, roughly the number who vote for a winning presidential candidate today? (If you're from Ireland, maybe you have some different historical context regarding distribution of property ownership. (To put it mildly.) But in America, we've kind of been obsessed with owning our own homes, for as long as America has existed, and I think a lot of it comes from a reaction to the situation in Europe a few centuries ago.) Nor was it truly restricted to white people or men; federalism allowed various states to have more liberal voting laws:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_the_United_States
And you're just wrong about whether non-whites and non-men would be admitted to higher education. Individual institutions had restrictions of their own, and most of the existing ones were explicitly religious; to the best of my knowledge, the early 19th century was when we started seeing religiously-neutral universities appear. But there was nothing stopping various groups from creating their own universities, and that is exactly what happened over the following decades. And they modeled themselves on what they saw were the best traditions of the existing universities, including the liberal arts tradition. Eventually, all states (I think) would create public universities with subsidies and scholarships for in-state students, ensuring that anyone talented enough had a chance of being able to attend, even if they grew up in a log cabin.
Society in the modern US may be more segregated than that in Europe, in some ways. (But how often does the average Briton cross paths socially with someone who went to Oxbridge? I personally have had an earful of complaints by Americans in England that they, e.g., could not invite all their friends to the same parties.) I think one of the factors you need to consider is America's size, and our abnormal expectation of mobility. People who don't fit in can pick up and move to somewhere they feel more comfortable, and this is not only expected but encouraged. The result looks a lot like segregation, for good and ill. But I think most of this is beside the point; a theory of the historical basis for certain aspects of the educational system does not have to account for the current state of society.
And yes, I attended a university that was starkly distinct from its surrounding environment, in both race and class. But that's partly because the university had a national profile, and attracted people from all over the country who matched that profile. If you want institutions that match the local demographics, that's exactly what community colleges are for, and I would expect that virtually all community colleges have a class and racial profile that is quite similar to that of the surrounding area. And on a larger scale, that's what state universities and land-grant universities are for (to include both the liberal arts tradition, and the non-liberal-arts tradition), and I'd expect similar similarities of profile on the statewide scale. (And on the original point, a lot of community colleges have a setup where students who attend for 2 years and do well, can transfer to a state institution and finish their degree there. This is one of the ways to work around the limitations of standardized testing and the application process; even if you don't test well, if you show up and do the work and excel, you can still rise high.)
I don't disagree with what you wrote, though the distinctions in the US between community colleges and private colleges does sound a lot to me like the "notion that people will be sorted into elites and technical serfs on the basis of education". Yes - some small number of people will progress from community college through four-year college and on to great things, but the probability is low. Overall social mobility in the US is low by international standards and the education system would absolutely seem to be a part of that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States/
The 'all men are created equal' quote is aspirational I guess, if its meaning is interpreted in terms of the sensibilities of contemporary society. I have never seen a convincing argument that Jefferson had women or black people in mind when writing those lines, though obviously that's the contemporary reading. Incidentally, in Ireland we're engaged in a process of rewriting the constitution. In two weeks or so there will be a referendum to replace outdated references to the role of women in society, among other things.
I'd say that there are sort of two broad traditions of education in America. There's the "liberal arts" tradition, and what I'll call the "vocational/technical" tradition, which encompasses all sorts of job-based training, from machine-ship classes to agricultural education to medical and law school. This second tradition does have a class-based component, in that we expect a lawyer or a medical doctor to spend 4 years at a liberal arts school, but we don't expect the same thing of a machinist or a farmer.
Community colleges are the bottom rung of both ladders. (Well, not really the bottom, below them are our primary and secondary schools, covering K-12 education, and the secondary schools do sometimes have different tracks.) One key part is that community colleges are cheap, and sometimes even free. They're also local and easy to access, and they have evening classes that are compatible with a full-time job. One of the functions they serve is to catch people who weren't good students in K-12, or who went straight into work, but then want to get more of an education. Generally speaking, people who go on to "great things" will have been better students in K-12, or will have scored high enough on tests that they can get into a 4-year college directly. (If you test well enough, and lack the money, most states will even give you a full scholarship to their public liberal arts university, meaning that it's free.)
And yes, I'd like more social mobility, and don't like how ossified our society is becoming. But I don't think that can be blamed on our educational system. I'd lay it more on the feet of trends in our general culture and specific sub-cultures, and various oligarchical tendencies that are separate from education.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer - I think the entrenchment of elites is a problem in all countries.
Something I found weird about (the northeast of) the US was the level of regionalism in the education system - spending per capita on elementary and high-school students was less than half of what it was in the next town over (geographically maybe 3 miles away). I have no children, and I was one of a tiny number of faculty members living in the same city as the uni in which I worked, perhaps for that reason. Demographic differences were stark between the two public school systems on any measure of race or class - in that sense I think students tend to be segregated from early on in US.
Note that "community colleges and private colleges" make up only a fraction of the US higher education system. There are also a large number of public four-year colleges and universities, I believe substantially outnumbering the private ones by enrollment at least.
If there's serf/elite sorting going on, it would almost have to be at the border between public community colleges and public four-year colleges.
I had AP credit coming in, but still had to get a composition credit*, a non-western cultures credit (for which I took World Religions) and within CS took a "and society" course in which I recommended to my teacher that she watch Idiocracy (she was very enthusiastic about it afterward).
*For which I submitted the initial version of what would be my preface to "The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays". I had already gotten paid for it well before the grad student evaluating it stopped asking for revisions. Admittedly, the published version was very heavily revised by Chip Smith.
In Germany at uni you really specialise. So if you study computer science they don't make you read poems.
However Germany to to high school for longer, and there they don't specialise much.
So overall a German computer scientist probably had to endure a comparable load of poetry as her American counterpart.
English Literature was compulsory at my school until 16 so I got I my poetry done then. Hated it. Love it now.
Literature is like sex: best enjoyed voluntarily, instead of forced down your throat.
Indeed.
The UK is unusual by specialising at 16.
I studied CS in the UK. While all my modules were all related to CS I felt there was an inordinate amount of time wasted learning skills preparing you for a career in academia rather than industry. I feel like my role is basically a tradesperson/ craftsman. I'm not doing novel or bleeding edge work, I implement whatever the agreed best practice is for the given problem in front of me. Why is my (every students?) largest project writing thousands of words in an academic style that is expected to be read by no one.
Only a fraction of professions need to analyse the scientific literature for work (never mind contribute to it) seems yet this seems to be central to every course
/end rant
Aside from the usual suspects - ego, institutional inertia, reluctance to experiment and adapt -, I think people are just brainwashed into thinking that more schooling == more knowledge == more intelligence == more success. None of those equations hold all the time or by logical necessity, but people think it does, and perhaps don't even realize that they think so.
Why go all the way back to your university education? just look at the typical tech interview:
Interviewer: What's the difference between static overloading and dynamic polymorphism? Can you solve this <thinly veiled textbook algorithmic problem> with Dynamic Programming? Walk me through how you would implement Twitter.
vs the actual job:
That same Interviewer, now your boss: Plz change this json to have a "Ping" instead of a "Pong" field.
People are not honest, not even to themselves.
Realistic coding exams would involve changing the spec halfway through.
90% of my job is getting the people who wrote the spec to understand that what they've given me is utter garbage and needs to be rewritten from the ground up, with several client meetings thrown in. Actually *implementing* anything is trivially easy.
'And the user exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt, "It's just what I asked for, but not what I want!" --Author unknown.'
Once, when I was about nineteen, I mentioned in passing the replication crisis when talking to a therapist. She had never heard of the concept before, and asked me to elaborate. When I explained the problem (that far too few psychology findings, particularly at that time, survive replication), she was personally offended -- I was obviously criticising *her* by way of implying her field must be fundamentally evil in some way, just because I knew it was facing a particular not-unique problem that anyone familiar with the literature would've known.
There are a lot of people who think you should be able to practice as a therapist without being elbows-deep in the literature. If I ever thought that, I sure as hell don't now.
I remember this when I think about the "how deeply should people in any field understand its research underpinnings?" problem.
I've studied in both the US "generalist" system and the European-inflected (not in Europe proper) "specialist" system. I found the US system more interesting, and wanted to take a lot more electives in the Euro-inflected system. I don't think "if CS should take humanities classes, humanties should take CS classes" is the right comparison exactly. CS is actually included under science electives or gen eds (I took CS classes as gen eds), but most people majoring in a very different field would take an "easier"-sounding science or one closer to their field. Taking CS as a gen ed in a very different field is more like a CS student deciding their humanities gen ed should be Latin or Ancient Greek -- it's an option, but it's going above and beyond the minimum.
I agree many Americans in TE have, in practice, a tenuous grasp of other fields. I've never seen this as isolated to Americans, though. I think it's a consequence of neglect of the humanities at the higher/decision-making level in general, and whether the downstream consequence of that neglect is "I dropped all my humanities classes in year 11 because they're dumb bludge subjects" or "I took Grievance Studies to fill a gen ed and it sucked" is less relevant.
My thought is that students form an opinion quite early about whether they are interested in humanities. Gen Ed requirements at university do very little to change that. The students who are interested will read literature (or study art or history or whatever) regardless of the degree requirements and the students who are not interested will do the absolute minimum.
I don't think it's coherent to say someone "is" or "isn't" interested in "humanities" in the same sense it's not coherent to say that about "science". People's interests don't seem to cluster like that. In practice, from what we know about personality, "interest in humanities" and "interest in science" are probably strongly correlated by way of "intellectual curiosity", and the idea they're disconnected or inverted is a consequence of Simpson's paradox. People with relatively low intellectual curiosity are rarely particularly into either, but there are merits to forcing basic understandings of biology/history/etc upon them anyway. (Are we any good at this right now? No, but that's a different problem.) The real yawning abyss beneath us is neither TE nor Grievance Studies -- it's the huge mass of people majoring in vocational subjects (if you're thinking CS, drop that thought, and think degrees with "Business" in the name) who think the whole "intellectual advancement" idea is some funny historical thing, who neither read great literature nor, per your post, can identify organs. This problem is not unique to any system, and I don't think accelerating into specialization *helps* it.
You might have something resembling a point if humanities subjects hadn't been almost entirely ideologically captured in the US, UK etc. and serve more as forms of propagandistic training than genuine learning.
You're reminding me of being irritated at Pamela Dean's _Tam Lin_-- a novel of the something weird is happening at a small liberal arts university variety.
It's a good book, but the characters are only interested in the humanities, no STEM. I'm used to science fiction fans, so the lack of more general interests seemed weird to me, but maybe it's part of the normal human range.
Also, the real world has changed in the sense of many more people being interested in the structure of stories and story-telling. I don't know whether it's the Flynn effect or what.
Great points.
I wonder if the too-many-vocational-subjects problem is a side-effect of the too-many-kids-at-university problem. Perhaps there's an ideal number of kids getting degrees — maybe 20% — and they are interested in something specific — maybe physics or Classical Greece. When the powers-that-be try to shoehorn 60% of kids into university, they end up with a lot of kids who are not interested in physics or classical Greece so they have to find topics they are interested in and can complete successfully.
Perhaps the vocational subjects would be better taught outside of university (with less essay writing). I did an engineering apprenticeship, FWIW, and was in charge of most of the sonar on a nuclear submarine at 21. I also taught myself programming from K&R and had a successful career in Silicon Valley. No degree required.
"Perhaps the vocational subjects would be better taught outside of university ..."
They used to be.
The US used to (maybe still does?) have things called "business colleges." You would go there to learn to "work in business" and would learn subjects such as basic accounting, filing and typing. It didn't take four years to get through.
The US also used to have secretarial schools (shorthand, etc.). Again, these did not take four years to finish.
And, of course, the US used to hire people straight out of high school with the idea that they could be trained on the job.
Now most of the modern age-equivalent kids think that they have to go to college if they want a job because they don't think they will be even interviewed without a piece of paper indicating a four-year degree. Of course they don't care about ancient Greece! They just want a job that has better prospects than running the register at a McDonalds!
For a while, the US military required officers to have masters degrees before they could be promoted to Lt. Colonel and above. The subject mostly didn't matter. Do you think the officers getting those masters degrees cared about the subject matter terribly? Keeping in mind that they still had to do whatever 40+ hour/week job was required to be a good captain or major.
Public school teachers often get paid better with a masters degree (vs a bachelors). Subject doesn't matter. You can probably guess where I'm going.
We have A LOT of students in colleges/universities who are only there because they need (or think they need) a certificate. What they really want is job training and then to be able to go get a job. But that isn't how things in the US are organized right now.
I should ask my uncle (Lt. Col., US Army) what his master's is in...
I've heard that the US does this as well. It seems kind of inexplicable, honestly.
I think part of it is grade inflation. You take a hard curriculum like engineering or CS, and you maybe do so-so in your core classes, but you can give your overall GPA a boost by taking easy classes in other departments, like intro to psychology, geology, western civ, etc. Not that I would know about this personally. Other students did this, so I'm told.
There is also cross-subsidization going on. Most students are picking practical majors these days like engineering, business, etc. It is important to a university's overall reputation to offer degrees in arts and humanities, too, and to have decent faculty in those disciplines, so you require the business school kids to take a literature class or two and that helps generate some revenue for the literature department, and thus it becomes a little more financially self-sufficient.
You're a lot more prone to assuming good intent than me - when I was in undergrad, I saw Gen-eds as a blatant, bald-faced money-grab.
I was (theoretically) paying this stupid school umpteen zillion dollars to learn and be able to attend the Physics and Math classes that actually interested me, and they wanted me to spend how much time on how many totally pointless, literally content-less classes??
Any class that's so pointless that *attendance* is literally part of the grade has no place in any actually educational schema or institution . And requiring TWO YEARS worth of that crap! Blatant money grab, an explicit FU to anyone paying their own way or wanting to actually learn anything useful or interesting in the limited time they have.
If I hadn't been able to CLEP out of most of them, I would have been even more militantly pissed, and that's my advice to my various nieces and nephews now - CLEP out of everything you possibly can. If you can't do that, do community college, because you're literally not going to *learn* anything in Gen-eds, it's purely checking boxes and wasting your time and money.
Well, yeah, I guess that's another way to look at it. I suppose I wanted to present a best-case scenario for a foreign audience, but also, I gotta say there were some Gen-ed classes I genuinely enjoyed as an undergrad, like the two philosophy courses I took, Russian history, creative writing, maybe one or two others if I thought harder about it. I was to some degree glad I was forced to take classes like those, because I probably wouldn't have done so on my own, although of course my parents paid for it all, not me, so that certainly colored my view on the subject.
Anyone want to play Inflection Point with me? It's a real time turn based military strategy game that my friend made.
https://inflectionpointgame.com/
A few years ago (triggered by the start of covid lockdowns) a family member began having strong paranoid delusions that the police are following him and that there's a huge conspiracy against him. He was about 60 years old at the time. The delusions have persisted since then, and he doesn't want to take prescribed psychiatric treatment, because he doesn't acknowledge that the delusions aren't real. (I guess otherwise they wouldn't really be delusions.)
I'd like to describe some of the symptoms, because I've been trying to find information online and in books for years with nothing seeming to be very helpful. My hope is that someone here might recognize this type of behavior/illness.
For at least a couple of decades now, he's had strong conspiratorial tendencies and forms what appear to other to be bizarre conclusions based on available evidence (not only about politics, but also about people at work, behavior of groups of strangers, etc.) He has in adulthood never been able to form social relations outside family. His thinking is very slow and rigid. He's had a slow cognitive decline for years, that has accelerated since around the time his delusions started. Since then, his memory and physical coordination have also worsened - a doctor has suggested dementia, but the main symptom does seem to be delusions (rather than memory issues). He hasn't had hallucinations at all, as far as anyone can tell, though doctors have also suggested a possible schizophrenia diagnosis.
He doesn't have an "official" diagnosis, mostly because he refuses to take tests/see the same doctor enough, though all agree that there is some kind of psychiatric/neurological issue here. I guess it may be common that such issues don't conform to cookie-cutter diagnoses, although all information I can find seems to be geared to such. Has anyone here encountered someone a bit like this? How was it for you?
Possibly it’s delusional disorder, occurring on the background of cluster A personality traits, but I really want to emphasise that the specific diagnosis doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting him into treatment. Perhaps you could do an intervention with all his friends and family members. Otherwise he won’t get better and may get worse.
"The delusions have persisted since then, and he doesn't want to take prescribed psychiatric treatment, because he doesn't acknowledge that the delusions aren't real. (I guess otherwise they wouldn't really be delusions.)"
"This is a delusion, in the sense the term for this sort of thing is 'a delusion', and it's also a literally true statement of actual reality" is a not-rare experience. (More complicated possibilities, like "it's a delusion, a literally true statement of actual reality, and a complex metaphor or pataphor", are also possible.)
More directly: the age of onset range for the "functional psychoses" is far broader than people think. 60 doesn't even get you to "very late onset", in naming terms. Progressive impairments in memory and coordination imply a frontotemporal dementia rather than a functional psychosis, though. Diseases in the FTD family can and do involve psychosis, and for someone who happens to be schizotypal at baseline...well, dementia makes you more of who you are.
In what sense does dementia make you more of who you are? I haven't encountered that idea before.
The early and mid stages of dementia have a way of exaggerating certain personality traits. This is certainly not the only dementia-personality interaction -- the opposite of "someone I knew for decades suddenly changes" is also notorious -- but exaggerations or distortions of longstanding tendencies are pretty well-reported amongst both caregivers and people with dementia themselves, and indeed coexist/synthesize with the "sudden radical differences" part. This often looks like exaggeration into flaws -- stubborn people become recklessly so ("our parent can't drive safely, but none of us have been able to take the keys"), caring and giving people get ensnared into scams because they can't draw the line anymore, people with "a temper" fly into unprovoked rages, etc. In the object case, people with paranoid tendencies becoming extremely so in early-stage dementia is not rare.
I am not a doctor and of course even if I were I can't diagnose someone I've never met. But this sounds a lot to me like Lewy Body Dementia or Parkinson's with Lewy Body
Could be, but hallucinations are usually more prominent than delusions in such cases
Any writers here willing to share their own writing schedules?
Lately I've been experimenting with diffetrent writing schedules and one things I came up with which works for me is to write shorter posts from time to time while having a longer post in the pipeline for several weeks. I used to try and push one article per week but some articles just take more than a week to proprely research (especially if I need to contact someone and wait for their response). The new system I am tryig now is having one of the big articles on the backburner, slowly moving it forwards, which "one-shotting" some small articles along the way, in areas where I feel comfortable to write (because I have done plenty of related research).
I write one 5000-ish word essay per week, published on Wednesdays. I work for one hour each day from Friday to Tuesday, producing 1000 or so words per day, and then correct and polish on Wednesdays. Thursdays I don't do any writing. At the same time, I have a notebook where I put down ideas, and I usually have at least an outline of what I'm going to write next when I publish an essay.
How about reading?
It's more a question of checking references and making sure I have the details right. Most of what I write is based on my experience over nearly fifty years in a relatively specialised area: politics, international relations, crisis and conflict, mixed with other interests of mine acquired over the decades. My essays are largely analytical, talking about current events and trends, and they don't require exhaustive academic research. I stay away from topics where I have no special knowledge or experience to offer. I read quite a lot anyway, and have an extensive library and a reasonable memory to fall back on.
I like the shorter post, longer post dynamic. There are a few ideas I have which feel like they need a lot of time to do justice. But it feels silly to drastically reduce my pace of writing in the meantime, so whenever an idea strikes me I'll still take to writing it and don't worry if the piece is a tad short; if I feel it's valuable I still post it. Definitely helps with momentum while working on longer pieces.
Oh yes, that's something I've come to appreciate too - let the ideas drive the process and set the goals instead of word counts
I write a web serial (as opposed to a blog) as a personal project, and I aim to publish something each Friday on the order of about 1000+ words. (Very rarely, if the pacing of the story demands it, I'll post up a smaller snippet; but if a scene is much longer than my usual parcel, I tend to cut it up and serve it in chunks.)
To achieve it, I go for walks to gather ideas on Mondays and Wednesdays after work, then write a bit, and I edit on Fridays, and write more on Saturdays. I don't worry too much about whether there are conflicting plans - the ideal schedule (+ the occasional stretch of vacation) leaves me with enough backlog that I can weather those as well as any sickness. (That said, I also only write from September to May; I don't like summers and having to negotiate with the hot temperatures is too exhausting to maintain that schedule. To maintain a steady schedule year-round, I'd probably have to reduce my output further.)
"Writing" means the actual act of writing, but it can also mean "doing research". I write in a hard-ish science setting, so I'm often looking something up. The biggest risk here tends to be that I get side-tracked by interesting science! That happens.
I haven't missed a scheduled publishing time yet (couple years into this), but a COVID-19 infection did get me uncomfortably close to "whoops, out of backlog".
I guess tl;dr my approach is "write enough to have a backlog". It sounds like you're working on establishing a similar system for your articles.
Could you give a link to your web serial?
Oh my, um, sure! [nervous shuffling] https://www.schlaugh.com/umbilical - or if you want to use in-post previous / next links instead of a maybe slightly clunky paginated 'all posts' feed, it starts with https://www.schlaugh.com/umbilical/prologue. It's a sequel to A Thread Between The Stars, though, and I don't yet know how confusing it is if you try to make sense of it without that context (eventually, during the editing phase, i.e. once the web serial is done and I'm turning it into novellas and a novel, I will try to make it make more sense for newcomers to the setting). It updates each Saturday at schlaupdate (09:00 UTC).
Yes, exactly, writing enough to have a backlog is a good way to put it! Thanks for your answer
I moved to Northern Michigan to live out my life doing what I enjoy in a quiet and beautiful place. Simply making a new friend changed that, for good possibly. "Make friends carefully," is advice I should have followed; but then again, well, we have to see how this turns out. Here's https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/floater-part-2-caz-pays-a-visit.
If you want to start at the beginning here's https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/floater-part-1-an-introduction
I like ghost stories, this one is good, waiting for the next instalment!
My company is looking for people who can program and more importantly can write well.
We are about a dozen people in our startup, and one of the bottlenecks we discovered is that we have a lot of knowledge floating around in conversations and in people's heads, but we lag behind in writing it down. For the moment, we need help with writing for our internal consumption; in a few months we will also want to write docs for people who want to use our system or build on top of it.
We are fully remote, and can offer part-time work, too.
You can reply here or contact me at m@mozak.com, if you are interested, or if you have some suggestions for how to hire good technical writers.
(Full disclosure: we are working with the bleeding edge technology of 'zero knowledge proofs'. Eventually some of our money will come from the crypto-ecosystem and finance in general. We pay in fiat money, and at the moment don't expect to ever offer our own tokens. Think, selling shovels into a gold rush. Most of our code is in Rust.)
Slight tangent: in principle I'm very in favour of https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ but so far we haven't really gotten around to implementing that. If anyone has experience with using work-sample tests to hire or get hired, please share.
EDIT: we are also looking for people who know their way around with compilers and interpreters. Especially of the 'Types And Programming Languages' variety. Or also someone who can compile from an assembly language that has both registers and memory to one that has only memory, and no registers.
What is the compensation?
I'm a programmer who has been blogging at https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/ since 2007. However, I've never written Rust and last took a compiler/interpreter course back in college around the time I started that blog. For my most recent jobs, prior to getting hired I did online programming tests with in-browser IDEs complete with the ability to unit-test my code. I think that's much better than unstructured interviews.
Could you give some examples of the kind of writing you're looking for?
That's an excellent request!
I quite like the style of the docs of https://0xpolygonmiden.github.io/miden-vm/ for example. https://succinctlabs.github.io/sp1/ also reads well to me.
Or pick a Scott Aaronson technical blog post. Or see eg https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/zk-snarks-under-the-hood-b33151a013f6
You mention fully remote, but do you have any timezone requirements?
We have people in Singapore, India, Israel, Abu Dhabi, UK and the US. So I am already maximally screwed as the team lead / CTO. I don't think there's any timezone that would make this worse.
(Fo what it's worse, I'm in Singapore and our CEO is in the Middle East.)
Who do you have in Israel? I'd be up to talk to them and figure out if I should try this more seriously.
I can put you in contact, if you share your email or other way to contact your privately. (Or you can contact me at m@mozak.com.)
Cool, emailed you
You might want to clarify pay bands and if you're looking for a technical writer or a full engineer.
I'd be happiest with a sharp technical writer, but I would also be ok with an engineer who has an interest in and ability for writing prose.
Sorry, I'd need to check with my CEO whether he's ok with publishing pay bands. I'm just the lowly CTO.
(For what it's worth, we are paying quite well.)
Can you say more about specific skills you want? E.g. do you want people who specifically know cryptography or os stuff (or js?).
Some knowledge of cryptography wouldn't hurt, but it's by no means a requirement.
We don't have anything in JavaScript at all. Knowledge of Rust or willingness to learn would be useful, as most of our software is in Rust at the moment.
Our system acts a bit like a very weird (simulated) embedded machine. So some knowledge of that area would be useful, but is not required.
Somewhat independent of the opening for someone who's good at writing technical prose, we are also looking for someone who's good with compilers. Especially the functional programming approach to compilers like you would find in Types And Programming Languages. But also nuts and bolts of llvm.
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!
The lead developer on my team (at a US-headquartered company) is a Norwegian living in Canada. I believe he technically owns his own country (EDIT: should be "company") and is paid as a "contractor" via that. It's possible he's one of those driven away by taxes, but I haven't asked him about that.
Thank you for responding! Would you be interested in asking him about his reasons for moving? I've been trying to find Norwegian expats to join me in drafting a letter of support- I think he would be an excellent fit!
I sent him a link to the article interviewing(?) you and he said he'd check it out. If you give me a way to contact you, I'll relay it to him. You can find an email address for me at https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
Sorry for not getting back to you before now- and thank you for engaging him! I sent you a sort email to give you my details.
Just to be clear- I’m not the founder in the article, I’m just a guy trying to help this resolution succeed because I believe it would be beneficial.
Ok, do you have a way you'd like him to contact you?
"I believe he technically owns his own country and is paid as a "contractor" via that"
Viking heritage in action? 😀
Doh, corrected.
I suppose there should be some organizations focusing on startups that may be relevant here, maybe you should reach out to those.
I mean agencies that provide funding or just try to help entrepreneurs by giving advice, whether they are private or public.
Or just walk into a coworking establishment in Oslo and ask around if anyone knows a company/organization with this specific problem.
Thank you for responding! Yes- there are some groups both local and national that have been critical about the wealth tax. That's an avenue I'm pursunig as well.
The physical aproach I've actually not considered at all- thank you for pointing it out!
I would encourage you to think of this as a political opportunity rather than an exchange of pure ideas. In short, think of this as having two goals: to build cover and support for the politician that wants to implement these changes and to organize relevant constituencies around the opportunity.
I have some ideas about how to do that but I'm not as familiar with Norwegian politics so I don't want to get out over my skis.
I agree with your assement! My short term goal is that my hometown become more attractive, which is based on self interest. (Even though I believe it is a net positive for the city and country overall as well)
Norwegian politics I would say is straight forward; you have interest groups clamoring from attention from politicians. Then you have the usual right/ leftaxis of more business friendly/ more socialist.
If you have any general advice towards influencing this policy change in particular, I'm sure I'll be able to make use of it. :)
I have been browsing through reddit for some years. In the last few years, the front page seems to have turned into a far-left echo chamber with completely crazy economics and a fair degree of crazy woke-aligned thinking. Tonnes of posts with an 'eat-the-rich', 'America and capitalism and billionaires are teh evil' kinds of energy. Has this trend actually happened or is it just me seeing things? Where have all the sane people gone?
Countless right-wing subreddits have been deleted, and right-wing (or 'not-left-wing') posters face continual censorship in almost all subreddits. The most powerful moderators on the site have an enormous amount of power and are virtually all left-wing, and multiple subreddits exist with the explicit goal of crusading against right-aligned subreddits and reporting it until reddit just deletes it to avoid having to deal with this crap.
What's so funny is that 4Chan, a supposed hive of literal actual nazis, has far more tolerance of left-wing opinion than place like reddit does of right-wing opinion. People will call you all kinds of slurs if you're a communist or something, but you won't get your post banned for being anti-right wing, even if your'e straight up trolling/baiting right-wingers.
So now reddit became a safe space for the left, which attracted more leftists who agitate for more censorship making it more left-dominated and the cycle repeats. Additionaly, the place selects for losers with minimal prospects and social skills/life who feel aggreived by American society/"capitalism" in the first place, making massive subreddits like 'antiwork' so popular.
Oh, and one other thing - the most left-wing mainstream place on the internet used to be Tumblr, but once Tumblr was bought by Yahoo and they tried making it into a respectable social media site, this caused a mass exodus of these types of people who found refuge in reddit (and some in twitter), bringing their politics with them.
Nope, not just you. It's bad.
Oh, they got banned.
To be fair, most of the problem with Reddit isn't political, it's that clickbait works and so most of the front page is clickbait. When I check back in on Reddit, I mostly try to scan through that to find things of actual interest but I don't blame Reddit for being mostly clickbait. Maybe...10% or less of posts are leftie junk.
But I 'member The_Donald. I 'member when it got banned. And, yeah, it was not the highest quality content but I go back now and every time there's some equivalently mid-tier political content from WhitePeopleTwitter or whatever and...it's like a gang sign. Lefties can flash leftie gang signs, righties can't.
This happened very, very explicitly with theMotte, you can read it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/x5t3jh/meta_the_motte_is_dead_long_live_the_motte/. They're now off on their own lil site where it's gotten...weird. Because, surprise, normie righties left Reddit, they can read gangsigns, and creator righties went off to their own 'lil echo chambers and ran into all the same problems we're seeing on Reddit.
The sane people are struggling to find a place to discuss things. If you get prominent and you're not leftie, you get stomped and the right is still trying to find a way around this, that's the guts of why people reacted so negatively to "Nazis on Substack" 'n stuff.
And I'm sure some lefties here will think I'm overstating and, like, no, we've had two situations in this 'lil community alone where the broadly right-wingers have been forced to splinter off (datasecretslox and theMotte), you can go visit, I'm not wild about them because, well, they're right-wing echo chambers and meh but I know why they exist and why those people aren't here anymore. Multiply that across hundreds of subreddits and you get the Reddit echo chamber.
But yeah, all the righties got banned. I 'member.
Yeah, I posted a question on a Reddit Mac sub and got woke attacked. I was asking for information about how to customize a Mac so it's safe for an autistic man who is as naive and lacking in common sense as an 8 year old. Someone suggested Disney stuff and I said no, he has adult tastes. Has interest areas where his knowledge is at an adult level -- certain music, certain kinds of cars -- said it was remarkable how when he talks about those special interestss he sounds almost normal. So the wokie went after me for daring to imply that when he was talking about things other than his special interests, he did *not* sound pretty normal. WTF? Everyone recognizes within 30 seconds of meeting this man that he is normal. And I was engaged in a complicated project to develop something to *make his life better and more interesting* and this wokie was doing their More Compassionate than Thou thing. It's madness. Also really really obnoxious.
The clickbait seems to intensify over time. For instance, after the last reddit "blackout" where some subs left and others didn't recover, the front-page seemed to be dominated with fauxmoi and popculturechat for the first time.
Oh wow. I did not know things were so bad at reddit. Think I will avoid giving patronage to the site (fwiw).
Why did parts of this community splinter off? Though there's some left wing slant, it does feel like there is more even keel discussion here?
Read the comments on any post about crime or homelessness in a subreddit for a small to medium size city and you wont get the impression it's a have of left wing politics. Or checkout the "wallstreetbets" extended universe - lots of redpill adjacent stuff going on.
The right wing stuff just doesn't get to the front page or go viral, while the left wing stuff does. Right wingers have been leaving most popular media sources (voluntarily or otherwise), i don't think its unique to reddit.
>Read the comments on any post about crime or homelessness in a subreddit for a small to medium size city and you wont get the impression it's a have of left wing politics.
Whenever there's a reddit thread about an ethnic minority murdering or raping etc. europeans, after a day or so you will see a long string of [Comment Deleted].
Non-left-wing people are still on reddit, but the moderators are very left wing and have enormous power and are able to make it an echo chamber even in places without an absolute left dominance of subreddit members.
> Right wingers have been leaving most popular media sources (voluntarily or otherwise), i don't think its unique to reddit.
NOT voluntarily, mostly. But post-Musk X shows you what a more natural distribution of content looks like (complicated by right-winger joing or returning to X given the less censorious environment).
>Or checkout the "wallstreetbets" extended universe - lots of redpill adjacent stuff going on.
Maybe once upon a time, but these days its been filled with normie shitlibs.
Mostly political pressure.
For theMotte, they were part of the SSC subreddit, then Scott asked them to move due to political and personal pressure, which is how theMotte subreddit arose, then the Reddit admins essentially made clear that, while they wouldn't explicitly ban theMotte, the standards would be raised to the strictest level possible until the Motte moderators inevitably failed. You can read their reaction as it occured here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_rationalists_leaving_a/.
For DSL and the commentariat here, it pretty explicitly arose out of the NYT doxxing. While it might seem that ACX followed seamlessly from SSC, in reality there was about a six-month gap between when Scott deleted SSC and when ACX began. Essentially all the old commenters went over to DSL, which was founded when we didn't know if Scott was coming back, and when Scott launched ACX most of them stayed over at DSL.
Which is why I think the discussion seems so even keel here. The NYT doxxing had two big effects on the commenters. First, Scott seemed to intentionally avoid...."spicy" topics, which I can't blame him for and, second, 90% of the old commenters had left. Frankly, I don't recognize a lot of the current commenters, ya'll are new and generally moderate liberal-leftists. This gives the space a very even-keel discussion because, well, ya'll are pretty homogenous. I can't imagine someone like GoneAnon posting here, it would be madness, but the old SSC energy was driven by a lot of "spicy" people finding an outlet and coming here to post and talk. The NYT doxx hit...kinda like a neutron bomb from my perspective. All the old commentators were gone and Scott wouldn't touch "spicy" stuff anymore so they stayed in the bunkers/echo chambers they built after the doxx and deletion. And then a bunch of moderate liberals walked into this...kind of abandoned forum and we're like "Man, it's nice here, let's set up shop".
If Scott or someone more knowledgeable wants to correct this, I'm certainly open to it but this, young whipppersnappers, is the history as I 'member.
I think it's a bit unfair to describe right wingers as being 'forced to splinter off' regarding datasecretlox. DSL had a decent mix of the old commentariat at the start, but over time the right wingers largely dogpiled, mod actioned and pushed out anyone posting even just moderate takes, let alone left aligned ones. I do miss the more heterodox and varied flavor of the SSC comments, but current ACX comments have a better light to heat ratio, at least.
I still lurk DSL, partly to keep a finger on the pulse of the right wing id and partly because they're just so wacky lol.
Mostly just posting because DSL's evolution and dynamics have been something of a hobby/case study/digital rubbernecking for me. Back to lurking!
I don't think right-wingers "mod actioning" moderates was a big factor on DSL, and I say that as one of the people who was mod-actioned.
But dogpiling, yeah, there was way too much of that going on. Like you, I liked the original mix that made up DSL, and think that the shift in the commentariat did bad things to the light to heat ratio.
What the HELL are you talking about?
Like, your comment is utterly incomprehensible to me unless you're so used to being in left-wing echo chambers that DSL is some sort of far-right place that censors left-wing opinion, because that's not even remotely close to true
Go to the meta forum for DSL and you'll see that most of the people getting banned are right wingers and the place is filled with left-wingers screeching about HBD discussions being allowed. I haven't been on in a little while, but there was basically a de facto rule that you're not allowed to post about HBD unless you've been there so many months or made so many posts. Many wanted it banned outright, others wanted it ot be bannable to bring it up in anything that wasn't explicitly as HBD thread (which means in practice people could make anti-HBD claims but nobody would be allowed to refute them because it wasn't a "HBD thread").
The left are just so used to having right-wingers silenced that anything less than this is viewed as some ultra right wing place.
And most right wingers would love being "dogpiled" to be their biggest problem, but as Wooly says, getting censored is the more common problem.
There's almost nowhere I can think of that's not genuinely right wing where right-wingers have an easy a time as left-wingers do on DSL. But because, again, the left are used to the right being censored, so they will STILL feel aggreived by this.
I was told that the righties formed (or expanded?) DSL during the Interregnum between Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. The SSC comments were *far* to the right of the ACX ones, but Scott was preferentially banning righties before the NYT told him they would doxx him.
My impression is that the winner-take-all system of upvoted articles making the front page and their demographics leads to a lot of politically naive content on Reddit. It's always been bad, and I don't _think_ it's gotten especially worse lately, but the exact nature of it changes from time to time. Right now they are very focused on the (as you put it) eat-the-rich narrative.
The timing is a little funny given that Reddit is currently trying to improve their monetization and go public, which makes Reddit (the corporation) the villain from the eyes of Reddit (the community). It was especially pronounced when they killed the third-party apps which got framed as 'this greedy company refuses to indefinitely give away it's service for free'.
It's absolutely not just upvoting, it's active censorships by the powermods of reddit. Explicitly right-aligned subreddits are either banned or so heavily policed that they're completely neutered.
Yeah there are definitely feedback loops in the algorithms they use that are reinforcing this. What I've noticed is that every three months or so it seems a new crop of popular subreddits pop up and dominate. The content is basically the same stuff but the subreddit is different. Can't tell what triggers the rise and fall. (though TikTokCringe seems to have fallen because it got dominated by pro-palestinian propaganda that people got sick of).
Now this new sub called "FluentInFinance" is super popular out of no where. You'll be shocked to hear basically nothing about the subreddit shows any fluency in finance.
I don't spend much time on reddit, so I went to the front page to check. This seems like an infinite scroll, so let's look at the top 10.
1 is about a bus driver retiring and people saying goodbye
2 is a cute baby chimp
3 and 4 are pictures of people waving swastika flags from the TN capitol building
5 is a video of a woman responding to catcalls by acting weird and funny
6 is asking ex-trump supporters why they stopped supporting him
7 is discussing a survey that says Gen Z is more socialist than any other gen
8 is a discussion of an argument a guy had with his wife
9 is githib humor
10 is angry that amazon driver opened their door and put the parcel inside
4 of them are clearly political, but 2 are the same thing so let's just talk 3 items.
People upset at demonstrators waving swastika flags seems pretty reasonable and sane to me.
The trump supporter thread is full of people claiming to be generally conservative, but put off by Jan 6 and election denialism.
The socialism thread is full of people basically agreeing "no, we don't really want socialism we want stronger safety nets and better corporate regulation"
None of these seem insane to me. A bit echo chamber ish in the sense that you don't have many people arguing "actually, swastika flags are good", but not a lot of calls to eat the rich or calling America evil.
So it seems likely that one of these is true:
1 you see different front page posts than me, and so your browsing behavior is causing the apparent effect
2 you disagree with me that these posts are sane
3 I got lucky and today's front page is more reasonable than normal
4 this effect isn't real and you are just remembering a small number of extreme posts
I look at reddit way more than i should (many times a day), i am not left-wing, but also not right-wing so I hope I can try to be objective.
I think the answer is a combination of 3 and 4 (and a tiny be 2 - posts 10 and 5 could, in the insane minds of constantly online people, be political in some way). When there are viral political tweets or news stories these will jump to the top of the front page and be posted many times in different subreddits. Subreddist like "fuckwork" or "workreformnow" are often on the front page.
Also, to address hypothesis 1, if you are logged in you see a "homepage" which shows posts from the subreddits you are a member of and also recommends posts you might enjoy from other subreddits. There is "All" which is supposed to be the front page, and there is all "Popular" which is the same thing but sorted somewhat differently (it's unclear?) and a bit more newsy. So it's definitely possible that people are seeing different things. You can also sort the posts by "New" or "Hot" or "Rising" and they will give you different results.
In the past 6 months, my personal homepage feed has gotten a lot more posts from big popular subreddits than it used to. Likely a tweak to the algorithm intended to increase engagement and boost their revenue.
Finally, an anecdote: Here is the list of the biggest subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/best/communities/1/ In my mind, I can barely remember seeing posts on the front page from many of these communities. Out of the top 20, i'd say less than half have posts on the front page on a constigten basis. The front page is more focused on viral content and not actually what people are interested in.
the sane people are spending time with their friends and families, not posting on reddit
Just as many other places, reddit has moved from merely on average being left-wing (while tolerating a large variance) to actively censoring and banning people who are perceived as being right-wing. To me it has also been one of the most blackpilling experience; I used to think that the left was fundamentally more tolerant and felt much more at home with them than the right, nowadays I consider the left a much bigger threat to scientific inquiry and free speech than the right (but not fundamentally, I expect the right to be just as bad the moment they're back in power).
To provide an actual answer to this question, several hypothesis I think are plausible (non-exclusive):
* GIFT
* Normal, reasonable people aging out of Reddit. As you get busier with other stuff, your reddit participation takes a hit, leaving behind people who are, on average, more maladjusted. Since younger people opt for other forms of interaction (Discord, groupchats, whatever young people do), there is no influx of normal people to replace the ones that leave.
* Normal, reasonable people are retreating from online interaction altogether.
* A moderation feedback loop: A disproportionate amount of power in reddit is held by mods, who are volunteers. A lot of ink has been spilled regarding the kind of people these "high" status - low pay (no pay, in this case) jobs appeal to. The mods set the tone, which drives less left-wing people away. This makes the environment more left-wing, which justifies further cracking down on right-coded stuff, and so on.
* Reasonable alternatives popping up (many will disagree with the idea that Substack's comment interface is "reasonable", but it exists). While I believe this is a consequence, rather than a cause, it can help accelerate a process that had already started.
What does "GIFT" stand for?
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies
On moderation feedback loops…
I was a contributor on the Straight Dope for many years but gave up on it when the moderation got taken over by the extremely woke. The Straight Dope was always notorious for an extremely diverse set of opinions but all of the opinions except one are gone now.
I buy your hypothesis.
Thirding this, I still really miss SDMB as it was in it's prime. I still think of a lot of the posters there (where are you now, Inigo, LSLguy, Oakminster, Shagnasty, msmith, Spice Weasel, Mangetout, and the rest?), and wish I could hear their thoughts on the things Scott talks about.
It's nice and somewhat unsurprising (but I'm still pleasantly surprised!) that there are refugees from the SDMB here
The SDMB was tremendous back in the day. Lots of intelligent posters. It's a shame what happened to it.
I was on the Straight Dope for years! Also left when it got left.
I noticed that more than ten years ago. I guess our tolerance for what counts as far-left might be different.
I suspect it has a lot to do with Reddit going mainstream. And the mainstream of people who express political opinions online is rather left.
I think substack (or various other places), my impression is that reddit has both shrunk and become more echo chamber -y.
>Where have all the sane people gone?
Are you entirely unwilling to entertain the possibility that the answer to your question is: to Reddit, where they make up most of the posts on the front page?
> Are you entirely unwilling to entertain the possibility that the answer to your question is: to Reddit, where they make up most of the posts on the front page?
The empiric evidence, gathered daily over the last 2 years, is distributed as follows:
* sane people making up most of the posts on the front page: 0%
* the front page mostly consisting of far-left echo chambers with completely crazy economics and a fair degree of crazy woke-aligned thinking: 100%
Exactly right? This thread gives me hope that it's just some kind of selection/moderation feedback loop and the world isn't actually going crazy.
The joke is that maybe:
a. It is you who has turned into a right-wing crank
b. Far-left echo-chambering is the end-state for sane people in the internet
I wouldn't agree that it's true, but it's always worth considering. I just bought a book about why, even though the term "fascist" has been overused throughout history, the new right-wing movements around the world are totally fascist, maybe I'll learn something from it.
> The joke is that maybe: [...]
Yeah, I get that. I was being sarcastic in response to a post that threw a cheap "Have you considered that you you're wrong?" at the wall. How should one respond to that? "Yeah, I've considered it, and no, I'm not wrong." maybe?
As an aside: It seems there's always someone on the Internet who'll misinterpret your sarcasm. I'll call this observation ... "Pete's law", because when that happens, it makes you say "Oh for Pete's sake, that was so obvious!"
At the very least, I think serious consideration should be given to a modified possibility b*: "Far-left echo-chambering is the end-state for sane people *with an eye for the main chance* in the internet."
Sorry for the misunderstanding!
>How should one respond to that?
Just my opinion, and perhaps only limited to a place open to dialogue like this one: address the underlying point directly. Why do you suggest that? What do you agree with the redditors on?
Assuming that you get an honest answer, it could provide more insight to your original question than the median opinion of the ACX commenter which is probably closer to "Reddit was always bad".
Is this a logged in front page? I browse Reddit but don’t post anymore so am logged out mostly. In that case it’s mostly the local subs and popular subs. Neither seem to be drastically different than a few years ago. If you are logged in then you are getting your own followed accounts which is up to you. I’m not saying they haven’t drifted left though, for you.
Oh wait, sorry, I meant /r/all, not the front page.
I don't know how much /r/all differs from a logged-out front page.
I...I see.
I haven't been using Reddit too much until the last couple of years, but I did come across several people raising the observation that the median Reddit user was be pretty libertarian 10-12 ish years ago(e.g., really strong cheering for Ron Paul back around 2008-2012), but now these views are mostly banned from more popular subreddits and woke/extreme left thinking became the norm.
Yes! This was exactly my sense. I wonder if anyone has looked at/studied/quantified this phenomenon.
Even Hacker News has taken a turn to the left recently.
Reddit was like that 15 years ago, and it's been that way ever since.
Reddit used to like Ron Paul back in the day
That was perhaps 17 years ago?
No, I’ve been on Reddit since 2011 and while I do remember liberal politics being popular too, it had a distinctly libertarian streak then.
For what it's worth, Reddit says my account is from February 1, 2006.
I used Reddit for a while back in the day, then stopped for a while, but came back when sub-reddits were invented. I think subreddits helped a lot to shelter some small islands from the corroding mainstream.
(My Hacker News account is from August 16, 2007. I remember using that a lot more, while Reddit had already gone downhill, but hadn't invented their best redeeming feature of sub-reddits, yet.)
Dang, now I'm feeling old...
I don't know why I seem to remember more economically sane voices. From the social perspectives I think it was always very leftist, yes.
I saw the same thing myself on most of the popular subreddits. You have to go out of your way to get something more middle-ground or leaning the other way, but then you run the risk of still echo chambering yourself, just in the other direction. My solution was to get off of Reddit, and I haven't missed it. Better, more curated spaces out there with more good faith conversation.
I'm trying to find a study I read several years ago that seemed to make a breakthrough on lie detection methods. I think they constructed fake border patrol scenarios to test it and the method involved asking the person basic information first, then gradually asking more detailed questions that only a person telling the truth should plausibly know.
The liars would tend to get far less detailed in their answers but truth tellers would maintain their or extend their answer length. Does this ring a bell for anyone? It seemed to stand above other studies on lying at the time in terms of rigor, but it's been a while since I've read it (and can't seem to find it anymore!)
The best way to lie is to tell the partial truth, if possible.
I've heard the opposite, that liars are much more likely to add details later in the process while truth-tellers say everything up front. Then you've got the pathological liars.
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-to-know-pathological-liars
What does it mean to construct a fake border patrol scenario? Have they just instructed random people to lie?
I think it was on very specific types of questions that liers would become devoid of detail - but again, my memory is very hazy on the study (hence why I want to find it!).
I've heard about liars giving more detail in general - the whole 'over-explaining' phenomenon.
>The liars would tend to get far less detailed in their answers
All liars, or just liars who aren't quick thinkers?
>but truth tellers would maintain their or extend their answer length
All truth tellers, or just the articulate/cooperative ones?
I can't recall exact details, but IIRC they had two parts of the study. One where they used the method and determined the shorter answer dynamic for liars (with the researcher using the technique), and a second part where they trained people to use the technique and put them up against people using only their intuitions (possibly with the same questions, I can't recall).
And they found using the technique had a very low false-positive rate. I know 'shorter answers for liars, longer answers for truth tellers' sounds simplistic - it is. But the method they used was more involved than that - I just can't remember the study very well.
...or (I'm guessing this is the case), did they not have any useful data on the range of intelligence/articulateness of the volunteer test subjects?
What might be going on with quantum field theory and 1+2+3... = -1/12, as touched on in this numberphile video?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=beakj767uG4
The paper he discusses is here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10981v1
I'm trying to understand how this summing of divergent series stuff might relate to the real world, and he seems pretty excited about something, but describes it too vaguely for me to follow.
I liked this response from a mathematician on the -1/12 result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA
Many Thanks! That was an interesting video.
It's better for understanding what is going on, but a little heavy on the "No that's wrong."
His "No this is wrong" is, itself, wrong. There's a sense in which what Numberphile is doing is undefined (and I emphasize that he is doing something that is undefined, not wrong - that is, the operations he is performing are not defined, and the sense that they are wrong is not the sense in which they arrive at the wrong result, but rather the sense in which you cannot sit down and rigorously define what it is he is actually doing) - and a sense in which what he is doing is entirely correct.
And if there is a fundamental theorem of mathematics as a whole, it would be something like "What is correct in one sense must be correct in all senses" (the poorly-defined principle underlying the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", generally expressed in terms of how mathematics can unreasonably predict physical reality, but also notable in how mathematics can unreasonably predict other mathematics), so I personally award a correctness point to Numberphile. He's not -wrong-.
In total fairness to Mathologist, however, he explains in what sense that particular summation is wrong (which is to say, undefined), and in what sense that particular summation is right - and does so pretty well.
I really don't follow what you're saying here. Doing undefined operations and then presenting their conclusions as meaningful seems pretty "wrong" to me, just like if it involved dividing by zero, and if something is not correct in some sense then it's not correct. Otherwise, how would you have proof by contradiction?
Consider exponentiation, for a moment. We have a nice intuitive understanding of exponentiation: Repeated multiplication. So - what's going on with non-positive-integer exponentiation? How can you multiply something by itself negative one times? Or one half times? With respect to that understanding, we might say that raising something to the one-half power is undefined.
So, we extended the definition of exponentiation. Because it's a bit of a pain in the ass to come up with a new term for exponentiation, we just kind of rolled it all together into one nice package.
The relationship to summation is extremely similar.
When Mathologist says that the use of summation in the way Numberphile used it is wrong, this is sort of like saying that 4^(1/2)=+-2 is wrong, if we lived in an alternative reality in which exponentiation was defined only for the positive integers, and only as "repeated multiplication". In that reality, somebody could post on a Youtube how "4^(1/2) is both positive and negative two, at the same time!" and there would be massive confusion from the public and outrage from mathematicians about this incredibly mathematically negligent proclamation, and there would be elaborate Youtube videos explaining that, no, that operation is not defined, but look, here is how you could define an operation that does have these insane properties using complex analysis to extend the function definition.
The operations are undefined -in a sense-, much as 4^(1/2) is undefined -in a sense- in that alternate reality. This does not make them meaningless, nor does it make uses of that logic wrong.
One of the things mathologist mentions is that you can prove contradictions by taking finite sums of diverging infinite series. So that would be "wrong" in the ordinary mathematical sense. You need to add the caveats and rigor he discusses to avoid such results.
The instance of this I can recall is somewhat misleading, and applies specifically to the supersum function, where it is violating the "average" mechanic by arbitrarily injecting numbers into the denominator (by adding 0s to the numerator). Which, yes, if you arbitrarily inject zeroes into the numerator, and treat them as components to be averaged, you can indeed make an average function produce different results.
(Not to say there aren't other cases where you can prove contradictions, just that that is the instance I can recall, and the problem there is fairly obvious and not directly related to what Numberphile was doing.)
I disagree with this metaphor, I think maybe for several reasons, but the one that seems easiest to articulate is this:
The extension of exponentiation to cover non-integer values is consistent with exponentiation with integer values - if you try to calculate the value of an exponent with an integer value in the same way that you would if you were using a non-integer value, you'll get the value from the hypothetical previous form of exponentiation. But there's already a (different) way to come up with the value of the sum of all integers greater than 0, and the answer is "it sums to positive infinity". Substituting a competing definition here that allows you to declare that the sum of all integers greater than 0 is "-1/16" is therefore false because the answer is "positive infinity".
Also I think this is literally a proof-by-contradiction of the method Numberphile is using - if you apply it, you get a value inconsistent with reality (or the abstract reality of mathematics), ergo their approach is wrong/false.
A more abstract disagreement that might not be phrased as clearly is this: Saying "In a hypothetical other universe where the rules we used were different, things we say are true wouldn't be considered true, but that doesn't mean they aren't true in this universe" seems like it would apply to basically any mathematical argument. When would be able to safely declare any mathematical statement "wrong" under this logic?
In the cases where we can apply an analogous method to reality, which is mostly QFT, we get answers that are, in fact, consistent with reality. Are there cases in reality where we can apply it where it isn't consistent with reality? (Seems a bit hard, on account of, y'know, infinities.)
Additionally, "positive infinity" is not, in fact, defined in the standard number lines - there's a special name for number lines that are extended to include infinity (amusingly enough, the "extended number lines"). And once you extend number lines to infinity, you're getting into the same branches of mathematics which also extend summation in exactly the manner which gets you meaningful answers. (Complex analysis and real analysis)
I am uncertain whether a well-defined infinity necessarily requires such extensions to summation, but my limited knowledge suggests this may be the case.
I'm a crackpot, and this touches exactly on something -I- am getting excited about as I have formalized my crackpottery, so take my commentary with a grain of salt, but:
There is a sense in which it is intelligible to say that numbers form rings/loops/circles, and the number lines we are familiar with are projections of these constructs onto a lower-dimensional surface. So, in a sense, if you keep heading towards infinity, you will, perhaps inexplicably if you think only in terms of the lower-dimensional object, arrive at a finite number, where the exact number you arrive at will depend on the process you utilize to arrive at infinity.
So as to how this pertains to the real world, it means that, when you have mathematical equations where infinities turn up, you may be modeling a higher-dimensional space in lower-dimensional mathematics - which shares a pattern of behavior with complex numbers, which often mean the same thing, albeit in a different way.
To illustrate this with a circle, consider a point moving around the circle. You can complete this loop an infinite number of times and remain in the circle; if you're a traveler traveling around the circle, moving what is to you "forwards", you can travel an infinite distance and yet remain in finite space - you'll just keep returning to the same points. So if you have accurate mathematics relating your distance to your actual position, "infinity" in distance could, if well-defined, map to a finite point on the circle. But if your mathematics relating to distance shows up with a complex number, you're possibly somehow going -off- the circle. Both infinity and complex numbers, thus, relate the two-dimensional behavior of distance to the one-dimensional mathematical expression of distance.
This is particularly relevant to quantum field theory because the usual mathematical approach involves explicitly dealing with infinities, and kind of ... just assuming the infinity behaves in a particular way which matches reality (generally canceling out, even if we can't mathematically prove that it cancels out, or that canceling out is even a reasonable thing for an infinity to do in those conditions). To frame this in a particularly misleading way, suppose you have a function that, when evaluated, is always "infinity plus n", where n is just some number - and the actual result is always, say, "n-1". Then, if you have a formalization that lets you treat the particular infinity in that particular function as specifically "-1" (or, more likely, as 0, where the -1 shows up for some other specific reason), you have a somewhat mathematically rigorous way of dealing with the problem.
A lot of ink has been spilled over this particular set of problems, which turn up in some form in basically all the methods we've figured out which calculate certain results in QFT. (Feynman's Sum Over Histories approach, IIRC, is particularly amenable to making the canceling-out-of-infinities seem more reasonable than it may be in more abstract approaches, but the problem does turn up there.)
> There is a sense in which it is intelligible to say that numbers form rings/loops/circles, and the number lines we are familiar with are projections of these constructs onto a lower-dimensional surface.
There is a sense in which you can formalise a number system that does form loops, and a number system that goes on forever. What answers you get depend on which system you are working in -- it's s forgone conclusion, not a surprise.
Foregone conclusions surprise us all the time in mathematics, or else we wouldn't need to go through the process of proving things.
This particular thing is a foregone conclusion. because it's an explicit axiom.
Also , maths doesn't contain empirical-style surprises.
That we have had to sit down and rewrite large swathes of mathematics should suggest that we have, in fact, had empirical-style surprises before.
(I believe the term you're looking for is epistemic closure.)
It's not rewriting in the sense of wholesale replacement.
Pure mathematicians aren't concerned with empirical truth, hence the pure.
Seriously, though, I've been slowly working through the desuspension of a point (where desuspension is the operation, loosely speaking, of removing a dimension - so the desuspension of a point is removing a dimension from 0 dimensional space, which is to say, moving into negative dimensions), and it appears, although there are a lot of ??? steps in the sequence, to form the Riemann Sphere. This was a total surprise to me, since I didn't even know what a Riemann Sphere -was- until somebody pointed out that my drawing of negative-dimensional-space looked like a projection of a Riemann Sphere onto a surface. And, as I dug into the Riemann Sphere, in a sense it is a direct mapping between positive and negative dimensional space - it's literally created by gluing an inverse complex plane to a regular complex plane.
And because the fractal-dimensionality of a negative dimension (cutting a line in half doubles its length) maps more or less perfectly to an inverse dimension (1/x), this makes perfect sense in retrospect - my drawing was trying to map a negative dimension to positive dimensional space, which is something the Riemann Sphere already does. (But my drawing does have something that the typical Riemann Sphere does not - a measure-preserving curve as the unit basis for the positive dimensional space. Or, to phrase that differently, my Riemann Sphere is constructed by a fiber bundle such that each fiber forms a spherical spiral such that each rotation about the sphere covers the same distance as measured from the poles, where one pole is zero and the other is infinity. I didn't just arbitrarily stick it there, but it is surrounded by a bunch of ??? steps in my derivation.)
To be clear, this isn't where I -started-. I -started- with "What if there are an infinite number of forces of alternating polarity, such that, if we assign each force F a counting number N, each force F has an initial value proportional to N, a polarity that is positive if N is even and negative if N is odd, and a decay value over distance proportional to N, such that for any given distance either a single force will dominate in effect, or they will all approximately cancel out."
Twenty years of trying to understand what that would mean about reality has led me to negative dimensions, and from there to the Riemann Sphere, with lots of bizarre hints along the way, like a little hint that the most natural interpretation of infinity is that it is directly connected to 0i. That is surprising, to say the least, and I strongly believe that starting from those assumptions, the Riemann Sphere is, in fact, a foregone conclusion. So - both surprising AND foregone.
Personally I find the "heuristics" section of the Wikipedia page more intuitive than the LessWrong post.
More to the point, QFT is plagued by infinities which need to be weeded out with this sort of dodgy maths (see renormalization). This is not necessarily as dubious as it sounds - in physics we often resort to abuses of notation and similar mathematical sins, so it's not surprising that sometimes we can only make sense of results by playing fast and loose with usual notions of mathematical rigor. Historically, it's often been the case that it was fine to do this sort of thing and let mathematicians find out why that was ok afterwards. (Which makes sense if you think this sort of less rigorous approach can be a little like a first pass at a problem, that you might do to gain intuition before seeing a rigorous proof.)
Also, often these procedures make trivially perfect sense if you assume a specific scenario is motivating your renormalization - e.g., that spacetime is not really continuous but more like a really dense lattice.
There are (at least) two approaches you can take explain this type of thing:
A) it's a mathematical trick, that maybe can be justified using more advanced mathematics
B) it's because of the actual physics
In the case of, e.g. using a Dirac delta function, I'd argue it's just a mathematical trick.
In the case of renormalization (and the Casemiro effect) I'm less inclined to view it as a mathematical trick, and more inclined to reach for a physics based explanation, e.g. that there really is some high-energy cutoff on virtual photons
Assuming you mean the Casimir effect, that is different from renormalization. The Casimir effect is more about how the energy of states without excitations (i.e. vacua) depend on boundary conditions. You may need renormalization to do the math in specific cases, but not all.
Anyway, the mathematical "tricks" are not different from the physics. From our point of view, they're the same thing - otherwise you're doing the wrong maths!
The Ancient Greeks worried about Zeno's Paradox ... how can 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... have a finite sum?
Now, we can just call it a mathematical trick. (And I don't need to appeal to physics to resolve it, with arguments along the lines of: well, eventually you reach the granularity of space and the tortoise can't actually move by a distance that small)
Does being "plagued by infinities" imply that our understanding is wrong, and that if we found the correct theories then the infinities would disappear? Or is bumping up against infinities to be expected when dealing with an infinite universe?
I'd argue that it's evidence that spacetime is not continuous at sufficiently small scales (possibly below Planck length).
Mind you, lots of these infinities don't imply anything serious. The typical example of this involves calculating the energy of a specific field configuration and finding it's infinity. This is not fundamentally problematic because energy is meant to be defined only up to an arbitrary constant. So as long as all the relevant energy differences are finite, then you're fine and this has no deeper implications.
There are a few cases where it's not obvious to me we can reduce the problem to this sort of situation where only differences matter. But I think there are many who think they are fundamentally the same thing. Still, if lots of this stuff becomes tractable once you pretend spacetime is discrete (see Wilson Renormalization), then I'd say that's a good reason to ask whether it might not just be that it actually is. But this is definitely not a super solid argument and it may well be everything is like the infinite energies only with different levels of complexity.
It's promising, and more generally there are lots of signs in pure math and physics that we don't know how to deal with infinite sums well yet. The basic idea is that we have some process, like an electron moving from place to place, and to compute the probability of this happening you discretize spacetime to compute something and then take a limit. There no a priori reason this should work well, and indeed you run into infinities. What people found is that there's some natural way of getting rid of the infinities and the paper specifically talks about a way of doing it while preserving some basic symmetries. But ideally, there would be some very different way to do it with doesn't involve ad hoc steps like discretization.
I don't understand that topic, but there was recently this article on Less Wrong:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4jANL9cZj28uALwsE/intuition-for-1-2-3-1-12
(No idea how correct or helpful is that article.)
That's actually the post that re-piqued my interest! Thanks though, there were some good new comments there since I read it the other day.
Tucker Carlson recently went to Moscow and said it seemed more orderly than US cities, especially in having no homelessness.
Question for Russian readers: is this true in your experience? What is Russia's homelessness policy? If you don't have enough money to afford a place to stay, what happens to you?
Left Moscow a few years ago. There are definitely much fewer homeless people there compared to major American cities like NYC and Philadelphia. It's similar to the level of homelessness in some cities in Europe and Tel Aviv, so it's not some kind of outlier.
While I've never interacted closely and for a long time with homeless people there, I think that one of the reasons for that is that it's harder to lose one's home (and at the starting point of the history of modern Russia, pretty much everyone had some kind of place to live due to the Soviet policies). For example, there is a provision in the law that makes it pretty hard to take away someone's property if they don't have anywhere else to live.
It's also true that the authorities are less tolerant of visible homelessness. While they don't care if someone is sleeping on a bench in a park, they are not allowed to sleep in the subway and any kind of tents would be promptly removed. See DeeNBee's answer for more details.
Live in Moscow, never been to USA, but compared to Paris, for example, Moscow is exemplary in cleanliness and orderliness. I was appalled by number of homeless people in Paris (been there about 15 years ago), and by how aggressive they are. In Moscow, I've seen homeless - they tend to congregate near churches and train stations - but generally they were quiet. In Paris, we were harassed by a bum after withdrawing some cash near Notre Dame - he wanted "his cut", because he camped near that ATM. If anything, THAT'S not a thing in Moscow - local police, for all its problems, at least prevents it.
Another thing to note: Moscow barely have "poor" and "rich" neighborhoods. Only a very few places house super-rich, everywhere else you will find a mix of poor, rich and middle class living close to each other (you can kind of judge it by looking at cars: a 60-year old commie block often will have both a rusting Moskvich and a few shiny new BMWs sharing the same parking near it). There are also not much ethnic neighborhoods (although they start to appear). That means that police coverage is more even - there are no areas where they doesn't dare to go. In 90's, some areas were considered dangerous - people still joke about "gopniks" (chavs, for our British readers) from South Butovo or Solntsevo, but these days, even those criminal strongholds became generally peaceful. That doesn't mean you can't get robbed or raped in Moscow - but chances aren't too high, especially if you avoid walking late at night while drunk.
Moscow is also a very clean city compared to many because of army of migrants from the South who work tirelessly at it. Or at least it used to be - these days, there are fewer migrants willing to be street cleaners (food delivery is MUCH more profitable!), and with VERY heavy snow this winter, some neighborhoods become a mess for weeks after a snowfall until cleaners get there. I hear they're started using robotic cleaning machines in some parks recently - maybe this will help with labor shortages in future.
In general, I'd say Carlson's videos (I've checked the first 3 of them) are not very biased in what they show - this is really Moscow as it is (although its peripheral neigborhoods looks far less interesting, but isn't it true for every big city in the world?). As others pointed out, Moscow is a country of its own, but in my experience, big cities has been getting better, safer and cleaner all the time, if more slowly than Moscow. Smaller towns, especially those that were built around a single Soviet-era factory, are a different story...
I’ve never been but your post reminded me of a popular YouTube video doing the rounds a while back. It’s long at 2 hours but it does show a well ordered city
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XVtdMEPtLiU&vl=en
When I was homeless I "inhabited" places shown in 01:47:00 - 02:20:00 part of the video.
On 01:49:42 you may notice bags on the bench, probably owned by some homeless person, but no obvious homeless people near it.
But there are some, probably 3-5 near that Griboyedov monument, they're just not easily noticeable.
How propagandistic is that video. Is he deliberately avoiding spots or is that a genuine example of a normal stroll around the centre?
It's the very center of Moscow and it really looks like you can see in the video when it's summer - clean and green.
Operator moves by Бульварное кольцо (boulevard ring) for the most part of the video and yes, if you were there you will see the same exact picture.
There are some spots that are not that nice near the place, but you should dig in the arches of surrounding houses to find them and it's not easy still: I guess not even many people living in Moscow know them.
I read somewhere that after the snow thaw in spring Russians find hundreds of bodies, of homeless people, probably mostly drunks, who keeled over in the snow the previous winter and froze to death before being covered by more snow and hidden until the spring.
They call them Подснежники (Snowdrops).
Yep, there are tens (couldn't find the actual stats, but according to some blog posts in Russia from medical and police workers, it's not hundreds) of them found across the country every spring.
But it's not only the homeless people, many are just someone who got drunk when it was -30 Celsius in the street and couldn't get home for some reason, others are drug addicts or being murdered during the winter with body left in the snow. And it seems there are more those bodies in the coldest regions of Russia, where homeless people are not usual.
(I am a Russian, lived through most of my life in smaller cities). Homeless people and drunkards are not that hard to find, imo, if it's your actual goal, but it's rare to see them in public view. There are some smaller specific places where they usually congregate, and these tend to be in some worse parts of town, out of the streets. You would occasionally still see a bum or two just walking down the street, but I believe police usually takes care of them and chases them away if they get into the nicer parts of the city. I could imagine Tucker Carlson never ventured anywhere outside of the Moscow city center and as such haven't seen more unpleasant sides of that city.
To be fair, "more orderly than US cities" isn't a very high standard.
Remember a couple of years ago when some American basketballer got arrested in Russia and Americans were shocked and outraged that Russia actually enforces its drug laws? And now they're shocked and outraged to find out that Russian cities are more orderly than American ones because they don't have fentanyl zombies standing on every street corner? I wonder if those things could possibly be connected.
That is not a fair description of what happened. Britney Griner was arrested for a very tiny amount of marijuana and Russia quickly turned her into a political pawn. They tried to trade her for a convicted arms dealer. She plead guilty and was sentenced to NINE years in prison for a crime that normally gets 15 days. She was freed after the prison swap.
>for a crime that normally gets 15 days.
Source?
According to this article https://theconversation.com/brittney-griners-sentence-is-in-line-with-russias-strict-drug-penalties-but-how-long-she-serves-will-be-decided-outside-the-courtroom-188271 her sentence was in line with the usual sentences handed out for this offence.
The fact that the US Government traded her for an arms dealer is idiocy purely on the part of the US Government.
I've spent about a year as a homeless person in Moscow.
- there are places where you can take a shower and have your clothes desinfected
- some organizations feed homeless people in certain places at specific times
- police isn't interested much: they may wake you up ask your documents when you're sleeping on the bench, in my case i've just answered that I'm homeless and have no docs and continued to sleep
- you may get emergency health service without much problem even without docs, happened twice to fellow homeless guys
- You will not "detect" most of the homeless people in Moscow: there are no tents or places with crowds of them, and they mostly look, wear the same clothes and act just like other people, not sitting on the road with a cup. If you expect homeless person to be dirty, stinky, drunk and with visible health issues... well, there are some, but maybe 5-10% of the total number
- there are enough warm places in big city like Moscow where one can sleep and be safe% old buildings prepared for reconstructions, railroad stations, basements, etc.
- some restauran and cafe workers in moscow share the unused food
If you don’t mind sharing, how did you end homeless, and in turn how did you solve the issue? I am sorry if Im being too nosy Its really interesting, I dont have any access to people with such experience.
It's not a very interesting story :)
recreational alcohol for years - daily alcohol - losing job - moving to Moscow to get another one - more alcohol (and no job except for some one-time stuff) - kind of "fun" while drunk in the streets for months and no place to stay with other guys and girls from all over the country with different stories - feeling like it's getting not fun but dangerous and fear that it'll end here - trying to stop - saving money to get hostel room to clean/sleep/find job - and, finally, getting sober (it wasn't very hard somehow), recover lost documents and return to sort of normal life when I can rent a flat, buy myself things, etc.
So for now I can quite say that everything's good. Except for my teeth, maybe. Lost some and got more damaged during the "adventure". Sadly there's no ACX-repair-your-teeth grant, so have to collect money to fix 'em and smile again
Thank for sharing! It would seem that in your story not only was your predicament somehow your choice but it was also somehow "under control". Could people tell you are homeless? Did you actually had a place to stay in your hometown but you preferred to stay homeless in Moscow? I wish you the best with your teeth, I hope you fix them.
Talking of "more orderly" - I guess it's true, but I've never been to the United States. I've visited Greek and German cities and Moscow is much cleaner, better maintained and appears safer.
My hometown is 1 mln people and 1000km from Moscow and is not in the same good condition but still doesn't look much worse than many of the US cities (e.g. Chicago) when visiting them via Google street view. There are some not good/safe/clean places, but I believe it's almost the same in other countries
How do most homeless people keep access to new/clean clothes? Are there shelters or something that help with that?
1. There are shelters and I guess one can get clothes there, but never tried that approach: homeless shelters here mostly used by old people or people with really bad health conditions, have schedules and restrictions (got drunk - get out), so not everyone wants to deal with them.
2. Churches. They can help you with clothes, but when I tried once it was something like: next giveaway is due 30th February if the moon is full, so no success (some others got clothes successfully)
3. Trash bins. There are large trash bins in the street for one or several apartment blocks and many people living there don't put their clothes in good condition just in there, but put it aside, washed and folded. You notice it, if it suits you or other homeless you know, you take it. I guess it's the most used way.
4. When you're in the street for a long periods you get a lot of acquaintances, good and bad. The good ones sometimes help you with clothes
5. Sometimes you just buy some cheap Chinese sneakers or something for $5-10, there are places with these prices and possibilities to earn that money
I was born in Moscow in the 90s and moved away in 2015. I remember seeing many homeless people or injured veterans in the early 2000s, but their presence has reduced by a lot by 2010. Several factors that come to mind:
1. Centralization. Moscow is in a league of its own when it comes to the prosperity of russian cities. I didn't travel the country much, but from what I heard, the situation in the rest of the country is dire and bleak. The resources of the entire country basically pool up in the capital, leaving the rest destitute.
2. Zoning. From what I understand, American cities are structured like a donut - affluent neighbourhoods on the edges and criminal ghettos downtown. This is inverted in russian cities (and tbh in every country I've visited). In Moscow, central areas are well-policed affluent neighbourhoods, and edges/suburbs are more poor and criminal. If Tucker Carson have visited the outskirts, perhaps he would've seen more homeless there.
3. Organized crime. The beggars in 90s Russia were being produced and exploited by crime gangs, sometimes being maimed by them deliberately. The "tough on crime" policy may have successfully dealt with russian Mafia, leaving the homeless more individualized and invisible.
4. Climate. Compared to SF, a homeless person in Moscow wouldn't survive in a simple tent. The lucky ones could find a semi-permanent facility or a drunk tank, the unlucky ones, well...
5. Demographics. Russian population didn't really grow much since the 90s, so there's more options for housing the homeless in numerous residential apartment buildings (I'm not sure if it's actually being done). America grows fast, so there's a constant competition for living space.
Nothing else comes to mind for now. If you Google the resources for homeless in Russian, perhaps you can check if equivalent facilities and services are available in US or not.
#2 is less true now than it was 15 or 25 years ago. There has been a move back into inner cities from suburbs and cities are often much safer and more affluent than many of the surrounding suburbs. But Zoning does definitely play a part in homelessness and housing issues.
Russia is a federation and public services are mostly provided by the locality. So most homeless services are provided by the local city or state, not the central government. Moscow and first tier cities like St Petersburg benefit from both a net transfer of Federal funds and from being rich enough to fund lavish social services and NGOs. They also benefit from having an unrestricted attitude to policing that keeps homeless people out of sight. On top of that, Russian gangs are more like mafia than street gangs nowadays. You have gangland warfare, kidnappings, murder. But you do not generally have public street disorder. At least not in the nicer or middle class neighborhoods and double especially near seats of government (where Carlson was) or other places where the security state has a higher presence.
Nevertheless, if you go to lower class neighborhoods there are still homeless people. Officially Russia has less than 15,000 homeless people in the entire federation but everyone considers this number a joke. Outside estimates are between two and five million. Which puts it about where you'd expect for a nation of Russia's wealth, with the low end estimate being lower than comparable nations and the high end being higher.
Also, I'd like to point out: one out of four Russian women is obese and one out of twenty Russians speaks English. Running into a bunch of thin women who speak English is a sign that something is going on. That something might be that he's being handled or it might be that he stuck to the wealthy/touristy areas. But he no more saw the real Russia than someone who goes to a rich neighborhood in LA and assumes that every restaurant in the US is staffed by stunning aspiring actresses.
(Actually, I don't need to guess. It was pretty easy to track down where he visited because he didn't really try to hide it. He was in a very posh neighborhood close to Moscow city center.)
Also, spending $100 on a week's worth of groceries in a country where the average monthly salary is $600 shows the opposite of what Carlson wants to prove about the relative affordability of both countries. That said, your dollar really does go farther in poorer countries. Whether that's Russia or any number of other, less geopolitically fraught countries.
The centre of Moscow and other places are amongst the nicest parts of the city. But you don't need to go out of your way to see homelessness and filith in Paris or San Francisco. I was mugged near the Eiffel Tower, as many are, and this should be basically the nicest part of the city. But Paris won't even keep their low-lifes away from where tourists visit and form impressions of the city. So even by this standard, Moscow is much better.
Yes, very good comment. Roaming around central New Delhi you will find wide roads with lush green environs and absolutely no homeless people. Extrapolating from there would be a big mistake.
Sure, but many western cities do not even accomplish this feat. Their filth is evident even in the centre.
Another common error is to assume people who are wealthy enough to speak good English and visit your country are representative of the average. I remember some guy saying that Saudi Arabia was so rich everyone lives in luxury and basically has a post-scarcity existence. True for the aristocracy who can send their kids to university in the US perhaps. But not true for the average citizen. But the average Saudi citizen probably can't speak English or go to university in the US.
True, but do you also put 2 and 2 together and understand that high IQ Nigerian immigrants are representative of Africans collectively, and we shouldn't open the floodgates expecting millions of smart africans to be the ones arriving here?
I left Russia when the war started, and situation might have changed in these two years, but from what I remember:
1. There were quite a lot of homeless people in Moscow; they were kept from showing up at the most visited tourist places (e.g. Red Square) and from central metro stations, but some major railway stations, such as Paveleckiy station, had a lot of them. A lot of homeless people near churches.
2. There are several NGOs that help homeless people (e.g. Ночлежка); if I were to require help I'd probably go to one of those to seek shelter.
3. I've seen a lot of police brutality towards homeless people in Moscow, much more in Tula, my hometown; I'd try to avoid seeking any sort of government help. If no NGO would be available, maybe I'd try to get committed to a type psychiatric hospital (ПНД) which allows for continuous stay – although it would really suck in most places.
4. The winters in Moscow are really cold, so homeless people would not be visible in the streets.
5. Carlson's visit was kind of a big deal for authorities, so his experience must have been heavily curated; Potemkin villages is a very strong tradition in Russia, and there's enough of police force to ensure that nothing unpleasant is shown to an important visitor.
Might be related – Belarus was considered by some to be a sort of authoritarian test ground for future Russian policies; you read about some weird stuff Lukashenko came up with and could expect Putin to implement something similar in a year or two. And a lot of people who went to Minsk noted that it was much cleaner than Moscow; amount of visible order scales with authoritarian approach and the size of police force
I am not Russian, but I visited Moscow just in October before the war and I was very surprised how clean and orderly it is (and I lived in Vienna at the time). Modern technology integration with their version of Uber and restaurants was seamless. I also visited some out centre places. For a tourist it seemed like a Swiss clock (Am not rich, i was in the cheapest apartment). That was unexpected for me.
Notice how he compares one -- definitely *not* randomly selected -- Russian city to "US cities". Now compare some city *other than* Moscow or St Petersburg and see how what works.
In Russia, there are huge inequalities between cities. Always have been; also during communism. I am not talking simply about "some cities have greater average income than others", but more like "people not living in this city are not allowed to go there". Moscow and St Petersburg are royal cities; they will be nice even if everything else goes to hell.
> What is Russia's homelessness policy?
I am not a Russian and have never been in Moscow, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is simply "if you are homeless found in Moscow, the cops will beat you and take you away from Moscow; try doing this repeatedly and you won't survive the beating".
Should the non-randomly selected US equivalent city be DC or NYC?
From some of the comments here by people who've lived in Russia, no. The point is that in Russia pours a vast share of its resources into the two "royal" cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg) at the expense of all others. No Western nation does that (anymore) because national elections would quickly vote out a national administration which did that.
I am reminded now of two secondhand accounts from earlier eras. In 1986 I spent an evening with a Russian Studies major just back from a full school year over there; she said that outside of the two prime cities "it's not a developed nation." Then during the mid/late 1990s my mother did two lengthy visits to Russia as a visiting expert in her field, mostly to cities other than MOS or STP. She came back astonished at several things one of which was how filthy and run-down those cities were. "Reminded me of American cities during the Depression (she was born in 1928)."
You claim Western nations don't have "royal cities". That is precisely what Paris and London seem to be, at least as a first approximation. Seoul might also qualify.
Those are just cities that have sucked up all the high-level economic and cultural activity within reach, because network effects matter and some nations aren't big enough to support multiple Great Cities.
But I think the "royal city" phenomenon that Paul notes, goes beyond that. It's about the central government putting almost all of the development resources into the "royal city" because that's where all the people they care about live and that's where all the diplomats and reporters who will boost their image and ego visit. So everything else winds up like District 12 in "The Hunger Games", supported to the minimum extent that will allow their critical industry to function.
Which is hard to do in a democracy, because most people in the UK and France live in cities that *aren't* London or Paris, and won't put up with that. Seoul could pull it off, and may be a marginal case.
There's a joke about this.
Russian geography is very easy.
Moscow is the capital and largest city.
The other city is called St. Petersburg.
Novgorod is where you go to college.
The rest of the country is called Siberia.
See? Easy.
> if you are homeless found in Moscow, the cops will beat you and take you away from Moscow; try doing this repeatedly and you won't survive the beating".
On the other hand a guy who claimed to be homeless in Russia said the police largely left him alone. I think Americans or westerners often misjudge how police work in other countries.
I experienced beating twice during the year I spent in the street, but never from the police (in fact the police helped sometimes). It were some young guys that kinda don't like homeless people hanging around or just sort of training their beating skills.
BTW when there were some crimes around the place, the police came to us (after some time they know your face) to ask if we've seen/heard anything, so we even were kind of useful
I'm not Russian, but the USSR did build a LOT of housing. You can call them totalitarian, but you can't call them NIMBYs.
Where are you from and where did you visit in the US?
Ah interesting. Those two cities are probably in the top 5 for visible homelessness problems. Not that things aren't bad in lots of places though. My small college town has a pretty visible problem but mostly because the main social services offices are in the center of town where the central business district is.
One of my hypotheses on why people in the US are complaining about homelessness so much the past few years is that inner cities have become nicer, more people live and visit there. Homeless people are in the same places but people see them more. Also the homeless also want to be in nice places where lots of people are so will concentrate there. This is in addition to the problem getting worse overall.
It's February, and that means it's winter in the US, so it's kind of boring. For high-schoolers who are graduating this year, it also means SENIORITIS. Soooo: if you had a group of mathy, way-way-above-average-ability high-schoolers, and you had, say, about 5 hours of their attention... asychronously.. to present (in a written format, with links, with the potential for discussions) stuff to them... what sorts of links and resources would you want to "point them in the direction of"? What questions would you ask them, and what personal problem-solving tasks (that few others would think to press upon them) would you point out might be significant?
Some I've come up with so far... Point them to Paul Graham essays like "How to do what you love." A few of them should probably read SICP even if they don't know it yet. The game "Robot Odyssey," maybe. A decent percentage of them should read TaoUP even if they don't go specifically programming/UNIX-heavy? At least 1 resource on negotiation. Suggest some of them will want to read "The Strategy of Conflict." Start a discussion asking how they practice "attentional-triage"* ...adblockers, maybe timers and beeminder-y approaches, and just personal habits of having a high threshold below which you don't click. (Some of them probably know way more than you do about obvious-to-them strategies/apps/things-that-exist in that area... except they probably have not all come across the same "obvious" things, and so they can help each-other.) I'd suggest they read Ender's Game, but... mmm, assume most of them already would have, and all will have already heard of it.
That's a start. What else?
* Stole this expression from Leah Libresco Sargeant's husband, from a book review he wrote. Too good not to steal.
[Edited, but not super-significant to direction of the question.]
Also a high school senior here. Some things that have been reliably important for the last few years:
- Fast.ai course (it’s a little confusingly organized).
- Andrej Karpathy’s videos on transformers and machine learning (maybe worth spending three hours per hour of video).
- Learning to make the most use out of Claude and GPT-4 as general purpose tutors.
For SICP, I tried that in ninth grade but only made it past the first chapter and felt bad and quit because I thought it was taking me too long to get through the reading. I’ve heard 10 hours per chapter is recommended (which I didn’t know), and should be added as a qualifier to any attempt.
If I could choose a few topics to present to my 18-year-old self, I would include:
(1) Intro to economics and game theory. For quantitative-minded people, I think these are incredibly powerful frameworks for understanding a lot of social issues.
(2) Intro to rationality, of course! In particular, Bayesian reasoning and common logical fallacies. In addition to the intro materials on Less Wrong, I enjoyed the book "Superforecasting".
(3) Health and fitness: nutrition, sleep, and exercise. While this might seem out-of-the-blue, it's really a fundamental part of being a human, and I think it doesn't get the systematic treatment it deserves--people tend to learn about this through news articles, which are typically incomplete, misleading, or simply wrong.
And I second your suggestion about productivity tips. Learning to structure your time well becomes a big thing as you enter college.
Thank you!!
And... yeah, the health and fitness thing is not totally out-of-the-blue... sleep surely is an issue for some students in that position by now!!
Because it is what I would have liked, I'm going to suggest hands on type projects. Build some wooden models, get some electronics kits and solder together various circuits and such, build things with an arduino or other micro. Mostly just interact with the world in some tactile way. And have fun.
Neat; "hands-on type projects" were not something I'd thought about me presenting/suggesting... surely some such students would've sought out experience in that direction... but again, what's "obvious" as something to investigate or utilize to one in that cohort might not be to another! (just because of... sort of, starting points and default "search spaces.")
Thanks for noting this!!
Don't ask them to read anything in bulk. I think talented people should just pursue their passions, and develop independence/sel sufficiency. In your position, I would find out what each of them is interested in and tailor my suggestions to that.
Assume... less of the discussion with the "would-be advisor-y person" is available and more along the lines of "discussion will happen only if the students themselves have sufficient interest."
(Basically, don't think "mandatory school-ish situation.")
Wow. None of that.
Have them read about the Great Horse Manure crisis of the 1890s, and the fact that the world produces *less* waste now than then.
Maybe some excerpts from Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage
Ask them to research which damages the environment more: nuclear power or solar power.
Read Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line
Read Wrong Turn in Cyberspace and ask what development made much of the concerns in the article obsolete.
Watch The China Syndrome and ask how technology impacted the plot of the movie.
If you're going to have them read fiction, I'd go with Sewer, Gas, and Electric.
and, In the same vein, perhaps "The soul of a new machine", by Tracy Kidder (1981)
What is everyone's thoughts on how to derive meaning in life in a universe that seems to be ultimately purposeless? I posited in my last post that things matter and have meaning in the world “because creatures such as we are graced and burdened with consciousness and the capacity to feel pain and joy—to suffer, as well as to flourish, irrespective of how small we are. Meaning stems from those facts like a flower out of a pot of soil.”
Interested in what ACX readers might have to say about arguments which assert that life is pointless without a God, for instance, or that our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters.
I'm drawn to mysticism, which is believing things that don't make sense. But about half the time I just slip down into not believing in anything. You don't have to believe in something to love your friends, enjoy your work, smell the air and feel delighted by it.
imho:
the search for an objective meaning in life comes from a modernism's glorification of the objective. But not everything has to be objective. the word "meaning" in generally is usually about dereferencing a pointer to its referent. In the case of "what's the meaning of life", people searching for meaning in *objective reality* are looking in the wrong place. Because really, the search for meaning constitutes an exploration of your utility function. I.e. when something feels "meaningful", it's because a highly-compacted bundle of information (e.g. "La Guernica", MCR's "Not OK", some Green Peace expedition, etc) resonates with some part of your value-system.
The trouble is that the process of searching is an uphill battle. A utility function is a highly abstract thing, and it's engineered just as much discovered. So on one hand, the world is reflected in a dewdrop, i.e. concrete reality is constantly shifting. But humans generally like symmetry/stability/invariance because "symmetry good, entropy bad" and because symmetry allows you to compress information efficiently. So there's this impulse to "transcend" the ephemerality of particulars by finding islands of stability in the abstraction hierarchy. But nothing in life is 100% guaranteed, so it's moreso about adding more 9's to "99.999% that you'll live long and prosper". Thus, the impulse is Sisyphean. Cf Robin Hanson's observation that the first world keeps pouring money into healthcare, despite not getting better outcomes.
In practice, I think things that humans find meaningful tend to be things that contribute to society. Cf Jordan Peterson's take that "meaning" constitutes taking a burden upon yourself like Jesus. But I think this is an artifact of our biology being hardwired to chase clout. I can easily imagine asocial alien lizardmen who are more selfish.
<mild snark>
Relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meaningless
</mild snark>
I'm actually most interested in the fact that nobody here has alighted on or discussed any of the other "smart amateur" ideas about ultimate meaning. I'll run down three that immediately occur.
What are forces that are larger than human, operate over deep time, and have markedly improved the states of qualia and consciousness available to living beings, and thus have credence for being universal-scale goods?
1. First contender - Complexification. The greatest good is that which makes the universe more complex, less entropic, more information per unit volume, etc. This is basically Gregory David Roberts' answer in Shantaram. People advancing science, creating companies, creating art? All making existence more complex, all good. People destroying art, companies, technologies? Reduces complexity in the world, a bad thing.
2. Second contender - sophotransmogrification. The greatest good is that which creates more thinking matter in the universe. Too much of the universe is dead, and doesn't think, and that doesn't do anybody any good! Making more people? Good. Making AI? Better, more scaleable. Eventually making godlike pan-galactic intelligences? Now we're talking! This is John C. Wrights conceit in his Count to the Eschaton sequence. The universe where sophotransmogrification is an ultimate good is also a simulation created out of waste-heat or waste-cpu processes of some sort of much more Hylaean and utopic "real" universe.
3. Bringing your universe closer to ultimate truth and understanding - the Platonic or Hylaean Theoric World as posited in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, in which he posits a multiverse of closer and farther (or up-wick and down-wick) universes, which participate in greater or lesser epistemic purity and closeness to capital "T" Truth, which our sciences peer through glass darkly to see rare glimpses and scattered pieces of. Science and engineering being the active practice of ultimate good in this schema.
You'll note that being closer to Platonic Truth in theory and execution has a great resemblance to greater complexification, which also seems to be taking us in a journey of greater sophotransmogrification (whether through spreading Humans or AI's or some combination though the future light cone is still to be determined).
I think any of these three have a pretty good case for being an "ultimate good" that you could attach meaning to in your own life and actions - they're all after all much greater than ourselves, have been existing or occuring over billions of years, and arguably end in much better and more interesting universes than we currently inhabit. So why not?
I'm reminded of Robert Freitas' Thermoethics, developed as a universal ethics code for interaction with extraterrestrial intelligent beings:
"The basic organizing influence in the universe is life. Life involves the utilization of a flow of energy to draw order from chaos and build internal complexity with an accumulation of information. Living beings thus are anti-entropic, or negentropic, entities. The principle of negentropism is, in a manner of speaking, the "natural law" applicable to all living (matter-energy) beings located anywhere in the universe... Hence we may state the Principal Thermoethic as follows: All living beings should always act so as to minimize the total entropy of the universe, or so as to maximize the total negentropy. In other words, living beings should always act to further the mission of life in the cosmos, which is to reduce the universe to order by building the maximum complexity into the mass-energy available."
http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/25.1.3.htm
negentropy is the input, not the output. It's an input in the sense that
A) physically, it's useful because it allows us to extract energy from the environment. if a low entropy object (like oil) is allowed to explode into a gas, it's the fact that the entropy increases which allows the oil to change its macroscopic properties (i.e. it's volume). Living beings exploit this because it turns out that the ability to manipulate the macroscopic properties of the environment is useful.
B) psychically, it's associated with simplicity. which is useful because it allows for efficient information compression.
What that energy gets used toward is completely arbitrary, from the perspective of a cold and uncaring universe.
Yes indeed, a 1-2 hitter on the same themes there. I wonder at the lack of engagement (or bringing it up at all) in our broader cohort here, it's not like these are particularly obscure or hard to find ideas, and I know the sci-fi runs deep in this crowd.
I've actually always idly wondered what the "real philosopher / thinker" take on these would be, because they seem pretty straightforward and relatively unassailable as universal net goods to ME, but I'm just a business guy, not really a thinker.
Oh, and also, for Simulationists (and seriously, what time period is most likely to be simulated than that time a bunch of tarted-up apes with electric sand gave birth to a god?) - you'll note that with greater complexification and sophotransmogrification, both are likely ultimate "goods" in the sense of "making the simulation contain more interesting stuff," and thus helping forestall the incipient cancellation of our second season. Even getting closer to Truth probably has some value in a "Ha, they're breaking the third wall now in this drama!" sort of way.
For AI accelerationists, you'll note that these also all tend to accelerate AI and lead unambiguously to the conditions for larger, grander minds.
Truly, there's something for everyone at Big Bob's Discount Metaphysics Emporium!
> What is everyone's thoughts on how to derive meaning in life in a universe that seems to be ultimately purposeless?
The meaning of life is:
(0) Nothing, a human is a chemical energy pump that gradually began to see itself as distinct from its surroundings, and this was advantageous or neutral or not bad enough to its efficiency so it kept happening
(1) To not do harm
(2) To Live for something other than yourself
> life is pointless without a God
I wouldn't say pointless, I would call it "masturbatory". Without an external point of reference like God, Life feels like an artificial game, done solely for the sake of itself. You live for your kids, or your nation state, or for money, or for glory, and all are things that - in turn - are created by people, people who lived for their kids, their nation state, or for money, or for glory, .... A God is a fulcrum that can exist "outside" of life and justify it non-circularly, too bad no such thing exists.
> our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters
"Smallness" is the wrong way to put it, looking at it from a size perspective is an inherently human quirk that misses the point, there is no reason smaller things should mean less than bigger things. The universe feels hostile because of its ... "unfeelieness". The vast majority of the universe is not conscious, the vast crushing majority of matter in the universe has not experienced pain (or love, or fear) and will never do, the vast majority of energy in the universe was not spent computing solutions to how best to catch food and mates. While some of this is good ("pain is - in the grand scheme of things - an intensely exotic chemical phenomena" is one hell of an optimistic statement), some of it is bad and all of it leaves you feeling intrinsically and indescribably lonely. Despite the apparent busyness of ~8 billion entities that - for all practical purposes - are near-identical copies of you, you are an anomaly, an unplanned mistake, out of a space so utterly vast and so vastly expanding that the fastest thing in the universe will someday lose the race and give up trying to outrun it, nothing that we know of resembles you. That's terrifying. Not being small, being alone.
If having a god is what gives meaning and purpose to one’s life imagine how shitty God must feel.
"Treatment is simple. Just think of how God loves you and cares for you, and works to keep you on the right path."
"But Doctor, I am God!"
He loves beetles too! Aren't there more species of beetles than every other insect combined?
Meaning to me is sensory. We rationalize that certain experiences are meaningful and others not, but really it comes down to how it makes us feel. Beliefs can go a ways, but only so far - relying on those means you need perpetual reaffirmation to soothe concerns. For instance, if you we were told that pressing a big red button all day in a dimly lit room would save lives or be for the greater good, it still wouldn't seem meaningful given enough time.
What feels meaningful is being socially validated and connected, experiencing flow in work, creating value for others, receiving gratitude, pursuing novel curiosity, etc. When we simple creatures get our fill of those experiences and meet fundamental needs, we aren't hung up about "meaning". And yet you can't rationalize there being a "cosmic importance" to any of it, for all we know about the universe or the eternal.
Sam Harris' take: "Finding meaning in life is a matter of having a story to tell yourself that puts your pains and pleasures into a context that you feel good about. When your attention is truly free - in the present - the question of meaning doesn't arise. In the end, to worry about life's meaning is to mistake a psychological problem with a philosophical one."
"Pointless without a god" is something you hear often on this topic, but I've never felt compelled by any argument that god changes the situation at all.
Maybe god tells us to live a certain way. Maybe they'll reward or punish us for our behavior. What does that have to do with ultimate meaning?
It's a sort of monarchist thinking. Loyalty to your sovereign above even one's own reasoning. But I think that's the big takeaway from existentialism: we're past the age of unquestionable monarchs.
The reason I imagine it does compel some is that it removes the overhead of contending with meaning or uncertainty. Your only responsibility becomes to worship and follow instructions, everything else is out of sight out of mind. Wherever the futility or absurdity of life presents itself, one can just reaffirm that only believing and following certain instructions matters, while wordly concerns do not. It becomes a kind of rinse cycle.
In practice, it's as though the issue of meaning might loom even larger for theists. You'd think it would suffice to only be told once that the only meaning's in doing x/y/z because it's what God dictates, if you believe it. It should deter against pretty much all feelings of anxiety and uncertainty in that sense, but it doesn't seem to.
Conversely, being atheist doesn't automatically invite contending with the issue of meaning.
In principle they're orthogonal axes, and you could make a square political chart for it.
Reflective theist, unreflective theist, reflective atheist, unreflective atheist.
I have a clear mental image of all four.
I guess my speculation is that the approach of the reflective theist qua dealing with meaning is to try to be an unreflective theist. The atheist can go in more than one direction.
There definitely is a common impulse to outsource reflection to religious dogma. But at the same time, there's dorks like Hegel who spent a lot of time thinking about the specifics of God's will in excruciating detail.
Very interesting! I never realized before, but in fact, loyalty over understanding is very much a value from feudal times.
Then you may also be interested in:
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https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem.html
Patriarchy is the Problem
tldr: God of the Old Testament as abusive, tyrannical patriarch.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSJ7Sl-Q-HE
WANDERER | The Profound Anglo-Saxon Poem that Tolkien Used in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
tldr: Medieval poem about the 5 stages of grief. Includes an aside about the loss of one's lord.
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https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1192109.html
Siderea Reads Watership Down: Introduction (Part 0)
tldr: A fable about leadership.
The purpose of life is grandkids.
Meaning and purpose are human level phenomena. They happen, they arise. Why would you expect them to be imposed from above a some kind of cosmic level? And how or why would they be invalidated if they are not so imposed?
>about arguments which assert that life is pointless without a God, for instance, or that our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters.
There's no evidence that there are, or ever will be, any *arguments* which assert these claims. As far as places where they are asserted without argument, I'd say that I know firsthand how tempting it can be for depressed people to convince themselves that their mood issues reflect insight into some great cosmic tragedy, but that has nothing to do with atheism. Anyone who's read through The Bible knows that believing in God can be used to legitimize your existential crises just as easily.
(I also think that God does exist and the Universe is made with purpose, but debating that seems outside the scope of the question.)
Just because we don't know what the purpose of life is right now doesn't mean it has no purpose. Maybe we just haven't found it yet. The only way to be sure is to keep living so we can continue the search.
To your last point, yes the human race is tiny in the cosmic scale, but we might also be very important to the future of the cosmos. If we create the right kind of AGI, it will spread out from Earth in every direction and reshape our galaxy and possibly many others. It could alleviate unfathomable amounts of suffering among sentient beings across that vast area.
To ensure any of that has a chance of happening, you need to do your small part supporting the system and not crawling into a hole to die of nihilism.
It's rather a commonplace argument, but one could reason that if the Cosmos has a purpose then the existence of life, including us, in some way furthers it even though we know not what it is. So to "do our bit", as best we can, we may as well just soldier on regardless and not worry about it. "Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die" [*]
[*] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S93lvQ4Ukg8
"arguments which assert that life is pointless without a God"
How does God help here? As with the cosmological argument, this just pushes the question back a step. Presumably the argument that life is pointless without God would go that nothing we do ultimately matters, because it will all be destroyed in the heat death of the universe. But what is the point of life if God does exist? Presumably something like to serve and glorify Him. But God is already perfect: we cannot add to His infinite glory and our service is of no value to Him.
The basic difficulty is that the notion of an ultimate purpose is incoherent. For any proposed ultimate purpose (maximising happiness, serving God, self interest, etc), one can ask, "What is the purpose of that?" I think the only answer can be, "It seems good to me; perhaps it seems good to you also. If not, I wish you the best in your endeavours."
"or that our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters"
That's a duff argument. Size is irrelevant to meaning.
I'm not really religious but I don't think that's right. God has angels and prophets, so clearly he already has servants and must derive some value from them. I think there is also the idea that God has a Plan for the universe/earth/humanity (ie, the second coming, the rapture, something along those lines), and each person is part of that plan and must carry out their small part in it.
No, I think Robert is right. God is already infinitely perfect and lacks nothing, so he can't gain from our service. Rather, we're the ones who gain value by serving Him, and He presents us with the ability to do so out of charity towards us.
I need to get my employees to start thinking that way.
Edit: but in all seriousness, I think when you start asking questions like does God benefit or not benefit or is he capable of being benefitted, you're firmly in "how many angels dance on the head of a pin?" territory in that you're debating a question you lack the knowledge to really answer, so maybe my statement assumed too much, too. I think I would sooner just make the looser statement that if you're a member of an Abrahamic faith, then you probably have to accept the idea that God has servants and at least works through them, and that being the case, better to count yourself among them than not.
Agreed on all counts. What I suppose I'm trying to organize in some of my writing is a conception of meaning that is secular, but also compelling for people who might be struggling with direction and purpose. I have a loved one who is bipolar and prone to depression. He has found meaning in Jesus, partly because it seemed to him that Christianity was the only game in town that offered a durable philosophy of meaning.
As I told another commenter, the new atheists did a great job at dismantling theistic belief, but that seems to have left some people with a lack of tools for creating purpose in life. I think the next step for secularists might be to contend with people's need for purpose. In any case, at least that's what I'd like to do.
"Interested in what ACX readers might have to say about arguments which assert that life is pointless without a God, for instance, or that our infinitesimal smallness in the cosmos means that nothing truly matters."
True, but 'matters' is relative. Yes, I am very sure that nothing I can do matters on the cosmic scale, but it often matters a great deal to me and the people I am close to. Why choose the obviously wrong cosmic scale for your personal meaning?
I agree, the fact of something 'mattering' requires a mind to which that something *could* matter. A universe with only rocks in it, for instance, and no consciousness, is one with no meaning in it. But that is not our universe! Earth is brimming with meaning because it is bubbling over with conscious life.
I guess what I'm trying to flesh out with some of my writing is a conception of meaning that appeals to, say, a depressed person who complains of a lack of direction and purpose in their life. Another commenter suggested a great analogy of people being "machines that manufacture meaning." Like I told them, I'd like to be provide secular tools for repairing broken machines and maintaining them, once healthy.
You asked why choose an obviously wrong cosmic scale for meaning. I think many people do so because they believe that God is the only "repair man" in town, if you will. It's imagined that religion is the best, perhaps even *only*, source for a durable sense of meaning. Not to go on a tangent, but the new atheists did a great job at dismantling theistic belief, but it seems to me that the next task for secularists should (or at least *could*) be to provide a conception of meaning for people that struggle with it. In any case that's what I want to try and do.
"Another commenter suggested a great analogy of people being "machines that manufacture meaning." Like I told them, I'd like to be provide secular tools for repairing broken machines and maintaining them, once healthy. "
I I understand correctly, you imply that depressed people feel that way (partly) because they lack purpose and meaning. It seems to me that causality is usually mainly in the other direction, and that people feel a lack of meaning and purpose because they are depressed.
"Not to go on a tangent, but the new atheists did a great job at dismantling theistic belief, but it seems to me that the next task for secularists should (or at least *could*) be to provide a conception of meaning for people that struggle with it. In any case that's what I want to try and do." That is a great purpose that should give meaning to your life! I think the usual New Atheist proposal in this direction has been "humanism", finding meaning in helping humanity flourish in this world rather than looking for paradise in the next. Which means we need a definition of flourishing...
Is Richard Hanania moving to a new market niche : Scott Alexander vulgariser? 😆
Sounds like an amusing proposition, can you expand on it?
It was prompted by this one: https://substack.com/home/post/p-133688838?selection=2480f8dd-f565-4b51-b5d5-af2d5983ffca#:~:text=Unfortunately%2C%20the%20regulatory%20state%20cares%20so%20much%20about%20your%20privacy%20that%20it%E2%80%99s%20taken%20notice%20of%20medical%20and%20fitness%20devices%20and%20wants%20to%20make%20sure%20they%20aren%E2%80%99t%20used%20to%20help%20you%20live%20longer
But I have had that thought on a couple of different recent posts of his:
1. Pretty strong Scott Alexander vibes in this one about not eating meat as the only rational option: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/which-party-protects-animals
2. The subtitle of this one is self-explanatory: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/epistemology-in-a-world-of-fake-data "On not trusting social science and still avoiding epistemological nihilism"
3. This one as well: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-the-technocapital-machine-is "Affirmative action won't cause planes to fall out of the sky"
4. Even this one! https://www.richardhanania.com/p/are-men-smarter-than-women
Anyone have study resources to learn how to use AI tools in life?
Not sure if this is as in depth as you're after, but OneUsefulThing is my go-to recommendation for writings about how to use AI, as in what you can usefully do with them now rather than theoretical future applications.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/
Thank you!
I adapted Scott Aaronson's post "Five Worlds of AI" into a political compass style chart.
Post: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7266
Chart: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/J7JPjJ5SxJ
The world "AI Surreality" is not related to any world in Scott's classification, but it seems to be the most popular with commenters on Reddit so far, so I think the modification is justified.
What does “AI Surreality“ look like?
The scenario "AI Surreality" was proposed by Asvin on ACX Discord. His description was:
"Somewhere between singularia and paperclipalypse. I think the specific way in which it will be different from both of them is that the transition might be better thought of as a new "transition in evolution" on the scale of emergence of eukaryotes or homo sapiens than what he describes.
Many fundamental concepts of what "it's like to be" will have to change, including notions of self identity.
To sketch my version of weirdtopia out a bit more, I think how we think about self identity will change a lot. When intelligence/abilities/skills become much more modular I don't see individuals being a very legible notion"
But anyone is free to interpret it as they wish within the constraints of "unrecognizable level of change, unclear if good or bad"
>To sketch my version of weirdtopia out a bit more, I think how we think about self identity will change a lot. When intelligence/abilities/skills become much more modular I don't see individuals being a very legible notion
Hmm... I'm not sure intelligence etc. becoming more modular is what I'd expect, or how I'd phrase it. That seems to suggest being able to unpack them from one person?/entity? and transfer them to another.
Having individual become less legible sounds plausible (more so for AIs than for humans), but what I'd expect to cause this would be high bandwidth communications. If two people?/entities? had communications comparable to connections between the lobes of our brains, I'd expect the system of the set of them to act more like a single actor than for any single one to act like a single individual, just as the lobes of our brains rarely if ever act like separate individuals.
See e.g. https://www.consciousentities.com/2009/01/telepathy/
>Freeman Dyson foresaw what he called ‘radiotelepathy‘. The idea is that a set of small implants record the activity of your brain which is then transmitted and delivered into someone else’s (and vice versa). Hey presto, at once your thoughts and feelings are shared.
( I actually think that, for humans, this is a fairly unlikely outcome. Medical device development and testing takes forever, so I think this is more likely to describe AI-to-AI links.)
What is a legible notion?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/
legible = easily recognizable by non-local third parties; associated with explicit episteme.
illegible = hard to recognize by non-local third parties; associated with tacit metis.
Loweren is saying that individual boundaries will become harder to recognize or define, especially to broader society e.g. the job market.
Legible, in the sense of referring to a concept that describes some feature of the world.